Over the past three years or so, more than one hundred books by Japanese authors have been published in our language, roughly the same number of those printed both in the last decade of the last century and in the first of the current one, slightly less than all those translated into Italian from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the eighties: an amazing figure for literature of a country that is supposed to be ten thousand kilometers away from ours, and it certainly cannot be the result of mere chance. What makes novels written in such a different language and at least apparently very distant from us attractive and usable? One of the many answers, which perhaps largely summarizes several, lies at the origins of modern Japanese culture, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Japan was sucked into the vortex of Westernization and consequently was subjected to a process of cultural mutation characterized by hyper-speed and excessive frenzy, based on a partial adaptation to internal reality. This phenomenon, from the point of view of literature, has given birth to a new hybrid creature in which the elements of the main Western literary currents are intertwined with indigenous peculiarities, or rather a novel form in which the lights of our part are found at the same time. of the world and the shadows of the opposite.
As Tanizaki Jun’ichir writesō, one of the great Japanese twentieth century: We resign ourselves to the shade, as it is, and without revulsion. The dim light? Let the darkness engulf us, and discover a belt for them. On the contrary, the West believes in progress, and wants to change status. passed from candle to oil, from oil to gas, from gas to electricity, chasing a clarity that would sneak out to the last patch of shadow. The shadow, the chiaroscuro, the unspoken constitute the stylistic code of Japanese culture, in fact nothing contrary to the shadow, and precisely neither darkness nor light says Giordano Bruno. But finally, lights and shadows are inseparable in modern and contemporary Japanese novels, and since everything is called light and darkness and these, according to their attitudes, are applied to this and that, Parmenides seems to add, all full of light and invisible darkness.
Now, returning to the original question and remembering very briefly that contemporary Japanese literature has drawn and continues to draw inspiration from European and American postmodern culture in various fields (cinema, rock music and so on), it could be briefly answered that, compared to the narrative of other Asian countries, despite today’s globalization, the Japanese one fascinates the Western reader because at the same time it attracts him to mysterious and unknown areas and he drives with a language that is somewhat familiar, in an almost perfect blend of light and shadow. After all, Japanese fiction enjoys excellent health and is confirmed as one of the most interesting and innovative centers of the world literary panorama, and continues to propose new generations of writers in the wake of revolutionary authors such as Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryū, Takahashi Gen’ichirō and others, architects in the second half of the seventies of an epochal fracture that determined the birth of contemporary Japanese pop literature, by virtue of an important work of definitive alignment of writing with the present, as well as demolishing the barriers between pure literature and mass literature.
In such a context, the unprecedented series proposed by this newspaper arrives with surprising punctuality and assumes the appearance of a small library available to the reader who wants to approach or deepen the world of Japanese fiction of the last two decades, starting with Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana, the first contemporary Japanese writers to be presented in Italy in the early nineties thanks to the well-known Nipponist and translator Giorgio Amitrano, recovering one of the last works of the Nobel Prize Ōe Kenzaburō, and finally ranging in various genres and proposing novels both of considerable literary depth and of pure and healthy entertainment, as it should be in the case of a bookish review at three hundred and sixty degrees.
Only in this way, perhaps, is it possible to systematize an elusive and magmatic subject such as contemporary Japanese literature, in a sort of attempt to anchor it towards a reality that is certainly among the most chaotic and multifaceted on a world level, as a consequence of the historical-cultural factor described above. Japanese postmodernism itself, which at times seems to take on the connotations of a sort of supermodernism before letter, in the sense of a cultural phenomenon evidently conditioned by excess of time and space, calling into question here the theory of Marc Aug on surmodernit, ended up resting on very little solid foundations, where the only categorical imperative was often to assimilate as much as possible.
Put very simply, futuristic Japan found itself confused and unprepared (again) upon impact with postmodernism. However, on balance, this unpreparedness has determined the stylistic code of the Japanese contemporaneity itself, read its extremely multifaceted and almost elusive character, that is that unique and inimitable union between the world of light and that of shadows that also distinguishes the necklace. / Japanese library that opens its doors to the general public.
May 13, 2021 (change May 13, 2021 | 19:54)
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