(Paris) Amélie Nothomb returns from time to time to Japan and her passion for the country of her early childhood. This time it’s in an audio series on Japanese myths, where she adds a stone to her own legend.
Japan, the flowers of a floating world with Amélie Nothomb is an Audible series, in ten half-hour episodes, which comes out on Wednesday.
This subsidiary of Amazon describes “a dive into the way of the kami, into Shintoism, the way of Buddhism and Zen, the way of the samurai and the way of the arts”.
A year after another similar one on the myths of the Divine Comedy, the project fascinated the author of Stupor and tremors (1999). She revisits many aspects of the Japanese imagination.
“There are also a lot of memories from my early childhood. Japan is what is most intimate to me, ”she explains in an interview with AFP.
two birthdays
As the Belgian says in the first episode: “I thought I was Japanese for a very long time. It was a deep conviction […] The fundamental shock of my life consisted in being torn from this perfect universe, at the age of five […] I experienced it as a metaphysical accident, a wound that would have to be repaired one day”.
This point of her biography is discussed, depending on the actual date of birth of the author.
Amélie Nothomb says she came into the world in Kobe in August 1967, at the start of a post of her diplomat father in the land of the Rising Sun. This version is retained among others by the Larousse dictionary. But she could very well be a native of Etterbeek, near Brussels, in July 1966. This is what we read in her biography as a member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature.
Questioned on this point, the author launched last year at The Express “I don’t feel concerned. It’s not so bad, they wish me my birthday twice a year”.
To AFP, she details: “My father spoke Japanese very well, he sang nô (a form of classical Japanese theater combining poetry, dance and music, editor’s note). […] I was the one of the three children who was seen as the Japanese child. First, because I was born there, but, in addition, because, as I was the youngest, I was the one he had decided to introduce to Japanese culture.
“Japanese Illiterate”
As she told in the autobiographical novel Neither Eve nor Adam (2009), his Japanese has largely remained stuck at this early childhood stage.
“I am an illiterate Japanese. It is a language that I have spoken very well, even if it has declined a lot. I know she is still there. But I missed the famous years when you learn to write,” she explains.
His knowledge of Japanese myths therefore combines bookish research and childlike sensitivity. Like when she takes up and develops this definition heard from her former governess who, when asked what Shintoism was, “answered: all that is beautiful is God”.
“It is absolutely certain that all this new knowledge gathered will germinate. But it’s hard to tell you how they will germinate. Something will certainly come out of it, ”promises the novelist.
His last trip to the archipelago had given a book a little apart in his work, happy nostalgia (2013). She recounted the filming of a documentary directed by the woman who is now the co-author of these Flowers of a Floating WorldLaureline Amanieux.
“I haven’t been back there for more than ten years. But, oh happiness, I’m going to go back there for fun, ”reveals the lady with the black hats. It will be at the end of May.