Japan's Manga Cafés & Internet Cafés

About this book

A warm, lockable booth. A library of fifty thousand comics. A shower, a hot meal, and quiet — all night, for the price of a modest lunch.

Japan's manga cafés and internet cafés are one of the country's most useful inventions and its least explained: the rental reading rooms that shelter the traveller who missed the last train, feed the night-shift worker at dawn, and give every reader a private room of their own until morning. This complete guide walks the whole institution in 200 entries — the booths and how to choose them, the great shelves and how they are stocked, the pricing machine of minutes and memberships, the showers and kitchens, the safety design for women travelling alone, the chains from Kaikatsu CLUB to the one-owner house on your street, the districts from Akihabara to snowbound Susukino, and the beautiful, unwritten etiquette of noise, light and air that lets a hundred strangers share one quiet building.

Written to be read before your first visit, it abolishes the nervous minute at the tariff board forever: register, booths, packs, etiquette and dawn — everything is explained before you need it. Prices and rules are deliberately never asserted, because they belong to each house; every entry closes by pointing you to the official information, so the book cannot go out of date.

Whether you travel Japan, work its nights, or simply love the idea of a library that never closes, this is your key card.