[Cool toys] A perfect website for the Japanese art of book-living

Like all great cultural traditions in Japan, being a person of letters is steeped in its own set of highly refined formalisms and rituals. Formalism in Japanese culture allows simple acts to be perfected, with beauty originating not from embellishment, but from subtraction down to the very essence. Thus, the tea ceremony is a reduced version of drinking tea, but simultaneously, it is so much more.

Being a person of letters, or shosei, is no different. "Sho" is the kanji for books (and writing), "sei" is the kanji for life and living. One traditional prototype of a practitioner of "book-living" is that of a young man living in a small room of his patron's house, working as a live-in tutor to the children of the house. The shosei will traditionally own only one suit, which he wears whenever he goes out. At home, he will wear a simplified kimono. He also owns a decent fountain pen and a functioning timepiece. Everything else is non-essential... except for the books.

Prototypes aside, here, I will take some liberties and use the word shosei in a somewhat broader sense; the unifying concept is a lifestyle devoted to learning, while shunning (or having no means to) material wealth other than books.

---

Books are the core of shosei-life-- however, life in Japan is antithetical to owning books.

First of all, with so many people living in a small archipelago, spacious rooms devoted to bibliophilia are impractical. The real estate economics of a cultural city like Tokyo or Kyoto can be overwhelming, especially for a poor shosei. The illustration is taken from a Miyazaki animated movie, "Whisper of the Heart." The father of this family is a librarian, the mother goes to graduate school, and the girl is a regular shosei-in-training. Notice the books.

Second, there is the mold. Japan is mostly tropical, with a month-long rainy season in June. Books, especially when kept in tight quarters, tend to get extremely moldy. Winter is quite dry though, and this constant cycle of wet and dry can cause pages to wrinkle like lasagna.

Even given these impediments to owning books, books are an essential part of being a shosei. A partial solution to this conundrum may be upon us in the form of a website, www.librarything.com.

---

This website allows you to keep a database of the books you own. You can apply multiple tags to the books to categorize them, write reviews, etc. Most satisfying to the shosei is that it allows you to keep track of the number of books in your growing library. Just as military men like to gather stripes on their lapels, shosei like to sport large libraries (shosei aren't immune from the mine-is-bigger-than-yours impulse).

The most revolutionary function is that it allows you to view the libraries of people who own similar books. You can also solicit recommendations from the database, based on what similarly-minded people own.

Shosei are always faced with the need to get rid of books. Otherwise, there may be no place to put your futon, and being smothered by books during the next earthquake is not appealing either. Perhaps keeping books virtually at this website may be a partial substitute.

Some books, of course, you can never throw away. Furthermore, I have noticed that using this website can stoke bad book-buying binges. However, I hold hope in the possibility that this website will let me get rid of less important books, while still enjoying the age-old art of book-living.



Links
How to live as a poor shosei (in Japanese)