There was this one book that was a real mess. It was the most beaten-up of all the books in the used bookstore.
The other books were used, too, but they were all in such good condition that they very well could have been sold as new.
It was the only old and dirty book there. When customers wanted to look at a book sitting on the shelf near it, they all took extra care not to touch that book.
Are you starting to feel a little sorry for it?
Well, look at it this way: Most books are read one time – at the most three times – before being set on the bookshelf, or thrown away, but this particular book was read over and over again by its owner. One hundred times, two hundred times, it was read and read. The owner of the book had received it as a present from his mother when he was a child. He hadn’t liked it very much when he first read it.
What a boring book, he had gone so far as to think.
But, if he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t so much that the book was boring as that he hadn’t understood it.
After a little time had passed, he happened to read the book again. And this time, he made a discovery: Oh, is that what this book is about? He had completely missed the point the first time he read it.
What he really discovered was something very deep: the pleasure you find in reading a book will change depending
on when you read it. The owner thought this was marvelous.
He read the book over and over again, and every time he read it, he discovered something new. Every time he went somewhere new, where he didn’t know anyone, he brought that book with him and read it once more. The book was
like a protective charm, he felt.
When the owner got a girlfriend, he told her all about the book with great excitement, and she, too, read it. The two lovebirds chattered on happily about the book.
When the owner and his friends went out drinking, the owner went on and on about all the things the book had done for him, the ways it had helped him, the courage it had given him. This made the book very happy. Even when the owner grew old, he continued to read the book.
The old owner gave his grandchildren new copies of the book. But the old, loveworn copy of the book always stayed with him.
At last, the day came when it was time for the book and its owner to part. The book sat by the owner’s bed. The owner was no longer able to pick up the book and flip through its pages, so in the end he simply gently stroked its cover.
The book made its way from one person to another, and ended up here on the shelf in the used bookstore. It thinks fondly of that time so long ago when its owner held the book in his still-small hands and flipped through its pages so carefully. And of the days when its owner would hold it in the warmth of his palms, larger now, and flip those same pages again and again.
So, the books around it sparkle on the shelf, and this book alone is old and ragged. But this book is the happiest of them all. The words on its pages tell one story. But the book itself tells another one.
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Excerpted from The Neverending Book. Copyright (c) 2022 by Naoki Matayoshi and Shinsuke Yoshitake. Translation copyright © 2025 by Kendall Heitzman. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
