[Japanese interiors (Zen Gardens, Kildare, 2014). Foto Rb]
Aki Shimazaki, Au coeur du Yamato. 2006-2013. Italian transl. by C. Poli, Nel cuore di Yamato. Milan, Feltrinelli, 2018.
Aki
Shimazaki is a Japanese writer born in 1954 who lives in Canada and writes in
French.
This
collections of five novels is called At
the heart of Yamato, the last being a word which can be interpreted as Japan
in general. In fact, each story is set in a specific modern period and tells a
tale about the history and society of Japan.
The first
novel is about a corporate employee who falls in love with a receptionist but
is forced to give up to another of her pursuers, the son of the owner of a company that
finances the firm where the protagonist works. The girl is in love with him but
she is blackmailed to marry the rich man even though, as we discover at the
very end, when she dies in the Kobe earthquake, she had given birth to the
employee’s daughter. This is indeed a sad story about the power of corporations and the
difficulty of genuine love.
The second
story is about a Japanese citizen who was imprisoned in a Russian camp in
Siberia during the second world war, he was liberated but killed accidentally,
and to defend a friend, a Japanese officer who had maltreated him in the camp,
so he takes a new identity and cannot go back home even after the statute of
limitations expires.
The other
three stores are partly about new characters, and partly about characters who
play minor roles in the first two stories but become prominent as protagonists
in the last three stories.
All stories are told in very humane and elegant way, taking into account the sentiments of all characters, and with a concise style that spares irrelevant details.
All stories are told in very humane and elegant way, taking into account the sentiments of all characters, and with a concise style that spares irrelevant details.
Themes and
motives are interlaced and reappear constantly to design a pattern of
sociological and existential concerns which depict Japan as it was and is.
If, on the
one hand, sense of duty linked to reconstruction after the war, and loyalty to
work and family, are recurrent elements, on the other the last story enhances
the role of escape from societal restraints to follow spontaneous love at first
sight in an optimistic vision that makes
the last couple in the book happily enamoured for the entire duration of
their lives.
The
fragmented angles of each story give a totality when combined in the whole
volume. Each story has the title from the name of a plant whose symbolic
connotations are pursued in the course of the narration.
This is a
fluid-to-read, intelligent and sophisticated literary work.
[Roberto
Bertoni]
