There Hervé is granted an audience with a local aristocrat, Hara Kei, who agrees to sell him some silkworm eggs. He travels on foot, avoiding major roads, until he reaches a rendezvous point where he is blindfolded and taken to a small village. Hervé finally reaches Japan by sailing from the coast of Siberia on a smugglers’ ship. Bringing some eggs back, however, will make Hervé rich. Hervé’s beloved wife, Hélène, is reluctant to see him go for so long, but husband and wife both know that without the silkworm eggs, their community will perish. Hervé must cross the entire latitude of Europe and Asia to get there. Furthermore, the journey to Japan takes months. Japan is still all but closed to foreigners, and Japanese law forbids the export of silkworms. Hervé’s town depends on the silk trade, and local magnate Balbadiou, who owns the town’s silk mills, dispatches Hervé to Japan to buy silkworm eggs there. The novel opens as a silkworm disease eradicates the species all over Europe and North Africa. The novella was adapted as a 2007 film of the same title starring Keira Knightley. Set in the 19th century, the novella follows French merchant Hervé Joncour as he falls in love with the wife or concubine of a Japanese nobleman. Silk (1996) is a novella by Italian author Alessandro Baricco, translated into English by Guido Waldman in 1997, and by Ann Goldstein in 2006.
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