Kyoko Kasuya

Diary of Eve’s Land draws from a series of video interviews Kyoko Kasuya conducted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2023. Through social media, she invited women to participate in the project, ultimately bringing together five individuals from diverse backgrounds: a doctor, a psychologist, a medical student, an IT professional, and an immigrant studying at an online university. Against the backdrop of Saudi Arabia’s sweeping societal transformation under the Vision 2030 government initiative, the work captures candid testimonies and everyday footage of women navigating the tensions between societal expectations and their personal aspirations.

This film is a sequel to “Listen to the Voices of the Sea” (2019) the first work in art video, based on a diary of a Japanese kamikaze pilot, Hachiro Sasaki. Kamikaze means wind of God in Japanese. During WW2 Japanese pilots attacked American aircraft carriers and army ships by dive-bombing their airplanes. For the realization of the second project, I transcribed a part of the diary of another kamikaze soldier from southern Japan, Norimitsu Takushima. By putting in his place a fictional French character, Noé Teissier, this translation sits in a broader contemporary context. The film ultimately reflects relationships to life, to death, to love speaking towards the universal experiences of any soldier.

This is an initial experimental short film based on an extract of the diary of Hachiro Sasaki, a former Japanese student at the university of Tokyo who became a Kamikaze during the Pacific War. His diary was published in a collection of writings by Japanese soldiers, under the title Kiké Wadatsumi no Koé (Listen to the Voices from the Sea) in 1949. I have decided to transfer this story into the territory of France so as to contribute to a better mutual understanding of how a man, confronted by the reality of war, while struggling against his own destiny, ends up by accepting it. Today, the memory and humanity of these Japanese soldiers seems to me to require a work of enlightenment and memorial amendment.