“My personal mythology is really Japan. My first memories are Japanese, for a very long time I thought I was Japanese and it was a deep conviction…” This is how Japan, the flowers of a floating world, Amélie Nothomb’s exciting documentary series for Audible, Amazon’s audiobook platform. The novelist spent the first five years of her life in Japan, in the “perfect” region of temples and prints of Kansai, between Kobe, Kyoto and Nara. “To be torn from it at the age of 5” was “the fundamental shock” of her life, she explains. I experienced it as a metaphysical accident, a wound that would have to be repaired one day. »
Stones that trace a path
This was perhaps the case when she returned, some fifteen years later, to Tokyo this time, for a radically different and much more painful experience from which she will draw one of her most famous novels, Stupor and tremors. Japan, she still returns to it from time to time, in reality or in her novels, and this time, it is in an audio series on the myths that she adds a stone to her own legend. Or several stones that trace a whole path: from kamis to Shinto, from Buddha to Zen, from the spirit of the samurai to the path of the arts – floral art, calligraphy, haiku, Noh theatre… Without forgetting the art of living: tea ceremonies or sake tasting that Amélie prefers “in the mountains, at altitude”…
“The most beautiful culture”
A year after writing another similar audiobook around The Divine Comedy, Amélie Nothomb revisits many aspects of the Japanese imagination, filling them with experiences and personal reflections. His knowledge of the mythology and traditions of the land of the rising sun mixes both expert explanations and memories of his childhood. Like when she takes up and develops this definition heard from her former governess who, when asked what Shintoism was, “answered: everything that is beautiful is god”.
“Amélie really has the gift of making sometimes complex stories accessible,” says Laureline Amanieux, the director with whom she co-signs this documentary series. Her story and that of a Japan which she praises, in the video that illustrates this article, both “the most beautiful culture” and the “incredible adaptability”.