Bidspirit auction | MORAES (Wenceslau de). CARTAS DO

MORAES (Wenceslau de). CARTAS DO JAPÃO: 2.ª série. Lisboa. s.d. - MORAES (Wenceslau de) CARTAS DO JAPÃO: 2.ª série . Lisboa: Portugal Brasil Sociedade Editora, s.d. 3 v.: il.; 190 mm. Second series of Letters from Japan , bringing together the correspondence that Wenceslau de Moraes sent between 1907 and 1913 to the pages of O Comércio do Porto . Wenceslau José de Sousa de Moraes (Lisbon, 1854 – Tokushima, 1929) was an officer in the Portuguese Navy, Portuguese consul in Kobe and Osaka between 1899 and 1913, and the most profound interpreter of the Japanese soul and culture in the Portuguese language. After years in Macau and repeated visits to Japan, he settled permanently in Kobe, where he converted to Buddhism and entered into a common-law marriage with the former geisha Fukumoto Yoné (Ó-Yoné), with whom he lived for thirteen years. Ó-Yoné's death in 1912 marked the beginning of his definitive withdrawal from the world. In 1913 he resigned from his consular post and the Navy, and retired to Tokushima, Ó-Yoné's birthplace, where he lived with Ko-Haru, the deceased's niece, who also died a few years later. Immersed in an increasingly complete solitude, becoming more and more Japanese in his way of life, Moraes maintained contact with Portugal solely through writing, visiting the graves of the two women daily and producing some of his most profound works until the very end. The Letters from Japan, written from 1902 to 1913, in a total of six volumes, constitute the core of his work of popularization: watercolors of the Japanese landscape, portraits of customs and festivities, explorations of Japanese psychology, all in an elegant prose with an unmistakable color that earned him comparison with Lafcadio Hearn, his American contemporary who also settled in Japan. The Japanese recognized in him the foreigner who most deeply penetrated the knowledge of their soul: they erected two monuments to him, in Tokushima and Kobe, and a museum. Wanted. ⚑ Auto-translated via Google Translate