Dejima
by Stéphane Audeguy
Threshold, 286 p., € 18.50
There is the American Mabel, who finds herself widowed in Tokyo in 1946, when she spent her honeymoon in Kyoto in 1902. There is the hallucinating and bloody Kumiko. Finally, there is Alice, a cheeky French teacher on the move in the land of the rising sun. Three chapters, which constitute a strange archipelago triptych.
Conceived like a kaleidoscope, Stéphane Audeguy’s novel combines the enigmatic, enchanting, or nightmarish bursts of a bygone Japan, before turning ultra-contemporary over the pages. The temporal shifts follow the rhythm of the reincarnations of female characters, which occur according to a narration marked by a crescendo of the fantastic genre.
→ CRITICAL. Mourning to understand and love
Metempsychosis seems to be a safe haven for French writers, in this disoriented first quarter of the 21st century – cf. The Annual Banquet of the Brotherhood of Gravediggers by Mathias Énard. Stéphane Audeguy, however, continues the idea slipped in his previous account, A mother : “What is a life? An appetite, a matter of desire. “
We eat, we devour, we consume the work of flesh in Dejima, while Japan sinks into galloping consumption, unbridled corruption, frenetic modernity, to the point of disgorging – the pages in italics, which are inserted in the fate of humans to summarize in small documented touches the fate of a nation, end with the suffocating landfills and pollution that plague the Japanese archipelago.
A Pavlovian heroism that leads nowhere
The latter, having gone from the forced opening under the threat of Yankee cannons in the 19th century to the two atomic bombings – still Yankees – in August 1945, leads his boat with the admirable constancy characteristic of Pavlovian heroism which does not lead to nothing. Like the living beings who pass and transmigrate: “Each of his murders populates Kumiko’s mind with a new life of memories, sensations, thoughts, emotions; quickly enough, the young woman feels as old, as complex as an ancient dragon. “
In a exhausted society and as in the terminal stage, where eating and mating punctuate the cavernous days, iterative pins accompany the loss of humanity while bringing people together, as echoing this other novel of twilight anticipation: Pale Foxes by Yannick Haenel. Stéphane Audeguy is one of the authors who embarrass us, hollowing out the era with torturing grace.
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