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Inventing Japan is just another way of getting to know it. Once
you’ve gotten beyond the clichés, once you’ve outwitted the
cliché of cutting through the clichés, then the chances are
mathematically the same for all, and consider the time you’ve
saved! Trust appearances, consciously confuse the decor with
the drama, never worry about understanding, just be there
-dasein- and everything will come your way. Well, something,
at least.

« We Japanese have a very special relationship with cats. » Toru
Takemitsu told me that last night, in a little bar in Shinjuku.
Coming from one of the greatest living musicians, it was a precious
confidence. Behind him, the regular customers’ whisky bottles stood
side by side, round and smooth like turtles. And the association in
your head of those two words, cat and whisky, gave rise as though
nevralgically to the gaze of a cat whose name was Whisky -rather
unlikely in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris, but that’s how it was.
Without even raising your voice, you could just call from the second
floor: « Whisky! » and that gaze -yes, an unforgettable gaze- rose
to meet you… A few microseconds later and there he was, on the
balcony, by one of those wrinkles in space-time that only cats can
slip through, along with a few Tibetan ascetics. The cat Whisky died
under the wheels of a truck and you raise your glass to his memory,
to the memory of your other Russian-blue cat friend -Tozai blue-
and to the memory of the frightened owl who died one day in your
hand, choked by the meatball she had swallowed with a hunter’s
haste. You sometimes wondered how those animals saw humans.