The Japanese Chronicles by Nicolas Bouvier
It never does to start a review of a book with a quote from the blurb, but sometimes it's unavoidable. Le Monde reviewed this book, at some point, with the words what the old master craftsmen would call a masterpiece. It is precisely that. A masterpiece in the sense of the craft as well as the art of writing. I'm going to hesitate to call it 'travel writing' because this is as much a history of Japan, a mythology-primer for the Japanese culture as it is a personal response to living and travelling in the country.
| The Japanese Chronicles by Nicolas Bouvier | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: An insight into the history & culture of Japan that well-stands the test of time. An easy & informative read. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 205 | Date: October 2008 |
| Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd | |
| ISBN: 978-1906011048 | |
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Arguably all of the best travel writing covers that kind of ground, but Bouvier has the craftsman's flair of both absenting himself from the tale, while at the same time telling it through his own prism, leaving his mark on something subtly enough for it to be unmistakeably his, but only if you care enough to look closely enough.
Some books date poorly. Some age well. And some have you checking publication dates and rechecking the text dates just to make sure they weren't written yesterday. Bouvier's Chronicles falls somewhere between the last two. First published in French in 1989, and in translation to English in 1992, the travels related date back almost decades prior. The Eland edition itself is over 10 years old. And yet reading it, as someone who has been reading about Japan in preparation for a trip already several times deferred by life and then lockdown, it still feels fresh and relevant.
Part of the reason for that is that much of it was historical / mythical even at first experience (in the 1950s & 1960s) and part of it, is that aspects of the society Bouvier discovered are still evident in only slightly changed form in the 21st century – insofar as one can judge from this side of the planet. Certainly at least some of the Japanese individuals he describes from his encounters ring true at least to the modern caricatures. Having watched both Joanna Lumley and Sue Perkins experience modern Japan, it is easy to draw the lines between then and now.
Much has changed. More, one feels, has not.
So to break my rule twice over and go back to the blurb. Le Figaro said If you go to Japan, it is unthinkable that you should leave without The Japanese Chronicles. Purely from the point of getting the basics of the culturally history that informs Japanese society even now, I can't help feeling that this is true. If my own trip ever comes to fruition I'll be able to put that to the test.
In the meantime, even if you have no interest in travelling there, if you have the remotest fascination with this world that is so different from that in 'the West', you could do no better than to read this book. I come out of it with corners turned down, passages highlighted, and having someone quote back to me the passage I read to them over the phone because I loved it so much.
To specifics: Bouvier (1929-1998) was Swiss and by his own description a 'slow' traveller. He lived his way into a place. He lived in Japan for over a year in the mid-1950s and returned (with a wife & child – although they don't feature in the work) in the mid-to-late 1960s. He took up photography to aid the cash-flow, and although it's illustrated with his own pictures, it's clear that his first love was words. The book is scattered with poems as well as (presumably, but not very heavily, edited) extracts from The Grey Notebook – his travel diaries.
Most of the Chronicles however isn't about his journey. It's about what he learned there. And he starts with Year Zero – which covers the Japanese creation myth – and works through the arrival of Buddhism, the trade with Portugal, Spain & others, the impact of the Vatican and other missionaries and on through the centuries to the end of the Second World War. Of course, none of this is covered in depth, but it is deep in flavour. It is all told with a tongue-in-cheek irreverence that the author may not have felt had he written it without the retrospective view of intervening years and other life-experience. That irreverence is not down-playing Japan, or her culture & people, but merely smiling with the wisdom of age & experience at both the absurdity of some of it and also at the degree to which that absurdity is common across the world.
There is an adeptness of holding up the mirror, showing how our Western viewpoints are similar or opposite or otherwise different, but all the same really when you get down underneath it all.
Reading the book is like taking a holiday. It is an easy read. It makes you smile. It makes you think.
It will teach you many things you did not know. And I suspect it will make you remember many things that you really did. There is a passage I'm thinking of towards the end of the book where he describes a railway station that reminds him of one back home in Switzerland from when he was a small child, and it made me remember stations across Britain and elsewhere in Europe from when I was somewhat older, but that still had, in some cases still have that essential Victorian sense about them, for all the glass and chrome.
It will provide you with a description of Noh theatre that might even make you want to go and experience it for yourself. I had not expected to like it either he says.
There are heart-felt personal stories, like the ones surrounding the aftermath of Hiroshima The ashes and human bones collected in the hospital ruins were weighed on a scale and divided equally among the mourners so that the conventional funerary rites could take place… the rest of this story is more personal to the teller, and involves a mother who got caught up in that world-changing event because of three kilos of sugar. That's the art and the craft – linking the global to the intensely personal. And Bouvier takes himself off-stage and relays this. Relays, not relates. You get the feeling that he is simply telling it as it was told.
He has a similar feel for describing the countryside, the inns, the night-trains, the empty stations, getting stranded on the beach, a two- (or maybe three-) day festival in remote countryside, with people too poor to see him, until they're too drunk (or too old) to care about what it means to be consorting with a foreigner.
I come out of the Chronicles with a much better feel for the country and her people – the feeling that my knowledge will be strengthened further when I've read it two or three more times, which I know I will.
Simply brilliant.
For more recent views on Japan we can recommend People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan's Shadows by Richard Parry and Japan Through The Looking Glass by Alan Macfarlane
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