Also written: rental manga, kashihon manga
Rental books: the lending-library market of the 1950s where many postwar manga artists, and gekiga, got their start. Read from the structure, as a 4.
4A 4 by its term: builder & organizer, and therefore the structure.
Kashihon (貸本) are rental books, and kashihon-ya the small shops that lent them for a few yen a day. In the decade after the war, when few people could afford to buy books, these shops were everywhere in Japan, and manga drawn specifically for them were a large part of their stock.
Rental manga were published as hardbound books or anthologies by small publishers, mainly in Osaka and Tokyo, and they were not subject to the standards of the children's magazines. Artists could draw longer, darker and more violent stories for an audience that included young working adults.
Yoshihiro Tatsumi and the gekiga movement grew directly out of the rental market, and Shigeru Mizuki, Sanpei Shirato and many others drew for it before moving to magazines. Its readers were among the first adults to read manga as a matter of course.
As incomes rose and weekly magazines arrived at the end of the 1950s, buying replaced borrowing and the rental shops declined through the 1960s. Their artists, and the older audience they had found, moved into the new magazines, where they helped create seinen manga.
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 40, which folds down to 4.
Four is builder & organizer — structure, labour, and the building of lasting systems. The reference files it as a structure. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 4's insistence that what lasts must be built patiently.
The vowels alone reduce to 7, the consonants to 6. Inquiry underneath, responsibility on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The 4 confuses the frame for the work. Structures outlive their usefulness, and several entries here describe conventions kept long past their reason. What the 4 still asks is that you look for the constraint the subject was working inside. The other entries that reduce to 4 are collected on The Structure.