What sets Musashino Literature Museum apart from other literary museums?

Musashino today

　Musashino was once a vast and expansive wilderness. Its untamed plains extended endlessly. Since ancient times, this wild moor has captured the hearts of poets from east and west, serving as a wellspring for their cultural creativity. However, there is no untamed wilderness that might be the object of awe in Musashino in present times.
　In the early modern period, it was transformed into a thickly wooded area in order to support the livelihood of its residents. Even people who might nostalgically seek out its vestiges have grown distant from the experience of imagining the wilderness that lies beyond it. One cannot help but feel that present-day people, having lost their receptivity to the mysterious, have also seen their imaginative powers atrophy, and their depth diminish. How then might we restore to Musashino its role as a wilderness?

Reclaiming “Musashino”

　The answer that we arrived at was the “Musashino Literature Museum.” The “Musashino Literature Museum” is the name of a facility that actually exists, but at the same time we also intend it to be a symbol that signifies an expressive space seamlessly linked to the online world in its limitless expansiveness.
　The purpose of the Musashino Literature Museum is to illuminate traditional literature, bringing to light the fundamental qualities that lurk within it, and joining this effort with rich expressive methods that make use of present-day technology to imagine and create a Musashino Literature for the next generation and release it to the world.

The journey toward the Literature Museum

　Come to think of it, we too are launching ourselves from a “wilderness” without anything in it.
　On November 8, 2006, the Literature Museum “preparation room” was born: though it did not yet exist in any physical space of its own. Before long, Akiyama Shun donated part of his collection of books to the preparation room, and these were put into storage. In March 2008, with the help of three university students and one graduate student, we began work on organizing and creating a catalog of the collection, which was designated “The Akiyama Shun archive.” On October 29 of the same year, Musashino University established the Musashino Literature Museum as an affiliated institute, welcoming Ōkōchi Shōji as Honorary Museum Director. Before long, Akiyama Shun came to entrust the committed individuals who gathered in the Musashino Literature Museum’s “Preparation Room” with the comprehensive task of processing his book collection, which were donated in more than ten installments.

The Formation of Musashino Studies

　In the 2008-09 academic year, we began a collaborative research project that involved all faculty members in the Faculty of Literature. In the pages of Musashino Nihon bungaku [Musashino Japanese Literature] journal, we proclaimed the advent of “Musashino studies” and soon instituted a series of open lectures and courses (eventually made mandatory) for students on the topic. In the 2010-11 academic year, we established Journal of the Musashino Literature Museum (Musashino Bungakukan kiyō). And with the collaboration of our undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni, we planned two special exhibitions—“Literary Figures who taught at Musashino: Toki Zenmaro, Akiyama Shun, and Kuroi Senji” (which ran from October 22 to 24, 2010) and “Lost in Musashino: authors from Hōya, Mitaka, and Koganei” (which ran From September 3 to 4, 2011)—and published exhibition catalogues for both.

Into Film Production

　In the 2014-15 academic year, a group of around thirty students (most of whom were enrolled in a seminar) carried out a survey of sites with literary significance in the university’s vicinity. They produced a visual documentary that combined their research results with images self-referentially captured in the course of their pilgrimage to sacred sites. They held panel presentations and planned screenings both on and off campus; the results were seen by more than 1200 individuals. In March 2016, a motion picture was produced in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Faculty of Literature and its theatrical version West Tokyo Story (88 min., Japan, color, stereo; produced by the Literature that Binds West Tokyo Together Implementation Committee of Musashino University) was screened at Shibuya Uplink. In the video, one can see students at work organizing and cataloging Akiyama Shun’s former library books and can also see an interview in which book designer Akiyama Noriko discusses her late husband.

The Birth and Creation of the Musashino Literature Museum

　In March 2017, we published the Catalog of Akiyama Shun’s Books (Akiyama Shun zōsho mokuroku). In March 2018, we produced a short-subject video called nobuko that depicts the background circumstances of Kunikida Doppo’s short story “Musashino” and subsequent images of “Musashino” from the perspective of Doppo’s first wife, Sasaki Nobuko. Then, on April 22 of that year, Masaki Construction company completed its work on the Musashino Literature Museum, designed by the office of Mizutani Toshihiro, at last bringing a concrete form to the imaginary musée-bibliothèque that had thus far existed only through human connections and collaborative works. The building was a physical space that made it possible to exhibit the “forest” of its book holdings.
　In July 2019, Tamaran Hill (Japan, 86 min., black and white, stereo, English subtitles produced by Musashino Literature Museum) was selected to appear in the International Film Festival Marseille, where it had its world premiere. Directed by Kotani Tadasuke, the film is an adaptation of Kuroi Senji’s collection of short stories by the same name, which are set in Musashino. We hope that this leads the Literature Museum to become a site for future endeavors to imagine and create a new generation of Musashino literature that we can share with the world.

What sort of place is Musashino?

　There were academic explorations of the place-name “Musashino” in the early modern period and earlier, but it is with the short story “Musashino” (1898) by Kunikida Doppo in the Meiji period that literary and other discourse surrounding Musashino began to develop greatly. Meanwhile, the world of Musashino tanka poetry was developed through the creative work of Toki Zenmaro and Wakayama Bokusui. In the Taishō period, the setting became the focus of the Musashino Club (1916-)’s “Musashino taste.” In the Shōwa and postwar period, the site became a regular subject of Noda Utarō’s “literary strolls,” with the (prewar) past being recollected nostalgically by those who visited graves and swept them clean or went on pilgrimages to sacred sites. These were succeeded in practical terms by the ideas of literary landscape espoused by Ōkōchi Shōji and others, but from the latter half of the twentieth century a variety of new ideas took the world by storm. With Karatani Kōjin’s The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 1980), debates about Doppo’s use of perspective in “Musashino” were taken up as a subject of discussion; through Katō Norihiro’s Theory of Japanese landscape (Nihon fūkeiron, 1990), the setting became the object of “theories of landscape,” which produced a new episteme that attracted interest in possibilities other than those of empiricist research. Perhaps it is getting to be about time to welcome a comprehensive assessment of these ideas.

Between respect and awe

　We named this museum of literature, which was born in Musashino in the twenty-first century, the Musashino Literature Museum: musée-bibliothèque en l´honneur des ecrivains de musashino. Those who will carry it forward are not only literary figures and animators with a link to Musashino. When all of the people with a connection to Musashino University, from kindergarten pupils to alumni, and needless to say all of the people who have some connection to the place, as well as all of those people who have accessed Musashino-B through the infinitely expanding online world, are brought together with a common sense of respect and awe, that is when a new Musashino will arise.
　On this website, we are making public research, criticism, and creative work without getting too caught up in boundaries. By publishing a diverse array of contents, we hope to foster the growth of a space in which various kinds of expressive artists can gather and that can serve as a space where tradition (oral literature, performing arts, literary arts) and the present (photography, manga, film) can interact.

About Musashino-B

We titled the project “Musashino-B” first of all because of the “B” in Bungakukan (Literature Museum), but also because it occurred to us that there were various other “B”s connected to images of Musashino: Base, Broadcast, Boundary, Breed, Build, Barbarian, and Bare. Musashino Bungakukan, written in kanji as 武蔵野文学館, is the name of the Musashino Literature Museum as an institutional entity; Musashino Bungakukan, where Musashi is written in hiragana as むさし野文学館, is the name of the place located in the eastern side of Kōundai on the Musashino University campus. This way of writing Musashino as むさし野 is an orthography that Toki Zenmaro was fond of using.

2009.03

A special issue on “Musashino studies” was compiled and published as vol. 18 of Musashino Japanese Literature (Musashino Nihon bungaku)