In the 19th century, when Japan was anything but an open country, a French merchant used to cross the world to buy (and then steal) silkworms for his town's supply.
The long trips are described magistrally by Baricco, the author, using repetitions and chanting to picture the overseas travels of the main character of the novel, Hervé Joncour. For him, the experience of "the land of the rising sun" becomes an obsession when he falls in love with the concubine of one of the Japanese barons who supplies him the goods.
That impossible love torments him in the bones:
"It's a strange grief to die of nostalgia for something you will never live"
Before knowing that forbidden land, where the foreigner was banned and hated, he was one of those men who witness their life without any ambition of fully living it.
His real-life and the secret one inevitably overlap at some point. But nothing to say or do can change the course of destiny:
“Perhaps sometimes life shows you a side of itself which leaves you with nothing more to say”
Its acceptance and persistence in "let it go" is disarming:
He consumed the rest of his time in a liturgy of habits that managed to defend him from unhappiness
You would like to enter the pages and act, talk, write, shout on his behalf, but you just finish the book before you even realize it.
Comentarios