There is a word for it in Japanese.
Well, sometimes I feel like there is a word for almost everything in Japanese. And also, most probably, in Korean.
English is quite rich in vocabulary, with approximately 172, 000 word entries in its dictionary. Russian has about 150 000 and Spanish over 96 000.
But Japanese? 500 000. Korean? 1, 100 000.
So no wonder there is a word for this in Japanese. A word used to describe people who tend to acquire far more books than they can possibly read in their lifetime. The phenomenon of purchasing way too many books, I mean stacks of books, only to have them pile up at home.
Tsundoku.
The legendary fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was familiar with this phenomenon. He once said he had more than 300 000 books in his possession. A whole paper kingdom of words.
As much as I would have loved to, I could never become a book hoarder. Living a nomadic life for so long meant having to say farewell to beloved books.
At one point in my life, I remember vividly, I had boxes of books in Istanbul, waiting for the day I would return and pick them up, boxes of books in Michigan, boxes of books in Arizona...
Volumes lost somewhere along the way. Books, although dear to my heart I could not take with me through multiple migrations. Because the truth is, there is only so many books you can fit into a suitcase.
What shall I take with me then?
Marcel Proust seemed to be out of question. What was he thinking! Just like Cervantes, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy or James Joyce. Too hefty. Between them they would have occupied half of my suitcase. So I would have to let go of In Search of Lost Time and The Karamazov Brothers, as well as The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, just to make space for Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova, Virginia Woolf… That would do! That would have to do! I would take out Joseph Conrad and put in Czeslaw Milosz. But immediately I would feel unhappy. A sense of guilt would seize my chest. The guilt of abandoning treasured books, companions, friends. So I would take everything out of the suitcase and start arranging carefully again. And again.
T. S. Eliot or W. B. Yeats? How can you possibly choose?
How many books can you take with you when you know you are leaving your home for good? How many books can you afford to carry in your suitcase when you are exiled from your home country?
The outcome was I started to commit things to memory.
Verses from Rumi, verses from Hafez, verses from Walt Whitman, verses from W. B. Yeats…. But I am not very good at memorising things, so I had to develop some silly techniques. Visual clues. I would spot a seagull, for instance, and would repeat to myself out loud:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
Never mind that it was a seagull that I was looking at, not a falcon. The mind needs its mnemonic clues.
My point is, if I could have carried all my books with me, I would not have bothered to try to learn as many poems as I could by heart.
Home is a room full of books. That is where I feel most free. At peace. In love. I guess a part of me can easily aim to become some kind of a book hoarder. But another part of me, a wiser part perhaps, understands and appreciates the beauty of sharing books, passing them on to others.
I have a lot of respect and love for Book Fairies. If you have never heard of them, I can assure you that they exist.
These are people who, when they have finished reading a book that they loved and enjoyed, they give it to another person for free. That person can be a friend, neighbour or a random stranger.
They pop a sticker on the book they want to share. Sometimes they wrap it with a ribbon to show that it is a gift from the heart. “Take this book, read it and then please leave it somewhere visible where it can be found and read by another person.”
In this way, thanks to them, stories travel the world. Books make their own journeys.
Anyone can become a Book Fairy.
Last year I was delighted to learn that Book Fairies had chosen my novel The Island of Missing Trees. Since then, they have left multiple copies of my novel inside parks, restaurants and public squares. I know this because I saw posts by surprised readers who had found these hidden copies.
I have never met a Book Fairy in person but I am very grateful to them for their generous spirit and heart. So if you are a Book Fairy, or planning to become one, thank you for sharing the joy of reading, the love of literature.
Having lived in Japan, I have long been familiar with the concept of 'tsundoku' and I do sometimes feel very guilty about all the unread books that I own. However, recently I came across these wonderful words, written by Umberto Eco: "It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.
"There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.
"If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!
"Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."
I resonate with this post! Onmy move to Portugal from the US I had to let go of more than 3/4 of my book collection which was not easy. Sometimes I remember a book fondly that I wish I had kept but then I acquire more books and the cycle continues in some way. I love the idea of the book fairies! I’m visiting Amsterdam and here they have large bookshelves out in public stacked with books in different languages that people can leave or take. There is something about this giving of books that can restore one’s faith in humanity.