DEPAYS7 STACK017

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That summer, the walls of Tokyo were covered with posters, their
charcaters cracked and splintered like the buildings themselves will
be one day. The certainly of the Big Quake is total for everyone in
Tokyo. It gives them an almost Berlinese form of humor. It also fits
quite well with the feeling of the precariousness of all things, that
untranslatable Mono no Aware, like Sehnsucht, like saudade, vague
words whose meaning is doubtless too precise (nostalgia isn’t what it
used to be, as Simone Signoret reminded us -yet that word doesn’t
cover everything, the in-between creeps in there too). Rumor had
even assigned a date for the great earthquake. In its place we had
two small ones, two nights in a row at the same hour (which is truly
incredible: telluric time adopting that of the clock). Bizarre, to fall
asleep in a tranquil bedroom, and to wake up in cabin of a train
gone amok, its rattling partitions hurling down glasses and books,
a domestic row on a planetary scale, while your consciousness
struggles to rein in an animal fear, awakened before you, precisely
the fear of the animals that foretell earthquakes. I looked at the crows,
their cries were the only signs of life beyond the groaning of the earth,
I tried to imagine what was going on in their heads. The next day
Keiko told me: « I’m not surprised. Everyone talks about it, everyone
predicts it… Down there, something is moved. » And Ichiro, pointing
to the crow: « Last night I was wondering what they were thinking. »