Gabriel García Márquez vehemently insisted how important friends were in his life, so much so that in the prologue to Twelve Pilgrim Tales he recounts a dream in which he sees his friends gathered at his own funeral and concludes of death that “to die is to never be with friends again.” From Osaka to Aracataca is evidence of this.
And I believe that this is how he treated each of the writers he crossed paths with, not only physically, but literarily, as his friends!
He admitted, years ago, that he did not know much about Japanese literature and, as a good writer, he set himself the task of getting to know it and looking for friends along those roads. As a consequence, García Márquez approaches Japanese literature in two ways:
In the form of a short story (which, in my opinion, is what suits him best).
In the form of a novel, this time in a Colombian context, from Barranquilla.
After 67 years of rewarding genius in literature, in 1968 a Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata won for the first time the Nobel Prize for literature with the work The Beautiful and the Sad, this does not mean that they had not deserved it before, I think that our western gaze had not allowed us to enjoy its charm.
García Márquez translated his magic for us, however, he did not want to do it with the book that deserved the prize, but with The House of the Sleeping Beauties, he even said that if there was a book he could have written about him, it would be that one.
Kawabata, in this book, transports us to a world unknown and perhaps unthinkable for many, full of eroticism, beauty, innuendo, sensuality, but not in the way we know it, but in an earthy, stark, perhaps somehow terrible way.
It tells the story of Eguchi, an old man who decides to visit a house where men pay to sleep next to the most beautiful young naked women, without being able to touch them, while they go into a deep sleep. The satisfaction consisted in being able to dream beside them, remembering the women of his youth.
Garcia Marquez was captivated by this fantastic story and builds his version in the story “EL AVIÓN DE LA BELLA DURMIENTE” which is the third story of the book Doce Cuentos Peregrinos (Twelve Pilgrim Stories). Narrated here by the Argentine journalist Alejandro Apo.
For Gabo, it was not enough to evoke Kawabata in his short story, and in 2004 he materialized his homage in the book Memoria de mis putas tristes, which is nothing more than the Nobel Prize winner’s version of the Japanese writer’s book, in fact, it includes in its opening page a fragment taken from Kawabata’s book
He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman at the inn warned the elder Eguchi. He was not to put his finger in the sleeping woman’s mouth or try anything like that.
Gabo certainly imprints his personal and very Latin American style on the novel.
It also tells of an old man who visits a brothel, he and the teenage prostitute end up deeply in love, while in Kawabata’s story, the old men are sordid and perverse, García Márquez’s old man from Barranquilla manages to blossom love in his life that is about to end.
An undoubtedly romantic and adolescent story, a story brought from Osaka to Aracataca.
