:25:41
So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs
:25:44
such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido?
:25:50
At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum,
a chapel, and a sex shop.
:25:53
As always in Japan, one admires the fact that
the walls between the realms are so thin
:25:58
that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue,
buy an inflatable doll,
:26:01
and give the goddess of fertility the small offering
that always accompanies her displays.
:26:06
Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems
of the television incomprehensible,
:26:10
if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible
only on condition of being severed from a body.
:26:28
One would like to believe in a world before the fall:
:26:30
inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism
whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation.
:26:34
Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain,
:26:38
the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture,
share in the same cosmic innocence.
:26:44
The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—
would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it.
:26:49
Not so sure...
:26:51
animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship,
:26:54
but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation.
:26:57
And even without original sin
this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.