NAOKO ABE Libri

On the 14th of August 1941, a Polish monk named Maximilian Maria Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz. Kolbe's life had been remarkable. Fiercely intelligent and driven, he founded a movement of Catholicism and spent several years in Nagasaki, ministering to the 'hidden Christians' who had emerged after centuries of oppression. A Polish nationalist as well as a monk, he gave sanctuary to fleeing refugees and ran Poland's largest publishing operation, drawing the wrath of the Nazis. His death was no less remarkable: he volunteered to die, saving the life of a fellow prisoner. It was an act that profoundly transformed the lives of two Japanese men. Tomei Ozaki was just seventeen when the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, destroying his home and his family. Masatoshi Asari worked on a farm in Hokkaido during the war and was haunted by the inhumane treatment of prisoners in a nearby camp.

This translation simultaneously published as The sakura obsession: the incredible story of the plant hunter who saved Japan's cherry blossoms in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

"Collingwood 'Cherry' Ingram first fell in love with the sakura, or cherry tree, when he visited Japan on his honeymoon in 1907. So taken with the plant, he brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England, where he created a garden of cherry varieties. In 1926, he learned that the Great White Cherry had become extinct in Japan. Six years later, he buried a living cutting from his own collection in a potato and repatriated it via the Trans-Siberian Express. In the years that followed, Ingram sent more than 100 varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe, from Auckland to Washington. As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, the narrative follows the flower from its adoption as a national symbol in 794, through its use as an emblem of imperialism in the 1930s, to the present-day worldwide obsession with forecasting the exact moment of the trees' flowering"--]cPublisher's description.

Die berührende Biographie des Engländers Collingwood »Cherry« Ingram, der Japans Kirschblüte rettete Ihr Blick auf die Kirschblüte, im Japanischen »sakura«, wird nach der Lektüre ein anderer sein: Collingwood Ingram (1880-1981), ein junger Botaniker, reist 1902 von Großbritannien nach Japan, um dort neben Tokyo auch Berge und Wälder, geheime Palastgärten und Klöster zu erkunden. Vor allem aber ist er auf der Suche nach wilden Kirschbäumen, denen seine ganze Leidenschaft gehört. In der überhasteten Modernisierung Japans im 20. Jahrhundert werden diese jedoch rücksichtslos abgeholzt. Ingram gelingt es, eine einzigartige Sammlung von Japans wertvollstem Kulturgut zusammenzutragen und nach England zu schmuggeln, um die Kirschblüten dort in einem bezaubernden Garten in Sicherheit zu bringen. Er schwört, diese Bäume einst ihrer Heimat zurückzugeben – ein Unterfangen, das ihn bis an das Ende seines hundertjährigen Lebens umtreibt. In »Hanami« verbindet Naoko Abe kunstvoll die Biographie des englischen Exzentrikers mit der Geschichte Japans und der kulturellen Bedeutung der Kirschblüte, die sich in Kirschblütenfesten auf der ganzen Welt spiegelt. Ein faszinierendes Abenteuer der Reiseliteratur und ein spannendes Stück Zeitgeschichte für alle Fans des Naturewriting!