âLe DĂ©paysâ(1982) by Chris Marker, English Translation (2/3)
The following text is the English translation of Chris Markerâs 1982 photobook âLe DĂ©paysâ. The translation is transcribed from the 1997 âImmemoryâ CD-Rom with minor correction. Hereâs the second part âYou called that one...â
The Disorient
by Chris Marker
1. Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn⊠2. You called that one⊠3. Itâs not justâŠ
2. You called that one la Derelitto. Despite the stubborn legend, the Tokyo trains are not always packed, they donât always need the white-gloved people-pushers that the films never spare us. One can spend entire days navigating from train to metro, underground to sky-rail, without being jostled any more than in Paris or New York (and more courteously in any case, even if they donât fool around when it comes to grabbing seats). Plus there are plenty of long empty stretches allowing one to choose a strategic angle or a face-to-face position. Then begins the hunt for the sleepers. They fascinate you. You take the tube to see them, you forget your appointments, you neglect to change trains, just to remain a few more minutes before the absolute short, the ideal close-up of a sleeperâs face. Their slumber frees up a range of expressions that social standing and a concern for appearances hold back in the waking state, and on their dozing faces you can read entire life histories, smiles and stress, nodding and ecstasy. How many scenarios did you invent in those moments â that woman, for example, between Kobe and Osaka, for an hour you tracked all her seasons, the sudden jumps, confusing like the airport departure board where the name of each city scrambles into the next. For an hour you scrutinized her metamorphoses with (almost) as much demanding attention as you would watch the upsurge of pleasure on a loved oneâs face. Donât look for her, she isnât in these pages. There are a hundred pictures of her, but publishing them would be a betrayal.
Youâre returning from Hong Kong, oyster of hundred thousand pearls, and from the very first train (the ones that takes you straight from Narita airport to your beloved Yamanote Line, short-circuiting the interminable trip by road) your heart is stolen by Japanese kindness. Who will find the proper note to sing the praises of xenophobic hospitality? Itâs because there is something really tragic, an irremediable flaw in the misfortune of not being born Japanese, that one must show all possible consideration for the foreigners (as for the Cat). You mount the staircase to the train station, and suddenly your bag hangs less heavily from your arm. A robust country-dweller has taken hold of the other strap, and will accompany you like that to the platform, where you will exchange thanks and little bows. A man circles around you: you recognize him, heâs the one you asked, in gibberish, for the number of the platform. Itâs not his train, he has nothing to do here, heâll leave in an instant after this new exchange of formalities: he has simply come to make sure you understood correctly, that you donât risk ending up in Yamagata, in Aomori, cursing him. In the train, you inquire as to the number of stations before you must change (you could look on the map, but itâs so much more amusing to play Passepartout). A young guy starts counting on his fingers, like a nursery rhyme. Obviously he got lost somewhere, because the girls in his group start laughing, their mouths half-hidden by a cupped hand, as Japanese girls do (the surest way to flush out the cross-dressers is to trick them into laughing). Another one steps in, gets confused as well, and now the whole carriage is cracking up. The sketch continues all the way to the right stop, where naturally youâll be guided by a confident hand. You crossed Japan that way from Hokkaido to Okinawa, with almost no linguistic baggage except the indispensable excuses and thank-yous, along with various combinations of the word neko, and from each stop youâve kept the memory of the merchant who left his shop to lead you to the foot of the building you were looking for, the guardian of the cat cemetery (neko dera) in Osaka who escorted you for twenty minutes, absolutely undeterred by the limited nature of your vocabulary, plying you with all kinds of intimate observations to leave you on a major street traversed by buses (which also means of course that you, stupid foreigner, would never have been able to find it all alone â but since courteous condescension is so much more pleasant that hostile equalityâŠ). This kind of interchange also takes far stranger forms. In one of those charming little trains in Hokkaido, all dark wood and green velvet (Larbaud would have loved them), you keep sneaking glances at the magazine being read by your neighbor, as youâve seen an illustrated article on takenoko(ç«čăźćæ), the little Sunday dancers in Yoyogi park, and you think you recognize one of the young girls you also photographed. Without having expressed your intention in the slightest sign, you mentally form the project of politely borrowing her magazine when she finishes reading. At which point, still reading, she slips off to sleep. Iâll wait till she awakens, you think. A few minutes later she does, and immediately she hands you the magazine. Clear enough. Harmony has struck again.
Youâre always afraid of seeming to tell more than you know, so youâll refrain from any babble about hyoshi (the âintegration of temposâ â Kenji Tokitsu ææŽ„èłąć ). But what your head isnât sure it can put into words, youâve felt with your skin several times. When one speaks about harmony with respect to Japan, people immediately think of the famous social consensus, and the Right swoons, the Left goes into convulsions. You think of something else, of the fuzzy network of rites, signs, and offerings that everyone claims not to believe in, or just a little, but that so often unseats the arrogance of pragmatism and efficiency, and that so graciously fills the void remaining between human enterprise and the vast abyss of nature. As though on the horizon of every event, of every action, there were not a beyond â that would be too metaphysical â but rather an in-between, which might not be so far from JankĂ©lĂ©vitchâs je-ne-sais-quoi. As though, when the hymn to the machine has been heartily sung, and the social screws locked tight (God knows they are), a space still remained to be filled, a surplus value of the spirit. No one knows exactly what to do with this in-between, this twilight zone, this nameless realm shared between the eight hundred and eight gods who watch over the flock of dreams, no one knows how to address it, but at least one can be polite. Hence the politeness toward ancestors, hence the politeness toward animals (those innumerable festivals of reconciliation with the birds, when the Awa Odori (éżæłąèžă) dancers of Koenji (é«ććŻș) call them politely by their names, and with the fish, when the men of Morosaki (ćž«ćŽ) south of Nagoya beg them to let themselves be politely fished), hence, in the heart of this society which is as pitiless as any, a respect for others that can peacefully coexist with the rat-race. The materialistic civilization of Japan may ultimately be obsessed by the spirit in the same way Christian civilization was by the flesh. Through its ancestors, its gods, its animals, its multiplicity of spirits (the back side of the decor, so perfectly arranged that one inevitably ends up wondering whatâs in back of this back side), it may finally be spirit itself, that spiritualist abomination so justly denounced by all of modern thought, that is really present and that grounds everything. One Japan can hide another. In the legendary age of Maozedong thought, a devotee formulated a proposition whose pataphysical depth has never ceased to amaze you: it was about the famous struggle between the two lines, where one âhad the characteristic of always passing itself off for the other.â (Reread it if youâre not sure youâve misunderstood.) Should we ask which Japan passes itself off for the other? Whatever you do, donât ask a Japanese that. Nothing exacerbates and horrifies him so much as such clear-cut Western questions: yes, no, one, the other, the excluded middle, Aristotle and Humpty-Dumpty. Donât tender him the reptile of certainty: his entire being is revolted by the idea of touching it. Leave him to his tranquil schizophrenia, his own way of seeing in everything its contrary, and the more vibrantly the thing is felt, the more imperatively he convokes its contrary, which rushes to meet him like the shadow of King Kong on the asphalt of Manhattan. Look at him instead when he is disguised as his ancestor, when he plays a bit-part for Shohei Imamura in the film Eijanaika, a meticulous reconstruction of the Edo period, pushing all the way to a full-fledged reconstruction of the famous curving bridge of Ryogoku (䞥ćœ), the one on the wood-block prints. Banish the façade of modernity, peel of the thin film of Americanization whereby he protects himself by imitating his environment, just as certain animal species do, and before you stands a Japanese of the Middle Ages, unchanged and perhaps unchangeable. Except that the younger generationâŠYes, perhaps the younger generation. Thatâs what the fathers of todayâs fathers said, when the younger generation was them. You donât believe in it, in the American Japan, you think that the Japanese is a warrior who has made a shield with a mirror. And that the âreal Japan,â as the magazines say, appears only inadvertently, in the in-between once again, when a woman being interviewed on TV answers the question âWhat do you wish?â with this answer that leaves far behind all the Stoic phrases heaped on our youth: âThat my death should disturb as little as possible.â











