'Musashi' author's museum draws young fans with 'Bungo to Alchemist' game tie-in exhibit

TOKYO -- Yoshikawa Eiji Memorial Museum, the former home of author Eiji Yoshikawa whose various popular works include the samurai epic "Musashi," is seeing a rise in young, female visitors thanks to a new exhibition being held in association with a popular online game that uses famous literary figures as characters.

The museum, based in the Tokyo suburban city of Ome, has teamed up with DMM Games's "Bungo to Alchemist," which roughly translates to "literary masters and alchemists" and is commonly referred to by the contraction "BunAl." In the game, historic literary giants are reborn to protect the world of books from destruction by "shinshokusha," loosely translating to invaders. Players control the characters in battles. There are over 70 characters, with each one -- including Eiji Yoshikawa -- portrayed as attractive men.

This summer, the museum prepared an exhibition showcasing handwritten documents owned by Yoshikawa and the Ome Municipal Government. To appeal also to younger audiences, the museum set its sights on the BunAl depiction of Yoshikawa and other literary stars with whom he had personal relationships and made a request for cooperation from the game's distributor, the major developer DMM Games, part of Exnoa LLC.

At the hall where the exhibition is being held are panels of the game version of Yoshikawa, as well as other authors he was known to have been friends with including Kan Kikuchi, Yasunari Kawabata and Saisei Muro. Further inside the exhibition space, photographs and handwritten letters between Yoshikawa and Kikuchi are on display, and visitors can also get a close look at handwritten pieces by Yoshikawa.

The Ome Municipal Government received a donation from the public interest incorporated foundation that owned the museum, and it reopened in September 2020. The municipal government's culture department said that in a normal month the museum receives about 300 visitors, with a majority of them men in their 50s and 60s who know about Yoshikawa's writing. But since the collaboration started in July, attendance has more than doubled to about 700 people a month, with half of them reportedly women and girls between the ages of 10 and 39.

The head of the culture section said, "Mr. Yoshikawa's works have been filmed and made into manga, and we hope to continue to host these kinds of collaborative exhibitions in the future."

The exhibition will run until Oct. 3. It is not open on Sept. 21 and 27. Inquiries can be made with the museum at 0428-74-9477 (in Japanese).

(Japanese original by Masamitsu Kurokawa, Tama Bureau)