Seventeen Seconds in kanji. Polluted history. Bloodstains on tatami mats. Silk scarf confessionals. Defiled. Discarded. The world grew so much smaller.
I recall the album from my Lost Youth. I bought it after seeing a reference to it in an '80s article called "Modern Girls"-- a journalistic classic in its way. But I loved the album.
Guilt is something one never shakes at a ryokan. Kawabata knew that sixty-odd years ago.
But the postcards of memories: yes-- I enjoy reading them.
A postcard sent to self - a photograph of a memory: a boy wrapped in a Tokyo ryokan, bludgeoning himself with that album as though it would undo his guilt.
"On the right wing you can see yourself trying to find your way in the darkness, lighting the hall and staircase with a miserable lamp dragging along tied to you as part of yourself, the corpse of your memories, of your wrongs, of your failures, the murder everyone commits at some time of his life -- you can never free yourself of your past, you have to carry the corpse while Life plays the drum."
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I'm suddenly thinking of a long-ago album by the Cure.
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Guilt is something one never shakes at a ryokan. Kawabata knew that sixty-odd years ago.
But the postcards of memories: yes-- I enjoy reading them.
Reply
A postcard sent to self - a photograph of a memory: a boy wrapped in a Tokyo ryokan, bludgeoning himself with that album as though it would undo his guilt.
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(I wish I knew who you were, to thank you).
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Tatami mats absorb blood. Scarves are always key.
And somewhere Mishima meets Roland Barthes.
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