On Tsundoku
Or the Art of Pretending I Have Time to Read
I get up in the morning and make a pot of coffee. It’s early enough that I don’t have to worry about anything, so I grab a book and take my steaming cup out onto the balcony. The air is cold enough to wake me up, but the sun is shining, so I quickly warm to the moment. For a good hour, I’m lost in reading, and then I put off everything for another hour as I turn page after page. When I finally close my book, I’ve finished it and, transformed by the wisdom of ages, I look upon the world with new eyes.
Or so it goes in my imagination.
Reality is rarely as kind. In the grimdark world of modern life, I wake up like a sticker that won’t come off: I can peel myself off the bed bit by bit, but I’ll leave behind ragged vestiges and the result isn’t pretty. Coffee’s stimulative properties are overrated, the weather is somewhere between yes-you-need-an-umbrella and unless-you-don’t, and the responsibilities of adulting are already clamoring for attention. They have a list of ailments, demands and grievances and they’re nailing them to my front door with seven-inch rusty nails. In this world, I reach for my bootstraps and, finding I’m wearing tennis with holes in the bottoms, soldier on. In this world, books don’t get read.
But I’m a bibliophile, so welcome to the world of tsundoku.
Tsundoku is the ancient Japanese art of buying enough books to replace what was lost at Alexandria without ever reading them. In Japanese, tsundoku combines the characters for pile-up-like-a-mothereffer and read: 積読. You buy them for peanuts online because bookstores have gone the way of the Nyasasaurus parringtoni and line them up on your IKEA bookshelves (BIBLI, white like all the pundits on TV have, $374.00), and then wither under their stare as you do other things. It’s one of those mysterious arts we’re told is Japanese, probably is Japanese, but isn’t as Japanese as we’re told is Japanese. I’ve spent the better half of my adult life in Japan and I only ever hear about it through Western media.
Nonetheless, I suffer from it. As an early 21st-century keyboard-driver, I make good use of my nonfiction for research purposes, but Holy Hades does the fiction accrue like sakura petals after a spring wind. The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed, Facial Justice by L.P. Hartley, The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Poster Girl by Veronica Roth, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos, Kobushi no Saki by Mitsuyo Kakuta, Balthasar’s Odyssey by Amin Maalouf, The House on Sun Street by Mojgan Ghazirad, Sumidagawa Shinjū by Riichi Akamatsu, Mansions of the Moon by Shyam Selvadurai, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, The Romantic by William Boyd and Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrique (delivered today) . . . I click Proceed to Checkout as if I actually have time to read.
It’s enough to make Marie Kondo pop open the nuclear briefcase.
Yet every self-destructive addiction has its consolations. Fight clubbers overcome the male loneliness epidemic, Lindsay Lohan fans will always have “Danceophobia,” and those suffering from tsundoku chūdoku, or tsundoku addiction — let’s call them tsundoku sennin, or tsundoku sages — do tend to spend a lot of time tucked into reading nooks devouring volume after volume of Scandinavian noir, LitRPG and progression fantasy, and heartbreaking works of staggering genius about how many shades there are of grey. They actually polish off a few of those books littering the place.
Even I do. Whenever I can be stirred to set a reading goal on Goodreads, I always imagine I’m going to read massive tomes, real doorstops, at a rate of about 1 book/month and instead I find myself reading several slimmer volumes a month. Not bad for a guy whose own private Furies are named, in Ancient Greek, Alekto (“you’re not reading enough”), Megaera (“you’re not reading enough”), and Tisiphone (“you’re not reading enough”). Still, I can buy faster than I can read. Thus, like Orestes, I wander, pestered and tasked.
