Florent Chavout, cartoonist in love with Japan

Sometimes, there are books that transport you to a country and make you feel its pulse, the smells and the atmosphere , without you ever having set foot there. And even better, once you finally put your suitcases there, you have deep down the impression of having already been there , thanks to the pages devoured a few months earlier. Tokyo Sanpo and Manabé Shima are among them.

Florent Chavout , with his mischievous line and his lively pen , manages to sketch Japan better than anyone, bringing the reader with him, thanks to works that are closer to a travel diary than to a comic strip in the classic sense. of the term. Between its covers, no story with a guiding thread, except to try to unravel the mysteries of the archipelago and to crunch its daily life . The Japanese capital and then a little-known little island have been scrutinized.

TOKYO SANPO, TOKYO ADVENTURE

While some might call Tokyo Sanpo an illustrated guide to the Japanese capital , the author himself describes it more as an “adventure book in the heart of Tokyo's neighborhoods” . Throughout the pages, we enter the districts of Ueno , Shibuya or even Shinjuku . We venture with Florent Chavezt like little researchers in supermarkets , marveling at the gigantic size of a Japanese melon, or the colorful labels with neat calligraphy. We also follow him in his apartment where a good part of the furniture or the utensils composing it are detailed there. An adventure book that makes you want to follow in the author's footsteps and reopen it, once you get home, to see if you've noticed the same things, and fall back with pleasure on what makes the salt of a trip to Japan: the love of details.

To go further: Tokyo, the Ideal Guide

MANABÉ SHIMA, AN ISLAND WITH A MICROSCOPE

Manabé Shima is, for its part, a work on the small eponymous island , located in the inland sea and which offered, in the eyes of the author, the double advantage of not being talked about and that one practices there the fishing . Along the pages, the reader discovers there in a kind of living herbarium, all the humans, but also the animals which will cross the path of Florent Chavez . There are also sketches of the houses on the island, where many details of their interiors are depicted. Small non-negligible bonus, the book contains a detachable map that you can keep close to you throughout the reading, in order to be able to situate the action, and once the book is finished, hang it on the wall, like a souvenir from a trip .