Kinokuniya Bookstore Visit

This is the second post in my series of posts on bookstores. Link to my previous bookstore visit post.

I first came to know about Kinokuniya bookstore when I enquired about Death Note funko pops at a Japanese store in a local mall. The shopkeeper asked me to check in the Kinokuniya bookstore. I visited a small local branch of this bookstore in South Bay which is inside a Japanese super market but I wasn’t that impressed with the manga collection there. Recently, during a visit to San Francisco, I checked their San Francisco branch and it was amazing.

From the bookstore website:

Kinokuniya USA offers a wide variety of books, magazines, and stationery from Japan. We are proud to bring you our extensive collection of Manga, graphic novels, art and design books, cookbooks, travel books, children’s book, and more, both in English and Japanese.

It is a great store with a huge collection of books in both Japanese and English. They also have magazines, funko pops and toys from Japan.

It is located in Japantown inside a mall which has only Japanese restaurants and cafes.

They have a huge collection of translated works by Japanese authors, books about Japan, China, Chinese and Japanese culture in English. They also have travelogues written in English about Japan. I bought a travel memoir written as a graphic novel about Japan from this section.

They also have a huge collection of books for children written by Japanese authors and some of them have been translated into English as well. I got one book with some Japanese folk tales for my son.

They also have art books about Japanese games and movies. These books were stunning to look at. I am not that much into movies and games from Japan so I did not spend much time in this section. The comic books are in level 1, while everything else is on level 2. They even have movie DVDs for anime.

The manga section was my most favorite section and I spent most of time browsing through their manga sections. Again they have manga in Japanese and also those translated into English. I asked the staff for some recommendations for manga which were dark and similar to Death Note and I got few good recommendations from them. I discovered many manga that I did not even know existed, thanks to this store. I bought plenty of manga from this section since I have been trying to get into more manga of late. I like dark and suspenseful stories, with some fantasy and sci-fi elements in them.

This was my book haul from Kinokuniya bookstore. I have already read few of these books and I am really excited to check out the rest of them.

Link to the bookstore website: https://usa.kinokuniya.com/

Location of the bookstore: Japan Center, 1581 Webster Street, San Francisco, CA 94115

Have you been to this store or any of its branches? Please recommend some manga you love.

PS: This was NOT a sponsored post. I am doing a series of posts like these since I love visiting bookstores.