CHAPTER 1

Lotus Eye

(Reading Miyazawa Kenji and Making Night Passage)

D-STORY, D-FILM

The name calls for mourning, sowing fear and panic in the hearts of mortals.It begins with a D in English, and in its realm time makes no sense. What is itthat we call Death? Heavily lugged around, it is a name we need when the urgeto draw a limit to the unknown arises. Die, Dissolve, Disappear: the three D's.D changes its face, passing from metamorphosis to metamorphosis, almostnever failing to surprise the one who dies. We tell stories in the dark to avertit, and we do everything else we can to forget, ignore, or deny it. Whether wehide it from sight or we provocatively display it for view, D remains elusively atonce invisible and all-too-visible. No amount of corpses, spilled blood, or skullsand skeletons can represent the everyday death that accompanies a life fromcrib to grave. By trying to show it and solve this problem of the end, we end uparresting the infinitely Al-ready-, Al-ways-There — the immortal in the mortal.

Night Passage (98 minutes, color film, 2004, directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha andJean-Paul Bourdier) is a D-film on friendship and death. Made in homage toMiyazawa Kenji's classic novel Night Train to the Stars, the story revolves aroundthe spiritual journey of a young woman (Kyra), in the company of her bestfriend (Nabi) and a little boy (Shin), into a world of rich in-between realities.Their journey into the land of "awakened dream" and out is experienced as apassage of appearances, from a death to a return in life that occurs during along ride on a night train. At each stop of the train, the travelers set out in thedark and come across an inner space of longing, in which their ears and eyesmeet with people and events at once too familiar and oddly strange. Everyencounter opens a door into the transcultural, and every intervention offersan experience of nonillusory, two-dimensional time-space spectacles. The filmitself unfolds in the sequential rhythm of a train of window images. With magneticintensity, each place features a gesture of the sensual world or a means ofreception and communication of our times.

MIYAZAWA'S SPIRIT

"Off you go now, birds of passage! Now's the time to go," says a character inMiyazawa's Night Train to the Stars. During the railroad trip to the Milky Way,characters appear and disappear. They move in seemingly precise time: theywant to get off the train but can't because "it's too late," and they leave the locationsof their visits to get back on the train when "it's time." Some must partmidway with their train companions, because "this is where you get off to goto heaven."

Hopping on Miyazawa's night train is to step into a universe of sentientcyborgs in which the mineral, the vegetal, the animal, and the human worldshappily mingle. As the journey into the fourth dimension expands in timeand space, earthly and celestial beings, the living and the departed, the easternerand the westerner, the poet and the scientist, the child and the adult arebrought together in a quasi-hallucinatory vision. Although driven at its coreby the dark boundaries of life and death, such a vision offers neither somberpicture nor mere drama. On the contrary, the glowing images strewn on theMilky Way are presented in light, subtle touches on the shimmering surface ofthe sky canvas. Although the sense of loss poignantly runs through the entirestory like an underlining thread, tears and laughter are fluidly woven into thescenes of magical encounters, and only now and then does an alarming noteof sadness erupt into the space of narration.

In conceiving Night Passage, there was no desire to imitate or illustrateMiyazawa's tale. As with my previous films, I prefer to work with transformationin encounters, retaining what I see as the spirit of Miyazawa's narrativewhile riding a night train of my own. I stumbled onto his stark and intensepoetry (A Future of Ice is an example) well before I read his stories and becameacquainted with the man's personal tale. Death always seems near and can befelt lurking in every spring of joy or innocent youth that gives his writing itsmagical freshness. What strikes me the most, like a lingering fragrance, is the"blue illumination" (a term he uses to define "I") that his sister's death left asa gift on every page. The eye that weeps while laughing speaks through thehaunting, absent presence of Toshiko, the young woman who died at the ageof twenty-five, while in her springtime.

Night Train to the Stars reminds me in many ways of Antoine Saint-Exupéry'sThe Little Prince — although, for reasons likely to reflect the power imbalancebetween East and West, the latter is far more universally known than the former.The two so-called children's tales offer a luminous tapestry of poetic,scientific, and spiritual imagery capable of speaking to an unusual readershipthat ranges from the very young to the very old, not excluding the majority ofimpatient "grown-ups." Saint-Exupéry and Miyazawa are both consummatestargazers and adventurous skydivers, the first being an aviator by profession.That said, their novels differ markedly in the location of their voice. Of significancehere is that Miyazawa, who also died at a young age, thirty-seven,having ruined his health with an ascetic food regimen, is a man of many selvesand many talents — an aspect that accounts for the sheer expansive quality ofhis work.

Poet, novelist, farmer agronomist, amateur astronomer, geologist, teacher,musician, and composer, he was a most misunderstood literary figure in Japanuntil the media decided to deify him sixty-three years after his death. A dilettanteat heart, he loved Western classical music and had a strong fascinationfor foreign languages, including English, German, and Esperanto. Relevantly,aside from his gift of speaking from an experience of death and dying, whatappeals to me as unique to Miyazawa are the quirky elements of transculturalismthat traverse his novel and the social consciousness that groundshis spiritual practice. While freely crossing borders and pushing boundaries,Miyazawa's voice is firmly rooted in local realities and the Buddhist sutras.The vividly depicted backdrop of his creative work is generally that of his owntown and region, Iwate — known for its exceedingly harsh climate and soil andregarded as the "Tibet of Japan." His hardship in volunteer work, his personalcommitment to the discriminated-against minorities, and his self-sacrificingstruggle for the welfare of the regional peasants who survive on the fringes ofsubsistence have all been well documented and repeatedly praised as a modelto emulate in Japanese media and literary circles.

In the first version I read of his novel Milky Way Railroad, the translators hadtaken the liberty of changing the characters' names into Japanese names, underthe pretext that it would "eliminate any confusion caused by Japanese charactersin a Japanese setting having European names." Since I usually prefer (atfirst) to enter a text directly and to follow the writer's thought process afresh,without the mediation of an introduction, at the end of the book I was deceptivelyleft with a feeling of wonder for what I considered to be a harmlesslycharming story of coming to terms with death, a story "typically Japanese,"as my prejudices dictated. It was only a year later, when a Japanese friend offeredme another translated version of the novel, Night Train to the Stars, that Irealized with awe and utter excitement the scope of Miyazawa's experimentaland cosmopolitan mind. In this translation, not only do the main characters'names, Giovanni (Jovanni) and Campanella (Kanpanera), appear as originallyintended, but a whole complex tapestry of foreign-sounding names of peopleand places emerges from the story, as if by magic. Suppressed in the first adaptedversion I read, these Italian, French, English, and American names, coexistingwith Japanese names, make all the difference. Here the politics of naming takeson an inventive role of its own.

FORCES AND FORMS: "WHERE THE ROAD IS ALIVE"

The Transcultural

Toshiko was the name I first gave to the young woman who dies in Night Passage.But as the script I wrote evolved with the actors and artists who participatedin the film, Toshiko disappeared to leave room for Nabi ("butterfly"in Korean), a name chosen by the actress herself, Denice Lee. Shin, the nameof the little boy, was the one Japanese name I had decided to keep, despitethe fact that the actor for that role is not Japanese. (This small detail did notfail to disturb some discerning viewers when the film was released.) On mynight train, rather than focusing on the two boys, I set out to explore the journeyof two young women accompanied by a little boy. With this shift of gender,everything changes. Miyazawa's original story recedes, leaving here andthere a few pertinent traces in its inspirational role. For me, in order to remainloyal to his spirit, only the glow and the bare minimum of the narrative arekept: the beginning, the ending, and a couple of small core incidences on thetrain.

As with Miyazawa's stories, which, to his credit, continually raised questionsconcerning their true nature (Is it a novel? A children's story? A poem inprose? A Dharma lesson?), Night Passage offers a journey that cuts across cinema,painting, and theater. Spectators coming into the film with expectationsof what a narrative on screen should be have been disquieted by what theyhave seen. The comments they made revolved consciously or unconsciouslyaround the boundaries they'd set up for cinema. As is known from analysesof the film world, there are two distinct Western avant-gardes: one based onthe tradition of the visual arts and the other on the tradition of theater andliterature. Working at hiding the stage, mainstream narratives are all theater,and it is with the power of money (in buying locations and expertise) thatthey naturalize their artifices. (It suffices to listen to these narratives withoutlooking at the pictures to realize how much they remain entrenched in "acting"and theatrical delivery.) In contrast, experimental films borrow so heavilyfrom painting and plastic arts that they're often conceived in negative reactionagainst anything considered to be impure to their vision, such as the verbaldimension and other nonvisual concerns. As with my previous films, NightPassage continues to raise questions about the politics of form (which includesbut is not reduced to the politics of representation). Not only is it at odds withclassifications such as documentary and fiction, but it also explicitly plays withboth traditions of the avant-garde.

I've often been asked whether my making feature narratives is a shift inmy itinerary as a filmmaker, but the one luxury that independent filmmakingoffers is precisely the ability to shuttle, not necessarily from one category toanother but between categories. Created with a mood, rhythm, structure, andpoetry that are at once light and intensive, Night Passage stays away from heavydrama and from the action-driven scenario. It invites viewers to experiencethe magic of film and video anew, to enter and exit the screen by the door oftheir own mediation, sensually or spiritually, or both, according to their ownrealities and background. At the first screening of Night Passage in Berkeley, aviewer (the poet and painter Etel Adnan) described the film to me as a "journeyacross appearances" and "a story of humanity with all five races." She wenton to specify that, yes, she agrees, "the world today is not occidental." Otherviewers noted that the film is "vast in its subject, but very local in the coloring"and made remarks on how distinctly Californian the film's backdrop is in itslandscape and art activities. As one of them put it, "I have been there and Iknow the place, and yet ... I don't quite recognize it. It looks gorgeous, but it'sas if I've never seen it before."

Certainly it is not by mere accident that the cast is highly diverse. The actorsselected to play the roles of the main characters are Chinese American forKyra (Yuan Li-chi); Korean American for Nabi (Denice Lee); Jewish Americanfor Shin (Joshua Miller); Irish for one of the storytellers on the train (HowardDillon); African American for the other storyteller on the train (VernonBush), as well as for the drummers and Black scientists (Sherman Kennedy andYesufu Shangoshola); Chicano for the man of wisdom in the street (LuisSaguar); French for his companion, the flutist (Viviane Lemaigre Dubreuil);Japanese for Nabi's father (Atsushi Kanbayashi, who is actually the art directorBrent Kanbayashi's father); and the list goes on. However, if diversity wasimportant in the process of building cast and crew, as well as of visualizingthe film, it was obviously not upheld for its own sake. Although gender, sexual,and racial diversities are easily recognizable by the eye and ear, their visibilityis often used to tame all disturbing differences, to give these a fixed, familiarface, and hence to turn them into consumable commodities.

What I find infinitely more challenging is to work on and from multiplicity.The term, as used here, should be neither equated with liberal pluralismnor confused with multiculturalism as touted by the mainstream media. Innormalizing diversity, multiculturalism remains deceptively color-blind andutterly divisive. Its bland melting-pot logic denies the racism and sexism thatlie at the core of biopower and biopolitics. Since the film features a transitionfrom one state to another, the focus is on the interaction of passages. Ratherthan treating difference as mere conflict, in Night Passage difference comes withthe art of spacing and is creatively transcultural. Here trans- is not merely amovement across separate entities and rigid boundaries but one in which thetraveling is the very place of dwelling (and vice versa), and leaving is a way ofreturning home — to one's most intimate self. Cultural difference is not a matterof accumulating or juxtaposing several cultures whose boundaries remainintact. The crossing required in the transcultural undermines fixed notionsof identity and border and questions "culture" in its specificity and its veryformation.

As a character in the film says, "Life's a net, made up of so many roads.Dirt roads, asphalt roads, virtual roads. Sometimes you go in a straight line;sometimes you just go round and around in circles.... Drives us crazy butthere's nothing to do about it. And sometimes you find yourself at the crossroads.Then what?" Well, you get stuck, or else take the risk and "go with thewind — where the road is alive," as Nabi urges Kyra to follow her inner voice.The crossroads are where the dynamics of the film lie. They are empty centersthanks to which an indefinite number of paths can converge and part in a newdirection. Inter-, multi-, post-, and trans-: these are the prefixes of our times.They define the before, after, during, and between of social and ethical consciousness.Each has a history and a seemingly precise moment of appearance,disappearance, and reappearance. Although bound to specifics, they are, infact, all related as trans-events.

Time Passage

At twelve, I found myself in sinister water: I drowned. Not in the sea but in thechlorine depths of a fire station's swimming pool. My brother pulled me out intime. Since then I have had to live with the ordeal of the liquid descent. Everynow and then, the experience of drowning arises again from nowhere, and theencounter with death in water returns with ever-changing faces. Never twicethe same, and yet always It. From one nightmare to another, I slowly learn topull myself out in time, to wake up just as I am being swallowed in a wall ofwater — usually a tidal wave. Now, as if by magic, sometimes I die not andemerge laughing in the fall, letting the drowning settle. Like vapor on seawater,the fear vanishes. I awake, feeling light in radiant darkness. The nightmare hasturned into a dream.

A passage involves both time and timing. For me, the advent of digital cinema,or D-cinema, as the tech community calls it, is a timely event. Its technologyseems most compatible with Miyazawa's inventive spirit and is very aptto capture his poetic world of beings and events — at once eccentric and oh soboringly ordinary. In view of the potentials and unparalleled impact of thisnew technology on the film culture, the elusive story of Death can also take ona new lease on life. The unknown, like the fantastic, is never merely out there;it is always already in here, there (in the ordinary, legible image) where oneneglects to look with eyes wide shut.

Already, in our previous feature, A Tale of Love (35mm, 108 mins, 1996,directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jean-Paul Bourdier), a character notes thatin the realm of photography and representation, the two impossibles are Loveand Death. Love stories are often stories made without love, and showing animage of death is primarily showing time passing. No matter how imaginativeone is, capturing these two on screen is literally impossible. The best onecan do is to circle around them without falling into the clichés abundantlysupplied by the media and its repertoire of ready-made images. To questionour consumption of these images is to touch the core of a whole system ofnarrative cinema that determines the way we sell and buy love-and-deathstories.