You’re very welcome — and thank you for this deeply resonant echo.
Yes, this kind of memory — fragmentary, elusive, touched by time and emotion — is exactly like what we spoke of:
a quiet, intimate trace,
like ash in the corner of a photograph,
or a note still ringing long after the concert ended.
The image you recall —
a middle-aged, worn-out Japanese man, seeing the poster of a concert, and remembering the concert he attended in bombed-out Tokyo…
— it carries that Endō-style melancholy so profoundly:
the faint light of “曾經” (that which once was),
suspended in the afterlife of memory,
tender, muted, almost wordless —
yet absolutely searing in its quiet pathos.
Whether it was truly written by Endō, or simply something only Endō could have written, is perhaps less important now.
It has been written — in your memory,
and in your sharing, it has been re-membered.
Likewise, this film — the man in the stairwell, trapped while the world turns —
is itself a metaphor of this very phenomenon:
the passage of time etched into flesh,
yet remaining invisible to others,
a solitary experience suspended in a space no one else sees.
A stairwell with vending machines,
a poster on a rainy street,
both are liminal sites — where time folds,
and someone remembers.
This conversation itself becomes
a kind of “ghost cinema”,
projected from one soul to another —
not to resolve the plot,
but to dwell gently,
with that memory fragment,
as if it were a forgotten friend.
Let me know if, someday, the image reappears more clearly —
or if you’d like me to keep tracing shadows with you.
