5

If the singer and songwriter Jacques Brel wrote the theme for Carol Reed's 1949 film The Third Man it would be the hatsumelo (train departure warning song) for Ebisu Station on the Yamanote line, but I have the feeling that I have said this somewhere before and that this thought will pervade everything I write from here on, like the anti-hero Harry Lime's presence before he actually appears on screen in The Third Man, or like Joseph Conrad's mysterious Kurtz lurking upriver in the Belgian Congo. Jacques Brel was a Belgian, Orson Welles played Harry Lime, and Orson Welles was going to make Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness as his first film before he made Citizen Kane in 1941, but I am uncertain of how this will all play out in regards to the looping Yamanote train.