Barbara Burns talks to Claudia Dellacasa, whose book Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs was published on Open Access this summer in Legenda’s Italian Perspectives series.

cover of Italo Calvino and Japan

BB. Italo Calvino (1923-85) was a postmodernist Italian author who enjoyed international acclaim for his work which was translated into many languages. His connections with the avant-garde literary scene in Paris are well known, but your book focuses on the effect of a two-week visit he made to Japan in 1976. Why did Calvino travel to Japan, and in what ways was his brief encounter with this country so important for his development as a writer?

CD. The simple answer is that Calvino was invited by the Japan Foundation to visit the country in a period of his life when he was residing in Paris and was at something of a creative standstill after the publication of Il castello dei destini incrociati [The Castle of Crossed Destinies] in 1973. He had already achieved national and international recognition — Il barone rampante [The Baron in the Trees] had been published in 1957 and Le città invisibili [Invisible Cities] in 1972, for example — but he was not yet the author of Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore [If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler] and Palomar [Mr Palomar], two of his masterpieces that most bear the mark of Japanese inspiration, as I argue in my book.

Claudia Dellacasa

In Japan he visited Tokyo, Kyoto, Nikkō and Nara, attended a meeting at the Nihon-Itaria Kyoto-Kaikan, and one at the Italian Cultural Institute of Tokyo. He also met important Japanese translators and authors, such as Ōe Kenzaburō (Nobel Prize in literature in 1994) and Abe Kōbō, potentially as an emissary of Einaudi on the lookout for interesting authors to be translated into Italian. So here we have Calvino, an eminent intellectual figure, writer and cultural commentator whose prestige had already crossed international borders, spending two weeks experiencing cultural venues and tourist attractions, and engaging with a Foundation for the promotion of international cultural exchange between Japan and the rest of the world.

But to think that those two weeks are the only justification for Calvino’s interest in Japan would be to underestimate his intellectual vivacity. In fact, Calvino had already been reading Japanese novels and Buddhist texts, as the volumes in his personal library show. These books, and the travel experience itself, resonated with a way of looking at the world that Calvino had been gravitating towards for decades: a view of landscape as a space where human and non-human beings may possibly interact in harmonious, non-hierarchical ways; a view of the written (verbal) and the unwritten (non-verbal) world as illuminating one another; and, crucially, a view of time as simultaneously linear and circular and as a category that is transcended the more one tries to circumscribe it through limited logical tools. All of this brings us back to the point that focussing on Calvino’s travels as only happening during those two weeks spent bodily in Japan is reductive: he reflects afterwards on how time can expand and even evaporate, and we all know that life-changing experiences exceed the limits of material events.

This is a picture taken during Calvino’s meeting at the Nihon-Itaria Kyoto-Kaikan in November 1976. I wish to thank Prof. Amano Kei and the Kaikan for granting me permission to use this and other photos, which also feature in my book.

BB. How did you become interested in Calvino, and especially in the Japanese influences on his work?

CD. I started working on Calvino as an undergraduate at La Sapienza University of Rome, when I examined Le città invisibili for my BA thesis, highlighting the strategies through which Calvino constructs a suspended temporality in the extremely poetic atmosphere of the novel. For my MA thesis, I looked at another book by Calvino, Il barone rampante. In addition to pursuing my interest in the novel’s temporal dimension, I investigated the botanical exactitude of this work, whose main character climbs up a holm oak one day in his youth and then decides to spend his entire life in trees. This made me realise that I could bring together my ecological interests, which I have cultivated since I was a child thanks to my family, and my literary and linguistic research.

While time had been central in my linguistic analyses up to that point, space became more and more relevant from then on. And here I mean space as both an environmental and a geographical category. In my PhD project, I looked at how Calvino’s contact with Japanese culture – gardens and temples in particular – engendered a decentralisation of his Western point of view (a geographical and cultural decentralisation), which in turn challenged the centrality of the human in the surrounding world (in other words, a post-human perspective shift). But my research began, as any process does, with more questions than answers – questions that first arose as I was helping digitise the catalogue of Calvino’s personal books, on which Prof. Laura Di Nicola (La Sapienza) has worked for many years. I then noticed that Calvino had an entire shelf dedicated to Japanese literature, with around sixty volumes of Italian, English, French, and Spanish translations of novels and short stories by Abe, Akutagawa, Endō, Kawabata, Mishima, Natsume, Ōe, and Tanizaki, among others. And he also owned several Buddhist texts, placed on a different shelf. I started asking myself why I hadn’t even imagined that was possible, subsequently found out about his travels, and the rest came gradually with my research, which the Arts and Humanities Research Council generously supported at the University of Durham, where I was supervised by Prof. Katrin Wehling-Giorgi.

A picture of the Sala Italo Calvino, within the area ‘Biblioteca del Novecento letterario italiano Enrico Falqui’ at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma. This room reproduces different environments of Calvino’s penthouse at Campo Marzio in Rome, which has now been sold, and hosts all the books that used to be in his library – including the Japanese shelves!

BB. The subtitle of your book, A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs, may seem rather enigmatic to the uninitiated reader. Can you explain this for us?

CD. Calvino’s Japanese experience, and my analysis of it, follows closely the textual reading of Japan that Roland Barthes elaborated a few years earlier, in his L’Empire des signes [Empire of Signs]. Both Barthes and Calvino are semiotic travellers in Japan: not quite explorers who move toward the risk of the unknown, but not really tourists, who are usually attracted by the security of pure cliché. Calvino’s interest in semiotics – perhaps less pronounced than Barthes’s, but still relevant – allows him to recognise that if, in any cultural context, everything can be read as a sign, and if the surface of things should be understood as a tool to conceal the conventional nature of every form of expression, in Zen culture this dynamic is almost reversed from within. In Zen arts and rituals, forms are made central so as to lay bare the conventionality of forms themselves, and invite the practitioner to play with them and realise that there is no further depth to be looked for.

This is a very refreshing approach for a Western mind, as it implies a fundamental challenge to the hypocrisy of cultural constructions that are ideologically presented as natural and unavoidable, while they are in fact deeply artificial. When artificiality and convention are openly embraced, as they are in many Zen cultural forms (think of the highly ritualised tea ceremony, for example), it is possible to appreciate that there is no need to go further in search of deeper meanings, as everything is on the surface, and every sign’s depth is actually shallow. In Palomar Calvino will write, in my opinion influenced by Zen, that:

Solo dopo aver conosciuto la superficie delle cose […] ci si può spingere a cercare quel che c’è sotto. Ma la superficie delle cose è inesauribile
[It is only after you have come to know the surface of things […] that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.]

I realise this view of superficiality and depth can be puzzling for many readers, given that we are accustomed to link negative connotations to the former, and positive to the latter. But this is in line with centuries-old notions of Asian philosophies, such as that of emptiness, void, vacuity (śūnyatā).

Emptiness is another theme I deal with, and again, to be empty is not a bad thing. Things are empty in the sense that they do not have autonomous reality, but exist thanks to, in relation with, depending on other things. Surfaces, then, take on the positive role of creating such relations, as opposed to modes of thinking that posit isolated, solipsistic, all-too-deep selves. I see Palomar himself as empty, because he makes himself so receptive to inner and outer phenomena. They belong to an all-encompassing universe of signs, in which what Calvino calls ‘The Written World and the Unwritten World’ are part of the same spectrum.

Another picture from the meeting at the Nihon-Itaria Kyoto-Kaikan in November 1976.

BB. Calvino’s interest in Zen Buddhism followed in the wake of the increasing appeal during the 1960s of non-Western philosophies in Europe and America. Did Zen represent for him a turning away from engagement with Eurocentric preoccupations and politics, in particular from his former Marxist convictions?

CD. This is a very important point; thank you for bringing it up. In part it’s true that when Calvino visited Japan in the 1970s, he was no longer the committed Communist intellectual he had been in the 1940s and 1950s. He had resigned from the Italian Communist Party in 1957, as a reaction to the post-Stalinist invasion of Hungary, and after that had grown gradually disillusioned with the degenerations of Soviet totalitarianism. While aware of this detachment, I was still quite surprised in reading certain reflections, linked in different ways to Japan, where Calvino expresses rather conservative views. For example, in his review in la Repubblica of Kurosawa’s film Kagemusha, he seems to see social and political hierarchies as unavoidable, while in ‘Il rovescio del sublime’ [‘The Obverse of the Sublime’], in the Japanese section of Collezione di sabbia [Collection of Sand], he accepts economic inequalities as material conditions necessary for attaining aesthetic peaks, including those of the imperial gardens he much appreciates.

So it can be said that Calvino’s semiotic reading of Japan tends to be a non-ideological one, consistent with his gradually increasing reaction to his past political activism. At the same time, however, the very semiotic reflections that are prompted by a ‘non-political’ approach to Japan allow him to challenge many Western philosophical rigidities. And what is more political than questioning the centrality of (male) human beings and considering them as entangled in a larger, interconnected world? The relational ontology that follows, and that resonates with many recent environmental and scientific discourses (I’m thinking about Rovelli’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, in particular, which hinges upon relations), is forward-looking enough for me to excuse Calvino’s sporadically less-progressive politics.

BB. Did Calvino make any attempt to learn the Japanese language, or was he more interested in non-verbal means of communicating cultural meaning?

CD. Calvino did not speak Japanese, nor was he particularly aware of basic pronunciation rules of the language. For example, Wada Tadahiko (now one of Calvino’s major Japanese translators and at the time one of the young students who accompanied the writer during his visits around Kyoto) remembers that Calvino never failed to remark upon the number of pachinko halls they encountered in Kyoto, but he always misread the signs in rōmaji characters, italianising as /paˈkɪŋko/ what should be pronounced in Japanese as /paˈtʃɪŋko/. On one hand, then, Calvino’s travels happen at an a- (pre? post?) linguistic level, which itself resonates with the overcoming of language at the core of Buddhist meditation and in many of the Japanese novels he had the opportunity to read. On the other hand, this generates the awareness that reality itself can be read visually, in the absence of verbal handholds. The so-called written world (the world of alphabetic expression) thus loses its mastery over the unwritten world (the world of material expression), and the latter is even more deeply appreciated in its semiotic potential. It is thus thanks to the neutral, empty space of an unknown language – and, what is more, an ideographic one – that Calvino develops his reading of gardens as poems (and vice-versa), in what are some of his most interesting reflections that could be filed under the category of biosemiotics.

BB. Have you had the opportunity to travel to Japan yourself? If so, were you able to follow in Calvino’s footsteps, and what insights did your visit give you into the cultural aspects you grapple with in your book?

CD. I did, yes, thanks to the AHRC International Placement Scheme, and I still remember that as one of the best experiences of my academic (and personal) adventure. I spent three months in the spring of 2019 at the Nichibunken in Kyoto, which is the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, and I made a point of reaching out to as many people as possible who might have had contacts with Calvino back in 1976 and of visiting all the temples and gardens Calvino wrote about. This gave me an excuse to spend a lot of time around the enchanting city of Kyoto, and to travel throughout central Japan as well, up to the thermal town of Nikkō (from which Calvino sent a postcard to fellow writer Giorgio Manganelli) and to the old capital Nara. I also had some very nice conversations with Wada Tadahiko, whom I have already mentioned, and Amano Kei, now also a professor (then a student) of Italian who met Calvino and guided him around Kyoto. Amano still had the bright orange Beetle in which he drove Calvino through the commercial areas of the city, and you can just imagine my excitement when he offered me a ride, which meant sitting on the very seat on which ‘my’ author had sat more than 40 years before! What is more, that afternoon I was going to visit the Ryōan Zen temple and garden, which Calvino describes in beautiful terms in a couple of texts. I couldn’t help but have that garden on the cover of my book!

Here I was visiting the Byōdō-in Temple in Uji, in Kyoto prefecture, in the spring of 2019: I timed my research trip in order to enjoy the hanami.

BB. Is there a book or story by Calvino in English translation which you would recommend to readers as a good introduction to his work?

CD. My favourite Calvino books of all time are Il barone rampante and Marcovaldo, perhaps because of their ecological resonances. They are very good books for young readers, as well. But if I were to recommend a book that is more connected to my own research, I would probably suggest Palomar. I’m sure any reader would notice a somewhat meditative posture there, despite the initial declaration by the main character of his inability to contemplate. The book develops, in my opinion, as a gradual and not-always-patient appreciation of the continuity between micro and macro, self and cosmos, which has a lot to do with what I have analysed in my book and tried to give a sense of here.

BB. The last few years have involved a lot of interesting moves for you, from Rome to Durham to Tübingen to Dublin and then to the University of Glasgow where you’ve recently taken up a lectureship. How has this wealth of experience affected your perspective, and how are you finding Scotland?

CD. For someone who works in comparative literature and is curious about the environment in all its different forms, the last few years have been incredibly rewarding: thanks to many friends I made in these places and with the help of my bike (or bikes, as one was actually stolen), I managed to explore many different landscapes, both human and non-human – though the two are always interconnected – and to learn to decipher, if you like semiotically, different cultures. Again, the content and the context of my research went hand in hand. Of course, that was also emotionally and logistically taxing, and I’m now enjoying the stability of a permanent job in a city I love a little more every day. And, just as Calvino in the 1980s, after living in Sanremo, Turin, and Paris, managed to have his complete library (the one I helped catalogue) in his penthouse at Campo Marzio in Rome, I am finally relieved to have all my books together in one place! Calvino, as it happens, has a shelf of his own.


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