Titre : Fantômes d’Ogura
Auteur : Hubert Delahaye
Editions: The Asiathèque
Publication date: August 28, 2024
Genre : Roman
After Letters d’Ogura et Of tea and lover, Hubert Delahaye, sinologist at the Collège de France returns to the scene of his first opus with Fantômes d’Ogurawhere we follow the wanderings of the benevolent specter of the deceased protagonist of the Letters d’Ogura.
Hatsumi is no longer physically present but her soul and her memories live on. Not in the form of a malevolent spirit but rather in that of a kind ghost who has retained all his goodness and liveliness of mind. A caring being who cares about her daughters and the people she has known and wonders what will become of her village.
A world that is becoming rare
Because if the picture presented is very pleasant and we can imagine a village embedded in a valley worthy of a landscape in Japanese prints, the author, through his chronicles of village life in Japan, presents us a universe certainly made of wisdom and simplicity, a universe worthy of a work by Hokusai, but unfortunately a world which is also dying. A phenomenon which is accentuated over time with a concentration of the population in megacities like Tokyo or other major cities like Osaka, Kobe, leaving the villages to die with their last elderly inhabitants.
However, this rather dark picture of the future should not prevent you from benefiting from Hatsumi’s wisdom and the gentleness that emerges from this book because we are filled with empathy for this character who cares about last neighbors present in the valley, the change in lifestyle and the technological innovations that have occurred over the last decades, which remembers the smell of the forests and the welcoming warmth of the baths.
Fantômes d’Ogura is a bubble of freshness in the gray, a book that immerses you in an ocean of serenity and makes you want for a few moments to transform yourself into a spirit and go wandering through the villages of the Japanese countryside in autumn.
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