The Ueno reading rooms where a Meiji library keeps its afternoon light

The reading room on the second floor holds its quiet the way old rooms do, from the floor up. Light comes in sideways through tall windows and lands on long wooden tables, on the backs of hands turning pages, and by three in the afternoon it has moved far enough that the person by the window shifts a chair to stay inside it. Nobody photographs this. There is nothing to point a phone at except light, which does not photograph.

A brick box the century spared

The International Library of Children's Literature (国際子ども図書館, Kokusai Kodomo Toshokan) sits at the quiet northern edge of Ueno Park, past the museums, where the crowds thin to art students and pigeons. The building opened in 1906 as the Imperial Library, a Renaissance-revival block of brick and stone from the years when Japan was learning to build in the European manner, and it outlasted the fires that took most of the wooden city around it.

In 2000 the architect Tadao Ando slid a plane of glass through the old façade, a corridor of light bolted onto the masonry without pretending to match it. You enter through that glass, hand in nothing, pay nothing — admission is free — and the century changes register around you as you climb. The staircase is stone, worn concave by more than a hundred years of feet.

What the rooms ask of you

This is a library, not a museum, which means it asks a small courtesy in return for the light: you keep your voice down, and for the older and rarer material you fill in a slip and wait rather than pull books off a shelf. The ground-floor children's room is the exception, with open shelves, low chairs, and picture books in dozens of languages that you may simply carry to a cushion and read.

Upstairs, the reading room for adults and researchers is where the afternoon collects. Bring a passport or any photo ID to register for a day card; laptops are allowed at marked seats, and pencils rather than pens are the rule near the old paper. Photography of the interior is restricted, which is part of why the place stays as it is.

A room that cannot be photographed keeps something a photographed room gives away.

The word for a place like this is anaba (穴場), a hidden pocket off the current, and this reading room is one of the last of them in central Tokyo. It is the sort of quiet you have to arrive at on foot to believe.

穴場とは、写真に写らない時間のことかもしれない。

The lane down to Nezu

Leave by the north and the park lets you down toward Nezu along Ueno-Sakuragi (上野桜木), a pocket of low houses the developers somehow missed. Three wooden buildings from 1938 have been kept and turned, gently, into a cluster called Ueno Sakuragi Atari — a bakery whose sourdough tends to sell out by early afternoon, a small beer hall in the old garden, an olive-oil shop about the size of a closet.

A few minutes on stands Kayaba Coffee (カヤバ珈琲), a butter-yellow corner kissa in a 1938 building, its second floor still laid with tatami. Order the tamago sando, egg salad pressed warm between toasted white bread, and the drink the regulars call a "Russian" — coffee and cocoa poured half and half, which sounds wrong and is not. A coffee runs a few hundred yen, and the seat by the upstairs window is worth the short wait for it.

Yanaka, where the hill remembers

Keep walking and the neighbourhood becomes Yanaka (谷中), one of the few parts of Tokyo the twentieth century mostly left alone. The shopping street, Yanaka Ginza (谷中銀座), drops toward a staircase locals call Yūyake Dandan (夕焼けだんだん), the sunset steps, because that is where the light goes orange over the rooftops at the end of the day.

Cats sit on the walls here as if posted to them. The croquette shops fry through the afternoon — a menchi-katsu for around two hundred yen, eaten standing — and the whole street begins folding up around five, shutters coming down while the sky does its one reliable trick over the steps.

Getting there, and when to go

The library is a ten-minute walk from JR Ueno Station, out the Park exit and up through the park past the museums; coming the other way, exit 2 of Nezu Station on the Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line drops you into the quiet lanes and lets you climb to it on foot from below. Admission is free and needs no booking. Come on a weekday afternoon, when the light is long and the reading room is nearly empty.

The one mistake is arriving on a Monday, when the library is closed, as it also is on the third Wednesday of each month and over the New Year. The second is expecting to browse the historic collection like a bookshop; that material is closed-stack, requested by slip, and the reward is the room itself — the tables, the windows, the afternoon moving across the floor while you decide you are in no hurry to leave. Bring a book of your own if you like. No one will mind, as long as you turn the pages quietly.