"Since they did not know the roads, they made the trip losing themselves and reorienting themselves."
This quote from the
Ise Monogatari
(Song of Ise),
A compilation of short stories from the 10th century, it appears in the first pages of the book
Lost Notebooks of Japan
(Candaya), by Patricia Almarcegui, and can serve to summarize some of the sensations that traveling through the Asian country produces: a strange mixture of being always lost and, at the same time, always being in the right place. For a long time, long before the Tokyo Olympic Games, Japan occupies an increasingly important space in the Spanish literary world, which goes beyond the work that publishers such as Satori, Impedimenta or Tusquets have been doing for years to bring Japanese literature closer to the Hispanic reader.
It is not a passing fad, but a trend that reflects interest in a society and a country much closer than it may seem, as evidenced by the Japanese fascination for flamenco and the Spanish for
rmen
(the hot soup of noodles which is a stew almost as caloric as a fabada) or manga, the Japanese comic. In fact,
Un tablao en otro mundo
(Alianza Editorial), by journalist David López Canales, tells the story of the
troupes
flamenco artists who began to travel to Japan in the 1950s, including Chiquito de la Calzada and Pepe Habichuela.
"He wondered, amazed, how that could be," says López Canales about Habichuela.
"It had taken 40 hours to get to a country where they were fighting over flamenco more than in Spain."
The guitarist says that, during that one-year trip in the mid-sixties, he did not
try
the “
chuchi”
.
"And now I love it, I shit on the mother who gave birth to me," he exclaims to the journalist.
Habichuela's lament reflects how raw fish with rice has gone from being something exotic, if not inedible, to becoming a fully accepted delicacy, one more indication of the gradual approach between the two worlds.
More information
Fascination for Japan
The long literary journey to Japan
This is how Japanese imperialism kidnapped the cherry blossom as a symbol of the kamikazes
Patricia Almarcegui travels to Japan to blow up travel literature
"The success of Japan is to find beauty in the ordinary and normal," writes Almarcegui in his heterodox and wonderful travel book, the reading of which is perfectly complemented by the most orthodox, and equally instructive,
Histories of Japan
(Peninsula), by the veteran Xavier Moret.
Almarcegui, author of works such as
The sense of travel
or
A traveler in Central Asia,
He mixes the aphorisms with notes from his notebooks, personal reflections, observations, data and even the itinerary he followed, which can be very useful for someone planning to travel for the first time. "Japanese culture is characterized because it attends to the fragility of the changing world, surrenders to it and identifies with the variable beauty of the universe," explains the author to define the Japanese fascination for the ephemeral.
Moret, a journalist and writer who has devoted himself to travel literature since the late 1990s, with some already classic books such as
América, América
, offers
a much more conventional essay
in
Historias de Japan
. And this definition is a compliment: I have been to this country twice and I would have loved to carry a book like yours in my suitcase, of course, full of data, easy to read, fun, loaded with tips and suggestions. The extensive bibliography reflects the enormous work behind each of his tours. "In the same way that arriving in Tokyo is a shock for the traveler, leaving is also difficult," Moret explains in a phrase that can be applied to the entire country.
Pumpkin by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in Naoshima, the so-called museum island.guillermo altars
Last year two wonderful travel comics were published in Spanish,
Otro Japan
(Norma), by Jorge Arranz, and
El viaje
(Lumen), by Agustina Guerrero, which reflect the extent to which a tour of Japan always has something of an initiatory journey, from which it is almost impossible to escape unscathed. Carmen Martín Gaite always said that, in a good novel, the characters had to undergo changes throughout the narrative. The same could be said of a great trip: the one that arrives can never be the same as the one that returns and, in that sense, Japan guarantees a vital experience that goes beyond tourism. Adolfo García Ortega's latest book,
La luz que cae
, reflects one of those experiences. The writer, who had prefaced
Roland Barthes's
Empire of Signs
, a classic among the classics of the fascination for Japan, discovers (or invents, because the frontiers between reality and fiction hardly exist in his book) during a trip the figure of Hiroshi Kindaichi, a heretic Shinto on which he builds an original work, in which the overwhelming vision of Mount Fuji is mixed with an intellectual (and moral) immersion in heterodox thought. "Fuji shocks those who let themselves be shocked by it," writes García Ortega.
A particularly original vision of the country is offered by Naoko Abe in
The Man Who Saved the Cherry Trees
(Anagram).
This Japanese journalist who has lived in London for two decades tells the story of an English gardener, Collingwood Ingram, fascinated by Japanese cherry trees, who thanks to a trip in 1926 managed to save many species that disappeared during World War II.
The book also constitutes an account of the history of the country, as well as of the author's own family and a lesson in the extent to which anything can be manipulated by a totalitarian regime: Japanese imperialism turned the cherry trees, a symbol of peace, into the emblem of the Kamikazes and of death by the emperor.
Tokyo Redux
starts in the ashes of that period that destroyed the country
: 72,
the third part of the Tokyo trilogy by British writer David Peace, based in the Japanese capital. His violent accounts are mixed with the description of the postwar period, when the country was devastated and practically had to rebuild from scratch. Thus was born that mixture between old and new, between chaos and order, while society was able to rebuild temples and gardens, factories and neighborhoods, and restore peace to the cherry blossoms. "The key to Japanese poetry is nostalgia for the past"; “Japan is a sensitivity. Words create sensations ”, writes Almarcegui. All these books offer different views on an infinite country, but they move between nostalgia and sensitivity. They show that, like Enrique Vila-Matas's Paris, Japan never ends either.
Entrance of a temple in Kyoto.guillermo altars
Readings
Lost Notebooks of Japan
Patricia Almarcegui
Candaya, 2021. 123 pages. 15 euros.
The man who saved the cherry trees
Naoko Abe
Translation by Juan Manuel Salmerón Arjona
Anagrama, 2021. 435 pages. 21.90 euros.
Stories of Japan
Xavier Moret
Peninsula, 2021. 350 pages. 18.90 euros.
The falling light
Adolfo García Ortega
Galaxia Gutenberg, 2021. 233 pages. 21.00 euros.
Tokio Redux: 72
David Peace
Translation by Ignacio Gómez Calvo
Tin Sheet, 2021. 464 pages. 24.90 euros.
A tablao in another world
David López Canales
Alianza editorial, 2021. 240 pages. 15.20 euros.
Other japan
Jorge Arranz
Norma, 2020. 190 pages.
29.50 euros.
The
Agustina Guerrero
Lumen
trip
, 2020. 232 pages.
18.90 euros.
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