Whether you spend a few days or a few weeks there, you generally circulate like a Westerner in Japan with the feeling of walking – often in circles – on another planet. The subtleties of language and food, the thousand and one codes that escape us and the weight of the unsaid quickly lead us astray.
To begin to understand something about it, this Japanese love dictionary is a real gold mine.
And one could not dream of a better guide to the Land of the Rising Sun than Richard Collasse, a Frenchman immersed “in a state of weightlessness” for almost 50 years in Japanese society, where he landed for the first time in 1971. Novelist (The trace, The tea pavilion), poet, boss of the luxury house Chanel KK in Japan, the man speaks fluent Japanese and has been able to penetrate all layers of Japanese society over the years.
Unsurprisingly, his work is the result of a long obstacle course: “Addressing Japan means agreeing to stumble from paradox to paradox. And Japanese culture, he recalls, is “reluctant to any simplistic approach, which bends but does not surrender, which can only be tamed through hard struggle and earned on a daily basis”. This takes time and patience.
Japan, in his eyes, is a kind of “millefeuille”. A society that changes less than it adapts, rather adding a new layer that does not erase the previous ones.
From Sei Shônagon to chanoyu, the hypercoded tea ceremony, via xenophobia, baseball, bento, love hotels, the subtle art of the gift (omiyage) and even fugu, this “balloon fish” prized by gourmets whose toxicity, says Richard Collasse (who has eaten it on many occasions), is one thousand two hundred times more effective than cyanide, this colossal Dictionary japan lover (1300 pages) will satisfy the most devouring appetites.
Alternately funny and erudite, always “in love”, in this pleasantly written book, the author invites us on a personal journey through time and space, mixing memories and anecdotes with the complex realities of culture ” millennium” of Japan. A must-read for anyone with an interest in Japan.