DEPAYS7 STACK010

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When one is capable of such violence (and the nations occupied by Japan
during the Second World War know a thing or two about it), when one has
additionally received the gift of taming everything with its contrary, it is
not unthinkable that a very strange and possibly fragile balance should be
struck between a highly policed reality and a bloody imaginary. The same
has been seen in other climes, and after all, Sony doesn’t have a patent on
catharsis. What’s more troubling is that in Japan one gets the impression
that the imaginary is settling its scores with itself, that it too is double, and
that finally it is not a matter of exorcising the violence of the world by the
spectacle of the dream, but of giving battle in the space of dreams, of
giving the spectacle of a battle whose stakes are nothing other than the
world. When I see the televised tales of the chambara, the serialized samurai,
they seem « mortified » both in the ancient and the modern sense of the
word, that is, roundly done in (which is often what happens to them) and
disconsolate to find nothing else at the end of the line. As though the
Japanese were born mortified, knowing everything about the violence, about
the world and about death, having but one life to excuse themselves for
so many imperfections, quick to marvel at everything that might hold
off the inevitable catastrophe if only for a second (a passing crow, a
cricket’s song, an owl clock, a reddening plant) -terrified before the
abyss, resigned while falling. The final scene of the chambara is the
moment when, everything else having failed, intelligence, guile, good
sense and intrigue, there remains nothing but to hurl oneself at the
adversary, mortified to have reached such a pass, mortified that life
should be just an eternal fall, saber drawn into an immense pool of
blood, with all signs on one’s face and in one’s gaze of a terrible,
futile and necessary pity.