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Japon, vue d'insecte by Bruno Sibona

2022; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tfr.2022.0109

2329-7131

Warren Motte,

French Urban and Social Studies

Reviewed by: Japon, vue d'insecte by Bruno Sibona Warren Motte Sibona, Bruno. Japon, vue d'insecte. PhB, 2021. ISBN 979-10-93732-48-0. Pp. 272. In this engaging book, a writer reflects upon a country that he first visited as a young man, and to which he returned several times since, in largely different circumstances. It is a work that resists easy classification, for it plays out in a variety of keys. Sometimes it is historical in approach; sometimes Sibona writes as a cultural critic; sometimes the text reads like a personal memoir. If a nonfictional perspective dominates, at certain moments a clearly fictional voice serves to interrogate and relativize that perspective. Poetry and prose rub elbows here, complementing each other; and if prose occupies most of the space in the pages of this volume, it is nonetheless a prose highly imbued with poetry, for Bruno Sibona is first and foremost a poet. He had first gone to Japan as a student, he tells us, to learn the art of Zen archery, surviving handily on a very limited budget. Decades later he returns, this time housed in the compound of the French Embassy. In the interim, he had never stopped thinking about Japan, about the shapes it assumes and about the way it shaped him. In describing that country, he avoids the trap of easy exoticism—which is no mean feat, granted the features of Japan upon which he draws his closest focus. He speaks frequently about temples, of course, he offers a typology of Japanese gardens, he talks about earthquakes and bullet trains. The title of the book promises insects, and insects there are: June beetles, for instance, and flies, and scarabs. But he also reflects upon ghosts, upon the tradition of palmistry, and upon the Yugen, an idea similar to our "uncanny" or the Freudian unheimlich, that dates back to the Heian period of classical Japan. He makes regular incursions into Japanese literature, from the writings of the ninth-century author Sugawara no Michizane to those of Yukio Mishima. Along the way, he asks questions, some resembling Zen koans, some querying his own attitude: "Quel visage avions-nous avant la naissance de nos parents? Et pourquoi faut-il que je pose toujours des questions?" (144). The final chapter of the book offers a shift in scene that is perhaps less dramatic than it would initially seem. Therein, Sibona describes his practice of "mudlarking" on the banks of the Thames at low tide. What he finds there will surprise and delight all but the most cynical readers. And what he sees later that same day in the streets of Wapping is a vision that demonstrates how deeply Japanese mysticism has structured his thought. As vertiginous as it may appear, that shift from Japan to London is emblematic of Sibona's broader strategy in this project. Early on, he remarks: "Une fois de plus, le déplacement seul est vital" (27). He is speaking in this instance about the arrow in archery, but one might very well take that statement as the general motto of this very agile book. [End Page 260] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French