Nicolas Bouvier observes with attention every detail inhabiting the “city’s hazard”. He wears out his soles, sometimes walking twenty kilometers. He gets lost, visits an exhibition of photographs, looks at a fire engine creating a whirl of dead leaves, wanders in a brothel, comes back to a little bar where the face of the boss’s daughter is less beautiful than in his dreams. At night, he marvels at the sight of Kyoto’s lanterns whose lights only reach the people and their shadows. In the night-train between Tokyo and Sendai, being the only one remaining awake, he takes pictures of sleepers, imagining their dreams.
The writer of senses sometimes describes solitude. « I think about my improperly threaded life when I lack heart », but he also says « the delicious air » of « the chaotic labyrinth» of Tokyo : « These streets without map, these warehouses, these libraries full of people, uneven houses beating against a stagnating canal, against a bloc of ultramodern buildings, against the ballast a railway… after eight hours of walk, I still wondered if it made a beautiful city, or even a city at least. I stopped asking myself questions. »
Even the curious writer succeeds in being admitted in the intimacy of a sumo stable. He describes vetoes and rituals in this « peaceful and, without hatred against the opponent, » joust. A shared opinion with Roland Barthes who publishes in 1970 in the « Empire des signes » five pictures of the Genevan photographers, the subject of one being a sumotori. In Tokyo, the semiologist observes a unique world paradox: the city possesses a center, but it is empty, forbidden, « occupied by an emperor we never see ». Is this « Le dehors et le dedans » by Nicolas Bouvier? He ends his story in Japan by speaking to his wife Eliane: « I will soon be bored of this city because it is unique and I have lived there ».