Rika, the Japanese of courage in the trap of Rome

by time news

The story comes from the news. Sour, raw, edgy story of Rika. A very young Japanese tourist in Rome, she suddenly plunges into a nightmare from which she will manage to come out, revealing to herself, before the world, an unexpected quality of woman and warrior, hidden up to that moment among the folds and uncertainties of a tormented adolescence.

It is inspired by a case of “black” about ten years ago the last novel of Mario Vattani, diplomat and writer with a deep knowledge and passion for the Japan, A heartland to which he had already dedicated three books: the novel Doromizu (Mondadori, 2016), the essay Unveiling Japan (Giunti, 2020) e The Via del Sol Levante (Idrovolante, 2017) which is halfway between the two genres. Therefore this just published Rika (Idrovolante, 250 pp., 18 euros) closes an ideal quadrilogy, which is not articulated on sequel but on the intertwining of stories, feelings, sensitivities, ways of life, visions of the future and of the past whose common thread is the relationship between the author and the country of choice.

Mario Vattani

Exponent of that rich tradition, not only Italian, of diplomatic writers, Vattani is an author who encourages quick reading, he does not want to captivate delays between the paragraphs of a page but to induce one to always move a block further, a chapter beyond and so on until the end of the book. If the comparison with music or kendo (other declared passions of the author) is possible, it is not with the virtuoso (or vain) guitar soloist, but with the rhythm of the bass player or the lunge – a decisive blow. , one at a time – of the shinai of bamboo.

Rika’s story is simple and complex: simple due to the ineluctable resemblance and squalor with which all violence against women is declined; complex because the first half of the novel is a delicate miniature of this involuntary heroine, of her world, of conflicts, of her minute expectations (when they fix her scooter, if she likes it more or less with shaved eyebrows). And too vast expectations regarding life, his which is this sea put forward to the eye and with too many shadow lines, or backwards is the past with the memories of the father, from the absence of more remote facts but always imminent re-emergence. Or the present is the rough relationship with the mother, who learns only later, in the concluding pages and through painful catharsis, to love her daughter better.

This is the time that Vattani puts together, in the same book, his own places: Rome and Tokyo. And perhaps it is true that this can be done more easily through narrative, even by choosing – not easily – a female narrative self and ultimately finding a morality that gives meaning to everything. It is the one for which the author dedicates the book to his daughter: the moral of courage which is found, for example, in the classic Japanese treatise Hagakure and that each woman, even if Rika doesn’t know it, carries her fears in her pocket and makes her win at the last meter. Because you never give up on violence.

Therefore it is a happy consequence, and it is not spoiler, that this book ends much happier than it began.

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