自译 | Le Dépays by Chris Marker (2/3)
2
You have named that photo la Derelitta. Contrary to a persistent legend, trains in Tokyo are not always crowded, nor do passengers always need the white-gloved pushers that no film ever fails to show us. One can spend entire days navigating from train to metro, from underground to elevated railway, without being jostled much more than in Paris or New York (and certainly more courteously, even if no one gives an inch when it comes to claiming a seat). There are also long stretches of emptiness, allowing you to strategically choose your angle or seatmate. Thus begins the hunt for sleepers. They fascinate you. You board trains to see them, forgetting your appointments, ignoring the transfer points, just to linger a few more minutes in front of the ultimate short film—the ideal close-up of a sleeping face. Their sleep releases a spectrum of expressions that social decorum and concern for appearance suppress during wakefulness. On those resting faces, you can read their entire story—smiles and tensions, nodding heads and moments of bliss. How many scenarios have you invented in this manner? Take, for example, that woman between Kobe and Osaka; for an hour, you observed every season of her being. Her rapid, confused transformations were like the flickering of names on an airport display board, where each city blends into the next. For an hour, you witnessed her metamorphoses with (almost) as much attention as the rise of pleasure on a beloved’s face. But do not search for her here. She is not among these pages. There are a hundred photos of her, but to publish them would be to betray her.
Returning from Hong Kong, an oyster with a hundred thousand pearls, you find yourself on the first train from Narita Airport (bound directly for your beloved Yamanote Line, short-circuiting the endless journey by road). It is here that Japanese kindness seizes your heart. Who can properly sing the hospitality of xenophobes? It is because there is something truly tragic, irredeemably flawed, in the misfortune of not being Japanese that every courtesy must be extended to the foreigner (as to the Cat). As you ascend the steps of the station’s staircase, suddenly your bag feels lighter on your arm. A robust countrywoman grabbed the right handle and guided you all the way to the platform, where you two exchanged thanks and bows. A man orbits around you: you recognise him, the one to whom you inquired, in Volapük, about the platform number. It is not his train, he has nothing to do here, and he will leave in a moment after another exchange of greetings. He simply came to ensure you understood correctly, that you would not end up in Yamaga 山鹿 or Aomori 青森, thus damning your trip. In the train, you ask about the number of stations before your transfer (you could read the map, but it is so much more fun to play Passepartout). A young fellow begins to count on his fingers, like a nursery rhyme. Clearly, he is making mistakes because the girls in his group start laughing, their mouths half-hidden by cupped hands, just as Japanese women do when they laugh (a foolproof method to spot cross-dressers is to make them laugh). Another person joins the effort, also fumbling, and soon the whole train is engulfed in laughter. The sketch will last until the correct station, where you will naturally be guided with a sure hand.
You have travelled across Japan this way, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, with your only linguistic baggage—aside from the essential phrases of apology and thanks—being the various combinations of the word neko. You cherish the memory at each stop: of the shopkeeper who left their store to personally guide you to the building you were searching for, or the caretaker of the cat cemetery (neko dera 猫寺) in Osaka, who walked with you for twenty minutes, undeterred by your limited vocabulary, showering you with confidences before leaving you at a main road with bus access (which also implies, of course, that you, the stupid foreigner, could not have managed it on your own—but how much more pleasant courteous condescension is than spiteful equality...). This sociability also takes more curious forms. In one of Hokkaido’s charming little trains, with dark wood and green velvet that would have delighted Larbaud, you sneak a peek at a magazine your neighbour is reading. An illustrated article about takenoko 竹の子族, the little Sunday dancers in Yoyogi Park 代々木公園, catches your eye. You think you recognise one of the girls you had photographed. Without expressing your intention in any way, you form the plan in your mind to politely borrow the magazine once she finishes reading it. She dozes off while reading. I will wait for her to wake up, you decide. The awakening happens a few minutes later, and immediately she hands you the magazine. Well received. Harmony has struck once again.
As you always fear appearing to claim more than you know, you will refrain from prophesying about hyoshi 拍子 (‘integration of rhythms’—Kenji Tokitsu 時津賢児). Yet, what your mind hesitates to articulate, your skin has felt more than once. When harmony is mentioned in relation to Japan, everyone thinks of the well-known social consensus: the right swoons, the left convulses. But you think of something else, that vaporous network of rituals, signs, and cults in which everyone pretends not to believe, or ever so minimally. Yet, they so often undermine the arrogance of pragmatism and efficiency, so gracefully fill the void between human endeavour and the vast abyss of nature. It is as if, on the horizon of every event, every action, there lies not a beyond—that would be too metaphysical—but rather an in-between, not far from Jankélévitch’s je-ne-sais-quoi. As if, after the loud hymns to the machine and the social locks firmly in place (and God knows they are), there still remains a space to fill, a surplus of the spirit. This in-between, this twilight zone between cat and wolf, this unnamed essence scattered among the eight hundred and eight gods who shepherd dreams—we do not really know what to make of it or how to properly address it, but at least we can be polite. Hence the politeness regarding ancestors and towards animals (the countless reconciliation festivals—with birds, when the Awa Odori 阿波踊り dancers in Koenji 高円寺 politely summon them by name—with fish, when the people of Morosaki 師崎, south of Nagoya 名古屋, pray for their respectful capture). Thus, at the heart of this society as ruthless as any other, a respect for others peacefully coexists with the rat race. Ultimately, Japan’s materialistic civilisation might be obsessed with the spirit in the same way that Christian civilisation is with the flesh. Through its ancestors, its gods, its animals, and its spirits in the plural, the hidden side of the decor is so perfectly arranged that one inevitably wonders about the reverse of this reverse. It may very well be the spirit itself; the appalling spiritualism, so justly denounced by all modern thought, yet remains present and ingrained in everything.
One Japan can hide another. In the legendary era of Maoist thought, a certain devotee enunciated a proposition whose pataphysical depth has never ceased to amaze you: it was about the famous struggle between two lines, where one ‘characteristically pretended to be the other’ (reread if you are unsure you understood it correctly). Should we wonder which Japan is pretending to be the other? It is best not to ask a Japanese person about this—nothing vexes or horrifies them as much as these sharp Western questions: yes, no, one, the other, the excluded middle, Aristotle and Père Ubu. Do not offer them the reptile of certainty: their whole being recoils at the thought of touching it. Leave them instead to their serene schizophrenia, their way of seeing the opposite in everything. The more intensely a thing is felt, the more urgently its opposite is summoned, rushing to meet it like King Kong’s shadow on the asphalt of Manhattan.
Watch them when they dress up as their ancestors, when they play extras in Shohei Imamura’s 今村昌平 film Eijanaika, a meticulous reconstruction of the Edo period, right down to the famous arched bridge of Ryogoku 両国橋, the one we see in prints. Strip away the facade of modernity, peel back the thin layer of Americanisation that protects him by mimicking his surroundings like certain animal, and before you stands a Medieval Japanese—unchanged, perhaps unchangeable. Except for the younger generation... Yes, perhaps. But that is what the fathers of today’s fathers said when the younger generation was them. You do not believe in this Americanised Japan; you see the Japanese as warriors who have fashioned shields from mirrors. And the ‘real Japan’, as the magazines like to call it, reveals itself only accidentally, in those in-between moments. Like when an interviewee on television, asked, ‘What do you wish for?’ gives a response that far outstrips all the stoic platitudes we were fed in our youth: ‘That my death inconveniences as little as possible.’
