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Empire of Clouds
A haiku-novel about reading the world and about transience of life
The twilight of the samurai culture and the birth of contemporary Japan. Life, science and war – painted with a light brush of words – are presented in a narrative following the structure and the spirit of haiku.
Towards the end of the 19th century Emperor Mutsuhito is visited by an emissary of the Country That Isn’t to forge an alliance based on the discovery of a metal lighter than air. In Hokkaidō shipyards a gossamer fleet of the Imperial Sky Navy is being built. And all of it is described in secret calligraphy by Kiyoko, a daughter of a Samurai who had rebelled against the rules of reason and democracy.
Empire of Clouds is a novel about the relationship of language and writing with reality, about an illusion of “I” of a Western man, about traversing of meanings between minds and cultures, and about the art of pure experience.
Place two experiences one next to the other, and you create a meaning which did not exist in each of those experiences on their own.
What is much more important than the fictional elements in Dukaj's work is what transcends fiction and what fiction is a pretext for. Reflections on the role of the individual in history and their influence on the course of events; responsibility for decisions made; the relationship between technology and semantics are issues also addressed in other, earlier stories.
Dr Adam Mazurkiewicz, laudation on the occasion of awarding the author the J. Żuławski Prize for the novel Empire of Clouds (Imperium chmur)
