Isekai no Sho: Genso Ryokoku Chishi Shusei (The Book of Legendary Lands)

This book is the Japanese translation of Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari (Bompiani, 2013), an anthology written and edited by the famous Italian writer Umberto Eco (who died in 2016) in his final years. The original Italian title of the book literally translates to History of Legendary Lands and Places, and the most important word here is “legendary” (or “legend”). As discussed in detail in the Introduction, “legend” here has a decisively distinctive element that cannot be found in fiction, including novels and films. It consists in a serious belief in the “reality” of what is referred to as “legendary.” There is an enormous difference — though both are pure products of imagination — between what is enjoyed and consumed as fiction by those who know it is fiction and what has been engraved in the hearts of many people, stimulated their spirit of adventure, caused their various actions, and formed indispensable elements of our real world history through these effects. “Legendary lands” are the imaginary lands that are important to the history of humanity.
 
The Antipodes inhabited by people with their feet above their heads, the whereabouts of the Ten Lost Tribes, the Queen of Sheba and the land of the Magi, the islands where Ulysses had his adventures, the Wonders of the Orient such as the Kingdom of Prester John and the Island of Taprobane, the Earthly Paradise somewhere in this world, the lost sunken continents (Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu), Ultima Thule in the farthest north and its major influence on Nazi Aryanism, the Holy Grail at the center of the Legends of King Arthur, the Alamut fortress as the home base of the Assassins led by the “Old Man of the Mountain,” Terra Australis which prompted many people to embark on maritime explorations, and the subterranean world called Agartha — these are only some of the legends treated in this book. Eco has vividly presented these and other legends with more than 300 color images, vast amount of text quotations from Homer to twentieth-century occult documents, and his own commentaries.
 
If you are already familiar with Eco’s literary works, the following would be useful. The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery, and Numero Zero — each of these novels is a fictional work filled with the historical materials treated in this book. This fact poses again the question about the distinction between legend and fiction in another way. Chapter 15 of the book titled “Fictional Places and Their Truth” touched on this topic separately; furthermore, you can understand Eco’s basic attitude on this subject in his criticism of another world-famous, popular novelist — Dan Brown — in Chapter 14, titled “The Invention of Rennes-le-Château.” In any case, for all these novels written with “sampling” techniques, this book is nothing other than a source book containing the author’s own commentary. Even if you are an experienced Eco reader, this book will provide an enjoyable reading experience. Finally, Eco had written and edited three more volumes — On Beauty, On Ugliness, The Infinity of Lists — before the publication of this book and they are similar to it in terms of the intention of the author and the book composition. Thus, reading these volumes along with this book can certainly give you a multidimensional reading experience.
 

(Written by Takeshi Mitani, Associate Professor, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies / 2018)