Rose cherry trees, silent wooden temples, buzzing LED billboards. Japanese clichés are many and they have increased since the Land of the Rising Sun opened up to the Western world. In the quiet garden of Baratta library, Benedetta Fallucchi, journalist, gives an historic overview of European perceptions of the Japanese culture. Taking five books as examples, she talks through the combination of charm and stereotypes used to depict this complex, oriental country.

Everyone one of us has our own Japan, Fallucchi says. We take it from a manga comic book, a movie, a Murakami novel, a sushi restaurant. The Irish writer Lacfadio Hern also had his own Japan, the one he writes about in the book My First Day in Japan. This travel diary talks about Hern’s first day in the country, after landing at the port of Yokohama at the end of the 19th century. It was a completely different Japan from the one we now know, notes Fallucchi. Hern was amazed by the care with which the Japanese people related to nature. Ercole Patti (The Girls of Tokyo) instead, focused on the Japanese perception of the house, seen not as a place to settle permanently like in Europe, but as a provisional refuge. Goffredo Parise, who wrote the book L'Eleganza è frigida/Beauty is Frigid in the 1980's, argued that everything in Japan is aesthetic: the nature, the cities, the temple, the uniforms. A distorted lens, says Fallucchi, that reveals just pieces of the puzzle that is The Land of the Rising Sun.

Amélie Nothomb’s novel Fear and Trembling revolves around the work environment of Japanese companies. It tells the story of Amélie, a woman that returns to Japan, her country of origin, to work for a big multinational. Fallucchi describes the book as a series of tragicomic stories that engage the protagonist with the pyramidal structure of power and women’s repression inside Japanese companies. Lastly, Fallucchi presents Quaderni Giapponesi (Japanese Notebooks) by the Italian cartoonist Igort, a three-volume graphic novel collection of the author’s personal anecdotes taken from his trips to Japan.