Murakami Underground
But this underpass bookshop also has Shelley, Sheldon, Shakespeare, and more, all of them you can buy for a song
Think of Haruki Murakami’s novels as you walk through the Manila City Hall underpass. Within the chaos of it, the rows upon rows of vendors selling cheap clothes and used phones, the indifference and desperation of the streetpeople, lies a portal to other worlds.
“It’s like a scene straight out of Murakami’s novels,” says AJ Laberinto, referring to life in Underground City, the pit of Manila, just beneath the asphalt jungle. He owns the Books from Underground, the four-year-old thriving treasure trove of literary gems tucked within the Manila CityHall underpass.
“No one has thought of it, a bookshop in an underpass, where you least expect to find one,” he adds, the “‘underground,’ after all, also connotes something dubious… illegal,” or to, borrow from the literary masters, forbidden.
Not that the store is selling anything unlawful, nothing like a speakeasy at all, where everything is hush hush. If you know how to look, what it offers is rarities. Or, if you’re lucky, maybe even banned books—now that’s forbidden, which gives us all the more reason to check it out.
Among the inhabitants of the Books from Underground, in the yellowed pages of secondhand classics, are the likes of Oscar Wilde, Kate Chopin, H.G. Wells, Louisa May Alcott, John Green, and Meg Cabot. “You got to have the pulse—” started Laberinto before in midsentence he was interrupted by a group of co-eds from Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila looking for a copy of The Game of Thrones. Unfortunately for the students, all the proprietor could say, shrugging his shoulders, was “Come back next week. I don’t have it yet.” What he has to sell he knows by heart, thanks to his internal inventory of books, a list he keeps only in his mind. Here among these piles of books was not a businessman, but a book lover, a wide reader, whose lifestyle he himself considers “bohemian.”
“I like reading and collecting books, especially Russian literature by the likes of Alexandr Pushkin and Anton Chekhov,” says the 32-year-old, his eyes lighting up behind his prescription glasses and the shadow cast by his fedora hat.
This is how the bookshop started from scratch. He and a friend Winter Gabayron, 34, saw a demand for reading materials, those not required by schools. Most of the books are from their own collections, the others they get from buy-and-sell enterprises, still others from such random strangers as a boy, who once bought a complete set of The Game of Thrones, only to realize his girlfriend did not like any of them. “So he sold the set to me,” says Laberinto, waving his gloved hands.
According to him, contemporary internationally acclaimed novels like George R. R. Martin’s sell like hot cakes, although from time to time, there is a clamor for local authors. The quaint little shop, dusty, musty, stuffy, and old, houses the cheapest (P10 for magazines) and most expensive reading materials (P1,000 for autographed titles, rare books like Filipiniana).
Before a customer stole his attention asking for a copy of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, Laberinto was saying that contrary to what we tend to think, “many young Filipinos still like to read…”
In the words of Rufus Wainright, set to the music of Burt Bacharach, “I don’t know… Go ask Shakespeare,” but by then, the man behind the Books from Underground was too busy entertaining the other customers.
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