127

At one hour and two minutes into The Third Man and at one hundred and twenty-seven entries into Takinogawamonogatari, Harry Lime makes his entrance accompanied by a cat. The actor is cued. The cat pads down the cobblestone street to its mark on the doorstep of an apartment building, then briefly glances at someone off-camera, possibly the director. A single glance is all it takes to show the feline's high level of reverence for the movie-making process and simultaneously undermine the believability of the scene itself. One can almost hear director Carol Reed whispering to the cat in barely contained rage not to look at him, to look at Orson Welles, "Look at Orson!" The cat then plays a bit with Welles's shoelace (most certainly slathered in sardine oil as an enticement), followed by a thorough cleaning of its paw and then a gargantuan yawn that concludes the scene.

47

I am looking at a relatively mutilated, 3” x 5” photograph of my childhood room. I brought this small catalyst with me from New York across the ocean to Japan. My current state of remove on a different continent and across the span of years affords me the opportunity to methodically, almost surgically go back into the heart of adolescent darkness and contemplate what exactly makes a high school room tick. I note the two old, battered skateboard decks mounted on the wall in the top left corner of the photograph. They are trophies. Recently, I noticed that there are two skateboarders regularly in front of Ōji Station in a parking lot on the east side. The numerous generations of skateboard decks developed since I skateboarded have evolved so much that now it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the front and back of a skateboard. That one skating closer to the Toden Arakawa line could potentially face forward and move backwards, face backwards and move backwards, face forward and move forwards, and the most interesting possibility to me: face backwards and move forwards. The last possibility reminds me of photographing, of expressing gratitude for mounting distance.

29

On Sundays I sometimes go to Narita Airport to photograph the people photographing the jets and the people photographing their children photographing the jets from the outdoor observation deck. Today I am thinking about that Austrian Airlines jet that just arrived from somewhere. Also, I am thinking about traveling from New York to Vienna to see The Third Man on January 17, 2003 at 7:44 AM and the jet bridge stretching out to meet the Japan Airlines jet that was next to me. Could there have been a hatsumelo warning song as the jet bridge pulled away from the aircraft? If the hatsumelo for the Japan Airlines jet flying to Vienna were in fact the theme from The Third Man, then what Japanese film might have been referenced in my plane's departure song as the jet bridge pulled away? On that note, could Austrian Airlines hatsumelos for jets departing Vienna for Narita possibly play Kojun Saito's theme from Yasujirō Ozu's 1953 film Tokyo Story?

28

I am sitting at the kitchen counter watching the 14:30 JST afternoon light illuminate my beer and pondering how each weekend in Vienna Harry Lime and Holly Martins are resurrected when the film The Third Man screens. Orson Wells (Harry Lime) and Joseph Cotten (Holly Martins) both previously starred in Citizen Kane where they played close friends. Watching The Third Man one can't help but sense their friendship leaking out from Citizen Kane and into The Third Man. I decided to screen the two films consecutively and marveled at the extraordinary saga of a tumultuous and shifting friendship with characters that argue, age, die, reappear, are thought to be dead, then reappear again and argue before finally dying. I specifically chose an icy cold Ebisu beer rather than my usual Sapporo to commemorate the occasion. The long yellow streaks of late afternoon light across the white counter top and intensified through my glass of beer serve as a lovely tribute to the strange longevity and richness of their friendship.

27

It turns out that the Ebisu Hasumelo for the Yamanote actually IS the theme from the Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. I can’t believe that I stumbled into being correct. Very much like the film's bumbling quasi-protagonist Holly Martins.

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.