Dacia Maraini, memories of a voyage

This book of memoirs came about in a very particular and spontaneous way. One day, having found them again after a long time, her father Fosco gives his daughter two notebooks full of photographs, bearing the signature and the handwriting of his wife Topazia.
These were travel notes that Dacia had forgotten about, since she was just two when her mother began compiling them. They dated back to the 1938 crossing that the Maraini family embarked upon to reach Japan, from Brindisi to Kobe, when young Fosco received a scholarship as ethnologist, after having given in to the dangerous temptation of tearing up his Fascist membership card under the troubled gaze of his father.
On board the Conte Verde, that sailed for over thirty days, the young and very blonde Dacia encountered the lands and people of Aden, Bombay, Singapore, Shanghai and of many other ports. On reaching Kobe, her very precocious Japanese adventure began.
Despite the sweet and confused memories of a young child, through the tears of which the diaries are imbued, the adult Maraini reconstructs her fond relationship with her mother, a stern and authoritarian educator, who was nevertheless moved by a love that was never as clear to the writer as it is today, apparent in every gesture that transpires from the diaries and enclosed in a time that memory has transformed into legend.
In the book these uncontrollable emotions hold sway and the memories of childhood honestly mix with those of the mature adult, dragging the reader to and fro in time in a fairy-tale divided between bittersweet persuasions, and intense like all sincere reminiscence. 
Inevitably, the profound experience of the concentration camp for anti-fascists in Nagoya, where the family was deported, is often in the foreground, together with the loss of her little sister Yuki.
Despite the reappearance of these horrors, while Maraini is surprised by a rare moment of weakness, these confessions allow themselves to be swept ahead by a delicate passion, that leads us once again to that corner of the heart where what we were merges with what we have become.
To end the book in a romantic tone, Maraini places in the appendix a few pages and photos from the original diary, as a touching and emotional tribute to her mother's love.

'La Nave Per Kobe (The boat to Kobe). Diari Giapponesi di Mia Madre"
by Dacia Maraini
260 pages
ITL 30,000
Rizzoli, 2001

Dacia Maraini, memories of a voyage

This book of memoirs came about in a very particular and spontaneous way. One day, having found them again after a long time, her father Fosco gives his daughter two notebooks full of photographs, bearing the signature and the handwriting of his wife Topazia.
These were travel notes that Dacia had forgotten about, since she was just two when her mother began compiling them. They dated back to the 1938 crossing that the Maraini family embarked upon to reach Japan, from Brindisi to Kobe, when young Fosco received a scholarship as ethnologist, after having given in to the dangerous temptation of tearing up his Fascist membership card under the troubled gaze of his father.
On board the Conte Verde, that sailed for over thirty days, the young and very blonde Dacia encountered the lands and people of Aden, Bombay, Singapore, Shanghai and of many other ports. On reaching Kobe, her very precocious Japanese adventure began.
Despite the sweet and confused memories of a young child, through the tears of which the diaries are imbued, the adult Maraini reconstructs her fond relationship with her mother, a stern and authoritarian educator, who was nevertheless moved by a love that was never as clear to the writer as it is today, apparent in every gesture that transpires from the diaries and enclosed in a time that memory has transformed into legend.
In the book these uncontrollable emotions hold sway and the memories of childhood honestly mix with those of the mature adult, dragging the reader to and fro in time in a fairy-tale divided between bittersweet persuasions, and intense like all sincere reminiscence. 
Inevitably, the profound experience of the concentration camp for anti-fascists in Nagoya, where the family was deported, is often in the foreground, together with the loss of her little sister Yuki.
Despite the reappearance of these horrors, while Maraini is surprised by a rare moment of weakness, these confessions allow themselves to be swept ahead by a delicate passion, that leads us once again to that corner of the heart where what we were merges with what we have become.
To end the book in a romantic tone, Maraini places in the appendix a few pages and photos from the original diary, as a touching and emotional tribute to her mother's love.

'La Nave Per Kobe (The boat to Kobe). Diari Giapponesi di Mia Madre"
by Dacia Maraini
260 pages
ITL 30,000
Rizzoli, 2001