Kuretake Bunko Main House

About the Kuretake Bunko Main House

The Kuretake Bunko Main House (呉竹文庫主屋, Kuretake Bunko Omoya) is a single-storey timber dwelling built in 1928 at Kuretake Bunko, the private library in Minatomachi, Hakusan City, Ishikawa Prefecture, and it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on June 29, 2022. It covers 112 square meters and has a tiled roof.

Kumada Gentarō, who founded the library, rebuilt the house on the library grounds as a second home. His family had already moved to Kanazawa, so the Kuretake Bunko Main House served as a retreat. Today the library's entrance hall is in this building, and every visitor enters Kuretake Bunko through it.

Why It Was Registered

The Kuretake Bunko Main House was registered as a model of architectural form. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a refined modern house in the Japanese style, singling out the arrangement of its reception rooms and the quality of their detailing.

What gives the building its interest is that it was not a library annex but the private side of a book collector's life. Gentarō gathered books in the stack and shared them in the reading room; these rooms were where he spent his own time, and each one is finished to a slightly different taste.

Three Reception Rooms and a Birch Alcove Post

The Kuretake Bunko Main House has a Kirizuma-zukuri gabled roof laid with Sangawara-buki pantiles. Its walls are built in the Shinkabe manner, with the posts left exposed and the panels between them finished in white Shikkui plaster, so from the garden the house reads as a calm grid of timber and white.

Inside, a corridor runs along one side and the rooms open off it. According to the Agency's description there are three main tatami rooms.

• The front room, with a broad veranda-corridor (hiroen) and an anteroom, was for receiving guests.
• The inner room, which includes a space for the household Buddhist altar, was the family room.
• The corner room, in the Sukiya-zukuri manner of tea-house design, has an alcove post (Tokobashira) of white birch.

The library calls the corner room the Shirakaba-no-ma, the Birch Room. A pale trunk with its bark still on stands at the side of the Tokonoma alcove, giving the room a lighter feel than the others, and it is where Gentarō's taste shows most clearly. The photographs the Agency chose for its database entry show this room, inside and out.

Visiting the Kuretake Bunko Main House

The Kuretake Bunko Main House is part of the museum route and can be seen with an ordinary Kuretake Bunko admission ticket. The tatami rooms beyond the entrance, including the Birch Room, are open to visitors, while the office in the same building is marked on the floor plan as closed.

Photography is not allowed inside, so the birch post has to be seen in person. The white walls and tiled roof can be viewed from the garden inside the gate. Opening hours and directions are on the Kuretake Bunko page.