Junichiro Kida: Wandering Private Collections

2018/01/01

I remember reading in a book by Sherlockian Koki Naganuma that a British bibliophile's paradise is growing roses while reading Sherlock Holmes by the fireplace at night, but unfortunately, my current situation is worlds apart from that.

Recently, in order to move to a smaller home, I disposed of about 30,000 volumes from my collection and recorded the process in a book titled "Zosho Ichidai" (A Lifetime of Book Collecting) (Shoraisha). I was somewhat concerned about how a person like me, over 82 years old, would be perceived by readers for talking endlessly about an obsession with books, but I was motivated to write by my indignation over the fact that not only mine, but the former collections of many researchers in recent years, are not being accepted by public institutions and are being disposed of for a pittance.

I have been writing for exactly half a century, mainly focusing on modern history and the history of publishing culture, and more recently on media-related criticism and occasional novels. All of these genres require a vast amount of literature. Having been born during the war and growing up in a state of hunger for books, when I set out to become a writer, I first strove to acquire as many reference books as possible, such as dictionaries and handbooks. While I had to use libraries, I built the foundation of my own collection with the policy of not relying on them too much. Since it was common knowledge for scholars and researchers from the pre-war to post-war periods to conduct research against the backdrop of their own collections, people like Togo Yoshida and Senzo Mori, who conducted research almost entirely based on libraries, were exceptions.

As a writer who is constantly chased by deadlines, I cannot work without having reference materials close at hand. Looking back, my busiest period was around age 40, when I was handling four newspaper columns and three weekly magazine serials, in addition to writing a new book. Sometimes I wrote standing up to keep from falling asleep. At such a time, when I asked Mr. O, who was in the spotlight as a critic of popular literature, when he wrote his manuscripts, he replied, "I wake up at 4:00 every morning and sit at my desk until 12:00. If I work until noon, I've basically done an eight-hour workday. In the afternoon, I have the peace of mind to meet people or go hunting for old books." I immediately tried this 4:00 a.m. wake-up routine. It was fine for the first two weeks or so, but when winter came, my body got cold, my efficiency dropped, and it didn't last long. In a residence centered on a library and a study, the heating doesn't work well enough. Mr. O had purchased two apartments and used one of them as a library. It was around this time that I began to realize that maintaining a collection incurs significant indirect costs.

Mr. O further maintained that "the value of a collection is determined by whether or not it contains rare books," but I, on the contrary, practiced abstinence regarding rare books. I could not afford to chase books for hobby or pleasure.

However, the world of books is diverse, and if you don't keep even hobby books in view, a collection becomes bland. For example, Momosuke Hoshina (1868–1911), an educator and mineralogist from Nagano Prefecture, has a privately published book titled "Yoikaka wo Hoshina Hyakushu-ke" (A Hundred Poems Wanting a Good Wife), based on his hobby of kyoka (comic tanka), in addition to his complete works. It means "Hoshina's hundred poems wishing to obtain a good wife," and it was Shozo Saito, himself a creator of "kisho" (curious or rare books), who praised this as a curious book.

I found this book at an exhibition and sale (a so-called exhibition). It is a small booklet with an elegant old-fashioned binding, and every page is illustrated. At the beginning, it says, "As I grow old / I find myself / Wanting a wife / Somehow in this world," which first strikes a chord. It develops eccentric playful poems such as "Every time / I buy a courtesan / I think / I want a wife / Who glows faintly," and ends halfway in desperation with the hundredth poem: "If you say / There are none at all / Then I think / I want a wife / From all things in nature."

While literature about Momosuke is now too numerous to mention, when I was asked to write a biography of Momosuke as one piece in a series called "Document Nihonjin" (Documentary Japanese) planned during the period of high economic growth, he was known only to those in the know, and this book was not even in the National Diet Library. It goes without saying that I did not hesitate to spend several times the usual material cost to acquire it.

There are infinite similar cases. When I looked around my bookshelves while organizing my 30,000-volume collection, the most numerous were not basic reference works but such secondary materials. This is probably not the case for me alone. If we imagine moving an existing collection into a newly built library, the order would be to first place large reference materials like "Koji Ruien" or "Kokushi Taikei" on the upper shelves, memoirs and biographies in the middle, and unofficial histories or reading materials that don't look very impressive on the bottom shelves. Enriching these shelves from the middle to the bottom is the greatest concern for writers and research-oriented collectors. Secondhand bookstores call this type of book "zappon" (miscellaneous books), but they turn a writer's hardships into joy and become a source for generating new ideas. No book is likely published with the intention of being a miscellaneous book from the start, but it is natural for some books to sink into the abyss of oblivion as times change, and it is the worth of a reader, collector, or writer to breathe life back into them. However, there are no standards for these miscellaneous books; they are precious books to some, but to others, they are nothing more than trash.

It was probably in my late 60s, when my collection exceeded 20,000 volumes, that I felt the limits of my physical strength after a major illness and began to think about the future of my collection along with my own future. Can a collection be passed on? Basic reference works have a visible universal utility. For example, an encyclopedia is a tool for everyone to gain a broad, introductory knowledge of subjects outside their specialty. However, a group of books called miscellaneous books does not have such universality, so their use is limited. For public institutions to take these in and attract the attention of visitors, they would need to provide categories such as "Former Collection of Takeo Kuwabara" or "Former Collection of Yukio Mishima."

However, that would only cover the collections of famous people with a wide readership. Just around that time, I was involved in the management of a literary museum and, to be honest, I had a faint hope that they might accept my collection, but that seemed unlikely. Every time I looked inside the library, I saw that it was already full of the former collections and materials of famous writers and critics. It had been open for nearly 30 years, and its collection had reached 1.1 million items, including books and manuscripts. Furthermore, because the building was sturdy and the material preservation technology was excellent, applications for donations were constant.

Once, there was an application from the bereaved family of a deceased literary critic who wanted to donate a substantial amount of his former collection, which had been kept for about 20 years after his death, with the future in mind. However, we had to decline on the grounds that there were "too many duplicate books." Since the deceased had also been a university faculty member, they likely inquired about donating to related facilities, but were probably refused because many years had passed since his death. Looking around again, the public cultural facilities that had sprung up like mushrooms after rain during the high-growth period were all hit by dramatic budget cuts after the collapse of the bubble economy and were gasping for breath; the situation was such that even the collections of devoted scholars were ignored. Fortunately, this collection was taken in by a university where the deceased had lectured for a short period, but at one point there were concerns that it might flow out of the country.

Since this incident, I have felt uneasy about the future of my own collection. My home, over 40 years old, was showing signs of aging, my wife was suffering from illness, and my own physical strength was rapidly declining, so I decided to take the plunge and consider moving to the countryside. I will omit the details of the process, but immediately after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, I set up a residence with a spacious library and study in a new town development area in Okayama Prefecture. For a while, I felt very happy, but as they say, "misfortune follows a good thing." Because the development of the new town was suspended due to the collapse of the bubble economy and it was predicted that daily life would become inconvenient, I ended up running back with my tail between my legs. I was depressed for a while.

At this time, I ended up repeating the useless task of moving 10,000 books into the new house and then moving them out again. What troubled me at the stage of moving them back was the problem of space. I no longer had the room to put 10,000 books back into a reinforced concrete house, so I pleaded with a secondhand bookstore I had been close with since I was young to temporarily store them in a warehouse in Tokyo. However, in the midst of the great confusion, I was unable to thoroughly implement the basic policy of separating the titles that could be disposed of from those that could not, which resulted in causing trouble for the bookstore.

Another thing is how much of a heavy labor it is for an elderly person to take a large number of books off the shelves, pack them into boxes of 20 or 30 each, and then open them. You don't know until you experience it. It's fine to leave it to others, but since no one but the person themselves can record the contents of the boxes so they can be understood, the total amount of work hardly decreases. When you can no longer organize your own books due to declining physical strength, that is the end of the story.

It was four years later, when I had reached the age of 80, that I ran out of options and was forced to declutter my collection, leaving only 600 volumes and dispersing the rest. It is an age where people might say, "That's enough. Give up," and in fact, I did give up, but what still crosses my mind is whether there really were no other options besides dispersal. Needless to say, I explored the intentions of facilities, publishers, and friends I knew, but I got nowhere for reasons such as "unable to secure space" or "short-handed." I also considered storing them in a book trunk room, but found it impossible due to the cost. Under Japan's cramped housing conditions, it can be said that the suffering of a book collector ultimately comes down to the difficulty of securing space.

In any case, since a collection is an accumulation of the owner's thoughts carved into each volume, it is natural to feel an attachment to it, and I cannot imagine anyone who does not wish for it to be passed on after their death. Furthermore, the fact that being passed on is an essential characteristic of books is clear from history, such as Untei in the Nara period, where private collections developed into libraries and archives. Maintaining such a book culture, which is unparalleled in other media, is surely a responsibility imposed on modern society. It is a concern related to the decline of print culture.

※Affiliations and titles are as of the time this magazine was published.