En el Japón sagrado : Un año de viaje entre templos, santuarios, mitos, espíritus y otras criaturas mágicas

The author of this book, a young woman in her thirties, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Italian father, arrives in Kyoto heartbroken after an unexpected breakup with the person she thought she would spend the rest of her life with. Now she has only one certainty: she needs to heal this wound, and to do so, she must rebuild herself by reconnecting with her roots. In other words, she needs to be reborn, but this time from the spirit. She then travels to Japan for the first time to undertake a kind of external and internal pilgrimage through beautiful shrines, hidden temples, and sacred landscapes to learn about and incorporate the traditions of her ancestors into her own life. Thus, for a whole year, she journeys through the Land of the Rising Sun, experiencing its four seasons: the scorching summer of Kyoto, the mysterious autumn of Tokyo, the snowy winters of Hokkaido, and the blossoming spring of Osaka. Each chapter of this unclassifiable travelogue and memoir combines intimate reflections, everyday scenes, and stories about yokai, kami, various deities, and the ancient rituals of his people: the Obon dances for the dead, the omikuji that predict the future, the omamori amulets, the thousand paper cranes of the senbazuru, the magical kitsune foxes, the playful tanuki, the icy yuki onna, or the kodamas that whisper in the thicket.