Two royal children on the way to paradise. The new novel by Adolf Muschg

No return in sight: A cat watches from an evacuee evacuee shelter in the Fukushima area. (Photo: Issei Kato / Reuters)

Does the Garden of Eden Look Like This? To know very original and wild and certainly very different from what we imagined. What you see: It grows and grows, the flowers shine abundantly, the grass and shrubs spout out, no way, no house, here and there maybe a pile of stones, but completely invaded, unrecognizable, this that the stones should have been used, between lizards and other animals, larger and smaller. Nowhere is a human. What you do not see: The area is contaminated with radioactivity. This is a restricted area. A double paradise, therefore: intact, beautiful – and out of reach.

Adolf Muschg wrote a lot of a love story in his life, delicate and exquisite. But he rarely described a connection as delicate and vulnerable as in the heart of his new novel, "Return to Fukushima". It is the story of two royal children, two creatures without parents, lost in their lives and lost in their world and therefore always animated by a nameless desire. They are electoral souls in the classical sense of the term: where they meet, as if by magic, all the links that could hinder their love dissolve.

Their life lines rest on an inner compass of which they do not know anything anymore. that he is stronger than his will. At some point towards the end of the novel, Muschg de Novalis quotes: "Where are you going? Always at home. "It attracts the German writer Paul and the much younger Japanese Mitsuko," home ", which of course the two do not have.

On the other hand, Paul has an offer of Japan that only someone described as indecent would be, who is more suspicious than the philosopher writer and less likely to die.Paul was attracted to Japan (especially because it was promised reunion with Mitsuko, who had already visited with her husband in Germany years earlier.)

He becomes mayor of a small town near Fukushima To serve as a decoy: Can he, according to the offer, set up a small colony of artists in the village.This would give people the confidence to return to their ancestral homes and resume their previous lives after the reactor disaster in the now slightly contaminated land

Sick to Death

Paul feels that he was chosen to A suicide mission, The Geiger Pipe Counter constantly reminds him during his trips with Mitsuko to the Fukushima area that there are more reasons to avoid the area than to settle there. And if there remains a doubt in him, then a dream does the rest: a doctor diagnoses a tumor without any hope of healing.

But why be frightened by a dream alone? After all, he is a writer and therefore fictional or provocative: he believes in art on word and in any case more than life. In his luggage, he is the breviary of the daily reading of the story of Adalbert Stifter "Progeny". And indeed he finds there, as if it was a plan, his own marked destiny.

Stifter also speaks of two royal children who are found because they have to find each other; it also speaks of an area infested with swamps and fever that must be made arable, but which, in its intact state, appears to lovers as the lost paradise, and here also the two lovers know only one direction of life: "Always at home". even they do not know where this house would be, if not in themselves.

We were driven out of old paradise, in the new dies.

The idyll of Stifter gives the novel a treacherous double bottom. And because with Stifter the idyll is always full of invisible abysses, Muschg, with this literary parallel world, invites twice more to his story. In her novel, Stifter's idyll still flourishes, but she radiates in her own way. This makes them more beautiful, attractive and, above all, more dangerous.

For Paul and Mitsuko found in their mortality the place dreamed of their unfulfilled desire. In the irradiated field, they love each other with a vehemence that is reminiscent of a death struggle rather than a romantic stumble. They leave all the caution, not carelessly, but in the assurance assured that their fate is sealed. They have nothing to lose, but they do not win either, they believe. Except the moment itself.

They found their paradise. This is not a place you dream of, it is everyone's nightmare. As a result, locals are fleeing the area around the damaged nuclear power plant, and almost no one needs to persuade them to live in old homes again. But Paul and Mitsuko want to go back, as if, as the title of the novel says, a "return home" – to a place where they almost never lived.

In the end, the salvation

is the idyll of Stifter Already quite scary, the duplicate here is completely tilted in a cold horror, which is all the more oppressive, as it does. is in a way imperceptible and invisible in the same way. The paradise in which Paul and Mitsuko come in as Adam and Eve of the atomic age is actually hell. His return home is marked by death, even though Mitsuko is expecting a child. We were expelled from old paradise and we died in the new paradise.

Stifter was even more gracious about his characters. The 19th century had its own way of identifying the needs of the world. Adolf Muschg, on the other hand, must give his characters all the hardness of the modern narrator and the present. And yet, he is not the implacable author who has to chase his creatures.

At the end of all desires, salvation awaits us. Muschg gently drives his king's children to this point. Finally, they expect nothing and receive everything. Chain reactions also stop life as we know it. The world will turn into a wild garden with cairns and some pale skeletons. Until then, we must reconcile ourselves with the inadequacy of everything and ourselves. Of these, however, Muschg's novel is in the brightest colors. How the imperfect man lives his life in a world a bit desperate: Few people know how to tell their soul and their lives as well as Adolf Muschg.