“Sonno Giapponese” is Gabriele Galloni’s only collection of short stories. It consists of forty-one very brief writings, modeled after Borges’s “Fictions,” where the author travels through other worlds, from the lunar surface to the silver fields of Saturn, passing through an imaginary Mexico to the Lazio coast. Some are psychoanalytic and mythological in nature, like the story that illustrates the misadventures of two boys suffering from progeria. It’s a love story where, however, he is convinced that she is a hallucination produced by his solitude, and great will be his disappointment in recognizing her as real as himself.
The boy, who in another life had been a verse of the poet Lafourgue and in another Alyona Ivanovna from Crime and Punishment, is convinced that the girl is a hallucination produced by his condition of exile, by solitude.
The stories, all without titles, could be considered visions, lyrical prose, fragments of elsewhere, of a distant place that frightens most, yet Gabriele seems irremediably attracted to it.
The title “Sonno Giapponese” is inspired by one of the stories: the tale of a man who offers his guests different varieties of sleep; among them, indeed, the Japanese sleep, snobbish and austere. Life, Death, dream, unconscious, horror, love, incest, Angels, God, and so much more. A journey into places where fantasy and reality become one, hallucinated but, paradoxically, very calm, with the lucid awareness of the madness of separating truth from the universes of imagination and thought. Death is always present in Gabriele Galloni’s texts, a taboo theme he had already faced through the poetry collection “In what light they will fall”.
In these stories, more than the event of dying, there are glimpses of places that might represent an afterlife; death itself is an irrelevant event, it is what precedes or follows it the greatest human adventure. Galloni narrates the boundary, the threshold without fear or reverence, but with a strong attraction; he brings the reader along, who, when starting to read the stories, can definitely be shocked. However, as the reading continues, this attraction towards something feared to be spoken about transfers from the writer to the reader, thus experiencing firsthand the places of “Sonno Giapponese”.
