Do you love books?

By Toh Ee Ming

Published on Feb, 2023

“Even a boring bookseller has to be a bit of a showman.” So says Kenny Chan, a fixture of the Singaporean branch of Books Kinokuniya. For almost two decades, Chan served as the major Japanese chain’s Asia-Pacific senior store and merchandising director. He supposedly retired in 2019, but the seventy-year-old continues to roam the store as a consultant, doing everything from social media to public relations. With this level of devotion to his profession, he’s built a space that has provided many Singaporean readers with cherished memories, turning the bookstore into a beloved cultural institution in its own right.

I meet him at ten in the morning outside Books Kinokuniya’s flagship store in a mall on Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping belt. The shutters aren’t up yet, but a father and son are already waiting outside.

Living up to his showman theory, Chan shows up in a dapper suit and his distinctive shock of white hair. He pulls me in for a wefie in front of the store before leading me in. He plucks two books from a corner with a flourish—“my secret stash,” he says conspiratorially—and navigates through the labyrinth of shelves. He ushers me past a hidden door and we end up in the belly of the bookstore, in the backroom where Kinokuniya’s staff can work away from customers.

Chan has carved out his own following on platforms like Instagram, where he posts recommendations and shows off products available in store. His interests run the gamut from philosophers like Schopenhauer and Buddha to economics, the cryptocurrency crisis, politics and TikTok trends. It allows him to connect with young and old; he’s sometimes even recognised while out in public.

It’s a reflection of who he is as a person: energised, engaged and curious about the world around him. “I’m still a thirteen-year-old in an old man’s body,” he claims.

While friends in his age group tend to commiserate about creaking bones and other health issues, he chooses instead to indulge in the “pleasant distraction” of K-pop, travel and, of course, reading.While his primary school classmates were still “fumbling with their ABCs”, Chan spent his childhood devouring his father’s stash of comics or whiling away the hours at the Queenstown Public Library and the Old National Library. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with books.

One day, while visiting the MPH Bookstore on Stamford Road—an iconic landmark that eventually shut down in 2002—with book vouchers he’d won in a literature prize, a teenage Chan noticed the manager at work. “I thought to myself, When I grow up, I want to be him. But I never expected it to happen.”

His dream would eventually come true, but not before a stint at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1978 to 1980. As a young attaché stationed in London, he had the unenviable task of procuring books requested by Lee Kuan Yew, then Singapore’s prime minister. Lee’s requests, sent over fax, were often cryptic. Once, he asked for a new book by a playwright he’d seen reviewed in The Listener, a BBC magazine. It was up to Chan to first figure out which book the premier was referring to, then to acquire and send it back to Singapore. He ended up befriending the manager at the bookstore Hatchards—who supplied books to the British royal family—so they could help him decipher Lee’s sparse clues and hunt the titles down.

Chan became a bookseller himself when he joined the Singaporean chain Popular Bookstore in 1983. For the next eighteen years, he made his rounds in the industry, including managing the MPH flagship store in which he’d first been inspired. His work was noticed; in 2001, Osamu Matsubara, the late chairman and chief executive of Books Kinokuniya, flew from Japan to Singapore to interview Chan for a job.

Chan had expected a grilling over sales and business strategies, and how he planned to bring the bookstore to new heights. Instead, Matsubara simply asked, “Kenny-san, do you love books?”

“That’s all he asked me! Damn dirty trick. That’s probably why I stayed in Kinokuniya for so long,” Chan says with a wry grin.

“Of course I love books. I consider it a calling, like a Jesuit order,” Chan says. “It’s not about bookselling, but the imparting of knowledge through offering a selection of books, to be part of a conduit to people to attain enlightenment through books… When you read your mind opens, and you will never regret it.”

With this mindset, Chan joined Kinokuniya in 2001, two years after it occupied a 42,000-square-foot space in Ngee Ann City. This was a stone’s throw away from Borders bookstore at Wheelock Place, which was already an established haunt for bibliophiles. The American-owned Borders was seen as the place to be. “The younger generation at the time was seduced by it. Hey, it’s American style, it’s just like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s,” Chan recalls, putting on an American accent for effect. The phenomenon of cultural cringe meant that customers often saw products from the West as ‘superior’. In contrast, Kinokuniya was more focused on Japanese goods, including magazines and manga.

“People sniggered,” Chan recalls. “They thought it would be a disaster, that it was the battle of bookstores between the West and East. In the end, we were the giant killers.” Borders closed in 2011. Today, it is Kinokuniya that is the behemoth on Singapore’s bookselling scene.

The secret sauce, says Chan, is that Kinokuniya is akin to an “international food court”, where you can find offerings from not just American but also African, British, German, French and Chinese authors. Chan and his colleagues have made sure that there’s something for everyone; at its peak, the store stocked a diverse range of up to 500,000 titles.

Chan wants the experience of browsing the store’s book districts—covering fiction and the classics; books in languages like French, German, Chinese and Japanese; travelogues, graphic novels, philosophy and more—to feel like an adventure. The shelves are arranged in a way that invites exploration.

“Just like travelling, you get off the beaten paths and get lost in the alleyway. And when you find a nice café or restaurant, you remember that for life,” Chan says. “If you like Harry Potter, then you might stumble upon J.R.R. Tolkien or Philip Pullman, and you’re hooked on to something new. The keyword is serendipity.”

The desire to create serendipitous encounters pushed Chan to expand Kinokuniya beyond the usual meet-the-author events. The store has also hosted fashion shows and even launched a Japanese pop girl group. Where some other bookstores might seek to project a high-brow vibe, Chan was more interested in keeping his finger on society’s pulse, reflecting the interests of the public back at them. Long before the runaway success of Marvel films pushed comic-book heroes firmly into the mainstream, Chan expanded Kinokuniya’s comics and graphic novels section. He was so committed to this direction that one of the first things he did upon joining the company was to fly to Comic-Con in San Diego, in Southern California, where he audaciously declared to the head of Diamond Comic Distributors that Kinokuniya would soon become their biggest customer. Within two years of this decision, comics were among the Singapore store’s top five revenue-generating categories, and in 2005 the store hosted Neil Gaiman, the British author famous for the graphic novel series The Sandman. Learning from this success, Kinokuniya stores in Bangkok, Sydney and Dubai followed suit.

Although Lee Kuan Yew once declared that “poetry is a luxury we cannot afford”, Singapore has grown a decent literature scene, collectively known as SingLit. Chan is particularly proud of his contribution to this scene; for many years, he has supported the annual Singapore Writers Festival and promoted Singaporean writers like Alfian Sa’at, Amanda Lee Koe, Rachel Heng, Sharlene Teo and the husband-and-wife team A.J. Low.

Case in point: Malinky Robot, a self-published comic by the artist Sonny Liew, had been rejected by many stores, but Chan gave it a chance. He read it and was hooked. Leveraging Kinokuniya’s space and reach, he arranged a launch event, throwing his support behind Liew’s work. This willingness to back writers and artists even when commercial success isn’t guaranteed can pay off. Four years after Malinky Robot, Liew shot to fame with his graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a volume that irked the Singaporean authorities—the National Arts Council pulled a publishing grant for the book on the grounds that it “potentially undermines the authority or legitimacy of the government”—while generating critical acclaim on the international stage. In 2017, Liew won in three categories at the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, making him the first Singaporean to achieve such recognition from the prestigious awards.

There’s still a long way for SingLit to go, Chan says. But great strides have already been made; government agencies, local publishers and literary organisations like Sing Lit Station have worked to create an ecosystem to support local writing. ‘SingLit’ is now more recognised as a term, making it harder for the collective body of work to be overlooked. Singaporean authors are also getting more attention abroad: Kirstin Chen, Koe and Balli Kaur Jaswal, for instance, have published with big-name international players. Chan still observes cultural cringe from time to time, but isn’t too worried. He points out how authors like Agatha Christie and Jane Austen hadn’t been well-received back in their day, either, but slowly gained recognition. “It takes time, but I think SingLit is getting nearer to that.”

Not everything Chan touched has turned to gold. More “susceptible to flattery” in his earlier days, he was taken in by a salesman who boosted his ego and led him to order too much of an entire range of books that turned out to be unsellable. They eventually managed to shift the stock, but only after marking down the prices during a sale. His boss was understanding, but Chan felt guilty. “It was a very bitter but good lesson.” After that, he became very careful about doing his homework and calibrating the number of books to order.

Kinokuniya’s size gives it an edge, because it can afford to stock and display an entire book series, or the complete bibliography of a particular author. For example, a reader who enjoys Norwegian Wood might want to pick up more Haruki Murakami novels. Someone who gets hooked on the first volume of the Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba series is going to want the other books too. In such situations, Kinokuniya becomes their best bet.

“Once you go into one, then you will read all the rest. And that works well with us because of the size of the store, we can cater to the long tail versus a smaller store which can only stock new titles and bestsellers,” Chan says.

Still, it’s tough times for brick-and-mortar shops. Bookstores are expensive ventures; Chan points out that, unlike designer boutiques, they’re not selling items with a high mark-up, and it takes a lot of capital to be able to bring in a decent range. Both independent bookstores and chain outlets in Singapore have had to fight for their survival in recent years.

BooksActually, for instance, has given up its premises to go fully online. The Moon, which marketed itself as an independent feminist establishment, also turned into an online store during the pandemic. Kinokuniya itself hasn’t been spared, shuttering two branches. One was lost to redevelopment plans on the part of the building’s owners, while the other had to be given up after the mall’s landlord hiked the rent.

“With the closure of every bookshop, it creates a void in the book ecosystem,” Chan says. “The book ecosystem and publishing ecosystem have a multiplier effect of encouraging education, learning, entertainment… so it’s a loss not just to Singapore society, but to the region as a whole.”

Despite this, Chan remains optimistic. He believes that humans intrinsically need the emotional connection that comes with physical books. “As long as there is content created that still connects with people, there’s still hope.”

Link to article here.