Posts filed under 'Tokyo'

City of Signs, Empire of Signs

May 18, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[Barthes] comes to know Japan not for her certain qualities, but for what she inspires within him about the art of living.

“If I want to imagine a fictive nation . . .” With those words, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, his study of Japan and its available reality, begins. Going on to infuse the elements of Japanese existence—everything from haiku to monolids—with his singular manner of interrogation, the Japan that Barthes illustrates is one that exemplifies the mental journeys that arise in correspondence with physical ones. Now, fifty years after its publication, Xiao Yue Shan takes contemporary Tokyo as a point of origin to discuss the Japan that corresponds to the Barthian instinct for examination, and how his fascination with this country’s collection of signs is a direct result of the city’s peculiar composition.

The urban environment is a contract between humans and their machines, between conscious and unconscious topographies, between vessels and inhabitants. It is a haven of both creativity and consumption, a spatial and experiential experiment. Of its understanding there comes a need for the discretions of a knowingly discontinuous cognizance; it is impossible to know the city wholly, and there is also no need for such knowledge.

In Tokyo there is a discreet strangeness in the negotiation between the city and its inhabitants—movements are organized covertly around narratives and histories. All that is built requires a reverence for what was there before. The past is hidden and present, the city is whole and in parts. When Roland Barthes arrived here in 1966, he recognized the enormous task that it assigned to him, that “Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” The resulting 1970 text, Empire of Signs, is a luxury of the imagination, in which a mind perforates the scene with both an intent to investigate and an egoism that affords one the comfort to discern and judge. Japan was an amalgam of facts and fictions, to be navigated with all the directions of thinking.

Foreigners assign themselves to the subject of Tokyo with a fascination first. To achieve the perfect balance between knowledge and impressions, of experiences both living and mythical. In his assignment Barthes accomplished a passion of translation, which is to fearlessly integrate the insights of the foreigner with the extant, accumulated comprehensions of the local. Where someone who was born and lived the entirety of her life in Tokyo may have accumulated a wealth of notes in the slow, linear fashion of smallness to bigness—from the room to the home, from the home to the neighbourhood, from the neighbourhood to its vicinity, and from thereon the entirety—the foreigner comes to involve herself with the city via a series of shocks, of enthrallment with “ordinary” things, of curiosity that encourages in turns awe and despair, and of constant referral to her lack of knowing. Inevitably one sees what the other cannot, and inevitably in this interchange an enormously valuable body of knowledge arises. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Blind Spot” from Brief Cartography for Places of No Interest by Marcílio França Castro

September 5, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Heath Wing

"We banished from cartography all lions, mermaids, pygmies, and dragons. The sterilization of maps only confirms the disdain we have for nature."

When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop in Brazil during the winter of 2016, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of combination of Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; several of the books were from his peers and not just ones he had authored. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing is in line with the likes of Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds, he perceives with brilliance unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economic and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphor, sentence structure and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept the translator sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017. 

—Heath Wing. 

The manuals say such devices are made to take anything. Bumps, turbulence, high winds, lightning. Even crashes and hurricanes. It’s said they come out unscathed from the most intemperate of weather. You know the protocols. For every inconvenience there is a plan, an automatic fix. An aircraft like this one, with all its resources, ought to be, according to the manuals, practically uncrashable. That’s why, if it were up to manuals and manufacturers, our role would be merely to maintain course and keep her steady, taking advantage of the dignity of flight and the charm of our profession. And that’s really what we do here, before this gorgeous instrument panel, full of buttons and colorful lights: with the prudence it conveys, we relax and commend our fate and everyone else’s to the invisible wisdom of the display.

Look ahead. The sky’s magnificent, full of stars; someone might say it’s a painting commissioned to decorate the cockpit. A captain, from the moment of departure, always has his beard well-groomed, his uniform impeccable; he pilots the plane with swan-like indifference. That’s how the passengers see you. We fly calmly. The seats are anatomic and dinner well-balanced. An almost anesthetic experience. The Pacific is nothing more than an enormous tapestry of black silk that clips the horizon. We think and act as if the world outside no longer existed, as though the clouds and the ocean below us were but unfailing radar bleeps or a set of geographical coordinates. In truth, as we fly we simply ignore the substance found in Earth’s elements. Try this coffee, it’s wonderful.

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