:27:05
In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai
I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,
:27:10
the rift that separates men from women.
:27:12
In life it seems to show itself in two ways only:
:27:16
violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy
resembling Sei Shonagon's
:27:20
which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word.
:27:24
So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts
against which the fathers of the church invade
:27:29
becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things,
:27:31
to a melancholy whose color I can give you
by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:
:27:39
"Who said that time heals all wounds?
:27:42
It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.
:27:47
With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits.
:27:50
With time, the desired body will soon disappear,
:27:54
and if the desiring body has already ceased
to exist for the other,
:27:58
then what remains is a wound... disembodied."
:28:09
He wrote me that the Japanese secret
what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things
:28:14
implied the faculty of communion with things,
of entering into them, of being them for a moment.
:28:19
It was normal that in their turn they should be like us:
perishable and immortal.
:28:32
He wrote me:
:28:33
animism is a familiar notion in Africa,
it is less often applied in Japan.
:28:36
What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to
which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart?
:28:43
When they build a factory or a skyscraper,
they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land.
:28:48
There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses,
and even for rusty needles.
:28:53
There's one on the 25th of September
for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.
:28:57
The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon
the goddess of compassionand are burned in public.