Kinokuniya, Melbourne Central, and the Ghost of Daimaru

There’s a specific kind of local excitement that only happens over construction hoarding. Not roadworks, not the endless scaffolding on some apartment tower nobody asked for. I mean the good kind, where someone spots a logo through the plywood and an entire subreddit loses its mind. That’s where we’re at with Books Kinokuniya, Level 2, Melbourne Central. Branding’s up. The council’s own “Walking the City of Literature” guide has quietly added it to the list. People are doing detective work on old shopfront leases like it’s a cold case.

I like this about Melbourne, genuinely. A city that gets this worked up about a bookstore opening is a city with its priorities roughly in order.

For anyone who hasn’t been to the Sydney store, the pitch is simple: it’s not Dymocks with a twist, it’s a proper Japanese bookstore that happens to also stock English titles, manga, art books, stationery, the lot. Someone in the thread mentioned the Sydney branch’s photography section being borderline unreasonable, in the best way. That tracks. There’s a version of retail that exists purely to make you spend money you didn’t plan on spending, and a good bookstore does that better than almost anything else. I’ve walked into a Kinokuniya overseas intending to browse for ten minutes and left ninety minutes later, wallet lighter, having bought a book about the history of pinball machines I did not need.

What got me, though, wasn’t the opening date speculation. It was the Daimaru tangent. Half the thread lit up reminiscing about the old Japanese department store that used to occupy that same patch of Melbourne Central back in the 90s, the toy section, the stationery, the media floor where apparently people picked up import CDs and games. Someone said Daimaru was “just a few decades too early” for Melbourne, and that’s a genuinely sad little sentence when you sit with it. A whole retail concept, ahead of its market, quietly closed down, and now people are nostalgic for a department store most of them visited as kids.

I remember Daimaru vaguely myself, more the vibe than any specific purchase. That slightly foreign, over-air-conditioned feeling of walking into a shopping space that didn’t look like anything else in the city at the time. My daughter has zero context for any of this, obviously. To her, a big multi-level bookstore with a manga section and maybe a cafe is just a Tuesday. Which is fine. That’s not decline, that’s just what “normal” looks like now, and normal has genuinely gotten better on this front.

There’s a broader pattern here that’s worth naming without overselling it: cities go through waves of what kind of retail they can support, and it’s rarely a straight line of progress. Daimaru closed. Borders closed. A lot of big bookstores closed in that mid-2000s to 2010s stretch when everyone assumed physical books were basically finished. And yet here we are, with actual hype building for a new multi-level bookstore in the CBD, in a shopping centre, in 2025. I don’t fully understand the economics of why this works now when it didn’t a decade ago, and I’m not going to pretend I do. Maybe it’s the manga boom. Maybe it’s people wanting something to do in the city that isn’t just eating or drinking. Probably both, plus things I haven’t thought of.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad it’s happening. Melbourne Central’s had a strange, slightly hollowed-out energy in parts since some of the bigger anchor stores moved on, and a proper destination bookstore is exactly the kind of thing that gives a shopping centre a reason to exist beyond convenience. If they bring a cafe like the Sydney one, even better. I’ll be there with a flat white, not buying a pinball history book, promise.