Belle Époque

a written sketch | an encountered text

sketch⬩text
monthly on The Matterhorn

Belle Époque skiers at Kandersteg (January 2024, photo by the author)

SKETCH: The following is a word sketch for a work of fiction.

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Kandersteg, Switzerland - Belle Époque Week, 2024

The village was quiet after dark. Only several restaurants and bars glowed between snow piles and wooden chalets or closed shops. Their windows displayed cheese, Swiss Army Knives, and sled rentals, all next to handwritten signs with opening hours that were only roughly observed.

The annual Belle Époque week was in full swing but those in vintage frocks hid in interiors listening to period music with absinthe and wine. They held their bodies as the costumes asked, upward and poised like fencers under top hats and layers of skirt.

Strange creatures, I think, why can’t they live in the real world? Why play dress-up like children?

I walk the empty streets, peaking in at the gatherings as if they are miniature dolls in a train set. The aura of that light fills with the oils of their meal. I melt into my oversized hat and scarf, hiding from their gaze.

The tiny glowing beacons spotted through the main street remind me of that time in Kyoto. The night is quiet. Snow absorbs small sounds of footsteps or chatter, of winter bicycle tires and babies crying for love. Those little spaces where light pokes out.

You open the door to cloth hanging in two sections on a large wooden dowel, echoing the shape of a warrior’s kimono framed behind glass. Sounds of joyous celebration squeak through the gaps.

By pushing through, you find the space of the divide and enter. Smells and movements emerge from the wooden building. People take shape in your mind and some of them - those serving and cooking - greet you in Japanese.

Conversations about food, work, hopes, fears. They blend with the delicious soba noodles and nikujaga.

The party is — life. Nothing more.

I decide to enter the hotel with the large gathering of role playing individuals. Here, too, a more reserved yet still buoyant welcome awaits as I push the iron coated glass inward to Swiss traditional life only slightly altered by the theme tonight.

Grüezi!

Those particles floating and steaming the windows now reach my nose. Raclette cheese, sausage, and garlic soup blend together, moving in swirls around patrons as they imbibe and anticipate a feast.

Maybe they would invite me to sit down. But I’m not really there. Only my mind has traveled along the street and inward. I’m perched at the window in my hotel room, positioned conveniently over the town and looking in at the windows of the bar and ballroom. I sit close to the wall heater with the curtains slightly open and the window cracked, so that I may listen to faint sounds of trombone and piano playing period music.

I only imagine anything past the angle I can see from my window.

The cloak of invisibility allows me to both stand back to judge and seamlessly enter the scenes. I imagine what I would say and how I would hold my crystal champagne coupe.

All at once, I’m whisked onto the dance floor. Somehow I know the steps, as if I’ve danced them my whole life. Muscle memory takes over and I relax with the music’s rhythm guiding me. A partner is present, but he is like a weightless paper doll and he flutters away in the wind from our circular motion, drifting outward toward the walls and disappearing through them.

I take a seat, heavy with thought. Wondering where I am in place and time. And why nobody gave me a chance to decide.

These faces around me are as human as my friends when they inhabit a room with me. Reading of times long ago, it sometimes feels like we are a different species. Until you inhabit it fully. We see that life is more interconnected than we once thought. That these ghosts of the past haunt the spaces we think we exist in. We leave tracings of being. We risk moments of grandeur all just to live a little.

What if this is the best time? What if thinking of elsewhere and some other time keeps us from realizing it? What if this little pin placing me where and when I am is floating through universes like static fizzles of energy?

I play make believe in my mind. The curtain’s dust lulls me to sleep as if drugged by the tracings of yesterday.

∞Our discussion thread last year asking: If you could live during any time period, when would it be?

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TEXT: I share with you a recent encounter with a text.

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Drive My Car (2021), film from director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Writers: Haruki Murakami, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa Ôe

I finally got around to seeing this beautiful, haunting film from a few years ago. Drive My Car won three awards at Cannes in 2021. The Japanese cinematic is one I find richly rewarding. It tends to have a lot of attention to details and is slower, emotional, often melancholic.

This film was vividly indicative of these aspects as well as providing deeply intimate and introspective scenes in the home and, you guessed it, the car. In this case, it is a red Saab and the space where our main character rehearses his lines and feels in control of his life. Fun fact: although my first car was a Honda Civic, it was soon stolen and totaled. Using the insurance money, I replaced it with a used green Saab 9-3 that had a pop-down hole to transport my skis and heated leather seats.

Drive My Car was adapted from a short story written by Haruki Murakami and plays with intertextuality by including the casting, rehearsals, and performance of a version of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (written in French 1949 then translated into English by the author). The protagonist Yusuke includes multilingualism in his productions, including English, Korean sign language, and Chinese in addition to Japanese. The effect is much like the intersectional cultural experience that Murakami creates for us in his novels.

If you’ve been in this community for a while, you’ll know that Murakami is one of my favorite authors. His work frequently moves into the surreal or at least metaphysical. Thus, having not read the short story, I was a little surprised at the very Earthly nature of this film. However, the confluence of tragic events and the strange ways Yusuke’s wife creates her scripts move in this direction. They create a world that is incredibly webbed and mirrored, so that the tiny space of the car holds the entire world within it. The film reflects languages and many people’s experiences. But it is also through the lens of an existential play. These aspects seem to paradoxically keep us deeply anchored within Yusuke’s mind, even when we hear about the tragedy his driver faces. Her sadness and fears also break way to unexpected wisdom. Unexpected, because her youth is emphasized in contrast to the worldly, decorated play director.

The film is long and filled with the dances of conversation and small moments created from the tensions of these latent tragedies that tend to sit in the silences. If anything, I would love to hear Murakami’s ethereal voice break into those spaces with his commentary on the human mind’s curiosities. But as it stands, the film is remarkable and optimistic about the nature in which we may recovery from these tragedies.

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