Rakushisha: heterotopias, non-places and silence

Abstract

"This story begins at ground level, by footsteps." These words introduce "The speech of lost steps", a chapter of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. Certeau understands the act of walking as an enunciative process. He says: "There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of shaping phrases is equivalent to the art of shaping pathways "(DE CERTEAU, 2000, 179). However, according to him, we can define the practice of space in such an onirical conception like "Walking is lacking of space. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of your own "(DE CERTEAU, 2000, 183). "If you should walk, just put one foot after the other. One foot after the other "(LISBOA, 2007, p. 9). With this sentence, Brazilian writer Adriana Lisboa begins her novel Rakushisha. Celina, her main character, is a woman that walks and writes. The narrative structure of this novel is developed in three overlapping actions: from Rio de Janeiro to Japan, Celina moves in a way that we could think at Marc Augé’s concept of non-places of supermodernity; however, to remain anonymous and be able to become similar, Celina needs to recover her identity by "signing a contract" with other users of a non-place; for doing so, the lecture of the Daily Saga, written by the seventeenth century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, will help her to look at the mirror and recognize herself as 'one'. A mirror as the "mixed and median experience ”, according to Michel Foucault, between utopia (ideal model) and heterotopia (real model).