Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
tomoyo kawari
golden gai district in Shinjuku, photo Gustavo de Mattos Jahn
The bar la jetée photographed by Nils Edström
BAR LA JETEÉ
text
by ANNA DUBOSC
Tomoyo Kawai was a friend of my mother. In the 1960s, they worked together at the same film distribution company, the Shibata Organization. After opening her bar, Tomoyo continued to work occasionally for the company, scouting films abroad.
We saw her every year in Paris, where my mother had been living since the 1970s. Tomoyo always arrived with four Japanese friends — single, childless women who were passionate about cinema. They would come for dinner at our place on Rue Ganneron before heading down to the Cannes Film Festival. In this way, we were part of the journey of cinema, that “great democratic night,” as Marguerite Duras called it.
I loved this group of Japanese women, noisy and talkative, as if unburdened by the presence of men.
Tomoyo opened her bar in 1974 in Tokyo. It’s located in Golden Gai, a network of old narrow streets connected by dimly lit alleys. A hub for black markets and prostitution until the late 1950s, Golden Gai became a lively district, home to tiny bars housed in its rundown two-story buildings.
Tomoyo named her bar after a Chris Marker film, though he himself preferred to call it “The Little Bar of Shinjuku.” A few scenes with La Jetée appear in his film Sans Soleil, shot in 1982, as if the original and its copy had become lost in the folds of cinema.
“Some might drink to the death of kings, to the fall of empires,” wrote Chris Marker in Le Dépays, “but in Shinjuku, we drink to the death of cats and owls.”
Those iconic orange, hallucinatory cats — both a motif and symbol of his work — are painted on the door of La Jetée. A rickety staircase leads to it, barely large enough to fit five people around the counter. The walls are covered in film posters, and the whisky bottles, signed, await the next visit from Francis Ford Coppola or Wim Wenders.
We’re far from the time when the little bar in Shinjuku reminded the narrator of Sans Soleil of “the Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it.” Now, every cinephile and filmmaker passing through Tokyo makes a pilgrimage to La Jetée; it has become a sacred rite.
A few months ago, I was in Tokyo with my friend Gustavo. We stopped by La Jetée to see Tomoyo. I hadn’t seen her in years. She hadn’t changed — still with that attentive gaze characteristic of bartenders and psychoanalysts, a gaze that holds its own secrets.
We arrived early, the first customers of the night. Of course, we immediately started talking about cinema. What else could we discuss? Like with my mother, it was the only topic.
We talked about Ryu¯suke Hamaguchi’s latest film, about
Hong Sang-soo and Alain Guiraudie, jumping from one to the other with no transitions. We kept drinking. The boundaries between reality and fiction grew more porous.
Gustavo took a few shots of the bar with his old Soviet 16mm camera. Tomoyo ducked behind the counter to snap a picture of him and his camera.
Eventually, another customer arrived — an eccentric Scotsman finishing a world tour. Strangely, he knew nothing about cinema but looked like a traveling salesman straight out of a ’90s comedy.
Tomoyo returned behind the counter. We had another drink and kept talking late into the night, time stretching and warping under her Sphinx-like gaze.
