Genevan Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998) is a major writer of the travel writing genre. Throughout his journey in Asia with Thierry Vernet, in 1953-1954, he does not take much pictures and rather interests himself in sound recording and telling what he sees and feels in his notebooks. This initiatic journey will be published in L’Usage du monde.
Alone, after crossing India, he sinks in Ceylon. “A knowledge by the pits”, revealed in Le Poisson-Scorpion.
“A journey is like a shipwreck, and those whose boat did not sink won’t know anything of the sea.”
He gets to Japan in 1955. Photography becomes for him a new and complementary way to earn his living. He sells his pictures to Japanese newspapers and stays a year on the archipelago.
He comes back to Tokyo seven years later to put together a book. This project encourages him to introduce himself in usually closed spaces: the avant garde of the butō theater or an animistic Ainu tribe. His attention towards others is shown by numerous portraits and his singular view composes symbolic images.
The praise of slowness is this traveller’s motive, following the example of the time allocated to his major works: nine years for L’Usage du monde, twenty-six for Le Poisson-scorpion and even more to weave Le dehors et le dedans. His observant writing and his curious knowledge are intertwined with very subtle philosophical touches, though never pretentious or moralizing. “Montaigne’s little cousin’’ as his first editor said about him.
In an era where travelling has finally entered the mundialization race of which the tourist has become the gravitation center, Nicolas Bouvier tells us a totally different assessment: “A journey does not need patterns. It does not take too long before proving its self-sufficiency. We think we are going to travel but it really is the journey which threads and unthreads us.”