Calvino and Japanese Gardens: A ‘Trajectivity’ between the Human and More-than-Human

ABSTRACT Italo Calvino travelled to Japan in 1976 and, throughout his career, became increasingly acquainted with Japanese literature and Buddhist philosophy. This encounter is evidenced by the ‘Japanese shelves’ of his Roman library and by several authorial reflections, which this article scrutinises in order to highlight the material-ecocritical relevance of Calvino’s contact with Japanese nature and culture. In particular, this analysis interprets Japanese gardens as spaces where Calvino rethinks his sense of the human and more-than-human by establishing their mutually constitutive relations. Augustin Berque’s concept of ‘trajectivity’, according to which dualisms are constantly transcended in Japanese milieux, guides this exploration of how Calvino’s Japanese reflections in Collezione di sabbia articulate his dialectical challenge to logocentrism in ‘The Written World and the Unwritten World’, to gendered dichotomies in the Japanese chapter of Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, and to traditional humanism in Palomar.


Introduction
In Zen, enlightenment can be attained through silent meditation, but also through the repetition and refinement of everyday tasks, such as garden design and maintenance. Common to all Zen gardens is the incorporation of the kokoro ('spirit') of the rocks, trees, and other elements comprising the overall composition, made by humans for humans but in accordance with the different needs of the various materials. 1 An extensive understanding of the self and eventual enlightenment in the garden is thus strictly connected to an acknowledgement of the interconnection between this very self and the multiplicity of surrounding forms of existence. To what extent did these dynamics influence a prehensile intellectual like Italo Calvino, who had the opportunity to visit many Japanese gardens in the autumn of 1976? 2 How can

The 'Trajectivity' of Japanese Gardens
According to the 1977 edition of the Japan Foundation Annual Report, Calvino was in Japan between 5 and 18 November 1976. 5 In Kyoto he visited Katsura Imperial Villa, Sento Imperial Palace, temples and gardens of Ryoan-ji, Daigo-ji, Manju-in, Ginkaku-ji (also known as the Silver Pavilion), as well as the district of Arashiyama and the commercial area around Shijo-dori and Kawaramachi-dori. He also attended a meeting at the Nihon-Itaria Kyoto-Kaikan with a number of scholars of Italian literature, language, and culture. A postcard to Giorgio Manganelli speaks to Calvino's visit to Nikko, where he collected a number of yellow and red leaves which he unexpectedly extracted from his pockets during a later dinner in Tokyo. 6 Finally, the Tokyo Italian Cultural Institute organised a formal event for the author, attended among others by Yonekawa Ryofu, the first Japanese translator of Calvino's works. 7 Despite the variety of experiences characterising Calvino's Japanese travels, a specific space recurs with marked persistence in the articles first published in the Corriere della Sera a few months after Calvino's return, then re-elaborated in L'Approdo letterario, and finally collected in the section 'La forma del tempo' of Collezione di sabbia -the space of the garden. 8 Whereas Nara, one of the old capitals of the Japanese empire where deer roam freely around parks and streets, is barely mentioned by Calvino, his attention is consistently attracted by gardens: spaces where nature is tamed by human will, while exerting its control over the human. In order to understand the relevance of Japanese gardens for the development of Calvino's dialectical interaction with the surrounding environment, it is worth recalling that, conversely, the Tule tree he visited in Mexico did not seem to inspire similar cross-species dialogues: Come se da quella nuvola o montagna vegetale che si profila nel mio campo visivo venisse l'avvertimento che qui la natura, a lenti passi silenziosi, è intenta a mandare avanti un suo piano che non ha nulla a che fare con le proporzioni e dimensioni umane. 9 If Calvino interprets this Mexican natural monument as the epitome of an environment that is beyond human scale, thus independent from human rationalisation, in Japanese gardens he is exposed to a culture that is traditionally supposed to see nature 'as fundamentally indistinct from the self'. 10 As Kalland and Asquith emphasize, 'the Japanese understandings of nature are as varied as those found in the West and we should not fall into the trap of talking about Japanese (or Western) perceptions in the singular'. 11 Moreover, if Zen is usually assumed to represent the underlying factor beneath allegedly consistent Japanese modes of being, it is important to remember, following Nina Cornyetz, that the canonisation of Zen as 'the aesthetic sentiment of Japan throughout the ages is [. . .] a modern construct', connected to the environment and ethnically connoted in 5 During a research trip to Japan, in the spring of 2019, I had the opportunity to retrace some moments of Calvino's travels, thanks to the cooperation of Prof. Wada Tadahiko and Prof. Amano Kei, who met the author in Kyoto at a time when they were promising students of Italian literature, and of Prof. Marisa Di Russo, then lecturer of Italian at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. 6 This episode has been recalled by Prof response to Western imperialism. 12 As a consequence, while the present analysis takes into account a number of canonised features of Zen gardens in light of Calvino's interpretation, it does so in order to highlight how a contemporary cross-cultural discourse can problematise forms of essentialism that were taken for granted in the past, contextually acknowledging the productive harmonies these forms have been able to generate over time.
Since nature is among the elements that most fuel Orientalism and self-Orientalism (nihonjinron) with regard to Japan, it is worth considering the extent to which Calvino himself was subjected to similar Orientalist views. 13 Indeed, the two writers who most profoundly shaped Calvino's image of Japan are both representatives of self-Orientalism, each in different and ever-changing ways: namely, Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro . Not only did Calvino own many of their books, he also referred to them when retracing the inspiration for his Japanese chapter in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, named the former among his favourite authors of the twentieth century, reviewed the latter's In Praise of Shadows in La Repubblica (in an article entitled 'Un viso bianco nel buio'), and quoted the same book in the essay 'La luce negli occhi', in Collezione di sabbia, when discussing different theories of colour and vision. 14 Kawabata, in particular, touches upon some general features of the Japanese art of landscaping in his Nobel lecture, and attentively names and describes a number of popular Kyoto gardens in his Beauty and Sadness (both of which are present in Calvino's library: see footnote 14). The opening of the chapter 'A Stone Garden' from Beauty and Sadness is particularly relevant in retracing Calvino's points of reference when visiting Japan. In its English translation, Kawabata's opening reads as follows: 'Among the many famous old stone gardens in Kyoto are those of the Moss Temple, the Silver Pavilion, and Ryoanji; indeed, the latter is almost too famous, though it may be said to embody the very essence of Zen aesthetics'. 15 In this passage, as in many others in his work, Kawabata openly refers to an alleged 'essence of Zen aesthetics', which must have almost certainly reverberated in Calvino's mind during his experience in Japan. As a further proof of this proximity, Calvino refers in Collezione di sabbia to 'un tempio a Kyoto il cui giardino è interamente ricoperto di muschio' -that is the Moss Temple -and to the sand gardens of the Silver Pavilion and Ryoanji: 16 C'è nei giardini zen di Kyoto una sabbia bianca a grossi grani, quasi una ghiaia, che ha la dote di riflettere i raggi della luna. Al tempio Ryoanji, questa sabbia, rastrellata dai monaci in solchi diritti paralleli o in circoli concentrici, forma un piccolo giardino intorno a cinque gruppi irregolari di basse rocce. Al tempio del Padiglione d'Argento, invece, la sabbia è disposta in un monticello tondeggiante, isolato, a tronco di cono, e s'allarga in una distesa rastrellata a onde regolari. Calvino's cross-cultural encounter proves to be strongly influenced by literary and aesthetic idealisations of Japanese gardens. The concept of a mutual embedding of nature and culture recurs in such idealisations and is supposed to weave contemporary, Buddhist, and Confucian philosophies into a peculiar seamless fabric, which also contains elements of Shinto, characterised by a common harmonic fusion of ecocentrism and cultivation. 18 Above all, Calvino is intrigued by the interpenetration of self and environment, as canonised by Watsuji Tetsuro  in his Fūdo, a cornerstone of Japanese philosophy, translated into English as Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study. Watsuji's essay presents a highlypronounced sensitivity to atmospheric phenomena as an objective reality of Japanese culture, allegedly proven by the existence of seasonal words in Japanese, by the long socio-cultural history of rice growing, as well as by themes and structures of haiku, landscape painting, and other forms of art. To borrow Augustin Berque's words, 'Japanese culture, as a collective subject', is supposed to cause 'its own environment to live in it as subject'. 19 Japanese gardens seem to epitomise effectively this 'subjectivation of the environment' and 'environmentalisation of the subject', in the words of naturalist Imanishi Kinji . 20 Unlike the symmetry of a space like the park of Versailles, which cannot but be identified with culture, the Japanese garden, while premised upon a 'reductionism' that allows gardeners to condense broader landscapes, is intended to give the impression of being entirely natural. 21 The traditional Sakutei-ki ('Notes on garden techniques'), a short collection of precepts that, after circulating secretly for centuries, is now considered a classic of the Japanese art of gardening, expresses this apparent paradox clearly: it provides norms for a cultural construction of the garden, but also consistently invites the gardener to follow nature, to do what the stone demands. In 'I mille giardini', Calvino shows how subtle his understanding is of this feature: Le pietre che affiorano in mezzo al muschio sono piatte, staccate l'una dall'altra, disposte alla distanza giusta perché chi cammina se ne trovi sempre una sotto al piede a ogni passo; ed è proprio in quanto obbediscono alla misura dei passi, che le pietre comandano i movimenti dell'uomo in marcia, lo obbligano ad un'andatura calma e uniforme, ne guidano il cammino e le soste. 22 Calvino also tunes in to Japanese gardens' harmonisation of humanity with culture and nature when visiting the garden of Sento Imperial Palace, described in 'Il rovescio del sublime': C'è una cosa che mi sembra di cominciare a capire, qui a Kyoto: attraverso i giardini, più che attraverso i templi e i palazzi. La costruzione d'una natura padroneggiabile dalla mente perché la mente possa ricevere a sua volta ritmo e proporzione dalla natura: così potrebbe definirsi l'intento che ha portato a comporre questi giardini. 23  22 Calvino, Saggi, p. 583. 23 Calvino, Saggi, p. 574.
Gardens in Japan are designed by human beings and created using natural elements, which in turn engender a reciprocal influence on human minds. Not only are these peculiar cultural spaces embedded in a natural dimension -with the assumed nature/culture dichotomy being exposed in its fundamental fallacy -but they also represent on a microscopic scale the interaction of human and more-than-human agencies, which the human mind is able to conceive macroscopically as a consequence of its own wilful decentralisation and of a rational renunciation of dominant rationalism.
Anthropological and semiotic analyses of Japanese cultural configurations have reflected upon this mechanism extensively. Drawing on Louis-Adolphe Bertillon's definition of mésologie as the study of the reciprocal reactions between organisms and their environment, Augustin Berque has proposed the definition of milieux as spaces that are both natural and cultural, subjective and objective, collective and individual. 24 Japanese gardens, in particular, are considered to be milieux that enshrine a dynamic 'trajectivity', a continuous mediation of the borderline between subjective, assimilatory impulses, and the objective intimations emanating from the cosmos. Berque has advanced the notion of 'trajectivity', drawing upon the root trans-, which encompasses the idea of transcending dualism and making connections between the extremes of subjective and objective, thus overcoming the inherently centripetal implication of the pro-in projection. 25 The Buddhist net of Indra is an image that recurs in many analyses of 'trajectivity': 'all relational events are likened to shining jewels reflecting all other jewels in the net from the standpoint of their own perspective'. 26 In such a holographic or fractal model, the whole can only be understood through the parts that constitute it, resulting in the absence of a dominant standpoint. Indeed, as far as Zen gardens are concerned, Calvino writes: Ogni pietra corrisponde a un passo, e a ogni passo corrisponde un paesaggio studiato in tutti i dettagli, come un quadro; il giardino è stato predisposto in modo che di passo in passo lo sguardo incontri prospettive diverse, un'armonia diversa nelle distanze che separano il cespuglio, la lampada, l'acero, il ponte ricurvo, il ruscello. 27 The 'naturalness' of similar gardens is a cultural construction itself, but one 'which emphasizes the quest for unity with nature'. 28 The human being relativises its own position in the surrounding environment, seen as a fractal where tout se tient, through a deliberate refusal to consider the rational tools that brought to the conceptualisation of such reality as the only viable point of reference for navigating space.
Kawabata addresses the reciprocal interaction between nature and culture in his Nobel lecture, bringing into the discussion what he refers to as 'the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature': '[t]he Genji [the Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu] was a wide and deep source of nourishment for poetry, of course, and for the fine arts and handicrafts as well, and even for landscape gardening'. 29 In his reference to landscape gardening, Kawabata identifies a cultural model of nature -emerging from the Genji -to adhere to when operating on nature itself. Indeed, from the late twelfth century, Zen Buddhist gardens were also designed based on Chinese poetry. 30  commento ai giardini. Ma mi viene da pensarlo più per amore della simmetria nei ragionamenti che perché ne sia veramente convinto: ossia, trovo ben plausibile che si possa fare con la disposizione degli alberi l'equivalente d'una poesia, ma sospetto che per scrivere una poesia sugli alberi gli alberi veri servano poco o nulla. 31 In order to create gardens -as distinct, for example, from composing a poem -the human being has to take into account the specificities of natural materiality. Calvino's ability to recognise the autonomy of poetry, and language tout court, from the surrounding world can only emerge in retrospect. Thus, Japanese gardens stimulate awareness of the 'intersections of materiality and discursivity', which, as Serpil Oppermann notes, 'create agentic fields of mutual emergence of all life forms, and connect human knowledge practices with biosemiotic emergences'. 32

Human and More-than-Human Interrelations: From Calvino's 'Japanese Shelf' to Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and Palomar
According to Shintoism, all natural objects have spiritual qualities; similarly, in Zen everything possesses the Buddha-nature. 33 Many of the prevalent conceptions of the world in Japan descend from this idea of a spirituality and agency diffused among all beings, which inevitably influences a number of the Japanese books Calvino had the opportunity to read. This section will survey the most significant examples of the multifarious literary transpositions of such cross-species interrelations, with a specific focus on the agency that Japanese authors attribute to plants and landscapes. Ultimately, it will discuss the extent to which Calvino's mature production bears the mark of his contact with the representation of cross-species interconnections in Japanese nature and culture.
Kawabata, the champion of the alleged 'essence of the Japanese mind', often rejects any artificial separation of the animate versus the inanimate, man versus beast, man versus plant, instead seeing all things as organically related as in one gigantic flow of a river. 34 In The Old Capital, the story of twin sisters Chieko and Naeko who, separated after their birth, progressively reconstruct an affective and existential connection, Chieko 'sometimes [. . .] was moved by the "life" of the violets on the tree. Other times their "loneliness" touched her heart'. 35 In Kawabata's earlier novel Snow Country, particularly in its final pages, even the Milky Way takes on a human quality and the fire inspires inanimate objects with life. 36 Japan's second Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Oe Kenzaburo (b. 1935), firmly rejected Kawabata's aestheticisation of Japanese culture. He even responded to Kawabata's Nobel Prize speech Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself with a provocative counter-speech titled Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, when awarded the prize in 1994. However, Oe's texts also speak of visible and invisible forces that interweave across human and nonhuman bodies. In Oe's A Personal Matter, the protagonist rides a bike in a state of utter confusion occasioned by learning that his son has just been born with a defective cranial bone structure. Not only does he encounter 'thick and dark' ginkgo trees that reflect his inner state, but he even feels 'threatened by the trees', as if they were properly living and agentive beings as much as himself. 37 Forms of botanic agency recur with a particularly strong emphasis in those texts where the permeability of human and more-than-human bodies and natures is actually triggered by states of mental disturbance. Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), for instance, lets his paranoid voice confuse trees with human beings when representing his physical and psychic malady in the short story 'Cogwheels'. 38 In The Box-Man, by Abe Kobo (1924-93), the landscape communicates, plays with, and even smiles at one of the human characters 39 He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him. [. . .] He looked playfully at the street beyond the mirror. And the street returned the smile of the amorous boy. Just by looking at it, the world was happy for him. In his imagination he put his signature to a peace treaty between himself and the world. 40 In Calvino's selection of Japanese books, the dynamic interaction between the human and morethan-human is consistently bi-directional and multifaceted: what originates from the human is not only projected onto the surrounding environment, but welcomes the counter-influence that this movement of 'trajectivity' entails.
In order to convey the sense of harmony that characterises Zen gardens in Collezione di sabbia, Calvino similarly describes natural elements in human terms: According to an aesthetic logic of identification, sharing a common attribute entails an intersubjective shift, where becoming together prevails over merely being. In Japanese gardens, this shift is premised upon the permeability of the self and the environment, which Calvino does not fail to notice and creatively re-elaborate.
Calvino's most overtly Japanese narrative, 'Sul tappeto di foglie illuminato dalla luna', the eighth chapter of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, applies this reciprocity to intricate male-female relationships. This incipit, set in an undefined and yet easily recognisable Japan, deals with shady sexual affairs and psychological connections. The main character is involved in academic research in the library of Mr Okeda, whose taciturn and pensive traits seem to evoke the temperament of a Zen master. 43 Besides spending his days discussing perceptions with Mr Okeda, he eventually seduces the man's daughter and has a sexual encounter with his wife. In the idiosyncratic context of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Calvino stages Japanese literature by highlighting one of its most characteristic themes (eroticism) and narrative paces (a rather slow and analytical one), which are abundantly present in several of the novels on his 'Japanese shelf'. 44 When Mr Okeda's wife (Miyagi) and daughter (Makiko) make an appearance alongside the two men, Calvino is compelled to confront his own discomfort at writing about sex, in order to express the sexual charge that their presence entails. 45 The heavy descriptivism of the chapter turns from trees and flowers to the two women's bodies and beauty, and the story acquires the distinctive erotic mark of several Japanese books, as well as of the erotic prints Calvino describes in 'Eros e discontinuità', in the Japanese section of Collezione di sabbia. 46 Calvino's Japanese text reproduces and stylises the androcentric gaze that dominates Kawabata's and Tanizaki's novels, among others. 47 At the same time, the enunciating self, while observing and approaching the body of Mrs Miyagi, realises more than once that he is also scrutinised not only by Mr Okeda, but also by Ms Makiko: [Makiko] spalancava gli occhi seguendo i sussulti di sua madre e miei con attrazione e disgusto. Ma non era sola: al di là del corridoio, nel vano d'un'altra porta una figura d'uomo stava immobile in piedi. Non so da quanto tempo il signor Okeda era là. Guardava fissamente, non sua moglie e me, ma sua figlia che ci guardava. 48 The observer thus turns out to be observed, with the female pole triggering the same reciprocity of perspectives that in Japanese gardens arises from natural elements. If this mechanism potentially reinforces what has long been assumed to be the natural inferiority of women, something which feminist theory has questioned and deconstructed, Calvino's stylisation seems to turn this problematic dynamic upside down. 49 By describing the intricate connection of female and male gazes, he gestures towards a dialectical mode of understanding the interaction between genders, where different viewpoints (and identities) emerge in their reciprocally structuring relations.
In Palomar, Calvino's last book, a dialectical approach to the interplay of different perspectives finally involves both non-anthropocentric forms of life and non-logocentric modes of expression. In 'L'aiola di sabbia', the text where Calvino describes his visit to the Ryoanji Zen garden in Kyoto, he states that in the relation between stones and sand 'si intuisce un'armonia possibile come tra due armonie non omogenee: quella del non-umano in un equilibrio di forze che sembra non risponda a nessun disegno; quella delle strutture umane che aspira a una razionalità di composizione 43 The attention devoted to the autonomous experience of the disciple rather than to verbal instruction, which Mr Okeda pursues, is typically Zen. Suzuki states that ' geometrica o musicale, mai definitiva . . . '. 50 From this text, which is the only one among Calvino's earlier articles about Japan to filter through to Palomar, Japanese influence echoes throughout the book, and the harmony between non-homogeneous harmonies mainly informs what Roberto Marchesini would call 'animal epiphanies'. 51 In 'La pancia del geco', for instance, Palomar recurrently compares some features of the gecko to human organs (its claws are likened to actual hands, its legs to human elbows), without dispensing with parallels with other animals (the tip of the gecko's chin, 'hard and all scales', is compared to that of an alligator). Alongside this description, there is an attempt to understand a troublesome aspect of human morality: [Il geco:] una macchina elaboratissima, studiata in ogni microscopico dettaglio, tanto che viene da chiedersi se una tale perfezione non sia sprecata, viste le operazioni limitate che compie. O forse è quello il suo segreto: soddisfatto d'essere, riduce il fare al minimo? Sarà questa la sua lezione, l'opposto della morale che in gioventù il signor Palomar aveva voluto far sua: cercare sempre di fare qualcosa un po' al di là dei propri mezzi? 52 The entire book is filled with similar questions arising from the observation of the forms and behaviours of animals, connecting them to specific aspects of human interior and exterior life. 53 As Serenella Iovino states, Calvino deploys 'the heuristic usefulness of anthropomorphism to shed light on ethical and ontological similarities across the species'. 54 To quote a few other examples, a sense of climate anxiety is triggered by the passage of migratory birds in 'L'invasione degli storni': 'Sarà perché questo affollarsi del cielo ci ricorda che l'equilibrio della natura è perduto? O perché il nostro senso d'insicurezza proietta dovunque minacce di catastrofe?'. 55 In 'La corsa delle giraffe', the clumsy movements of giraffes and their inharmonious yet perfectly functioning bodies offer food for thought as far as the world's and Palomar's very movements are concerned: Il signor Palomar [. . .] si domanda il perché del suo interesse per le giraffe. Forse perché il mondo intorno a lui si muove in modo disarmonico ed egli spera sempre di scoprirvi un disegno, una costante. Forse perché lui stesso sente di procedere spinto da moti della mente non coordinati, che sembrano non aver niente a che fare con l'uno e con l'altro e che è sempre difficile far quadrare in un qualsiasi modello d'armonia interiore. 56 An albino gorilla who never abandons a car tyre recalls human investment in things, in the search for an escape from the pain of living, which triggers Palomar's 'simultaneous alienation and camaraderie' with the animal 57 Nell'enorme vuoto delle sue ore, «Copito de Nieve» non abbandona mai il copertone. Cosa sarà questo oggetto per lui? Un giocattolo? Un feticcio? Un talismano? A Palomar sembra di capire perfettamente il gorilla, il suo bisogno d'una cosa da tener stretta mentre tutto gli sfugge [. . .]. Di lì gli si può aprire uno spiraglio verso quella che per l'uomo è la ricerca d'una via d'uscita dallo sgomento di vivere: l'investire se stesso nelle cose, il riconoscersi nei segni, il trasformare il mondo in un insieme di simboli. 58 In 'L'ordine degli squamati', the iguanas in a reptile house of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris -again described by means of parallels with human and other animal bodies, and even with flora and stones -59 renovate the interrelation between a cross-species proximity and the understanding of  58 Calvino, Romanzi e racconti, II, p. 943. 59 See Ibid. p. 946: 'Le zampe anteriori a cinque dita farebbero pensare più ad artigli che a mani se non fossero impiantate su vere e proprie braccia, muscolose e ben modellate'; 'iguane [. . .] che si scambiano continuamente di posizione con agili mosse di gomiti e ginocchi'; 'la pelle d'un verde brillante, con un puntino colour rame al posto dove i pesci hanno le branchie, una barba human relativity: 'sono queste le sensazioni di chi s'affaccia fuori dall'umano? Al di là del vetro d'ogni gabbia c'è il mondo di prima dell'uomo, o di dopo, a dimostrare che il mondo dell'uomo non è eterno e non è l'unico'. 60 In all these instances, Calvino is anticipating what Rosi Braidotti has defined as 'a relational ethics that values cross-species, transversal alliances with the productive and immanent force of zoe, or nonhuman life'. 61 The harmony between non-homogeneous harmonies of the Ryoanji Zen garden constitutes the embodied validation of such relational hypotheses.
Finally, in 'Il fischio del merlo', Palomar advances a parallel between the modes of communication of blackbirds and humans: by cohabiting a shared material and discursive Umwelt, animals and human beings form what Dominique Lestel would define as 'semiotic community', where mutual understanding is made possible by the overlapping of each species' semiosphere. 62 The blackbird's whistle is said to be always almost identical to itself, thus breaking the basic rule of human language, which has to be variable in order to convey variations of thought. What changes in the communication of blackbirds is rather the duration of silence between each whistle. Therefore, either the whistle has a merely phatic function, or what truly has meaning is silence. 63 Through this parallel, Calvino envisages two key factors behind human communication: not only is it possible that human beings do not understand each other, but silence must be considered a viable, alternative form of expression, and by no means a less productive one. Again, it is by means of a perception of the dissimilar that a previously unexplored potentiality behind human language becomes intelligible, thus proving the epistemological relevance of a dialectical interaction among beings.

The Language of Gardens: between 'The Written World and the Unwritten World'
In the text 'I mille giardini', in Collezione di sabbia, Calvino connects in a decisive way Japanese attentiveness towards changing perspectives and the idiosyncratic silent language of meditation, at once subsuming the human experience in the garden under a broader conception of life, where the human does not assume a privileged position: Qui [nel giardino di villa Katsura] è il percorso la ragione essenziale del giardino, il filo del suo discorso, la frase che dà significato a ogni sua parola. Ma quali significati? [. . .] il contrasto tra la civiltà e la natura? [. . .] una lezione sul modo di muoversi nel mondo? Ogni interpretazione lascia insoddisfatti; se c'è un messaggio, è quello che si coglie nelle sensazioni e nelle cose, senza tradurle in parole. 64 Here Calvino reiterates a parallel, already suggested in 'Il rovescio del sublime' ('qui poesie e giardini si generano gli uni dagli altri a vicenda'), between human and more-than-human systems of signs: both are based on a finite number of units (phonemes on the one hand, plants or stones on the other), whose combinations constitute ever-expanding mechanisms of signification. 65 But he also advances a notion of signification as bursting forth from things, without any linguistic counterpart, which is one of the main tenets of material ecocriticism: 'All matter [. . .] is a "storied matter". It is a material "mesh" of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces'. 66 Calvino further expands on this concept in a later paper delivered at the Institute for the Humanities of New York University on 30 March 1983, under the title of 'The Written World and the Unwritten World'. Here Calvino declares that he is not totally convinced by the thesis according to which 'il mondo non esiste; esiste solo il linguaggio', nor by the opposite view claiming that 'il linguaggio comune non ha senso; il mondo è ineffabile'. 67 He denounces the impossibility of doing without language, at the same time acknowledging that there also exists in the world a 'silenzio pieno di significato', towards which language strives. 68 Hence his pragmatic view: In un certo senso, credo che sempre scriviamo di qualcosa che non sappiamo: scriviamo per rendere possibile al mondo non scritto di esprimersi attraverso di noi. Nel momento in cui la mia attenzione si sposta dall'ordine regolare delle righe scritte e segue la mobile complessità che nessuna frase può contenere o esaurire, mi sento vicino a capire che dall'altro lato delle parole c'è qualcosa che cerca d'uscire dal silenzio, di significare attraverso il linguaggio, come battendo colpi su un muro di prigione. 69 In other words, Homo legens (Calvino coins this expression in the essay) cannot but approach reality by means of language, but this operation is viable only if accompanied by an awareness of the partiality of this same language, and of the fact that the entire universe is 'perfused with signs', as Peirce remarked. 70 In the final text of Palomar, 'Come imparare a essere morto', Calvino takes this relativisation of human language to extreme and original consequences. Here Palomar dies while describing his surrounding environment and the book ends contextually. In this way, the subject achieves his own dethronement, undermines his own centrality, at the same time acknowledging the ungraspable objectivity of the world and proposing a way of representing such inaccessibility. Palomar's death is inherently close to forms of awakening characterising both Buddhism and, in the Western context, Platonism: it is prepared by a discursive path in which logos is still present, and in which a triadic, traditionally dialectical structure is deployed; but this very logic ends up being subverted from within -or perhaps sublated -when the protagonist dies and represents through embodiment his own fusion with the surrounding world in its entirety. 71 It is notable that Palomar initially tries to read the surrounding environment ('Lettura di un'onda'), whereas he ends up dying while writing it ('Come imparare a essere morto'). When reading, the subject unavoidably keeps the read object at a distance and set apart. In the act of writing, on the other hand, the border between subject and object blurs significantly, for a specific deliberation of the subject: 'scriviamo per rendere possibile al mondo non scritto di esprimersi attraverso di noi'. 72 This increased, wilful proximity -if not fusion -recalls the condition of the human being exploring a Zen garden and feeling part of an all-embracing and non-hierarchical reality. The complete removal of any strong distinction between the inside and the outside of the human, towards an integration into the surrounding whole, represents the highest intellectual and narrative consequence of Calvino's contact with the material reality of Japanese gardens, where the human being characteristically fuses with nature in its widest, cosmic extension.

Conclusion: A Post-Ideological (Japanese) Posthumanism
As Gian Carlo Ferretti has argued, Calvino's essayistic and journalistic production reveals a longstanding awareness of the role of the animal gaze in relativising the centrality of the human. 73 However, Calvino initially expressed this awareness only in journalistic form and under a specific ideological influence. 74 All the early articles where he acknowledges the ethical need to consider more-than-human points of view in order to better understand human responsibilities ('Le capre ci guardano', 'Soggezione di un cane', 'Il marxismo spiegato ai gatti', and 'Da Esopo a Disney') were published in L'Unità, the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, in 1946. In 'Il marxismo spiegato ai gatti', Calvino comments: 'Io [. . .] propendo per una concezione dell'uomo come non staccato dal resto della natura, di animale più evoluto in mezzo agli altri animali, e mi sembra che una tale concezione non abbassi l'uomo, ma gli dia una responsabilità maggiore, lo impegni a una moralità meno arbitraria, impedisca tante storture'. 75 Marxism surfaces again in the animalcentred short story 'La gallina di reparto' (1958), whose political reading has been observed by Iovino, as well as in a passage from La giornata d'uno scrutatore (1963) when the relationship between human beings and nature is discussed: 76 'Il comunista Amerigo Ormea cercò in Marx. E vide, nei Manoscritti giovanili, un passo che fa: "[. . .] La natura è il corpo inorganico dell'uomo, precisamente in quanto non è essa stessa corpo umano. Che l'uomo viva della natura vuol dire che la natura è il suo corpo, con cui deve stare in costante progresso per non morire . . . "'. 77 Later, especially after Calvino's decision to resign from the Italian Communist Party in 1957, ideology gradually attenuates in Calvino's texts, as does his early interest in possible dialectical relations between human and more-than-human beings. 78 This article has argued that it is only after Calvino's acknowledgement of the agency of the botanic other -which he experiences in Japanese gardens, reads about in a number of Japanese literary works, and discusses in his own Japanese articles -that his deconstruction of several hierarchical conceptualisations of the surrounding world emerges with renewed strength, perhaps made even more pervasive by the absence of any manifest ideological charge. 79 Indeed, Japan epitomises the tendency of Calvino's mature discourse to distance itself from overt forms of impegno, standing as a post-ideological, aesthetic function that contrasts with Calvino's own previous travelogues from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and United States of America, and with the predominance of committed reportages of Italian writers travelling around the East in the late 1950s and 1960s. 80 On the one hand, the choice to disengage from previous political frameworks leaves Calvino unequipped to recognise ideologies of different kinds in Japan, when he encounters and rather uncritically absorbs Kawabata's and Tanizaki's self-Orientalist tropes. On the other hand, the nonanthropocentric humanism that arises from this cross-cultural experience is able to unleash its radical potential precisely by virtue of its disengagement from a connoted, Western ideology like Marxism. Of course, the heuristic position according to which the human is recognised as materially permeable with other natures can only be theorised after a series of practical experiences such as the ones that Palomar undergoes, and precisely this praxis -the interrelation of theory and practice -is at the core of both Marxism and Buddhism. 81 This article has sought to demonstrate, however, that Calvino's late non-anthropocentric humanism ultimately resonates more profoundly with the forms of Buddhism he explored while wandering around Japanese gardens, which consider 75 Calvino, Saggi, pp. 2133-34. 76 Iovino, Italo Calvino's Animals, pp. 39-42. 77 Calvino, Romanzi e racconti, II, pp. 49-50 (emphases in original). 78 La giornata d'uno scrutatore itself, although published in 1963, is the result of a long gestation which started on 7 June 1953, during the election day described in the book. As Ferretti recalls, between 1964 and 1973 Calvino's intellectual participation in social, cultural and political events diminished, as though he progressively felt the need to be less involved in that time's upheavals. See Ferretti, Le capre di Bikini, p. 96. 79 Iovino states that, although Calvino's 'working-class sympathies were deep and sincere, his vision was simply larger, prone to a more "humane" and even postanthropocentric Marxism, that would embrace humans, animals, and the landscape in a single view'. See Iovino, Italo Calvino's Animals, p. 42. 80 Angelo Pellegrino, Verso Oriente: Viaggi e letteratura degli scrittori italiani nei paesi orientali   any being on the same level, contextually paving the way to the deconstruction of widespread forms of androcentrism and logocentrism.
Calvino's awareness of being part of an interconnected universe results in a renewed understanding of the non-hegemonic role of human beings, who must approach, describe, and potentially blend with all other forms of life in order to truly appreciate their own and other beings' role in the cosmic whole. This opening towards the world, to realise that the world is already open within every human and more-than-human being, is not only a tenet of Buddhist thought, but also operates effectively in the atmosphere of Calvino's last book: after all, Calvino once stated that 'il signor Palomar è quanto di più vicino si possa immaginare a un monaco, se vogliamo buddista'. 82 Calvino's Japanese experience thus bears a posthuman and ecological significance that enriches our comprehension of the author's mature production, while also highlighting the need to engage in cross-cultural dialogues in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of contemporary Italian literature and culture.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.