Going to Frankfurt for the Book Fair may seem like a dream, but it’s actually work. You get to work in a nice place, which means getting to contemplate varied architecture (in transit) and eating new, interesting food (when you manage to find the time).

It also means meeting new people and gaining new perspectives. Just talking to people from different countries and different walks of life is a significant educational experience.

The pace of Frankfurt is fast if you have booked plenty of meetings—and it’s necessary if you want to make the most of it. Of some twenty new people I met with, I only saw two of them again around the fair venue—it’s huge, after all! The building with the guest of honor pavilion is called Entrance City which seems particularly apt. Perhaps it’s not really as large as a city, but it is as tiring to traverse the whole place on foot as it is to wander around a city.

One person I did see repeatedly even if he wasn’t part of the delegation I was in was a hotelmate at our little Japanese hotel the Toyoko Inn, Japanese translator Koji. Except for my first night when I slept longer than usual after a long flight, I would wake up early each morning starving. I’m not really a breakfast person, normally, but being seven hours behind my local time, 6 am was already a late lunch hour for me and my stomach was screaming I’d missed dinner and breakfast in my sleeping hours!

Having already met in the Asian Rights Fair in September and discussed titles at the Buchmesse, we had plenty to talk about. I found Koji was observant of cultural differences from the beginning. When he was in Manila for the Asian Rights Fair, he asked me if it was typical for fathers to look after their children here, noting a number who had brought their children to the Manila International Book Fair. This stood out for him as it wasn’t quite as common in Japan. In fact it is something I have also been noticing more over the years and highlighted in an baby magazine article I wrote back around 2010 on fatherhood. I explained to Koji that one reason might be that many mothers not only work but often work abroad because of the high demand for Filipina nurses. While now a job for any gender, there are still more women nurses and women are still preferred as nurses, especially Filipino women.

There was a continuation of this discussion in Germany as, noting how many Filipinos seemed to be at our stand, he asked if any of them had come from Germany or Europe. I explained there were a few who had among our delegates and that we were also visited by some Filipinos living in the area. Many Filpinos, I explained to him, got work in Europe as health workers (mostly nurses, of course!) and laborers.

Over breakfasts of miso soup and rice accompanied by Western breakfast foods such as sausages, eggs, green salad, and the continental breakfast staples of pastries, hot chocolate, coffee–a cultural mix that aptly represented our current book fair experience–we had discussions on the literature of our countries and literary trends in general and the mundane details of life in our country and in our particular locale. As with Kannika Claudine D. Peña, the author of our title All The Lonely People which he took an interest in, Koji does not care for the big city but relishes living in a rural area. He brought up how stressed the Japanese living in Tokyo and other congested cities were.

He had mentioned some aspects of this in the ARF when we talked about reading demographics, mentioning that Japan had a large aging population and less younger people to look after them. And that this was also a cause of stress to adults who had to take care of their older relatives while dealing with jobs and families. Even young people still in school had to look after aging relatives. This led to a discussion on the issues facing young people in Japan. He mentioned the issue of bullying particularly online which, along with academic pressures, causes children to avoid attending school.

A bit of a rambling conversation, but learning about these issues from him prompted me to share with him our title about a teenager dealing with her mother with a mood disorder, At Home With CrazyAt Home with Crazy. And a week ago, he sent me an information sheet he had prepared in Japanese about this book to share with the publishers he translates for.

We talk of making business connections but in the world of books, particularly works of literature, which are about human concerns, personal connections are just as valuable. Diverging from talk of business may seem inefficient, but it can lead to relevant discoveries, as Koji’s divergence from the topic of the age demographic of readers led to a discussion of mental health concerns that happened to be related to titles we had.

His sharing of information of our book may lead to a sale, for which of course I hope. Not just for business reasons, though of course that is a factor because we are in business. But my heartfelt concern is for the mental health of schoolchildren in Japan, as well as young people in the Philippines. Because that concern is the reason I champion this title and recommended it particularly to Koji when my heart was moved by the concerns he was sincerely troubled about. The business of selling literary books is ultimately a human business.