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最近だいぶ☯ に近づいて来ました

The following text is the English translation of Chris Marker’s 1982 photobook “Le Dépays”. The translation is transcribed from the 1997 “Immemory” CD-Rom with minor correction. Here’s the first part “Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn.”

The Disorient

by Chris Marker

1. Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn… 2. You called that one… 3. It’s not just…

1. Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn. The voices of the message-bearing crows at every gate begin to dissipate into the noise of the city. At the terminal stations the colored trains start rolling — Yamanote green, Tozai blue, Marunouchi lacquer-red, color and name forever joined. They will gradually fill the morning with their bowling-alley-din, dominated by the imperial foghorn of the Shinkansen. The static of the still-flickering TV is soon to fade behind the first target card, but at this moment it resembles nothing so much as one of those square white lanterns you see on the televised tales of ghosts and samurais, like a tube within a tube. The Lady of the Morning News appears on the screen, or the first commercial, or Doraemon the cat-robot. So, you say, another day has passed. As though it were only upon walking and looking back that one could take the true measure of this day lived outside time, in a zone of silence amid sound, in the taste of eternity that we’ll call Japan, as Aragon used to say Holland. Here time is a river the flows only at night.

Inventing Japan is just another way of getting to know it. Once you’ve gotten beyond the clichés, once you’ve outwitted the cliché of cutting through clichés, then the chances are mathematically the same for all, and consider the time you’ve saved! Trust appearances, consciously confuse the decor with the drama, never worry about understanding, just be there — dasein — and everything will come your way. Well, something, at least.

“We Japanese have a very special relationship with cats.” Toru Takemitsu told me that last night, in a little bar in Shinjuku. Coming from one of the greatest living musicians, it was a precious confidence. Behind him, the regular customers’ whisky bottles stood side by side, round and smooth like turtles. And the association in your head of those two words, cat and whisky, gave rise as though neuralgically to the gaze of a cat whose name was Whisky — rather unlikely in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris, but that’s how it was. Without even raising your voice, you could just call from the second floor: “Whisky!” and the gaze — yes, an unforgettable gaze — rose to meet you… A few microseconds later and there he was, on the balcony, by one of those wrinkles in space-time that only cats can slip through, along with a few Tibetan ascetics. The cat Whisky died under the wheels of a truck and you raise your glass to his memory, to the memory of your other Russian-blue cat friend — Tozai blue — and to the memory of the frightened owl who died one day in your hand, choked by the meatball she had swallowed with a hunter’s haste. You sometimes wondered how those animals saw humans. For the cats, it was not sure that their human represented a single person: rather a kind of flock or herd, toward which they always came curiously to verify if it still appeared the same way, vertical or horizontal, here the feet, there the head. For the owl, perhaps we were great fuzzy shadows, not hostile, but enigmatic. While she fought to regain her breath, while the dizziness of death entered her head for the first time, her eyes said “Shadow, you are killing me, shadow, you are abandoning me”; and her sharp claws, fatal to rodents, clenched around your finger in a final convulsion. Your finger remained blue for weeks, blue like the Russian cat, blue like the Tozai Line, and you bore that sign a long time, slow to fade, like remorse.

Others this evening may drink to the death of kings, to the death of empires. In Shinjuku we drink to the death of cats and owls. What could be more natural? A quarter hour’s walk away, without leaving Shinjuku, we would come to the temple of Ji Cho In(自性院), in Nishi Ochial(西落合), where they pray for all the cats of the world. A superb maneki neko watches over the door of the sanctuary: the greeting cat, the mascot of knowing merchants and attentive prostitutes. For some slight offering the monk will unveil the statues of cats — the one donated in the sixteenth century by a warlord whose path had been crossed by a black cat (and who, rather than fearing an ill omen like an ignorant Westerner, followed the cat to a strategic position that brought victory) — the one donated in the seventeenth century by a merchant whose cat attracted clients by his sole presence, and made his master’s fortune — the one donated in the eighteenth century by a Beautiful Lady of whom you remain unsure even today whether she had a cat, was a cat, or what exactly she had to do with the story. But you learned not to ask. What the tale tells is true, for the tale tells that what the tale tells is true, as would be told by the Damsel at the crossroads of your travels.

When you returned for the first time to Europe with your cat stories, your friends saw proof that a maniac always finds fodder for his mania. You had to show them image of Ji Cho In, of the feline cemetery at Go To Ku Ji(豪德寺), with its dozens of tiered maneki neko, you had to prove that the children of 1-16-1 block in Ginza Chuo-ku had drawn a hopscotch game for cats, and that a real kitten came to take its siesta there, you had to swear that a cat had left its initials in the concrete of Shimbashi. But only when you opened the book published in 1980 by Keibunsha(恵文社), and showed them the methodical inventory, complete with maps, of all the places in Tokyo connected to the Cat, did you finally feel them getting a little shaken up. To see printed on glossy paper, with a geographer’s precautions, the surest way to find the Iriya(入谷) restaurant where one can dine among free-stalking tabbies, that makes an impression. Then you had more leeway to tell of your other adventures, the one of the twins in the train bringing you precisely to Go To Ku Ji (it was raining, just like in Rashomon, you didn’t yet know where the temple was, you stopped the passers-by saying “neko” and joining your hands in the gesture of Buddhist prayer. They all understood, but they didn’t all know, it took you an hour and a number of versions, just like in Rashomon, until you finally found yourself in front of those rows of cats greeting you, thanking you for having come all this way just for them beneath such a rain…. You worried about it later: for all over Asia, the cat is dogged by a lousy reputation. Wasn’t it the only animal to arrive late for Buddha’s death? Exactly, they replied. One must be even more compassionate because cats bear this stain. And the Japanese way of siding with the weakest, with the undercat, alongside the well-established — and justified — reputation of Japanese cruelty, opened a new window for you). Still in Shinjuku (you seem to spend your life there), on the roof of the little shops at the edge of southern exit of the pedestrian tunnel, a cat saluted you with its two ears. Since then, you’ve never been able to take that passageway without remembering him. The same morning, you had photographed one of the vice-presidents of the rich and powerful Reiyukai Shakaden(霊友会) sect at the instant when he vitrified a watchman by his simple entry — and that cat’s smile seemed to you the incarnation of all the counter-powers in the world. Another day your Japanese friends, intrigued by your folly, brought you to a secular temple to cats, Nekomaya, the store where one finds all the objects, all the images, all the books, and even food for cats — the first stone in an International that has spread to San Francisco, with Wholly Cats, and to Paris, with Au Chat Dormant, rue du Cherche-Midi, on the same sidewalk as the florist. In between times you learned not only to pronounce neko but also to write it.

「猫」

One long stroke and two little ones puffing out, for the tail: an animal. A rectangle consolidated by a cross: a rice field. Two little vertical strokes crossed with a raging, fleeting horizontal bar: a race. In Japan, the cat is the animal that races through a rice field.

Meka Tome