Sans Soleil Transcript (2 of 7)

He described me his reunion with Tokyo, "...like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket, who immediately starts to inspect familiar places." He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers. He was told it was now little girls who made and unmade stars, and producers shuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passersby and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant* or about the results of the daily double, asked feverishly how Chinyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, or the oldest mobster in Tokyo, who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt--of returning to a country, a house, a family home--,but 12 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 only read in the street, or perhaps they're just pretending to read, these 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 a 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, from plasticized baroque to Stalin central*, and the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book reader, 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 among the skyscrapers."

The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whoever is playing it. He might have cried out, as 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 it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'The End.'

"I 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 commercials become 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 Gerard de Nerval." (Memories of a visit to the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a simple and moving monument in stone, guarded by tall trees.) 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 source in Asian people's 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 is watching you.

Even television newscasts bear 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 luck, while losing candidates, sad but dignified, carry off their one-eyed Daruma. The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe. I watch 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 the 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 gotten to the habit of moving in a world of appearances, fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurais fighting in an immutable past. That's called the impermanence of things. I did it all, all the way to the evening shows for adults, so-called. The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but it is 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 blazen above 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 in 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 3rd floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs such as seen at Jozankei, 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 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 the sex is visible only on condition of being severed from the body. One would like to believe in the world before the Fall, inaccessible to the complications of a puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on in it by the American occupation; where people who've gathered around laughing at the votive fountain, the woman touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence.

The second part of the museum, with its couples of stuffed animals, would then be the earthly paradise as we've 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 splendor of the gentle animals of Jozankei, 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 the man to the level of the beasts, against which the fathers of the church inveigh**, 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.'"