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Welcome to this video instruction manual for Haiku,

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my book test with Japanese poetry. Today we are in Osaka.

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Tonight we are in Tokyo, in Akihabara. Today we are in Nagasaki.

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Today we are in Hiroshima.

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We have the castle in the background.

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Haiku is an effect that evolved a lot over time,

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whether it is the format of the book, the content

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of the book, the presentation, or even the method.

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So today we are going to look into this in this video.

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Originally I was inspired to create this book test

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for three main reasons.

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The first one is I was born in France in 1983

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and my generation grew up watching Japanese animation on TV,

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mostly after school.

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And then we had Japanese cinema

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featured prominently in France and so on.

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So I'm sure it played a part in making me very

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sensitive to that kind of culture.

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The second reason I was inspired

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to create this book test was

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because at the time I really wanted

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to have an emotional impact on the audience.

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If you think of a traditional book test where you think

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of a word in a book

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and you reveal it impossibly, yes, it's very fooling

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and very impressive, but most

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of the time people walk away from it thinking,

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"How did he know what I was thinking about?""

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So it's more like an intellectual challenge.

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With Haiku, I wanted people to get something positive

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for themselves, walking away from the experience.

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If you use poetry for the revelation, Japanese haikus,

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you have an interesting effect

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because poetry is in itself emotional.

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You ask the person to take a haiku that is linked to her,

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a memory, a sensation,

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a situation she's in, a question she might have.

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So of course at the end when you reveal what it is, it has

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that very personal feeling to it.

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And because of that dynamic of trying

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to have a magical moment together for everyone,

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it creates a situation where they don't fight you

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as much in terms of methods.

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And the third trigger, element that inspired me

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to do Haiku was, in the early 2000s I visited a

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stationary shop in Paris,

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specialized in Japanese stationery.

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And in that shop I found a very peculiar notepad.

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It was a very small vertical format with a hole at the top

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and a metal ring binding everything together.

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And at the time I thought it was quite an original format.

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Now that I've visited Japan a few times, I have seen

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that it can be found in shops, even convenience stores

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because it's like a flashcard system for them

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or note-taking device and it's very pocketable.

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So it's very easy for everyday life.

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That small vertical format

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with the ring was the original format when I created Haiku,

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a very limited run that doesn't exist anymore.

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And now we moved to a more classic western format

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with a binding, with a paperback format

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and pages that are attached in a traditional way

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for the Western literature.

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If you look at the book that you received, you should see

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that there is a a barcode at the back.

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There is a title in Japanese

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and in English, there is an author's name.

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If you look at the first few pages, you will find

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the legal copyright mentions.

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You'll find a few pages presenting what is a haiku,

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and then you'll find the haikus themselves.

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So everything has been done

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to make this book look like an actual book

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you could find in a bookstore, in a library,

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that is about a compilation of haikus.

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If you look on Amazon, you can even find books

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that have the exact same layout

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with the very minimalistic Japanese style layout.