CHon Francesca Scotti, talented Milanese writer and oboist, we met two years ago, at the time of Shimaguni. Narrated Atlas of the Islands of Japan. Beautiful between fantasy and geography, and reviewed with the author “in absentia”: Francesca was living at the time, and for over ten years, in Nagoya with her jurist husband Giorgio Fabio Colombo, one of the leading experts in Japanese law.
We found it again last spring in Milan for an exquisitely harmonious telephone chat, he went out Nobody knows Sayuki (Bompiani), the latest novel – the theme of unknowability (also) within a marriage – and the couple had moved back to Italy.
But the Rising Sun must exercise a special attractive forcebecause that’s where we finally – and incredibly – met this fall just outside Tokyo, for a synchronic convergence between our Journey of I Woman in Japan and the presentation tour of The time of the turtles (Hacca), his stories just translated by the Tokyo publisher Gendaishokan.
The writer Francesca Scotti with her husband Giorgio Fabio Colombo (in the centre, in dark clothes) and the travellers I Woman in Japan.
The perfect place
Spatial dimension: the magnificent Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architectural Museum, in Koganei Park. Temporal dimension: uncertain, unsettlingbuildings – original houses, dismantled and reassembled – of different eras and styles coexist side by side in the large tree-lined avenues. You will understand, the perfect place.
How long!
Lovers at risk in the Tokyo night, the old lady who is unique with the old house to be demolished, the little girl traveling between two dimensions… Fifteen short storiesbut very complete, those of Turtle timewhere he reigns an apparent balance until it is permanently altered and yet, at first, almost imperceptible.
Bergson teaches that time has more to do with inner experience than with mathematical calculation, and in these stories it is never a straight line.
«It intervenes in two ways. On the one hand it’s not linear: elements of the past seem to return to the present, and at a certain point it’s not even important anymore, because it’s as if chronology wasn’t really central. Indeed, this allows you to “repair” in some way what has been.”
The writer Francesca Scotti with her book in a bookstore in Tokyo.
«On the other hand, it is definitely turtle time slow, quiet, a time that makes you wait as if there were the right time for things to happen. A time that needs to matureand it is a possibility that in the daily rush we have somewhat lost. Today we feel the need to express immediately anything, good or bad, at the very moment it is imprinted on our heart, in our eyes, in our memory”.
Francesca Scotti, Japan, megacities and rice fields
Minimal stories, names and places very distant from each other. Maybe even the passage of time is perceived differently?
«In Japan I personally experienced special attention to succession of seasons, in a cyclical nature that instills a sense of peaceof serenity. But here too time is full of ambivalences, of duality. I think about the maximum speed of the Shinkansen line and to maximum slowness of trains proceeding meticulously through the rice fields. Among other things, a journey on the “bullet train” is totally different from our experience of traveling by train: it is a space of imagination, not just moving from one place to another.”
Turtles aside, his stories are populated with animals and children.
«Animals because they are gateways to something truer, more universal. They were there before and I hope they will be there after us, the turtle guarantees continuity and cyclicality regardless of our busyness. THE children for their pure and merciless gaze. Theirs is the age where everything has yet to happen. Or maybe in the stories it was happening and yet it seemed to me that it had yet to happen…”.
Expandable, flexible, changeable time. And closed space?
«It’s true, the spaces of these stories are paradoxically very closed. There are cars, trains, many houses, a retirement home, restaurants… Like turtle shells, they protect or they try to protect. And they are places of protection that… continually move. I would add that for me, as a foreign country, Japan is a perfect place, because I have my whole identity on me and everything I look at is still different, new. So inspiring.”
Five stories to tell
In contemporary Italian literature the short story is not very popular. Abroad, however, yes. His top five?
«In the first place, The lottery by the American Shirley Jackson, where apparent reality is real and normal… until it isn’t anymore and a small crack changes the meaning of everything. Contemporary Gothic. Then, Diary of a pregnancy by Yoko Ogawa (one of the most important post-modern Japanese authors. With this story, in which a woman cynically “records” the nine months of her sister’s pregnancy, admitting that she hates her, she won the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize in 1991ed.) and the collection Vendetta. So a classic, Stories from the palm of your handsmall jewels by Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese frescoes with all the emotional and spiritual charge of nature. In the end, The bats by Inès Cagnatì, far from me due to its rural settings, but of absolute beauty. All titles that I read and reread, even when I want to “retune” the writing.”
The Italian and Japanese editions of the short stories “The Time of Turtles”.
She lived in Kyoto and Nagoya, upon returning to Milan the Japanese translation of the Turtle time. A good reason to return to Kyoto, Tokyo…
«It was a formidable emotion, finally not only friends but also those in Japan who don’t know me can intercept my work. I had the feeling that this country that I love so much was finally “seeing” me. It’s like when the gaze of a person you care about falling on you. Naturally this causes performance anxiety, fear of making mistakes. But how wonderful the readings at Kyoto University arethe many interviews (also that of Mainichi Shinbunan important daily newspaper that publishes two editions a day, ed.). And above all, seeing that it is something of the past (the collection was published for the first time in Italy almost three years ago). generative over time, in relationships, in meetings: led to the beautiful morning with you at the Edo-Tokyo museum!».
Slow progress
To close: I learned that when you were a little girl you actually had a turtle…
«A “turtle” (laughs). His name was Achille, he was fond of apples and his favorite place was the pedalboard of my piano. We kept each other company for a long time. Then one day he chose freedom, he ran away from the garden of our house in the mountains to enter the woods. Never came back. It will have evolved, it will have changed stage according to the cyclical nature of the world. Dear, dearest Achilles.”