"Pale Flower" (1964)

(Music by the inimitable Toru Takemitsu. Direction by the deft Masahiro Shinoda.)
...
She, the pale flower of his withered heart,
asks him,
"What time is it?"
The night obsidian-edged, & the zinc stars
of Tokyo, merge
in dispersive velocity.
Speed past. The dire
need for meaning at a dire time. Faces
in the crowd, beasts
in hiding. He has a nightmare - they
drive in her convertible,
borrowed from the noir films of holly-
wood, but she drives
onward to alphaville, in search of love
or dope. A new wave.
She doesn't betray him, much worse:
steals his composure,
he a yakuza, miraculously
in love with the death
she sets off in him like a fever.

He answers, "2:30."
Laughing, her paperthin arms
& hands
sinewed on the wheel,
the wind raising her voice like
a dashed petal,
she tells him, "I've no use
for the dawn;
I'd rather these lunatic nights
endlessly."

In a cold war of coward
against coward,
the yakuza smokes cigarettes
& gambles his time
away. She, the pale flower
of his withered
heart, speeds him to a
resolution:
a resolve to kill the killer.
Even lame
vendettas hold forth
pathos. He
shares with her an incongruous
love for gambling;
the nihilist & his sweet
heart, she
nameless as a nightmare -
her small face
sharpened by the lust
that carves
his guts with savage marks.
He will kill
again. No better high
than imagining
what a man must feel
with the blade
steep in the tenderest,
softest
part, the withered heart
of his pale
flesh, as he staggers
down the stairs
operatic
& starched in crimson
the white
linen of his newlybought
doublebreast:

He tells her,
I will kill a man, a man
I know nothing
of, but a man I must kill.
No other emotion
not even
gambling, rivals that sensation
of -
she interrupts:
"How... meaningless."

When he wakes up from his fever,
he is in prison.
An inmate, an old
accomplice,
finds him in the courtyard.
Informs him
that the girl, the pale flower
of his withered
heart,
is dead.
Only then does he yearn for her,
with all
his body & soul, the branches
of his desiccate
heart reaching out across
the threshold
of a night caged in memory -
wild geese
flying out in an early morning
sky he can't
remember seeing ever
again.
...