:16:51
He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains,
tied together with electric wire she shows her veins.
:16:57
They say that television makes her people illiterate;
as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets.
:17:02
Perhaps they read only in the street,
or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men.
:17:08
I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku.
:17:12
The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope
:17:15
ten centuries before the movies compensates a little
for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines,
:17:20
victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship.
:17:23
Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls.
:17:26
The entire city is a comic strip.
:17:37
It's Planet Manga.
:17:41
How can one fail to recognize the statuary
that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central?
:17:45
And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down
on the comic book readers,
:17:52
pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.