Orly Castel=Bloom x Yuki Hashimoto
"Digital Library: Timeless 5. with Israeli Short Stories" Art Collaboration Project

Although COVID-19 hindered Israeli artists from visiting Japan and limited in-person artistic activities, we launched our website to continue to promote Israeli arts and culture.

By archiving previous email magazine articles, we were able to better organize past events and create an index of Israeli artists who had visited Japan. This database will be useful for us in the future.

One of the cultural activities we actively pursued on our website was the "Digital Library: Timeless 5," featuring Israeli short stories. The goal of this project was to create an electronic library where users could easily access Israeli writers' short stories on their smartphones during a short train ride. This idea stemmed from my concern for hygiene when handling a paperback book during my commute. Thus, this project was initiated based on my personal desire.

I also noticed that there were many unpublished masterpieces of Israeli short stories and that people are moving away from physical books. This led publishing companies to assume that there were few readers for these books. However, I believe that the lack of readers is because these writers are not widely known. If more people become aware of their existence, they may gain new readers, which would make publishing companies more enthusiastic about publishing their works. To attract new fans, I felt that it was necessary to use formats that everyone can easily access and enjoy, such as YouTube and TikTok.

For the content of the project, we enlisted the help of two experts in Israeli literature: Ms. Natsuu Motai, a leading translator in the field for many years, and Ms. Noriko Higuchi, who has been active in children's literature. As a parallel project, we also released four short stories through the prominent J-wave podcast program "SPINEAR," with the assistance of young translators Ms. Kyoko Hirooka and Ms. Naeko Hatano. The program was voiced by famous J-wave navigator Rachel Chan, whose refined speaking style and effective use of music created a completely different impact compared to reading books.

On the other hand, the concept of collaborating with modern art came from the desire to expand the world of those short stories in a different way from the audio content. Because some of the short stories were surreal, and I was concerned that adding photos of Israeli landscapes alongside them on our website could disrupt the worldview of the stories.

The best example is a story by Orly Castel=Bloom, whose stories are enigmatic, similar to those of Etgar Keret. However, Keret's writing style is drier and feels like solving a puzzle, whereas Orly's style is more mysterious and unique as if her stories carry the weight of prophecies. That is why I planned to match her story with artwork by Yuki Hashimoto, who had recently returned from studying art in Israel.

Yeled Peleh (Child Prodigy) is a book that features testimonials and confessions of an unknown man in an unfamiliar city that is neither Jerusalem nor Tel Aviv. I invite you to dive into this unique world and appreciate the synergies between the power of vivid words and modern art.

I would like to express my gratitude to the writers and copyright holders who willingly provided their works for this project. They are the most significant contributors, and some of them have already passed away, leaving their bereaved family members to manage their copyrights. Throughout the negotiations to digitize their works, I had the opportunity to learn about their family history, which I never expected to hear. The saying "truth is stranger than fiction" often came to mind as I was deeply moved by the testimony of their lives and warm-hearted love. Additionally, I would like to thank those who assisted me in communicating with elderly writers and locating those whose contact information was missing.

Cultural Section, Embassy of Israel

<Message from an Artist>

As humans, our lives are heavily dictated by various measures such as time and length. It's becoming increasingly clear that something is wrong with us as we keep identifying new diseases that are considered abnormal and separate us from normal. The number of these standards in the world keeps growing, but as I delved into the book Yeled Peleh (Child Prodigy), I felt as if all the standards that had been imposed on me started to shrink, distort, and melt inside of me. The border that separated me from the world became blurry, like a dream that merges past experiences with future memories. It was a disconcerting experience, and I wasn't sure how to feel about it.

From October 2021, I spent a year producing artwork and conducting fieldwork in Jerusalem. Perhaps because I was in a land of conflict where people fight over "white" or "black," the beige color of stones and soil had a profound impact on me, and it shook my soul. I want to create artwork on the theme of "I am a nobody, but I am a somebody" by shifting my focus to the border of standards and punctuation. It was an honor to collaborate with Ms.Orly Castel=Bloom, and I am grateful to Ms. Yuki Uchida from the Embassy of Israel for planning this project.

-Yuki Hashimoto