The Soul of Books — Naoyo Fukuda
Naoyo Fukuda is a contemporary Japanese artist who treats books as living organisms. Her work is a form of "micro-art" – she uses needles and surgical tools to transform the physical matter of a book into something ethereal. Her exhibition, titled Hitotsukui (meaning "a single scoop" or "a handful"), is a collection of such handfuls of fleeting moments. The title refers to a gesture of mindfulness and care – scooping something into your hands to save it, to look at it closely. Fukuda suggests that these ten years of work (the entire "soul of the book") are ultimately just "a single scoop" – something small, yet infinitely precious.
“The brown bookmark strings that trail from paperback books were lightly bleached, and I continued to unravel the fibers until they could no longer be decomposed by my fingertips. For nearly ten years, this process continued, until the string transformed into something fluffy, soft, and indefinable.”
What strikes me most about Fukuda’s work is her radical mindfulness. The artist took a bunkobon – an ordinary, cheap paperback of the kind thousands of Japanese people read every day on the subway – and focused on its humblest element: the brown bookmark string. For ten years (2013-2023), almost atom by atom, she unraveled that string with her fingers. What once served to keep one's place in a story has, after a decade, become a useless but beautiful cloud of fibers. It is an incredible manifesto – in a world that wants everything "right now," she gives ten years of her life to a single thread.
This captivated me because, like many of you, I love to read. This artwork symbolizes the way ideas contained within stories stay with us. Not as structured sentences, but as a delicate, long-lasting feeling in our minds. The string changes from linear (marking a specific place in a story) to cloud-like, possessing unlimited potential.
Everyone reading the same book actually reads a different story, and we become richer through each of them. For me, books also provide comfort and understanding. And that is exactly how I feel here – when I look at this work, it’s so fuwa-fuwa, a plush little cloud that hides within it the strands of infinite stories.
How about you? Do books help you find a way deep inside yourself? Are they a compass for you, or just a pleasant escape?
