Benoît Reiss
Junko Nakamura illustrator

Notes découpées du Japon

Notes Cut from Japan

August 1, 2018
Novel
88 pages
110 × 119 mm
15,50 €
9782359840964
978-2-3598-4096-4

“L’Estran” collection

																Benoît Reiss, Notes découpées du Japon
																Benoît Reiss, Notes découpées du Japon

A Frenchman living in Japan teaches his language to Japanese people who are passionate about the complexities of French conjugation. With the eyes of a foreigner, admiring and astonished, curious and seduced, he observes the people—the young, the old, the salarymen, the sleeping spectators at the Kabuki—, the food—the rāmen, the rice cookies, the elegant jelly cakes—, the nature—the frogs, the cherry trees, the birds, the cedars, and the water, especially. Lakes, the sea, hot springs, rain, rivers, the black waves of deadly tsunamis.

With a bare, contemplative and unpretentious writing style, Benoît Reiss describes a few moments of this life, fragments cut out of the continuity of existence, as many snapshots that tell the beauty and poetry of the “little things” of daily life in Japan.

Junko Nakamura’s Chinese inks, between exotic landscapes and ordinary details, punctuate this narrative and inhabit the space between these “cut-out notes”, which she gathers with a brush stroke.

the authors

Benoît Reiss was born in 1976. He studied literature in Lyon and Paris. He worked in educational publishing before moving to Japan in 2007, where he taught French. Since 2017, he has been co-director of Cheyne Editions, with Elsa Pallot. As an author, he published the novel Le petit veilleur with Buchet Chastel in 2019, poetry with Cheyne, and stories including O’Yu, un éloge de l’eau chaude with Esperluète Editions in 2021.

Born in Tokyo, Junko Nakamura lives and works in Paris. As a child, she loved to look at beautiful pictures in books. Since 2012, she has published children’s books with MeMo Editions, such as Nous allons au bois (2017), Ce matin (2015) and Au fil du temps (2012). She has also illustrated various authors, including Léa and Nancy Huston (Véra veut la vérité et Dora demande des détails, L’école des loisirs, 2013) or François-Régis Gaudry (On va déguster, Marbout, 2015). Before devoting herself to illustration, she practiced metal engraving.

August 1, 2018
Novel
88 pages
110 × 119 mm
15,50 €
9782359840964
978-2-3598-4096-4

“L’Estran” collection