Culture January 1, 1

Shelves at used-book stores in Japan more resemble the cat-food aisle at Wal-Mart than they do the cramped and haphazard arrangements in their American counterparts: row after row of gleaming books, identically thick and tall, differentiated only by the color on the label. Tokyo’s most notable secondhand-book store, Book Off, even employs in its logo an insipid smiley face similar to the Evil Empire’s.