Sans soleil Page #2

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These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to

a country, a house, a family home.

But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

He wrote:
Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains,

tied together with electric wire she shows her veins.

They say that television makes her people illiterate;

as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets.

Perhaps they read only in the street,

or perhaps they just pretend to readthese yellow men.

I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku.

The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope

ten centuries before the movies compensates a little

for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines,

victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship.

Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls.

The entire city is a comic strip.

It's Planet Manga.

How can one fail to recognize the statuary

that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central?

And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down

on the comic book readers,

pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages,

with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks,

with its stations and temples.

Each district of Tokyo once again becomes

a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute

whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it.

He might have cried out if it was in a Godard film or a Shakespeare play,

"Where should this music be?"

Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori

where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.'

He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures

and his way of mixing the ingredients

one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts

common to painting, philosophy, and karate.

He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed

in his humble way the essence of style,

and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush

to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'

I've spent the day in front of my TV set

that memory box.

I was in Nara with the sacred deers.

I was taking a picture without knowing

that in the 15th century Basho had written:

"The willow sees the heron's image... upside down."

The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye,

used to Western atrocities in this field;

not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.

For one slightly hallucinatory moment

I had the impression that I spoke Japanese,

but it was a cultural program on NHK

about Grard de Nerval.

8:
40, Cambodia.

From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge:

coincidence, or the sense of history?

In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive

and incommunicable sentences:

"Horror has a face and a name...

you must make a friend of horror."

To cast out the horror that has a name and a face

you must give it another name and another face.

Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty

of certain corpses.

Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty.

One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering,

that requires that even pain be ornate.

And then comes the reward:

the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises;

absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

But the more you watch Japanese television...

the more you feel it's watching you.

Even television newscast bears witness to the fact

that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things.

It's election time:

the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma

the spirit of luckwhile losing candidates

sad but dignifiedcarry off their one-eyed Daruma.

The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe.

I watched the pictures of a film

whose soundtrack will be added later.

It took me six months for Poland.

Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes.

But I must say that last night's quake

helped me greatly to grasp a problem.

Poetry is born of insecurity:

wandering Jews, quaking Japanese;

by living on a rug that jesting nature

is ever ready to pull out from under them

they've got into the habit of moving

about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable,

of trains that fly from planet to planet,

of samurai fighting in an immutable past.

That's called 'the impermanence of things.'

I did it all.

All the way to the evening shows for adultsso called.

The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips,

but it's a coded hypocrisy.

Censorship is not the mutilation of the show,

it is the show.

The code is the message.

It points to the absolute by hiding it.

That's what religions have always done.

That year, a new face appeared among the great ones

that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's.

Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown

on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.

He wrote me:

curiosity of course, and the glimmer

of industrial espionage in the eye

I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient

and less expensive version of Catholicism

but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred,

even when it's someone else's.

So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs

such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido?

At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum,

a chapel, and a sex shop.

As always in Japan, one admires the fact that

the walls between the realms are so thin

that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue,

buy an inflatable doll,

and give the goddess of fertility the small offering

that always accompanies her displays.

Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems

of the television incomprehensible,

if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible

only on condition of being severed from a body.

One would like to believe in a world before the fall:

inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism

whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation.

Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain,

the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture,

share in the same cosmic innocence.

The second part of the museumwith its couples of stuffed animals

would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it.

Not so sure...

animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship,

but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation.

And even without original sin

this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.

In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai

I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,

the rift that separates men from women.

In life it seems to show itself in two ways only:

violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy

resembling Sei Shonagon's

which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word.

So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts

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