Igort’s Japanese Notebooks: Fragments of the Unsaid

This paper aims to suggest a reading of Igort’s graphic novel Japanese Notebooks, a two-part travel journal (Un viaggio nell’impero dei segni / A Journey to the Empire of Signs, 2015 and Il vagabondo dei manga / The Wanderer of Manga, 2017), which illustrates the author’s lifelong experience across Japan. Drawing on the work of the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien (Traité de l’efficacité, 1996; Les Transformations silencieuses, 2009) as well as Roland Barthes’ thought as expressed in L’Empire des signes (1970), the article examines Italian-Japanese theoretical exchanges converging in this graphic novel. Igort’s operation, like the ones by Barthes and Jullien, through a deep mimesis with the debated matter, manages, with in absentia contrasts, to show Western thought from a different “sideways” perspective, highlighting – passing elsewhere – even the most obscure and contradictory aspects of it.