It’s Sunday morning. You’re walking around your favorite local bookstore. A collection of new and used books stacked from floor to ceiling. A rickety step stool is placed in a corner to reach the top shelves. The owner’s cat is hiding beneath a plush armchair.
Perhaps you’re browsing the staff recommendations. Maybe these books are displayed on a separate bookshelf (like at The Regulator Bookshop), or propped up on a round table (like at Letters Bookshop), or remain on the shelves that line the stores perimeter, distinguished by index cards hanging from the shelve’s ledge (like at Books Are Magic).
Regardless, you’re holding 3 books, replacing your pile as you continue to read the descriptions of covers that catch your eye.
And then it hits you. Suddenly, you find yourself overwhelmed with the urge to defecate.
Maybe it’s the intoxicating smell of ink and paper. Or the calm you feel around a room full of books. Or, perhaps, it’s the stress that arises from having to choose which title is coming home with you.
It could be the squatting you’re forced to do when searching for authors unlucky to find themselves on the bottom shelves. Or the cup of coffee you drank while perusing the aisles (if this bookstore also has a coffee shop inside, like at Stories Books & Cafe or Books & Books). Or perhaps you grabbed coffee with a friend beforehand.
It could be none of those things. Either way, the sensation is instantaneous and you can only hope your favorite bookstore also has a restroom.
Maybe I lost you. Or maybe this has happened to you before. Regardless, there’s a name for this somewhat peculiar experience: the Mariko Aoki phenomenon. It was named after Mariko Aoki after a Japanese magazine pushed her description of this peculiar association in a 1985 article.
We could talk about the theories behind this phenomenon (of which there are many more), but no need to drag you down the deep rabbit hole I found myself in last week (unless, of course, you stopped reading 2 sentences ago and already found yourself on the Wikipedia page dedicated to this expression).
The truth behind the book bowel tendency doesn’t actually matter to me anyway. It’s the last month of summer, afterall, and I have no interest in dragging out an unproven hypothesis about the sudden need to shit every time you enter a bookstore. Except to say that I hope you think of this the next time you’re at your favorite bookstore. And that it makes you laugh to yourself. And that you look for the staff recommendations section and grab something new to read the next time you find yourself on the toilet.
Happening, by Annie Ernaux
Spanning a three month period at the age of 23, Happening recounts the physical and emotional experience of finding a means to abort her unwanted fetus. Part memoir and part meditation on writing and memory, Ernaux’s writing captures how lonely and gruesome it can be to be marked with shame, cast as social failure, and denied one’s body. It’s imperfect and fragmented, much like her memory of the three month experience. Read because it’s important we talk about these experiences.
Translating Myself and Others, by Jhumpa Lahiri
A collection of essays on Lahiri's experience transitioning from author to author/translator. My favorites include her meditations on what it means to think in translation, and especially those that detail her life in Rome, and translating Whereabouts. Read if you are at all interested in the process of writing or translation or simply love Lahiri’s works of fiction (because, to me, it’s a privilege to enter her thought process).
Chinatown, by Thuan (Translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý)
While stuck on the Paris Metro, a woman recollects her past, moving through space and time as she recalls her life in Vietnam, her education in Russia, her unfinished relationship with her son's father, her "guy," and her experience as a single mother living far from her family. The stream of consciousness style of writing made it challenging to follow, yet I haven't read anything quite like it. Read if you like Milkman by Anna Burns.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, by Satchidananda
This is a translated collection of the Sanskrit sutras (which detail the theory and practice of yoga), by the sage Patanjali. Not unlike other religious texts, the sutras are intended for reflection, study, and mediation again and again. Read if you practice/have ever practiced/want to practice yoga.
Bluets, by Maggie Nelson
Blurring the line between prose and poetry, Bluets is a meditation/reflection of all things blue - the color but more so what it conjures. For Nelson, Bluets is an exploration of a past lover and the feeling / experience of heartache/break. Read if you are going through heartbreak, or if you like Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong.
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