The money of Japanese women in the novel by Hika Harada- Corriere.it

About women and money. Nothing more prosaic. And already seen. Stories of very brilliant underprivileged who make their fortune thanks to wealthy husbands and lovers we have read hundreds of them. And just as many are the extraordinary literary heroines who owe everything to brains and work. But in such a scenario – female adventurers and brilliant entrepreneurs – the novel by the Japanese Hika Harada, Like petals in the wind (Garzanti), touch other strings. those ofeconomic independence which for a normal woman means the possibility of choosing her own path, of deciding for herself, of emancipating herself from the family. Especially by men.

A booklet in which to write down expenses, manuals and courses for saving money: making ends meet every day, setting aside a nest egg for emergencies, a Japanese dot for generations (after all, the kakebo, the book of accounts, now famous also in Italy). And indeed this is what the debut bestseller that sold eight hundred thousand copies in its homeland speaks of: di a female family saga in which all the protagonists, somehow and in different seasons of existence, come across a truth as simple as it is revolutionary: the future and, therefore, freedom, are conquered with economic independence.

New Year’s. The sisters Miho and Maho, still children, receive from their grandmother Kotoko (difficult to disentangle the names of the main figures) an allowance accompanied by these words: The way you spend your money can decide your life. And in fact the differences between the two little ones are immediately noticeable: one (the younger, Miho) uses that money to buy a book, the other buys a purse to keep an initial treasure. Twenty years have passed, Miho – who in the meantime hasn’t put anything aside – is faced with a choice: to stop working and get married, as her boyfriend would like, or to scrape together the necessary sum to live in a house with a garden and get a dog? Maho, on the other hand, has a husband and a daughter, she has said goodbye to her desk but hasn’t stopped filling in her savings notebook (it Scheme for home accountinganother milestone of the Japanese housewife, first edition in 1904) and to scrape together, sacrifice after sacrifice, a sum that would guarantee an independent future for her little girl. They are minimal stories, told with the typical levity of Japanese authors, but which strongly affect the armor of a blocked society, founded on nineteenth-century stereotypes: the mother of the family never complained; the wife completely dependent on her husband and he who doesn’t even look up from his plate during dinner; the young career as long as the patriarchs of the house allow it; the middle-aged spinster who is no longer needed at work is the first to be fired.

Yet none of the normal girls told by Hika Harada-there are no saints, nor revolutionaries, nor courageous visionaries in this book-has given up on freeing themselves from the constraints of the 21st century. Neither grandmother Kotoko, who at the age of seventy-three shows up willingly at the employment office. Or Tomoko, the mother of the two sisters and daughter-in-law of the old woman, who reflects with a friend on the economic aspects of divorce at a late age, who has just had stage one cancer surgery and points out to her husband: Did you hear what he has said the doctor? He asked me to refrain from doing standing work for about a month. And she thinks: But why is this man, who doesn’t even know how to cook, silently eat what I have prepared for him, without a minimum of gratitude?.

The male figures in the novel are less interesting (indeed, they don’t really look good). The father of the girls, exactly as we can imagine a man of another era rather than of another generation (even if in the end he redeems himself); Yasuo, the grandmother’s neighbor, who doesn’t want ties, who has no economic stability, who fears that he has impregnated a young woman who is not really her partner; Daiki, Miho’s first boyfriend, who thinks: Talking bad about a woman who is not a key figure for the success of a company does not hurt or embarrass anyone; and Miho’s second boyfriend, with his very heavy university debts, isn’t much either.

A little claustrophobic – the savings tips and the comparisons between smartphone models and more or less convenient telephone subscriptions cause a certain anxiety -, at the end the story surprises: what at first glance might seem like a cold novel, focused exclusively on the women’s well-being at all costs, even giving up head shots and passions in the name of economic tranquility, she finds a simple balance (never goofy, never irritating) between instances of freedom and feelingsbetween the rigidities typical of Japanese society and the love that is cultivated in a real family and which becomes the driving force for all its components.

Miho concludes her growth journey with an awareness: Money, or savings, are made to make people happy. But if they become a purpose it’s not good. A possible future exists. And perhaps from these words we understand the title of the book: we are like petals abandoned in the wind, but we can always cling to a branch and save ourselves.

The Japanese maniacs and the volume of Imai Messina on newsstands with the Corriere

Growing up. In the Sixties (all ten), 25 titles by Japanese authors were released in Italy. Three decades later, in the Nineties (the first of Murakamimania, but Banana Yoshimoto was also driving the market) there were already 87. The count went up, more and more, inexorably, first writers and then women writers, so much so that among 2020 and 2022 120 novels and essays were published made in japan. And this 2023 promises to be – the publishers say – very promising.

Japan dreamed. Technological and very traditional East; cherry blossoms and murders; delicate love stories and the abyss of hikikomori, the guys who retire from life. Whatever it is, with its contradictions, the mix between futuristic and samurai, between comforting coffees and true masters, the formula works: Japan wins in fiction. Beyond Like petals in the windonly in January they came out
novels like
Murder at Mizumoto Park

(translation by Cristina Ingiardi, Piemme, Reading #580 took care of it) by Tetsuya Honda, and
night lovers
(translation by Gianluca Coci, and/or) by Mieko Kawakami. And then there are the reissues of great authors, such as
The sun goes out
by Dazai Osamu

(edited by Alessandro Passarella, Atmosphere) or, for the first time in Italy,
At the tip of the pen
by Yukio Mishima (translation by Alessandro Clementi degli Albizzi, Feltrinelli; Marco Del Corona took care of it in la Lettura #583 on newsstands).

Even Corriere della Sera has always been attentive to Japanese book production. He did so in 2021 with the series The great Japanese literature in 25 volumes, followed in 2022 by the 28 essays of Japan. History, culture, lifestyle and, just finished, from the Japan series. Crimes and mysteries, the latter available for purchase on

store.corriere.it. instead at the newsstand with the newspaper
Tokyo all year round
(illustrated by Igort) by Laura Imai Messina, the Italian in love with Japan.