The writer-photographer comes back to the Japanese archipelago, from 1964 to 1965, for a project ordered by the « Editions rencontre ». With a backpack on his back, he travels thousands of kilometers by foot on the trails, going from the island of Shikoku to Hokkaido where the Ainu live. He becomes the villagers' attraction or the fishermen’s, who have never come across a westerner. He returns to his wandering like Basho, the master of haïku, and wants to reach the « edge of the edge » or lay in a moss garden by the shadow of a temple.
Back in Geneva, he publishes his rural impressions in the « Gazette Littéraire: « Le village de la Lune (Moon’s village) ». Erudite storyteller, specialist of the popular arts, he confesses mischievously that the first thing he really fell in love in this « damned country », right after cemeteries, are the peasant’s scarecrows. He sees them like ghosts living in rice fields.
In his Japan's observations, « The other face of the moon », the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss shares the same opinions as the Swiss writer and outlines the importance of this civilization to the Western world. “To live in the present, it is not necessary to hate and destroy the past. If the Japanese civilization succeeds in keeping balance between tradition and change, if it preserves balance between the world and men, it will continue to exist.”
At the end of his life, Nicolas Bouvier remembers: « the countryside I knew doesn’t exist anymore ». He has in mind a book about lost Japan. He wishes to unveil the inland countryside of this long archipelago that he crossed so many times. Especially the Breughelian photographic portraits of their kind people that he loves so much. His happy memories. But the book will never see the light.