Even though it was a small-town library, since I’d taken on the job of head librarian I’d been prepared to make the rounds in town, introducing myself and being introduced to local dignitaries and so on. Social niceties weren’t exactly my forte, but I could handle them when the job required it. After all, I’d worked for over twenty years in a company.
But contrary to my expectations, these visits never occurred, not even once. I wasn’t introduced to anyone in town, and never visited anyone to pay my compliments. Mrs. Soeda did assemble the part-time women staff members (there were but four of them), and introduced me as the new head librarian; we sat down and had tea and cupcakes together. Each of them briefly introduced herself. That was the extent of it. Short and sweet.
Naturally I was thankful things were kept so simple, but I did feel a bit let down, and baffled. I wondered if something important, something critical, had been overlooked.
One time, when Mr. Koyasu and I were in the head librarian’s office, drinking tea together, I asked him about it.
“This library is officially named after Z**, so shouldn’t I drop by the city office and at least introduce myself ?”
When he heard this Mr. Koyasu half opened his small mouth and made a face like he’d accidentally swallowed a bug.
“Ah, by introduce yourself you mean—”
“In other words…wouldn’t it be good for me to at least establish a connection with them, meet the people in charge in town? Just in case something happens?”
“Establish a connection,” he repeated, looking put out.
I waited, silently, for him to go on.
Mr. Koyasu cleared his throat awkwardly and said, “I don’t think that’s, ah, necessary. This library has no real connection with the town. It’s completely independent. It does have the town name attached, but that’s just because it would be too much trouble changing it, so we left it as is. So there’s no need at all for you to stop by to introduce yourself. Actually, that would complicate things.”
“Don’t I need to introduce myself at a board meeting?”
Mr. Koyasu shook his head. “No, there’s no need to. And there won’t be any opportunity to, since they hardly ever meet. As I explained before, the board is just a formality, a token.”
“A board that’s a formality,” I said.
“Ah, that’s right,” he said, beaming all the more. “There are five board members, not a single one of whom cares about this library. We just use their names because the system requires that we have a board. So therefore, yes, there’s no need for you to go introduce yourself.”
I didn’t get it. A library operated by a pro forma board.
“If something comes up and I need to consult somebody about it, then who should I go to?”
“I’m here. You can ask me about anything at all. And I’ll give you an answer.”
All well and good, but I didn’t know his address or telephone number, or email address. How would I get in touch, then?
“I’ll be stopping by here once every three days or so. Things keep me from coming every day, but I should be able to come that often. If anything arises, please ask me then.” He sounded as if he’d been reading my thoughts.
“And also, Mrs. Soeda’s here. I’m sure she’ll help you. She knows just about everything. So there’s nothing, ah, for you to worry about.”
I asked him about something that had been on my mind for a time.
“But you require adequate funds to continue running this library. Even a small-scale town library needs to pay utilities and salaries, and funds to make monthly purchases of books. If the board of directors doesn’t fulfill its function, who shoulders those costs, and oversees them?”
Mr. Koyasu crossed his arms and tilted his head, looking a bit perplexed.
“I think as you go about your work here day to day you’ll gradually come to understand all that. Like the dawn arriving and sunshine streaming through the window. At this point don’t let it concern you, and just focus on learning the ins and outs of the job. And acclimating yourself, physically and mentally, to this little town. Right now, there’s nothing for you to worry about. It’s all under control.”
He reached out and lightly patted my shoulder, like encouraging an adorable dog.
Like the dawn arriving and sunshine streaming through the window, I repeated to myself. A nice turn of phrase, that.
One of the first tasks I set myself to as the newly appointed head librarian was getting a handle on what kind of books the library patrons read and checked out. By doing that I could see what kind of books the library should purchase, and grasp a kind of guideline for operating the library. Doing that, however, meant going through, by hand, all the visitor logs and all the lending cards. Requesting books to read in the library and checking them out was all analog, without the aid of computers.
“In this library we keep all those records without using any computers,” Mrs. Soeda explained to me. “It’s all done by hand.”
“No computers at all are used here?”
“Correct, none at all,” she replied, as if nothing could be more natural.
“But doing it all by hand takes time, and isn’t it a lot of trouble to manage all that? If you use barcodes it can all be finished in an instant, you won’t need a place to store the documents, and it’ll be easy to organize information.”
Mrs. Soeda adjusted her glasses with the fingers of her right hand, and then said this: “This is a small library, and not all that many books are read or checked out. We can manage very well using old-fashioned methods. None of it takes all that much time.”
“So you’re fine continuing this way?”
“I am,” Mrs. Soeda said. “This was already decided and that’s how we’ve always done it. Isn’t that a more human approach? And the library patrons have never complained. If you don’t use machines, you have fewer technical glitches, and your expenses are less, too.”
The library didn’t have wi-fi so I was only able to access my computer at home. Even so, there wasn’t anyone I regularly corresponded with by email, and I wasn’t into social networking, so I never felt this setup was inconvenient. And I could read a number of newspapers at the library so there was no need to check information online.
All of which is to say that I grasped the gist of the library’s activities by going through, one by one, the pile of handwritten lists of books read and cards for books checked out. Not that this time-consuming process led to any startling, useful information. The books people read and checked out were for the most part bestsellers at the time, most of these being practical guidebooks or light entertainment. Though occasionally people would check out more weighty works—novels by Dostoyevsky, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Mann, or Ango Sakaguchi, Ogai Mori, Junichiro Tanizaki, or Kenzaburo Oe.
Most people in the town weren’t what you’d call devoted readers, yet among them (a minority, I would think) there were some who’d regularly come to the library, had a healthy intellectual curiosity, and were quite serious readers—this was the conclusion I reached after going through all those cards by hand. I had no idea whether the proportion of such devoted readers there was, compared to the national average, something to be celebrated or lamented. I could only accept it as the present reality. Since this town existed, and functioned, as a reality that (at least for now) operated apart from any of my hopes or intentions.
When I had free time, I’d wander around the stacks and peruse the books. I pulled damaged books to be repaired. I got rid of those that had outdated information and the ones I figured nobody would be interested in, or I stored them in the warehouse in back and replaced them with others. I checked lists of newly published books and purchased titles I thought would appeal to our patrons. The budget I was given for monthly purchases of new books was more generous than I’d imagined (even though still not enough), which surprised me a bit.
I’d spent every day of my life up to now dealing with books, and this new routine gave me a new kind of happiness. I had no boss here, no need to wear a tie. No annoying meetings, and no entertaining of business clients.
I met with Mrs. Soeda and the part-time staff to discuss how the library should be run. I made a few modest proposals, but the women didn’t seem too keen on new policies or regulation. We should continue as we’ve been doing, they said, since there haven’t been any complaints from the patrons. So why change anything? They all were dead set against introducing the internet to the library. In short, they wanted to keep things just as Mr. Koyasu had had them.
But about my proactive reorganizing of the stacks, and of the library’s inventory—modernizing things, in other words—they had no comments or complaints. They left that up to me. They weren’t all that interested in those kinds of matters—maybe that’s all it was. I got the impression that they didn’t care one way or the other about what happened to books on the shelves, or what sorts of books the patrons read. Though they did all work hard and seemed to enjoy working in the library.
I had little opportunity to come in contact with the library patrons directly, and we never spoke. Were the people who frequented this library even aware there was a new head librarian? Who knows. After I was appointed to the post I wasn’t introduced to anyone, and no one spoke to me. Other than the handful of women who worked in the library, a newcomer like me seemed of no interest to anyone in town. No one seemed to notice, or care.
This was a small town and everyone should have heard about me taking over from Mr. Koyasu as head librarian. The news had to have made the rounds. A newcomer from the city coming here, in this town where few ever came and went, had to arouse the curiosity of the residents.
But not a single person showed, by their expression, any of this. They came to the library as if nothing had changed, did things there as always, and even if I peeked into the reading room, no one even glanced in my direction. They’d sit in the lounge’s chairs, reading newspapers and magazines, or in the reading room turning the pages of books they’d borrowed, and I could walk right past them without anyone showing a flicker of interest. It was as if they’d all agreed not to notice me.
I was truly puzzled. Were people really not aware I’d taken over as Mr. Koyasu’s successor? Or for some reason—what reason I couldn’t imagine—had they all agreed to ignore me, and treat me like someone who didn’t even exist?
I couldn’t figure it out. It was baffling, though it didn’t cause immediate, practical problems for me. With Mr. Koyasu and Mrs. Soeda’s help, I steadily mastered the essentials of the job. So I didn’t let it bother me, figuring things would eventually settle down. Like Mr. Koyasu had said, things would become clear over time. Like the dawn arriving and sunshine streaming through the window.
The library opened at nine a.m. and closed at six p.m. I arrived every day for work at eight thirty and left the library at six thirty. It was Mrs. Soeda’s job to unlock the door in the morning and lock it again in the evening. I had a set of keys, too, but hardly any chance to use them. I left that to her, as they’d been doing. When I arrived at work in the morning the library was already open, with Mrs. Soeda at her desk, and when I left in the evening, she was still there.
“Please don’t worry about it. It’s my job,” she explained when I looked apologetic for leaving before she left.
Seeing Mrs. Soeda there inevitably reminded me of the library in the town surrounded by a wall. There, too, it was her job to unlock and lock up the door. The girl always carried around a large bunch of keys. The only difference was that there, after the entrance to the library was shut, I walked her back to her house. We’d walk together, silently, along the river at night, heading toward the Workers’ District.
But when the library closed for the day in this little town in the mountains, I walked home alone down the path along the river. Alone, lost in random thoughts, there was a similar murmur of flowing water, but no rustling willow leaves, no calls of night birds. “In the fall you can hear the cries of deer,” Mr. Koyasu had told me, but I couldn’t hear those either. Maybe it had to be deeper into fall. But then again, what kind of calls did deer make, anyway? I had no idea.
Not too long after I started my job as the head librarian, Mrs. Soeda led me in a tour of the whole library. They used to brew sake in this high-ceilinged building. The sake manufacturer moved to a different facility, and for a long time this old building was vacant, but it was valuable as a historic structure and it would have been a waste to tear it down, so a foundation was set up and the old brewery was reborn as a library.
“That must have cost a lot,” I remarked.
“It must have,” Mrs. Soeda said, tilting her head slightly. “But the land and the building were owned by Mr. Koyasu, and since he donated it all to the foundation it didn’t cost anything.”
“I see,” I said. That explained a lot. Mr. Koyasu personally owned and operated the library.
The part of the building in back, the area not used as a library, had a complicated layout of rooms, so much so that it took multiple trips to grasp the whole structure. There were dark, winding hallways, slightly raised areas, a minuscule inner garden, and small, mysterious rooms. There was a storage room, too, filled with old, oddly shaped tools the purpose of which I couldn’t figure out.
Behind the building was a large old well. It was covered with a thick lid with a heavy stone on top to weigh it down. “So no child will open the cover and fall inside,” Mrs. Soeda explained. “It’s terribly deep.” And in a corner of the rear garden stood a small stone jizo statue with a gentle face.
“The building was renovated to make it into a library, but the budget only allowed for partial renovation,” Mrs. Soeda explained. “So this unused part of the building, the part we can’t use, has been left as is. Right now we only use about half of the whole building as the library. Though of course we’re thankful to be able to use half.”
Her voice was utterly devoid of emotion. Rather than sounding neutral, however, I detected some tension, as if she were afraid of someone overhearing. (I couldn’t help glancing around me.) So I couldn’t decide if her feelings were negative or positive toward the building.
The part of the two-story building below the stairs consisted of the magazine lounge, the reading room, the stacks, storage rooms, and a workroom. In the workroom, staff created cards for books and repaired damaged books. In the middle of the workroom was a huge worktable carved from a thick slab of wood (probably used for something special back when the place was a sake brewery), the top of which was a jumble of all sorts of tools used to repair books, as well as office supplies.
The reading room for patrons had vaulted ceilings and several skylights, but most of the rest of the rooms were windowless, the air a bit chilly and dampish. Those rooms must have been used to store all kinds of ingredients used for brewing.
The second floor, which non-staff didn’t use, consisted of the cozy head librarian’s office (where I spent most of my time), a sort of dimly lit drawing room for guests with heavy drapes, and a breakroom for staff. There was a thickly upholstered sofa and easy chair set in the drawing room, but the room was hardly ever used. “If you’d like,” Mrs. Soeda said, “you can use the sofa to take a nap.” But the room was musty with a smell from a forgotten age. And the color of the curtains and fabric of the sofa set felt sort of ominous, as if they had absorbed the unhappy secret of something that had taken place here in the past. Even if I was dying to fall asleep, it would be the last place where I’d ever want to take a nap.
The staff breakroom was farthest back on the second floor and was known by all as the rest area. It contained lockers, a small kitchen, and a table for simple meals. It wasn’t exactly off-limits to men, but in reality, only women used the room. They changed their clothes behind a partition in back, exchanged whispered gossip, ate sweets they’d brought with them, and drank tea or coffee. Occasionally their happy voices would filter down to my room.
This rest area was a kind of sanctuary. Unless it was some pressing matter, I hardly ever stopped by this room at the end of the hall. I had no way of knowing what sort of conversations they had there, of course. I would guess, though, that gossip about me (hopefully nothing too bad) was a small part of it.
So my days at the library passed by uneventfully. Actual day-to-day practical tasks were taken care of by Mrs. Soeda and the team of women she led. The work I had to do as head librarian was nothing too laborious. Handling the purchase and disposal of books, checking the day-to-day income and expenses, and a few simple authorizations. As Mr. Koyasu had told me early on, even though the library was, officially, the Z** Town Library, the town had nothing to do with its operation whatsoever. So it was only rarely that I needed to contact the town hall. And even then, when I phoned the town Education Section to ask a question, the response was, if not cold, quite half-hearted. Whatever I asked, the reply was always along the lines of Whatever it is, just do what you like. I got the impression that the town hall wanted to have as little to do with the library as possible. Not that they were antagonistic, but they clearly weren’t trying to create a friendly relationship. Why, though, I had no clue.
The upshot for me, however, was that this situation was to my advantage. Even in the tiniest rural town you can’t avoid all kinds of bureaucratic complications. Actually, the smaller the local government, the fiercer the territorial skirmishes. So avoiding those conflicts was a welcome change.
As Mr. Koyasu had stated, he visited the head librarian’s office every few days. The time he appeared depended on the day. Sometimes he’d come early in the morning, and sometimes toward the evening. We had friendly chats, but as before, he hardly ever spoke about himself. I knew nothing about where he lived, about his everyday life. I figured he didn’t like to discuss personal things, so I refrained from asking. What he spoke about in that calm (and unique) tone of voice was confined to business matters related to the library’s operation.
The first thing he did when he came into my office was remove his beret, adjust its shape carefully, and then place it on top of the desk, in one corner, always in the exact same spot, facing the same way. As if doing otherwise would lead to dire consequences. He was completely silent as he went about this meticulous process. His lips were tight, the ceremony was performed solemnly, in utter quiet. Once this was accomplished, his face broke out in a smile, and he said hello to me.
While he always had on a skirt, from the waist up he wore what could be called conservative men’s wear. A white shirt, buttoned to the neck, a good old-fashioned tweed jacket, and a plain, dark green vest. He didn’t wear a tie, but his somewhat old-fashioned outfit was always neat and clean. This combination of garments took some getting used to, but Mr. Koyasu himself seemed not to care one bit.
In this way my days in Z** passed uneventfully. I gradually acclimated, mentally and physically, to this new life. The late-summer heat ended, fall came on, and the autumn leaves in the mountains surrounding the town turned a variety of beautiful colors. On days off I liked to tramp down mountain paths, taking in the brilliant art that nature had etched into the hills. And as I did, signs of winter began to take shape around me. Fall was short-lived here in the mountains.
“It’ll begin snowing before long,” Mr. Koyasu said one day as he was leaving. He was standing by the window, studying the movements of the clouds. His smallish hands were clasped tightly behind his back.
“You can smell it in the air. Winter comes early around here. It’d be best to buy yourself some snow boots.”