Let's talk books this first Sunday of the new year.
When I came to live in Japan in 1967, I was struck by how many passengers on the train were reading. Literature was widely discussed in the media and in ordinary people's conversations. I would have described Japan as a nation of bookworms.
Throughout the 1970s and '80s, sales of books and periodicals rose continually. But then came the shriveling of the economic bubble in the early '90s, and the bibliophiles went into a wormhole. Since then, the publishing business has slipped into a slow, steady decline. You'd think that people would turn, in the doldrums of economic life, to books — if only to seek out ways to extricate themselves from inertia. But instead they appear to have become sucked into the screens of their computers and mobile phones.