That's the title of a Japanese novel, manga, and anime series by Miya Kazuki. (I've been reading/viewing all three formats simultaneously, as installments become available, with the result that I sometimes get confused as to the progress of the plot since they've all reached different points in the story.) I've never come across anything quite like this story's intriguing premise: A Japanese college student obsessed with books—even more than I am, if that's possible—ironically gets killed by having a bookshelf fall on her during an earthquake. With her dying breath, she prays to get reincarnated in a world full of books. The gods apparently have a dark sense of humor, for she wakes up in the body of a sickly five-year-old girl named Myne, the younger daughter of a poor, illiterate family in a preindustrial world. (It's implied, though never explicitly confirmed, that the "real" Myne died during her latest attack of illness, leaving her body vacant for the heroine to enter.) Books are rare, hand-copied, expensive, and owned only by the clergy, nobles, and very wealthy commoners. Myne determines that if she can't acquire books any other way, she'll make them herself. Paper and ink, however, are also scarce and expensive, so she has to figure out how to make those products first. Fortunately, she gets a head start from extensive reading about the history of printing, along with her prior-life varied experience dabbling in arts and crafts. Still, as a five-year-old girl prone to collapsing whenever she exerts herself, she has an uphill battle even convincing anybody to take her wishes seriously, much less gathering the materials she needs. In the course of her "ascendance," she not only manages to introduce movable-type printing to her new environment and spread literacy, she also achieves what I think the "gods" might have intended by placing her in this world: As well as continuing to love books, she also learns to value relationships with people. Along the way, readers pick up a lot of incidental knowledge about the manufacture of paper and the process of printing.
The further I delve into this series, the more Myne's plight seems to resonate with some real-world analogs. While she knows herself as an educated adult on the inside, at first everybody else sees her as a lower-class, perpetually sick, fairly useless child. In this quandary, she brings to mind people suffering from disabilities that make communication painfully difficult even though their minds are as sharp as anybody's. Or transgender people whose outward appearances conflict with their core gender identity.
On a more personal level, I can identify with Myne from childhood and teen years as a bookish academic overachiever who got no respect from her parents aside from a few minutes once every six weeks during the school term, when report cards were distributed. Now, in old age, I realize the adults knew many important things to which I, as a child and teenager, was oblivious. Yet, in retrospect, I remain aware that I wasn't totally wrong to think I did know some things my parents didn't.
This heroine also reminds me of my early experiences as an avid reader of horror, fantasy, and science fiction—all that "crazy stuff." Nowadays that field of interest is probably considered less "weird" than in the 1950s and 60s. Nevertheless, I believe most lovers of speculative fiction share the feeling of not fitting into the mundane world around us, of being aliens whose true home is elsewhere. Maybe that's why we started to read fantasy and SF to begin with.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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