Sans soleil Page #7

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The Japanese defended their position inch by inch.

At the end of the day, the two half platoons formed from the remnants

of L Company had got only halfway up the hill,

a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers

on their way to the purification ceremony.

The noro communicates with the gods of the sea,

of rain, of the earth, of fire.

Everyone bows down before the sister deity

who is the reflection, in the absolute,

of a privileged relationship between brother and sister.

Even after her death,

the sister retains her spiritual predominance.

At dawn the Americans withdrew.

Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered,

and toppled into the modern world.

Twenty-seven years of American occupation,

the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty:

two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations

the noro continues her dialogue with the gods.

When she is gone the dialogue will end.

Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister

is watching over them.

When filming this ceremony I knew I was present

at the end of something.

Magical cultures that disappear leave traces

to those who succeed them.

This one will leave none;

the break in history has been too violent.

I touched that break at the summit of the hill,

as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch

where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945

rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans.

People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch.

Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.

On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned,

shredded in a frame of fire.

The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora,

the name of the cat the couple in Gokokuji was praying for.

So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.

Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet;

they would become a legend.

They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units

who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria

and then to hot water so as to see

how fast flesh separates from the bone.

One would have to read their last letters to learn

that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,

nor were they all swashbuckling samurai.

Before drinking his last cup of sak Ryoji Uebara had written:

"I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally.

It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime.

We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say,

except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams.

In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal

that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier.

But once on the ground I am a human being

with feelings and passions.

Please excuse these disorganized thoughts.

I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture,

but in the depths of my heart I am happy.

I have spoken frankly, forgive me."

Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of Sal,

which is in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic.

At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria

and its cemetery with the painted tombs,

it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.

He wrote me:

I've understood the visions.

Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night;

whatever is not desert no longer exists.

You don't want to believe the images that crop up.

Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France?

This nameIsland of France

sounds strangely on the island of Sal.

My memory superimposes two towers:

the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy

that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc,

and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal,

probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.

A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage

until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt.

Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal.

Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch

of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal.

They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.

I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight;

they were playing with the sea as I had never seen them before.

Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood:

today was the first day of the lunar new year,

and for the first time in sixty years

the sign of the dog met the sign of water.

Out there, eleven thousand miles away,

a single shadow remains immobile

in the midst of the long moving shadows

that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo:

the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.

For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning.

Temples are filled with visitors who come

to toss down their coins and to prayJapanese style

a prayer

which slips into life without interrupting it.

Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal

in the company of my prancing dogs

I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather

I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo.

They have substituted themselves for my memory.

They are my memory.

I wonder how people remember things

who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape.

How has mankind managed to remember?

I know:
it wrote the Bible.

The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time

that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.

As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall,

that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes

at new year may offer us:

a little more power over that memory

that runs from camp to camplike Joan of Arc.

That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio

picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo,

and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces

back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.

At the end of memory's path,

the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic

than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year.

It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element

to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies

by which the Japanese wash off

one year to enter the next one.

A full month is just enough for them to fulfill

all the duties that courtesy owes to time,

the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition

at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird,

who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come,

and according to another turns them into truths.

But what gives the street its color in January,

what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono.

In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange

on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono.

At that moment of the year other Japanese

may well invent extra flat TV sets,

commit suicide with a chain saw,

or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors.

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