Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room

About the Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room

The Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room (呉竹文庫書庫及び閲覧室, Kuretake Bunko Shoko oyobi Etsuranshitsu) is a two-storey building at Kuretake Bunko in Minatomachi, Hakusan City, Ishikawa Prefecture, made up of a Dozo-zukuri book stack built around 1915 and a timber reading-room wing added in 1928, and it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on June 29, 2022. With a footprint of 173 square meters, it is the largest of the four registered buildings at Kuretake Bunko.

Kumada Gentarō first opened his books to the public by turning a fireproof storehouse on his land into a stack. That storehouse is the stack half of the Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room, the place where the library began. When he rebuilt the main house, he added the reading-room wing in front of it.

Why It Was Registered

The Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room was registered as a model of architectural form. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes how two structures of very different construction, an earthen storehouse and a timber wing, are brought together as one two-storey building under a single roof.

Pairing a vault that protects books with a room for reading them follows directly from the building's job as a private library. The library explains that temperature and humidity inside the storehouse change only slowly through the year, which is why its books of the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa eras have survived in good condition. The building and the collection are worth most together.

The Stack and the Upstairs Study

The stack of the Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room has a lower wall finished in washed mortar that exposes the gravel, and its doorway is fitted with Kakegonuri stepped-edge fire doors. Through the heavy Kannon-biraki double doors, the ground floor is lined with shelves.

The library's leaflet gives the collection as 13,863 volumes (the website rounds it to about 14,000), arranged on both floors under a decimal classification devised by the Ishikawa Prefectural Library in 1911. Buddhist works are prominent, including 161 volumes of the Dai Nihon Bukkyō Zensho and 85 volumes of the Taishō Tripitaka, and there are many poetry collections and magazines from the Shinshisha circle of poets. Gentarō favoured complete sets, and first editions are common.

Upstairs is the study that the Agency describes as heavily Western in style. The staircase and the room are fitted out in zelkova (keyaki). An anchor motif marks the center of the ceiling, and the four corners carry the family crest of two embracing ginger buds (daki-myōga) in gold leaf, details that speak of a shipowning family that was also one of the largest landowners in the prefecture. The shelves hold the collected works of Natsume Sōseki, Masaoka Shiki and Mori Ōgai, many of them in editions never sold to the public.

The Reading-Room Wing

The timber wing of the Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room holds the reading room on the ground floor, in front of the storehouse, and an upstairs tatami room in the Sukiya-zukuri manner with a Tokonoma alcove. Because the storehouse and the wing share one roof, from outside they look like a single building.

The reading room now displays panels on the Kumada family's ventures: the entrance gate Gentarō donated to Higashi Honganji, the Kitamaebune trade, farm settlement in Hokkaido and the family's warehouses in Otaru.

Visiting the Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room

The Kuretake Bunko Stacks and Reading Room is inside the museum, and an admission ticket gives access to the ground-floor stack, the reading room and the upstairs study. The document storage and processing rooms are marked on the floor plan as closed.

Visitors are asked not to touch the shelved books or the exhibits, and the books cannot be borrowed or read. Photography is not allowed inside, so take time to look up at the crests and the anchor on the study ceiling. Opening hours and directions are on the Kuretake Bunko page.