Sans soleil Page #3

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against which the fathers of the church invade

becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things,

to a melancholy whose color I can give you

by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:

"Who said that time heals all wounds?

It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.

With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits.

With time, the desired body will soon disappear,

and if the desiring body has already ceased

to exist for the other,

then what remains is a wound... disembodied."

He wrote me that the Japanese secret

what Lvi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things

implied the faculty of communion with things,

of entering into them, of being them for a moment.

It was normal that in their turn they should be like us:

perishable and immortal.

He wrote me:

animism is a familiar notion in Africa,

it is less often applied in Japan.

What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to

which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart?

When they build a factory or a skyscraper,

they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land.

There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses,

and even for rusty needles.

There's one on the 25th of September

for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.

The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon

the goddess of compassionand are burned in public.

I look to the participants.

I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots

had the same look on their faces.

He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau

ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands.

That would be our contribution to the unity

dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.

Why should so small a countryand one so poor

interest the world?

They did what they could, they freed themselves,

they chased out the Portuguese.

They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent

that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship,

and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.

Who remembers all that?

History throws its empty bottles out the window.

This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity,

where everything began in 1959,

when the first victims of the struggle were killed.

It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog

as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity

of tropical longshoremen.

Rumor has it that every third world leader

coined the same phrase the morning after independence:

"Now the real problems start."

Cabral never got a chance to say it:

he was assassinated first.

But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on.

Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism:

to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion,

temptations of power and privilege.

Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter

to those who expected it to be sugar coated.

My personal problem is more specific:

how to film the ladies of Bissau?

Apparently, the magical function of the eye

was working against me there.

It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde

that I could stare at them again with equality.

Les "No s qu" des figures

cest proche du ritual de la seduction.

I see her,

she saw me,

she knows that I see her,

she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act

as though it was not addressed to me,

and at the end the real glance,

straightforward,

that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second,

the length of a film frame.

All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility.

And men's task has always been to make them

realize it as late as possible.

African men are just as good at this task as others.

But after a close look at African women,

I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.

He told me the story of the dog Hachiko.

A dog waited every day for his master at the station.

The master died, and the dog didn't know it,

and he continued to wait all his life.

People were moved and brought him food.

After his death a statue was erected in his honor,

in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed

so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.

Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals.

The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once

the empire of Mr. Okadaa great collector of French paintings,

the man who hired the Chteau of Versailles to celebrate

the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.

In the computer section I've seen young Japanese

exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra.

They have a war to win.

The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits

at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt,

but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him:

men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.

Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field,

every day he saw Mr. Akao

the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party

trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony

against the international communist plot.

He wrote me:

the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones

are part of Tokyo's landscape

Mr. Akao is their focal point.

I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko,

at this crossroads from which he departs

only to go and prophesy on the battlefields.

He was at Narita in the sixties.

Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land,

and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow

behind everything that moved.

Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo.

Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there.

Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation

of the Northern Islands by the Russians.

Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan

with the abominable occupier of the North

are a thousand times better than with the American ally

who is always whining about economic aggression.

Ah, nothing is simple.

On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor.

The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung

kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo

is threatened with the death sentence.

A group has begun a hunger strike.

Some very young militants are trying

to gather signatures in his support.

I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle.

The demo was unreal.

I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon,

of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players,

with the same blue lobsters of police,

the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners

and the same slogan:

"Down with the airport."

Only one thing has been added:

the airport precisely.

But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it,

it looks more besieged than victorious.

My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution:

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