It is unusual to meet someone so unconventional as professor Luigi Cerantola. He has impeccable credentials in his publications of poetry, art and literary criticism, and in his collaborations with musicians for opera librettos. He presents himself with whimsy as a maverick who has a nonconforming wry, detached way of looking at life. For him, ordinariness holds no appeal at all.
He says he cannot speak English fluently, nor Japanese. Those who know say he uses Italian as if it were poetry. A teacher from a private school in Padua, and a guest professor in Italian art and literature at the University of Tokyo, Cerantola begins his personal story 52 years ago in Italy.
"Surely I was present at my birth, even if unconscious, as all of us are then," he said. "If that weren't so, I would gladly have gone back, as no one told me that I would be put into such a dreadful world. They decided against my will, and I haven't yet forgiven them.