La Nostalgie heureuse

In this autobiographical narrative, Amélie Nothomb returns to Japan for the first time since Stupeur et tremblements, published in 1999. Through a journey oriented toward childhood and the mother tongue of the heart, the writer explores the paradoxical pain of a past happiness that will never return, a feeling she calls “nostalgie heureuse” (“happy nostalgia”), borrowing the expression from Japanese culture itself.

This is the first of Amélie Nothomb’s books to take the explicit form of an autobiographical documentary, written on the occasion of a filmed report for France 5 (Amélie Nothomb, une vie entre deux eaux), in which the text reads as an emotional wandering, somewhere between a novel of the self and a logbook revisiting her nanny Nishio-san, her first love Rinri, the neighborhoods of Tokyo and the wounds left by the 2011 tsunami.