Portraying Japan

This chapter discusses Ferrier’s writings on Japan, initially placing him in the lineage of Japonisme but then showing how he goes beyond and above it, and how creates a new classification into which he himself fits perfectly, that of the ‘Coral Writers’. It then discusses all of Ferrier’s fictional works set in Japan: Kizu, Tokyo : Petits Portraits de l’aube and Sympathie pour le fantôme, as well as his critical essays on Franco-Japanese creative and cultural relations, and shows how Ferrier’s knowledge and experience of Japan – of modern, hybrid Japan as well as the more traditional Japan – have had a profound effect both on his portraits of the country, and on his own aesthetics and writing style. The chapter also analyses Ferrier’s website, Tokyo-Time-Table, which is not just an ‘author’s website’ but a site dedicated to disseminating knowledge about Japanese culture to a Francophone Internet audience, a kind of mapping out of his relationship with Japan in the continually evolving space of the Internet.