The first contemporary fiction novel debuts in the catalog of the Venetian publishing house Wetlands: it’s called Venice, wildflowers and is the work of the poet, writer and translator Ryōko Sekiguchi, one of the most appreciated Japanese authors, already known in Italy for Nagori (Einaudi, 2022). It will be released in bookstores on Friday 10 April.
Venice, wildflowers
A work born “in the field”, written by Sekiguchi during a series of artistic residencies in the city and the result of a two-year collaboration with the lagoon publisher. Recently published in France, where the writer lives, it now arrives in Italian bookstores in the translation from French by Giampiero Massano.
The novel takes hold from the discovery of Ilaria’s herbarium, a nineteenth-century Venetian botanist, and develops as a journey through the hidden scents and flavors of the lagoon city. Through archive materials, botanical fragments, poetic visions and epistolary exchanges, the author constructs a narrative that intertwines past and future, bringing to light a secret Venice, crossed by a surprising vegetal presence.
What emerges, explains the publisher, is “a sensorial and imaginative topography, in which the lives of 19th century women intertwine with the nature of the places, providing an unprecedented portrait of the city, suspended between reality and imagination”.
The author
Ryōko Sekiguchi was born in Tokyo in 1970 and has lived in Paris for more than twenty years. After graduating, he studied art history at the Sorbonne and earned a doctorate in comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Tokyo. Poet, writer, translator and food critic, she promotes numerous initiatives on the relationship between literature and cuisine. He publishes his books in both French and Japanese and works for institutions such as the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales.
The cover
