Italo Calvino’s essays, Collection of Sand, is a brainy delight

The Japanese are sometimes said to suffer from ‘outsider person shock’ (gaijin shokku) when travelling abroad. Recently in London we had a lodger from Hiroshima who wanted to practise his karate routines in our back garden. Concerned to see him chopping at our apple tree in full combat gear, a metropolitan police helicopter hovered in close to take a look. Afterwards Mr Kinoto admitted to me that he was lost in London amid alien signs and habits. ‘The object of my time in England is not sightseeing’, he told me ruefully, ‘but home-staying.’

I thought of the Japanese lodger while reading Italo Calvino’s wonderful essays, Collection of Sand, published in Italy in 1984, a year before Calvino died at the age of only 62. Some nine of the 38 essays are devoted to Japan, a country that entranced as much as it mystified Calvino. The ‘tiny trotting steps’ of Kimono-clad Kyoto women are a source of amazement to him, as are the ornamental lawns he sees made of ‘moss rather than grass’. His meticulous observations of Japanese life and culture owe something to the French intellectual Roland Barthes, whose fine book on Japan, Empire of Signs, is mentioned approvingly here.

During his 15-year exile in Paris, Calvino got to know Barthes well enough. ‘In Memory of Roland Barthes’, written shortly after Barthes was killed in a car accident in Paris in 1980, Calvino reflects on the mandarin diversity of interests displayed by the French writer, from food to photography to fashion. Beneath Barthes’s decidedly academic erudition, however, was a man with a vocation for wit and satire. Barthes was in fact conspicuous among European intellectuals for his refusal to be glum, Calvino suggests.

These essays, many of them, are distinguished by a sly philosophic humour and whimsy.