Sans soleil Page #2

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and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid.

Here to place adjectives would be so rude

as leaving price tags on purchases.

Japanese poetry never modifies.

There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow,

hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.

Newspapers have been filled recently

with the story of a man from Nagoya.

The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work

Japanese stylelike a madman.

It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics.

And then in the month of May he killed himself.

They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

He described me his reunion with Tokyo:

like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket

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 that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars;

the producers shuddered before them.

He was told that a disfigured woman

took off her mask in front of passers-by

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 Chiyonofuji had done

in the last sumo tournament.

He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, ...

of 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 twelve 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 read only in the street,

or perhaps they just pretend to readthese 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 of 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

that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central?

And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down

on the comic book readers,

pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

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