DOGO MIYU LIBRARY BOOKS SELECTION & DISPLAY

If I may begin with something personal: as a child, I was irresistibly drawn to my father's study. Difficult-looking books lined the dim room, and the air was thick with the faintly damp smell of paper. Whenever he was out, I would slip in, take down books I could not understand, and simply look at them. It was a longing for a world I did not yet know, and at the same time a kind of secret conversation with a father I rarely talked with. A bookshelf is a medium that conveys its owner's character and intellect vividly, even in their absence. The spine and wear of each book, which books sit beside which, the shadows and smells that fill the space: all of it speaks of the richness of the life and the depth of the knowledge from which that place came into being.

Many hotels have a library, but it is rare to sense any intention or personality behind one. However wonderful the hotel itself may be, I feel dissappointed whenever I see shelves where books chosen for how they look sit jumbled together with tourist magazines and whatever happened to be on hand.

At Dogo Miyu, the dim library beside the lobby, sunk one step below ground, was a place where I had hoped to handle everything down to the book selection by the time the hotel opened. In the rush before completion, however, it had been put off. Four years after opening, the general manager, feeling the library was somehow lacking, came to me for advice, and that is where this project began. The upper shelves were nearly empty, the categories were unclear, and the books were arranged in a way that left guests unsure whether they were meant to be touched. At the same time, there was no budget to fill such large shelves with books.

So I set out three principles. First, an arrangement that conveys volume and quality at a glance, even with a limited number of books. Second, a selection and presentation that make guests want to reach for a book. Third, a selection that resonates with the hotel's concept of a modern tōji, the traditional culture of hot-spring healing, and speaks to the sensibility and intellect of grown-up readers. I steered slightly away from the dead center of the bestseller lists, and for famous authors I chose short-story collections or essays rather than their best-known works. Starting from some 500 candidates, including books the library had held since opening, I narrowed the list to about 200. Then, weighing the budget and the overall balance, I chose just over 100 new titles.

The books are sorted into groups such as "Five Books to Know Dogo Miyu," "Ehime Biographies," "Traveling by Reading," "Writings on Hot Springs," and "Literature to Eat." Each group draws on ties to Matsuyama and Dogo, or to the experience of travel and hot-spring healing, and each comes with a short text written for its display card. The shelves hold books that served as touchstones for the hotel's design, such as Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows and Seiichi Shirai's Muso (Windowless). They also hold short-story collections for reading a single story late at night, and paperbacks that make Soseki and Shiki easy to pick up. I also designed metal and wooden book stands and display tables for books shown cover-forward. From the selection and categories to the display-card texts and the design of the fixtures, I did everything myself.

Since the renewal, the number of guests browsing and picking up books in the library has visibly increased. Guests are free to borrow books anywhere within the hotel, and at Christmas or during events held across Dogo, related titles appear in a special corner. Every so often, I'm told, a guest praises the selection or the arrangement. Just recently, a compliment came from a guest who runs a secondhand bookshop.

Small, yet carrying a clear sense of intention and intellect, without ever pressing it on anyone. A place where a book, picked up by chance, quietly begins to speak. That is what I wanted to create. A study that never changes is hardly a study at all. Just as its owner's interests shift over time, a bookshelf, too, should change little by little.