By Sally Zhang & illustrated by Xi Chen
Have you ever wondered whether there might be a soul living inside a book? I’m not trying to start a religious discussion or invent an Aladdin-esque myth, it’s just that this question has gradually entered my mind in recent years and made me wonder about what it really means to own a book.
As a book lover, I couldn’t wait to go to the Old Book Festival once I moved to Kyoto. Unlike modern book fairs, the old book festival in Kyoto is held in the open space of a temple. Often in autumn, on the first morning of the book fair before all the bookselling begins, the temple holds a ceremony for old books. The monks chant sutras to express their gratitude to these old, dusty, and forgotten books that are relics of the past, and respectfully tell them that they may soon have new owners. The books become both the subject and the object of the ritual, their souls are consoled while their physical presence is offered up. The idea that everything has a spirit is ingrained in Japanese culture. The assumption that books are inhabited by souls in need of consolation has stayed with me for a long time.
At first, I couldn’t help but imagine that, like in Toy Story, the books on my bookshelf might talk to each other at night. Maybe Leviathan would complain that I am a pseudo-intellectual and that I have never read more than ten pages. Maybe Neruda’s poem collection would lament about how I lost his cover. Maybe the books read each other, and talk to each other about literature, philosophy and history and go to gatherings together, like a literal ‘book club’.
I don’t mean to turn this into a delusional piece of crappy science fiction, the more realistic dimension of this idea lies in the moment I open the books. Whenever I buy a book from a bookshop, I always find something between its pages.This makes me wonder if the bookshop owner slipped it in there on purpose. Moreover, when I open books that I haven’t read in a long time on my own shelves, I always find something in them as well. For example, during the pandemic when I started rereading many of my books I found a postcard from my major crush in secondary school, a list of books that I had made for myself for no reason, and tons of notes I passed in class. I’m not sure whether the soul of the book inhabits whatever is sandwiched between its pages, but these objects do have this secret ability to suggest what made me (or the former owner of the book) happy or sad when we read it. Their cues are so pertinent and so subtle that they transcend time and space, connecting many parallel universes in this single moment when we open the book. Each reading is so different, but there is always some emotion that connects them, an emotion that is ineffable, embodied by what is in between the pages and stirred by the little piece of soul caught in the book.
I read somewhere that today’s technological advances will make books last much, much longer than a human’s lifespan, so that the books on our shelves today will exist in silence long after we are gone. I don’t know how they will speak to other souls in the future. I don’t know if the traces of me reading them will become parts of their soul, something to be discovered by future humans or non-humans. I don’t even know if books are inhabited by souls or not, but by contemplating this idea, I think I have opened the books on my shelves more often. For perhaps, like all souls in the world, they need to be constantly affirmed of their existence in order to dispel the insecurity that surrounds them; and to affirm their existence, they need to be acknowledged, so that they can be remembered and never truly disappear.
