Memoir & Poppy Kuroki

 

The author's literary recommendations (and it's my birthday next week):

Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically,

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.

There are many emerging authors in world literature. In recent years, I have pleasantly encountered contemporary Japanese literature that has made me very happy. Historical novels, simple and rich, whose content reveals the culture of a people, among other things. Those who know themselves, they say, know the world around them. When we know their culture, we can more accurately understand its subtleties and affinities, its values and feelings. That's what I enjoy most when I read about others. No matter their nationality, creed or color, or the mannerisms they use to describe immense realities. That's what I seek in books: to get to know people and enter the world of possibilities that these personal and collective "journeys" offer me. After Haruki Murakami, I've discovered some more contemporary literature that I admire, for its complicity and descriptions of humanity, for the relentless search for the identity of ancestors in the wars and rebellions they experienced, and for ways to ensure continuity in what we call contemporary reality, so often where parallels are drawn to our Western reality. The author's nationality is ultimately blurred in what she writes. Poppy is not Japanese, but Scottish, who investigates Japanese history, perhaps because her own husband is from there, perhaps because the magic, the fantasy in which she was raised, in the era of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, inspired by Outlander and video games, led the author to journey internally, in this piece of fantasy that anchors itself, formidably, in my view, between different times, constructing a captivating narrative. The happily ever after, divinely contemplated, is the book's touchstone. Love. When a book teaches us something, it's as if it plays a melody, until then dormant, within us. Waking us up and inspiring us to take another step on our journey. That's what authors can do, if we allow them to.

Poppy Kuroki is a young Scottish author who grew up in London and currently lives in Japan, where she weaves ancestral memories of the history that shaped the people who inhabit the country. This book, "Journey to Kagoshima," which aims to take us back to the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, is her first book in this Chain of Ancestral Memories. The sentence below, about memory, is duly identified within her book, where its authorship refers to Musashi Miyamoto (1584-1645), claiming he was the most famous and admired of the Japanese samurai.

Truth is not what we wish it to be; it is what it is, and we must bow before its power or live a lie.

Musashi Miyamoto