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This weekend all around Tokyo there are cultural festivities to celebrate Culture Day.
I was extremely happy when I heard that this weekend the European Literature Festival will also take place and I booked (free!) tickets for three full days of talks and events around European culture and literature.
The first day of the festival was held in the Instituto Cervantes in Tokyo, what a place! It has an amazing library, a well furnished book store and an amazing cafeteria.
I attended three talks on the first day of the festival and they were all very informative and it was a great opportunity to listen to talks by various European authors.
The first event I attended was Jonas Jonasson's talk "Out of Europe, in Europe." It discussed Jonasson's work, from The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2007) and The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (2013). I have read the latter in Hungarian translation, beautifully translated by Kúnos László, and the title in Hungarian is Az analfabéta, aki tudott számolni (The analphabet who could read) which is also closer to the original Swedish title.
Jonasson discussed how his characters in his books navigate through turbulent times and how accidental encounters shape their journey. He cites as a main inspiration for his novels works such as The Good Soldier Švejk (1921) by Jaroslav Hašek and Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes. For Jonasson, both Švejk and Don Quixote represent characters where one cannot be sure if these characters are the "stupidest charcaters or the ones who understood things better than anybody else."
SMLXL
The second talk I attended was by two comic-book writers, Martin Dürr, author of Zenobia which tells the story of the Syrian war to children and Barbara Stok's Vincent which follows Vincent Van Gogh's last years. Both talks were really interesting because they shed light on how the visual aspect of the story - colours, frame, details in the picture - contribute to the overall message of the stories and allow the authors to be expressive through these visual narrative elements.
The third event I attended was a panel discussion organised by EUNIC Japan. The speakers were: Thomas Brussig (Germany), Pavel Bricz (Czechia), Helena Janeczek (Italy), Victor Hugo Mãe (Portugal) and Johan Lauwereyns (Belgium).
It was a truly European panel discussion and the theme was "Breaking Walls, Building Bridges." The authors discussed how their works create bridges between people through the stories and languages used in their works.
All in all, the first day of the European Literature Festival was an amazing opportunity to discuss European identity and literature. It was also great to see that many Japanese people were interested in the talks as they were nearly all fully booked out!
I also was very lucky to be able to attend a Dia de Muertos celebration!