:03:03
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo
there is a temple consecrated to cats.
:03:27
I wish I could convey to you the simplicity
—the lack of affectation—
:03:31
of this couple who had come to place
an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery
:03:36
so their cat Tora would be protected.
:03:39
No she wasn't dead, only run away.
:03:42
But on the day of her death no one
would know how to pray for her,
:03:45
how to intercede with death so that
he would call her by her right name.
:03:48
So they had to come there,
both of them, under the rain,
:03:53
to perform the rite that would repair
the web of time where it had been broken.
:04:11
He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to
understand the function of remembering,
:04:15
which is not the opposite of forgetting,
but rather its lining.
:04:18
We do not remember, we rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten.
:04:24
How can one remember thirst?
:04:42
He didn't like to dwell on poverty,
:04:44
but in everything he wanted to show
there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model.
:04:49
A world full of bums, of lumpens,
of outcasts, of Koreans.
:04:54
Too broke to afford drugs,
they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk.
:04:59
This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes
from the glories of the center city,