Such perfume ! Yasunari Kawabata’s " The Dancer of Izu" and other stories ( I have just read it in French) spread a heady scent into the soul which stays on for days. It is sad to think of the poignant loneliness of the teenage narrator, a boy who had lost all his family, one member after the other, in his childhood ( this is not mentioned in the story, but one can safely assume that this is an autobiographical story). In another story ( " La lune dans l’eau’), a sick man watches the world from his bed using a mirror. His wife discovers that the world, as reflected in a mirror, has a beautiful sparkle to it: the sky has a shimmering blue, clouds are rimmed with shining white.
I have also been struck by this, recently. I was driving near the coast and the landscape seemed particularly beautiful, as seen from the rear mirror. And less so, to the naked eye. I was bringing some foreign friends along. On the evening of that day, they showed me the photos taken from their digital camera, which they had downloaded in the computer. As seen on the flat liquid crystal screen, the colours were gorgeous. The burnt red earth of the sugar cane fields, on which the spotted brown old stone walls arose, was like a thick red sauce in a witch’s cauldron. At the same time, they were seeing back what they had filmed on their camcorder. It was incredibly boring. These long shots of someone’s feet, followed by a groping and shaking blurred view of what had been a magnificent landscape. A waterfall, caught in a photo, is a drama of spray and frozen movement. On a camcorder, it is just a white line there against the cliff and you are catching all kinds of tourist comments as background noise.
Ok, so what pearl of wisdom can we obtain from the above ? I guess taking a photo gives you more leeway for on- the-spot dramatic embellishment – you can focus, and play a bit with light, and tell people to come closer. Of course, you can do the same with a camcorder, you can edit scenes, and redo the light but it’s more complicated. Like everybody else, I bought a camcorder when my boy was born, but I have been using more and more the digital camera.
To come back to Kawabata – I hope I can get hold of "Snow country" and "The Go Master" one day. The japaneseness of these titles ! " A Thousand Cranes ", "The rumbling of the mountain", "The Old Capital".