The images in this article are from the web, or provided by the interviewee Ukato
Monster Circus | wen
In 2018, a bookstore called Ben Bookstore opened in Shenzhen.
A year and a half after its opening, it will open a two-dimensional area in the venue, becoming one of the very few places in Shenzhen that specializes in selling two-dimensional books; and in another year and a half, this two-dimensional area will cease to operate and usher in its own demise.
The whole thing didn't make any waves, but for those who knew about the store, it meant that the two-dimensional area of a bookstore in Shenzhen had fallen, and at least for a short time, it would be difficult to see a replacement.
Ukato, a clerk in the original two-dimensional district of the bookstore, found the job before it was removed, witnessing the last three months of its life cycle.
Inside the bookstore
The disappearance of the quadratic zone was almost without warning, Ukato said. The bookstore was closed in October, but as recently as July, it was still celebrating. For Ukato, who had just joined at the time, the store was not a hot one, and it was by no means a dying atmosphere; its turnover in the summer vacation was good, and later the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day were "ok".
"Our employees received news suddenly." He told me.
Harry Potter booth
So until the last week before the closure of the two-dimensional zone, for the clerks and customers, its vitality is alive. Ukato originally considered using this as a pension job for a year or two, because although it was paid very low, it was at least stressful and could match her interests.
For Ukato, the greatest pleasure of this job is to complain to his two-dimensional friends about what he has seen in the store.
They posted the records of the complaints on Weibo, which attracted the attention of some insiders, and some Weibo received hundreds of likes. Many people commented that they wanted to see it and asked for the name and address of the bookstore; others felt envious and wondered if there were similar stores in their cities, whether they were in Guangzhou, Chongqing, or Beijing.
In the eyes of Ukato and his friends, the bookstore was originally the "most secondary bookstore" in the whole of Shenzhen, and obviously many people agreed with their views.
In just three months, Ukato and his friend's Weibo inadvertently sparked a spontaneous publicity campaign about the bookstore. When I searched the bookstore online, in addition to some official propaganda that no one had discussed two or three years ago, a small number of personal travelogues, I found these microblogs with the nature of tap water.
The official public account with an average reading volume of more than 100 people
At the time, naturally no one expected the store to close so quickly. Looking back at the discussion at that time, there will even be an illusion that the operation of this bookstore is "thriving" and finally ushering in spring.
Ukato told me that the bookstore was originally divided into three museums: humanities, arts and parent-child, and the second dimension was a part of the humanities museum.
Probably because the shop specializes in foreign language books, its two-dimensional area is also "rich and authentic", and you can find many Taiwanese and Japanese versions of manga here, which are difficult to see in the anime area of ordinary bookstores.
It used to be a bookstore that sold art galleries, magazines, photographs, and peripherals. In addition to the popular IP such as Ghost Annihilation and Spells, there are also more otaku books such as Furumi Classmates and Dragon Maid. Of course, more niche things, or masters such as Imatoshi and Miyazaki, can also see it.
But the bookstore's propaganda strategy is so Buddha-like that many ACG enthusiasts in Shenzhen are unaware of its existence. Before Ukato came to work at this store, he did not expect that there was a physical store in Shenzhen that imported books for anime, even though he often bought books on the e-commerce platform of the group behind the bookstore.
Excluding holidays, the bookstore does not have much traffic, which in Ukato's view may be the biggest omen before its withdrawal. Sometimes on weekdays, it can even be described as a menkolo finch.
The mall where the bookstore is located itself has no traffic, and this shopping mall called Shenye Shangcheng was originally considered to be high, but under the impact of the epidemic, only a depressed skeleton was left. Search for its reviews and find that many stores on the same floor as the bookstore have also closed.
Although there are not many customers on weekdays, Ukato still meets enough two-dimensional enthusiasts in the bookstore. In his opinion, these three months in the bookstore are almost a broadening of horizons.
Most of the customers Ukato touches are fashionably dressed and travel in groups. And Ukato's evaluation of himself is a person who "dresses and lives so much in line with the stereotype of the second dimension", he feels that he has new discoveries every day, and gradually makes him lament that he knows too little about the cultural circle in which he lives.
He has met many interesting customers, the main customer of the bookstore is students, but from time to time there will be middle-aged people patronizing, such as mother-level customers who want to buy "The Sky is the Red River Bank", and parents who bring their children into the ghost pit.
This year's Tanabata, Ukato saw a family of three who came to visit the bookstore, and the mother accidentally saw her childhood memories of "Sailor Moon" in the store, so she asked her husband to buy her a set as a Tanabata gift.
He also knew a female customer who often came to the store to buy Japanese manga, and once he bought it, it was a complete set, which according to Ukato was "very wide". During his time as a clerk, she bought Soul Eater, Guardian Sweetheart, and Shadow House.
So this shop is not a place for young people alone.
Although Ukato is only a clerk, he is actually responsible for the purchase of secondary and Japanese documents. The bookstore gave him a lot of freedom, and he described it as "entering whatever he wants." In the offline stores in Shenzhen, many things are responsible for Ukato alone.
He said that before himself, the people in charge of this position were very "generous", and one of them also entered an 8,000-piece handmade office, which had no place to put it and could not sell it. When he took over, novels and comics were mixed together, many goods were not on the shelves, and there were many high-priced books with high library age.
The bookstore executives do not seem to care about this, will not conduct business assessment of the clerks, Ukato believes that it may be that after all, the sales group does not expect the offline bookstore to sell how many books.
But Ukato did hope to make the bookstore's two-dimensional area better, and he did some simple research, and he would enter some new original works, or well-known works.
Sometimes, he also enters some of the smaller books, and their audience is not as narrow as expected. For example, he once entered a set of beautiful girls' albums, originally felt that it was probably impossible to sell, who knew that some netizens spontaneously publicized a wave, and one day they were bought by an enthusiast.
When Ukato finds out that the books are the same, he is also very happy, because he can see customers saying, "This is even for sale here", "Very hardcore" or something. Although he is semi-self-deprecating, he is actually not so hardcore, and this sense of accomplishment is also a bit illusory, because he does not think that this is his own credit, mainly due to the lack of competitors and the scarcity of imported comics.
Advertisement when the second dimension district first opened
All in all, although there are not many customers in the store, it can still be seen that for Ukato and the customers of the bookstore, this place has become a small world for Shenzhen's two-dimensional enthusiasts.
Ukato told me that not only himself, but also the circle (of Shenzhen' two-dimensional) believes that Shenzhen is a desert of two-dimensional culture.
Although it is a first-tier city and has a large ACG audience, there are very few comic festivals, physical stores and animation production companies, and there is basically no atmosphere. He thought that the bookstore could have become an oasis in the desert.
Unfortunately, such a day ended quickly. Until the end, Ukato did not operate the two-dimensional zone as it was in his mind. Those netizens who saw Ukato and his friends' Weibo posts and planned to explore the store did not have a chance before they could leave.
As mentioned at the beginning, the closure of the bookstore was sudden for the clerks. When the withdrawal was announced, everyone was surprised, and the cheerful Microblogs that recorded Ukato's days of visiting the store suddenly changed their atmosphere one day.
Ukato's last day shots were all black and white filters
Subsequently, the three museums of the bookstore will leave only one art museum, the humanities and parent-child museums will be removed, and the second dimension district will naturally disappear.
The day of the removal
So on the day when Ukato was supposed to be regularized, the work content became the withdrawal of the museum, which was before the National Day, and there were still many guests.
The bookstore's leaders wanted to leave a part of the comics, but it could be seen that he didn't know anything about ACG culture, and wouldn't even use the term "comics" instead calling them villain books.
Before the removal of the museum, the leaders came to the second dimension to pick out the goods to be retained, but what they wanted to leave behind had nothing to do with whether they were popular or not. The criterion for selection is only whether the book can be related to "art", for example, they think that Doraemon's film collection is art, but its original comics have nothing to do with art, and they naturally have to be eliminated.
The same thing happened not only in the second dimension, Ukato said that it is like the humanities museum's social science import books, in fact, many of them are very popular, but after this withdrawal, they disappeared. In Ukato's view, the group behind the bookstore itself may have given up on planting trees in a cultural wasteland.
As for the reason for the closure, Ukato can only speculate, but it is basically the dilemma that every brick-and-mortar bookstore will encounter in this era. Physical bookstores have struggled for years, selling books can't make much money, books have become an ornament, so bookstores didn't care which books were popular; that casualness seemed to be a not-so-funny foreshadowing.
The last day before closing
Brick-and-mortar bookstores survived wave after wave of closures in 2010, and the remaining stores survived by transformation and national tax cuts.
Bookstores seem to have experienced a postmodern deconstruction, in the battlefield of e-commerce and publishing house games, draped in a series of bookstore 2.0, 3.0 and other trendy concepts, into a tool for shopping malls to divert and sell cultural and creative supplies, and try to dial their own lifeline.
In station B, if you search, you will find a lot of VLOG for self-employed people who open bookstores. They used uninvited videos to record how their unloved "N.0 model" bookstore collapsed step by step, swallowing up the savings saved from years of part-time work.
@Sirius bookstore
So even if it becomes a game of capital, there is not much oil and water in this game. Bookworms scoff at the internet celebrity bookstores, but the internet celebrity bookstores still close down one after another, leaving only discarded images in the corners of the old city of Cyberspace. Ukato said that many bookstores are like this, when they first entered the mall, there was a huge rent discount, and after 3 or 5 years, the preferential policy was gone, and they had to move away.
It's not just the dilemma this two-dimensional bookstore faces. Shenzhen has been named the "City of Libraries", but in the past two years, stores such as Eslite and Kubrick Bookstore, which have been talked about, have left the city one by one.
Kubrick's bookstore, which also closed this year
In Ukato's eyes, the last twilight industry seems to need someone to do it, because the demand has not disappeared. And this matter must have feelings to bear, because the plight of foreign bookstores is more severe than that of ordinary bookstores, and they have to face the risk of book review, the edition number is difficult to get, and the future wind direction of the ACG industry is also unpredictable.
Ironically, before the bookstore was withdrawn, he took such a photo: in the messy bookstore, the slogan holding up the feelings was printed between the logos of the ghost extinction, and the ghost extinction was thrown on the ground. The shop did have feelings, but it was still trampled underfoot, unable to delay the almost doomed death.
So the two-dimensional area of a bookstore disappeared. Except for a few people who knew that the store existed, it didn't make much waves. Because like Ukato before I joined the company, and like me before I saw him Weibo, this small area of the second dimension did not exist for us in the first place.
But it is true that since then, Shenzhen has lost an offline store selling two-dimensional books, which has added a concern to those who want to engage in the same industry later.
On the last day of the bookstore's withdrawal, not many people visited because of the typhoon. But when everyone was about to leave work, a middle school student came, saw that the store door was still open, walked in, saw the notice of withdrawal, and then asked someone: "In the future, what is around, will it not be sold?" ”
Then I asked Ukato.
"Then there is no more, tell people not to sell, and then go sadly." He replied.
Ukato's answer was simple, but he still photographed the scene
When I was in junior high school, there were plenty of shops selling DJing in cities, and this not-so-legal thing supported a small area of rock and classical music fans many years ago. Everyone gathered in the store to talk about bands whose genuine records had not been introduced, and made friends.
Playing discs: overseas genuine records that should have been destroyed but flowed into the Chinese market
One day, however, I went to the familiar store and suddenly found it closed. Slowly, one by one, these stores disappeared, followed by chains selling genuine records. At that time, I felt very sad, and it felt like watching an era pass by.
Who knows later, more and more people began to listen to those music, because of the change of the environment and the evolution of the Internet, people instead got to know more and more friends, almost forgot those former sauce-sharing shops. So many years later, when I went to Japan, I could see Yamano musical instruments selling physical records near Ginza at high land prices, and when I looked at the people who were still listening to music in the store, I suddenly felt as if I had traveled into a parallel universe.
In retrospect, though, it seems that this loss didn't really lose much. But the brick-and-mortar stores that sell PATAs have indeed long since disappeared.
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