Tokyo Club SPREAD Turned Its Dancefloor Into a Silent Reading Party, and 1,200 Reddit Comments Followed

For four hours on a Saturday in September, nobody danced at SPREAD. Tokyo's basement club in Shimokitazawa pulled up its usual booking, rolled carpet across the dancefloor, and charged the door for something closer to a library with a sound system than a rave.

The event is called Jucy Book Rave, and the format is exactly what it sounds like. From 10am to 2pm on September 26th, attendees lay on the carpet, leaned against the walls or sat cross-legged with a paperback while Saku and Ochikabouran played ambient sets low enough to read by. Advance tickets ran ¥2,000 and the door was ¥2,500; both included two drinks and a book pulled from a list the organizers chose on purpose, titles picked to split opinion rather than please everyone. Guests Tsuyachan, a writer who runs book-swap meetups, and novelist Ota Stephanie Kanto were on hand to talk through the selections. After 1pm, the volume came up and whoever wanted to dance, could. Nobody was required to. Nobody has published an attendance figure for the room.

Why It Went Viral

A video of the event surfaced on Reddit's r/interestingasfuck and passed 1,200 comments within days, Mixmag Asia reported on October 2nd. The reaction splits along predictable lines. "Libraries been real quiet since this dropped" is the top comment. Someone else called it "my kind of disco." A third wasn't sold: "this looks so uncomfy - lol. Imagine sitting on the floor for 2h in such a crowded space where you can't even stretch your legs." Fair point, and also beside it: nobody forced anyone onto the concrete floor. The tickets sold.

The Room Behind It

It's a fair question why a magazine about house and techno is writing about people reading quietly on a dancefloor. The answer is the room it happened in. SPREAD opened in the basement of Shimokitazawa's Riverstone Building in February 2020, days before the pandemic rewrote what a nightclub was allowed to be. Six years on, it still runs regular club nights on the same concrete floor Jucy Book Rave covered in carpet for one Saturday. A reading rave doesn't replace the dancefloor. It's one more thing a small room can decide to do with its own floor and its own PA, on a day nobody had booked it for anything else.

No second date for Jucy Book Rave has been announced. If SPREAD runs it again, the rest of Tokyo's underground rooms, the ones Loopliner covered in its guide to the city's best house and techno clubs, will have a harder time arguing a club can't double as a library for an afternoon.

Cover photo: SPREAD's entrance in Shimokitazawa, via the venue's Facebook page.