Vadim Smolensky is an unexpected figure: a brilliant translator from Japanese, a talented programmer, a linguist who roams the world and never stays anywhere for long… His prose looks just as unexpected.
Vadim Smolensky is an unexpected figure: a brilliant translator from Japanese, a talented programmer, a linguist who roams the world and never stays anywhere for long… His prose looks just as unexpected. “Notes of a Gaijin” is a poetic and very accurate story about Japan, a country in which the author lived for almost ten years. However, neither regional excursions, nor on-duty enthusiasm about the «incomprehensibility of the East» can be found in his book. Japan for Smolensky is no less transparent and logical than Russia — another thing is that the principles of logic operating here are sometimes directly opposite to those that guide us. Having taken them for granted, the author, and with it the readers, gain the opportunity to look at their country and at themselves with a detached look, cleared of stereotypes. And to discover that it is not Japan that is exotic at all — any person is exotic and unknowable to the end, regardless of on which continent he had to be born and grow up.
Amphora, 464 p.