Home » Kawamura Genki: life rediscovered in the shade of a hundred flowers

Kawamura Genki: life rediscovered in the shade of a hundred flowers

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The light and the dark, all in a few days, to discover that, despite the night, the sun will return. Izumi works in a record company and, in a short time, she knows that she will become a father and is faced with the sadness of mother Yuriko, who loses her memory, her path and her words. He is bewildered, he is a twig in the dance of emotions.

Kawamura Genki, 41, recounts this spin of life in Don’t forget the flowers, translated by Anna Specchio (congratulations, and also for the note on page 305). You can start from the flowers. There are the elegant and delicate ones on the cover designed by Anna Regge. They are anemones, the flowers of the wind, dancing shaken, like Izumi, by the whirlwinds of life. There are those of the original title in Japanese, and there are a hundred flowers. Because flowers have the beauty of life that blooms and the sadness of memory that fades, bringing with it reflections on love and death, tumbles and amnesia, the past and inheritance. The novel is inspired by the author’s grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease. Already in Kawamura’s first successful book, If cats disappeared from the world (Einaudi), it all began with a personal event, the loss of the telephone, on which the writer had built a reflection around mortality.

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The new novel

In the new novel, the protagonists dance on the edge of memory. Mom Yuriko was a music teacher, she lives alone, like Izumi raised alone, and she begins to forget. From the head are given, words, fragments of life. Once it was Izumi who got lost, now it is Yuriko who has lost her way and her son can only choose a family home for her. It is a painful decision, in which Kawamura accompanies us with great delicacy, a tone that characterizes the entire novel, whose pages reproduce the narrative linked to Rakugo, a traditional theatrical form of intimate verbal entertainment. Izumi is a restless magma, he searches, digs, he is overwhelmed by questions, above all because his mother, when he was little, had disappeared for a year. 1995 was a dramatic year, torn apart by the Kobe earthquake of 17 January. Why that absence? Izumi approaches her mother and discovers her because the more a person is dear to us, the less we know her. Had he ever really known her, mother Yuriko? What are its secrets? And his heartbeats?

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A disease to rethink

The woman withers, the son suffers and finds her again. Each page is loss and revelation, as if life were an hourglass. What goes away immediately returns to rebalance the void because, as Kaori, Izumi’s wife says, “maybe losing something means growing up.” It happens to a mother when she stops breastfeeding her offspring, it happens to a baby when she leaves her parents’ hand, it happens to a child when she sees mom and dad leave. Finding beauty by subtraction, as in Michelangelo’s marble torment. Kaori’s words echo in Izumi’s head. And in ours. What do we lose and what do we find? What is the ultimate meaning of being children? The healthier memory the wounds or the more it marks them?

Meanwhile, one day, Yuriko reminds her son not to forget the flowers when he comes back to visit her. The hundred flowers of the title or even the fireworks that they admire together. Just at that moment, in front of the flowers blooming from the sky, Izumi notices something new: “Mom had a tone of voice similar to that of a child, she was a different person from the one who until a few minutes earlier had witnessed the fireworks “. Yuriko is another person, Izumi too. It is a beautiful anemone flower.

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