Preface - Comparative Literature - University of California, Berkeley

Transcription

Experimental Arts
in Postwar
Japan
Moments
of Encounter,
Engagement,
and Imagined Return
Harvard East Asian Monographs 329
Experimental Arts
in Postwar
Japan
Moments
of Encounter,
Engagement,
and Imagined Return
Miryam Sas
Published by the Harvard University Asia Center
and distributed by Harvard University Press
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 2010
© 2010 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Printed in the United States of America
The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese
Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also
sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Index by
Printed on acid-free paper
Last figure below indicates year of this printing
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
for Beckett Ariel and Yair Reilly,
who came into the world as this book was being formed
Contents
List of Figures
ix
Preface
xi
Note to the Reader
Introduction: Death Acts (Survival Acts)
Part I: Post-Shingeki ’s Edge
xviii
1
00
1 No Holds Barred: Betsuyaku Minoru
and the Paradoxes of Total Commitment
00
2 Terayama Shūji: Gender, Power, and the Imperative Voice
00
3 Blindness and the Visuality of Desire
00
4 Intersubjective Spaces, Communal Dreams
00
Part II: Theories of Encounter
00
5 Theories of Encounter: Breaking the Everyday
00
Part III: Imaginations of Return: Film, Butō, Photography
00
6 X Marks the Spot: Experimental Film Crossings
00
7 On Homecoming: Hijikata’s Writings and Butō
00
8 The Provoke Era: New Languages of Japanese Photography
00
Conclusion: Counterfeit Coins / Phantasms
00
viii
Contents
Reference Matter
Notes
000
Bibliography
000
Index
000
List of Figures
1
The invalid poses, Zō
00
2
One veteran holds the other, Shōgo no densetsu
00
3
Tenjō sajiki theater, Shibuya
00
4
Saint-Master machine, Nuhikun
00
5
“His Master’s Voice”
00
6
Self-spanking machine, Nuhikun
00
7a–c
Image of boxes inside boxes, Video Letters
00
8a–c
Torn and resewn photo of Terayama’s mother,
and photo of mother and boy moving apart, Video Letters
00
Images of Terayama with a dog, a painted picture of dogs,
and the hiragana word inu (dog), Video Letters
00
10
Image from Lee U-Fan’s Correspondance series
00
11a–b
Stills from Heso to Genbaku
00
12
Man upside down, Batsu
00
13
Man draws Xs on the woman’s back, Batsu
00
14
The man looks into the camera, Batsu
00
9a–c
15
The man “crosses out” the sky, Batsu
00
16
Opening sequence, Gebarutopia yokokuhen
00
17
Hijikata Tatsumi in Nikutai no hanran
00
18a–b
Cherry blossoms, Moriyama Daidō, Nagano, 1972
00
19a–b
Beauty shop sign and poster on a wall, Tōno monogatari
00
Preface
This book examines central moments in the arts in Japan from the 1960s
to the early 1980s, focusing first on examples from experimental theater and
then on related works of film and video, butō dance, and photography.1 My
approach emphasizes critical readings of these works and artists’ writings in
order to understand them on the artists’ own terms and in a complex dialectic
with key issues of contemporary theory.
This project started as an exploration of the relation between performance
and memory in the Japanese experimental theater during the prolific period of
the 1960s and 1970s, growing out of my previous work in Fault Lines: Cultural
Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Surrealist poets and avant-garde writers in the
prewar period grappled with questions of the relation between language and
the “actual,” the limits of the visual, and the structures of subjectivity. Such
issues carried forward into the postwar period “transposed,” in a certain sense,
into the realm of the body, the corporeal / performing arts, and especially into
collaborative works of theater, film, and dance. Although experiments in the
performative avant-gardes were already underway during the 1920s through
the early 1940s, there is a strong and specific resonance between the particular
kinds of inquiries that took place in the realm of language (poetry, manifestos)
in the 1920s and 1930s and their legacies or reinvention in the work of performance and “post-shingeki” experimental theater that came to prominence
during the 1960s and 1970s.2
In writing about surrealism in my first book, I drew on theoretical models
of memory to challenge prevailing discourses of influence in the study of
cultural transmission; instead, I focused on disjunctions and “fault lines” in
the temporalities and relationships between European and Japanese poetry and
thought. Experimental performance works of the postwar period pushed my
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Preface
readings in new directions. Grounded in the era of student protests and political demonstrations (“engagement”), they required an accounting for issues
of political agency and efficacy as well as the limits of these. In an era of
changing gender norms and familial structures, in which the debates on subjectivity took center stage once again, artists and writers explored the structure
of “intersubjective relations”—collectivities, collaborations, and intimacies—
in ways that demanded closer attention (“encounters”). To account for changing media forms and newly rearticulated avenues of artistic production (video,
photography), I was pushed toward the task of a theoretical accounting for
the modes of interaction between spectator / participant and artistic work. The
works here also brought me to confront notions of “origins” and “returns”—
some of them centering around essentialist or explicitly fictionalized ideas of
nation, others around ideas of ethnicity or embodied race, still others around
questions of the nature of “reality”—that many of these works challenged,
mobilized or aimed to overturn.
Critical paradigms framed by the experimental artists themselves are at the
heart of my endeavor to read these plays, films, videos, photo journals, and
numerous critical writings. The “fundamental promiscuity of the arts” in the
1960s and 1970s, as one curator phrased it,3 makes divisions along the lines of
discipline or genre misleading. Instead, one can identify interlocking networks
of artists and local “scenes.” The works I choose to engage here are often not
those that relate to political activism in the most direct ways—yet these works
do reflect on their relation to the “political” and “activism,” as well as “art,” in
complex and striking ways. If at times they focus as much on the limits and
foreclosures of agency as on its openings and opportunities, they are always
attentive to the stakes of their explorations in terms of questions of value,
social practice, and ethics. Similar problems formed the core of many earlier
debates around surrealism in Japan as well—whether it had sufficient connection with “reality” in a time of crisis, or was excessively detached and hence
“warped”; and the nature of the “reality” thus conceived. The experimental
artists studied here thus often expound on the nature of “reality” as well as the
related concepts of materiality, actuality, and concreteness.
The idea of “moments” in the title reflects two things: first, that a work
such as this one aims rather for a deeper knowledge of a necessarily limited
selection of works and artists, as they illuminate fundamental issues whose
relevance can be extrapolated to the broader range of artists of these historical
times; and second, in reading critic and photographer Taki Kōji’s “Memorandum” in the first issue of the photography journal Provoke (1968–69), I came
upon his use of the term keiki, usually translated as “chance” or “opportunity,”
and learned of its alternative translation for the Hegelian philosophical term
Preface
xiii
“moment” (Das Moment), not as a moment in time but as a kind of force that
allows for a particular conglomeration of circumstances to come together, to
work in tandem (hence the colloquial meaning of opportunity). The encounters described in this book are most frequently structured in terms of their
possibility of occurring, the occasion of an opportunity rather than its full
realization. Similarly, “engagement” here is most frequently an aim or project,
an attempt rather than a completed act, and one that requires a certain “leap”
(from Kierkegaard’s leap into subjectivity) rather than a linear teleological /
political progression. Hence, the “case studies” in this book represent and
explore within themselves just such “moments” in which the opportunity for
a novel experiment is enacted / explored, and, very often, its limits also come
to be exposed in the process.
In her argument on the issue of engagement in Jean-Paul Sartre, Suzanne
Guerlac outlines the current critical place of the problem of engagement in
relation to post-structuralist theory. In her rereading of Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que
la littérature?—one of his fundamental treatises on engaged literature and the
possibilities of “committed” works of art—Guerlac claims that in the light of
a fundamental rift within the genealogy of post-structuralist theory around the
false dichotomy between aesthetics and politics, the notion of “engagement”
came to be supplanted by “theory,” only to return to haunt and reconfigure
the “theory” it would now surpass. Whether one is sympathetic to the idea of
“engagement” or against it, she points out, “engagement remains a thoroughly
familiar notion, one associated with an outdated cultural polemic that opposed
esthetics to politics.” While in the 1950s in France, engagement held a central
ideological place, critics such as Julia Kristeva in Tel Quel in the 1960s argued in
favor of modernist poetics and signifying practices, such that, according to
Guerlac, “the issue of engagement [was] ultimately absorbed in the program of
theory.” Post-structuralism, with its challenges to humanism and to the status
of the subject, eventually “buried engagement”; yet “engagement has returned
to haunt post-structuralism. Today feminist and multicultural perspectives presuppose some version of it.” One thus sees a dialectical process in the history
of the problem of engagement: “although what we call ‘theory’ could be said
to have emerged in reaction to engagement, engagement is now invoked in the
name of a dépassement of theory.” Nonetheless, as Guerlac claims, “the familiar
notion of engagement has hardly been read.”4
Rather than continuing to rehash the “outdated cultural polemic that opposed aesthetics to politics,” this book holds as one of its aims to press forward, in the context of studies of Japanese arts, in relation to this impasse
that still plays out in the theoretical trajectories of engagement and poststructuralism. Each work examined here has its own illuminating way of
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Preface
framing questions that parallel this one, but in relation to its own times and
artistic and cultural “scenes.” Sartre’s work, though at first idiosyncratically
understood, was perhaps one of the most influential critical strains in the
immediate postwar period in Japan. In part popularized by Sakaguchi Ango’s
reading of Sartre’s story “Intimité,” it was at first conflated with the strand
of “carnal literature” (nikutai bungaku); but by the time of Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir’s visit to Japan in 1966, when they were known in the media as
chishikijin no bītoruzu (the Beatles of the intellectuals), a more subtle understanding had taken form in artistic and critical circles.5 Their popularity and the sense
of their countercultural power was such that high school students were known
to hide copies of Being and Nothingness (along with works of Ōe Kenzaburō, and
manga journals like Tsuge Yoshiharu’s Garo) behind their textbooks in class.6
Here, we may note that many artists followed parallel routes to the issues Sartre
raised, including his central exploration of the relation between engagement and
the violence of the intersubjective encounter. In Sartre’s revision of Alexandre
Kojève’s reading of Hegel, the work of art “mediates the intersubjective encounter”7 and thus the place of the work of art in the encounter between
subjects presupposes a reflection on the question of “engagement.” The term
“engagement” (angajuman in the Japanese loanword from the French) also became popular in the 1960s in colloquial speech—as in “Angajuman suru ka?”
which could be translated as, “Are you going to the demo?”8 Yet it is in a much
broader sense that I ultimately pursue the question here as the engagement
between subjects, between a viewer and a work of art, between a subject and
the environment.9 “Engagement” is framed as a problem that bridges theoreticcal, aesthetic, and political questions. It grows out of the problem of intersubjective encounter analyzed in critical detail in the middle section of the
book, and extends its reach in the works of theater and critical paradigms of
film, dance, and photography examined in the earlier and later chapters.
How do the specters of nation and national origin haunt works that deal
so profoundly with the dislocation of the subject and the (limited, but ever
hopeful) striving toward such values as connection, freedom, and transformation? How does the striving toward the international (or the Euro-American)
in the world of the contemporary ( gendai) inflect images of locality, place, situatedness? One could trace the circulation of discourses of liberation, dislocation, and subjective dissolution from Sartre through Jacques Derrida and from
Lee U-fan to Yoshimoto Takaaki; parts of this book discuss some of these in
their relevance to the Japanese art scene. Theoretical and critical discourses,
translated and quickly disseminated in a Japanese art world striving to conceive
of itself as relevant and to be intelligible on the international stage, enter into
relation with a local elaboration and at times co-optation of the terms of the
Preface
xv
experimental or avant-garde (such as in the Osaka Expo of 1970) as artists
attempted to frame suitable conceptual models that could continue, supplement, or supplant the terms of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes.10 If
the term zen’ei (avant-garde) comes to be replaced by the more broadly applied
gendai (contemporary), the term jikken (experimental) in this book functions,
differently at different times, to bridge modern and contemporary forms. In
discussing works from the underground or post-shingeki theater worlds to the
worlds of dance, photography, and film, I try to stay close to the critical
parameters used by practitioners and critics to describe their own projects. In
the last part of the book, I focus more closely on the variously inflected problem of nation and “origins,” proposing a reading of what I would here dub
“flexible, appropriative essentialisms.” Artists reiterate and struggle with these
essentialist discourses in a self-conscious way (“imagined returns”), aware of
their status as myth, trope, or dream. Experimental works reframe nihonjinron
discourses (rhetorics of Japanese uniqueness) while nonetheless, and sometimes misleadingly, drawing on or exploiting their power as origin stories, longings, and unfulfillable, generative desires.
This study, then, is not the linear history of the arts of an era, but rather,
more of a theoretical tour of key moments that aims to map the intersection
of central critical and theoretical questions with specific and prolifically generative experimental art works. My argument is that the issues outlined in this
selection of works resonate through many other art forms and the work of
many other artists beyond those that could be discussed in detail here, and
that the particular forms they take at this moment can teach us something
about these works and about the arts of the period of the 1960s and 1970s
more broadly. The resonance of such theoretical issues clearly continues in
altered forms well beyond the end of the time period under examination. Some
of the ways I have come to view these questions came to prominence, or
became more fully articulated in later critical / post-structuralist thought, but
nonetheless, I argue, are fully if sometimes ambivalently present, and creatively
articulated in the works of this time. It is my hope that the book will contribute to the currently growing body of scholarship that takes seriously the
theoretical stakes and insights of experimental works generated in Japan from
this period to the present.11
This book has been in progress over many years and I have found support
from many sources along the way. I would like to thank the following institutions and programs at the University of California, Berkeley, for particularly
generous ongoing research grants: the Mellon Faculty Fellowships, the Humanities Research Fellowship, the Committee on Research, and the Center for
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Preface
Japanese Studies. I also benefited from grants from the Doreen B. Townsend
Center for the Humanities at Berkeley and Seikei University’s Center for Asian
and Pacific Studies. Graduate and undergraduate students at Berkeley discussed many of the key texts with me, and audiences at numerous universities
responded to parts of this book in earlier versions.
I thank the following people for material help, thoughtful interviews, and
many forms of encouragement: Senda Akihiko, Betsuyaku Minoru, Uchino
Tadashi, Moriyama Daidō, Gōda Nario, Uno Kuniichi, Higashi Yoshizumi,
Kishida Asao, Inaba Mayumi, Ōsawa Hisayuki, Shimokōbe Michiko, Kogawa
(Komuro) Midori, Ohno Kazuo, Hibino Kei, Motofuji Akiko, Tatsumi Takayuki, Kotani Mari, Keiko Courdy, Yuki Ishimatsu, Odette Aslan, Morishita
Takashi, Okada Mariko, Fukuzumi Haruo, Nishimura Tomohiro, Hirasawa Gō,
Michelle Puetz, and Jonathan Mark Hall, among many others. At Berkeley,
my colleagues in Comparative Literature and Film Studies helped create a truly
supportive environment for writing. I was blessed to receive invaluable research
assistance and unmatched energy, dedication, creativity, and sheer stamina from
the brilliant Maiko Morimoto-Tomita throughout. She is a true collaborator
on this work, and I cannot thank her (and her family) enough. Thanks to
William M. Hammell at the Harvard University Asia Center for intelligent
editing and expert guidance in the production process. I received insightful
editorial suggestions from Sarah Ann Wells, and research help at various stages
from John Tain, Jessica Crewe, Paul Roquet, Abbie Yamamoto, Glenna Gordon, and Amy Wang. Many thanks are due to Miriam Bartha, Michiko Tsushima, Frédéric Maurin,Yariv Rabinovitch, Barri Malek, Coriander Reisbord,
Rachel Mercy-Simpson, Lucy Ames, Irene Moore, Amy Greenstadt, Dan Rosenberg, Mia Fineman, Sarah Boehm, Sumi Shin, Josine Shapiro, Melissa Milgram, 57, Takeyoshi Nishiuchi, Carolie Sly, Dan O’Neill, Kimber Simpkins,
Liz Bogan, Rehan Khan and Susan Haskell Khan, Shelley Doty and Jodi and
Zev, the Greenwald-Bachs, and Harry and Dorothy Rubin, for many gifts of
music, theater, inspiration, encouragement, and friendship, and to Luz Maria
Monréal and her family for making time for completion of this book materially
possible. The late Professor Edwin McClellan, honored teacher and mentor,
gave valuable support and heartening advice at key turning points. I am grateful
to the late Barbara Johnson for starting me on the path toward literature. Unbounded thanks to my parents, Nira and Joel Silverman, and to Sharon, Gary,
and Benjamin; Harriet, Larry, Steffen and Dolly; Edna, Alex, Jason, Abby, Carl,
Matthew, and Eric. Most especially, for impossible levels of patience and lots of
playtime, listening and chocolate, big yavos to Paul, and more recently, Beckett
and Yair.
Preface
xvii
Earlier versions of portions of this book have been published in alternate
forms. A version of Chapter 7 appeared as “Hands, Lines, Acts,” Qui Parle
13:2 (Spring / Summer 2003): 19–51, and in French as “De chair et de pensée:
le butō et le surréalisme” in Butō(s), edited by Odette Aslan, CNRS Éditions,
in the series “Arts du Spectacle” (2002). Initial research on Betsuyaku Minoru
(here found in Chapter 1 and the Conclusion) appeared in the Review of Asian
and Pacific Studies 17 (1998): 35–52.
Note to the Reader
Macrons are not used for well-known Japanese place names. I preserve the
Japanese order, surname first, for names of Japanese persons except when
the individual resides in the United States and / or is known primarily for his
or her work in English.
Experimental Arts
in Postwar
Japan
Moments
of Encounter,
Engagement,
and Imagined Return
INTRODUCTION
Death Acts (Survival Acts)
Hauntings
“Terayama is dying. This is really the end,” announced Kujō Kyōko, the exwife of theater director and artistic impresario Terayama Shūji, to the assembled members of his Tenjō sajiki theater troupe on May 4, 1983.1 The group
was in the middle of rehearsing for an upcoming Japanese and European tour.
By the time Kujō came to them that day, the flamboyant and ragtag group
of actors, longtime associates, and friends had been to Europe many times,
traveling to Poland, Holland, Germany, France, Belgium, England, as well
as Yugoslavia, Iran, the United States, and many other locations as a highly
acclaimed though often controversial representative of the Japanese theatrical
avant-garde. Together with butō dance practitioners, Suzuki Tadashi’s highly
polished theatrical troupe, and Ninagawa Yukio’s adaptations of the classics
and Shakespeare, Tenjō sajiki was among the best (and earliest) internationally
known Japanese performance groups to emerge from the tumultuous and prolific period of the 1960s. Many other groups were well known only within
Japan. The place and structure of an experimental troupe responded to a conflicting network of demands—to innovate within the philosophical and artistic
contexts of a developing Japanese “post-shingeki” and angura dramatic scene,
to work within and differentiate from the currents of Tokyo’s experimental
milieu as well as the broader terrain of popular culture, and at the same time
in some cases to navigate the efforts (and rewards) of “representing” Japan in
an internationally recognizable experimental arts medium.
Narratives of the 1960s and 1970s as Japan’s long “postwar” 2 usually begin
with descriptions of rebuilding and economic growth, and proceed to focus
on the student and civil uprisings, the massive and violent protests against the
2
renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a crucial symbolic set of events for
this period.3 Though such protests as well as the history of postwar experimental arts movements might well begin in the 1950s,4 the “long” 1960s form
a crucial opening to a prolific and tumultuous period that includes the flourishing activities of Sōgetsu Art Center and Shinjuku Bunka Center, as well as
the entrance into the worldwide “60s” movements of civil rights and cultural
transformation: the “cleaning up” of Tokyo—including newly paved roads and
flush toilets—in anticipation of the international presence for the 1964 Tokyo
Olympics; renewed protests in South Korea in 1965; protests against the Vietnam War in 1968–70; the peak and fall of the Japanese studio system for film,
followed by the ascendance of the Art Theater Guild (ATG) and the success
of “independent” filmmaking ventures (the so-called Japanese New Wave);
Gutai, Fluxus, and Mono-ha among many smaller movements in the visual
arts; and all of this paralleled with the unprecedented streamlining of society
and production (and environmental destruction) for the sake of the high economic growth of Japan. This period of proliferation of the arts is often said to
end in 1970 with the Osaka Expo (representing the attainment of success and
the simultaneous mainstreaming of many experimental arts movements) and
with Mishima Yukio’s spectacular, performative suicide.
To return for a moment to the time of the 1960s protests against Anpo, the
changing public sphere at that time opened increasingly to include the work of
artists and intellectuals:
The protesters were not a homogeneous mass but occupied a variety of subject positions: workers defending class interests marched alongside farmers fighting the expansion of the military bases; teachers concerned about state control of education
joined housewives involved in the movement to ban atomic weapons; religious groups
joined citizens trying to protect their participatory interests against revision of the
constitution.
This newly mobilized “public sphere,” was not limited to the work of politicians, statesmen, and the mass media: “Theater groups and filmmakers and
musicians as well as artists established more competing publics through their
productions.”5 Such experiments challenge the role of the arts and the encounter of the public or viewer with the art work, and they engage key debates
about the structures of the social world and the ways individuals can participate in (or disengage from) the public sphere. Within discussions of power and
subjection, subjectivity and collectivity, artists contributed to the formation of
the public sphere and helped to reconfigure that newly structured and mobilized space. Drinking in tiny watering holes in Shinjuku ni-chōme, translating
and reading French and German Marxist and phenomenological writers, working in cabaret clubs for money—each troupe had its own morays and means of
3
survival—the artists, performers, and intellectuals of this period took idiosyncratic means of making an impact among these competing “scenes.” Before
turning briefly to a key moment in the immediate postwar period, however,
we can return to Kujō’s story of Terayama’s death as a symbolic locus for the
kinds of ghosts and hauntings that this period of the 1960s to 1970s would
generate.
“Terayama is dying. This is really the end”—the actors had heard it before.
Terayama, then aged 47, had a serious liver condition and recurrent illnesses
that had plagued him since his youth as a prize-winning poet in the Tōhoku
town of Misawa in northern Japan.6 The actors seemed not to believe it, and
turned away to continue rehearsing as if nothing had happened.
Kujō, who narrates this event in her memoir, tells us that she herself could
hardly believe it was real. Terayama had been “about to die” so many times. At
his hospital bedside, when she saw the doctor check his watch while the heart
monitor on Terayama went flat, all she could think of was that this gesture was
too clichéd; it was bad acting, and had to be changed. As a director, screenwriter, and playwright, Terayama was close to many professional actors and
theater people, many of whom were milling around the hospital to visit him
on his sickbed. Kujō writes that she felt as if she were on the set of a film. The
only thing that let her know that this event was real, she tells us, was a dream
of a black butterfly she had had the night before, the same butterfly she had
seen as a child the day her grandmother died.7
On the one hand, this story plays on the boundaries between performance
and reality, fiction and fact, that Terayama’s troupe had worked relentlessly
to interrogate, explore, and ultimately break down. Both at the edges and at
the center of post-shingeki drama, theater artists aimed at exploding and exposing what we might now call the discursive terrain and invisible functioning
of ideologies, the structure and coercions of subjectivity framed within social
bonds and its implicit boundaries. In their performative work, Tenjō sajiki
had long aimed to rupture the formal edges of the theatrical world and the
“fourth wall,” from the cars they set on fire during their street performances
in Holland and the sleeping drugs they gave to their audiences there, to the
leaps onto the spectators some actors took during a performance of Mōjin
shokan (Blind Man’s Letter) in Tokyo, allegedly breaking one audience member’s nose. At times they added a labyrinthine and mobile set of walls, and
worked to make theater invade, contaminate, or corrupt the apparent edges
of everyday life.8 Tenjō sajiki had worked tirelessly to create the conditions for
what they called a true “encounter,” in the strongest and most destabilizing
sense, between performers and spectators to the point that one might become
a performer, a participant, and a spectator at once. Some would accuse this
4
philosophy of ultimately leading in the direction of causing the audience unnecessary pain,9 or even supporting “terrorist” acts, though the implications
of this latter term have become the subject of complex theorization in recent
years.10
Kujō’s story also helps to launch again the legend of Terayama’s world
(which is also her own), with the intervention of the spiritual, the supernatural,
in the form of a dream. In Terayama’s dramas, dreams are not solely the possession of the private individual. A character may at any moment wander into
the dreams and fantasies of others, and can be subject to the rules and parameters of those other imaginings, such that dreams become privileged figures for
studying the intra-psychic dimensions of the social. An object or sign from the
world of the dead—a mark of haunting—can appear in the world through the
medium of a dream and can be every bit as crucial as what is conventionally
marked as real (medicine, technology). In Kujō’s story, the butterfly speaks
more convincingly and eloquently than the EKG line.
Performance studies theorist Uchino Tadashi writes of the continual remystification of Terayama: “The first thing we must do is put his ghost back
in the grave. . . . Take the path opposite to that of Mallarmé who rouses the
quietly sleeping spirit of Poe in ‘Edgar Poe’s Grave.’ But a ghost once roused
does not return to the grave so easily.”11 Uchino, primary advocate of performance theory in Japan and co-founder of the performance studies journal Theatre
Arts,12 brings us back to an image of Terayama’s death and his survival—
or rather, his haunting. In seeing the experimental arts of postwar Japan, one
needs to take into account cathexes of the imagination, butterflies, advertisements. Terayama thus irritates scholars, including Uchino slightly, by his aura
of a religious guru, while as a bricoleur he embodies the figure of a genius
“post-modernist” avant la lettre. Yet as Uchino himself recognizes—before
he goes on to tell us some of the more concrete legacies of Terayama’s ideas in
the work of younger playwrights—“a ghost once roused does not return to the
grave so easily.” We can see the impact of experimental art works of the 1960s
and 1970s not only in their direct effects in the limited circulation and audiences of individual works at the time of their making, but also—because of the
circulation of forms and ideas beyond the bounds of a single event, the proliferating repetitions/reiterations of individual works, the networks of artists
and other reverberations—in their extensive and often unpredictable reach.
Reverberations of Daraku
Stepping back in time for a moment, we can consider the 1946 essay “Darakuron” by critic and novelist Sakaguchi Ango as a key transitional text at the
moment of entry into the early postwar cultural landscape.13 “Darakuron” made
5
a huge splash in its time, in part because of its wild romp through sacred
terms such as the emperor system, bushidō / militarism, and also for the personal
and linguistic performance of the value known as daraku (decadence) that it
expounds. The essay’s humor, its utter irreverence, created an atmosphere, both
in its time and for its later readers, of liberation from the wholesomeness of
wartime morality.14 For readers of the Ango revival in the 1960s and 1970s
as well as to many readers today, Ango showed a prescient ability to intuit a
description of the relations between subjection and ideological control that,
as we shall see, are also a central concern of postwar experimental drama. In
his closing paragraphs, as James Dorsey also points out, Ango attributes the
inability to escape from ideology to “human weakness” rather than to the ideology’s constitutive inescapability; nonetheless, within the constraints of his
high-energy linguistic style full of contradictions, Ango succeeds in describing
what more recent cultural theory (via Foucault and Althusser) would articulate
in terms of the workings of ideology and the State. A parallel reading (of “Darakuron” as a liberating critique) is part of what made Ango a household name
in 1946, caused his work to be “rescued from the brink of oblivion” and become
a bestseller again in 1967, as well as being reignited in new readings by critics
such as Karatani Kōjin in later years—although Karatani also argues that a fundamental misreading made Ango famous in the first place, that he came to represent “solitude in a crowd” but was never truly speaking with / for the crowd.15
In the context of Occupation discourses about the individual, Ango invokes
individualist discourses of the (perhaps reified) self ( jibun jishin) in his writing,
and does not abandon the national unit of discourse about “Japan” (at times
reifying while de-concretizing the parameters of “Japan” and “Japaneseness”).16
Yet his work more broadly in its moment and in its reception is a key site for
exploring the frameworks that guided understandings of ideology and subjectivity, one that resonates broadly with the work of experimental artists of the
following decades.
Degradation, delinquency, even apostasy—a place reached through the destruction of war—daraku marks an unmooring from religious, political, or social systematicity and structure. Daraku, related to the Buddhist term for falling away, has often been translated as decadence, depravity, or degeneration.
Rotting or dissipation under the guise of an amoral, banal chaos, daraku is the
anti-hierarchical, the “topsy-turvy.” Ango sees daraku as the chaotic state that
is also in fact the “real nature” of human beings, their “human essence.” This
fundamental and banal fact, this necessity of survival, he manages to articulate
without falling into an unqualified or universalist humanism: while at certain
moments Ango uses the terms of the “human,” the vision of humanity (and
the individual “self”) he elaborates fragments, becomes contingent and un-
6
grounded, at his more radical moments, through the very idea of daraku he
proposes.
The force that Ango opposes to daraku in the essay is the “will of history”
(53), a kind of deterministic deus ex machina to which human beings succumb,
or rather, to which they volunteer themselves, variously complicit dupes and
sustainers of history’s “strong-smelling” will under the guise of morality. It is
paradoxical and intriguing that the animalistic is related not only to daraku, but
to the will of history as well: Ango consistently figures it as a living being or
creature—”the unavoidable will of history, an enormous creature that pierces
Japan” (Nihon o tsuranuku kyodai na ikimono, rekishi no nukisashinaranu ishi)—and
as having a smell. In his figuration, Japan cannot get out of the grip of this
“will” that also partakes of the creaturely; and this Japan (and granted, he is
still using the rhetoric of nation, “Japan” as entity) is both trapped and
“pierced,” as if it, rather than the animal, were the hunted one.17
If daraku is the place of a terrifying free-fall, a place related to animalistic
desires for food and sex, a place of the body and of the black market (an image
he takes from the immediate postwar scrabbling for food and survival), then
history’s will and the emperor system and even the warrior’s code of bushidō
are, for Ango, tenuous bulwarks against the free-fall of the social, the banal
human reality that constitutively underlies the workings of ideology and the
state. On the other hand, though, “change doesn’t come so easily to human
beings” (57): the loss of all structures and hierarchies in daraku, while it may be
fundamental to being human, is at the same time not a simple matter to experience, assimilate, or pass through.18
If daraku is a necessity, a “realism” to be opposed to wartime’s idealisms,
then it is also something that, at least in the conclusion of his essay, Ango
points out is what allows people to survive, to be saved/rescued (if not redeemed, as the word sukuu is sometimes translated). Daraku may be banal, but
it is precisely banality itself—heroes now reduced to black marketeers—that
opens an alternative possibility: to seek “one’s own truly authentic way to fall.”
If falling is indeed inevitable, in other words, it still matters how one falls. In
Ango’s essay, then, this issue of the fall becomes crucial as the way in which
the body becomes a site of an animal necessity for survival that can be counterposed to (and provide a perspective on, or puncture, or make impossible
the complete adherence to) ideological rigidities and moral control. It reveals
the always existing fissure in the completeness of such control. More immediately, the move from kamikaze pilot to black marketeer echoes or prefigures
the desire for and yet suspicion of “total commitment” expressed in the first
plays we will consider by Betsuyaku Minoru, obsessed with the issue of “commitment,” of fully devoting oneself to any cause, or of seeking just such a
7
cause to allow for social participation in an utterly disjointed and disconnected
world, bereft of any markers of meaning.
Ango’s essay is both a manifesto and an irreverent testimony to violent
loss, well known for its description of the firebombings of Tokyo in 1945,
one of which Ango watched from the roof of a building in the Ginza.19 His
narrative has a strange quality of detached involvement: the speaking subject
seems almost to divide in two, scrutinizing his own thoughts and feelings. We
hear the narration struggling with and against these thoughts: “thought” itself
is hardly trustworthy. This mistrust of the intellectual or conceptual is a thread
that runs through his work, and gives it a resonance with many other, later
experimental artists in search (sometimes by means of language itself, sometimes by other media) of what language cannot attain. Ideological thoughts led
to acts of complicity with a moral and historical order now thoroughly discredited though not fully overturned. “If we were to forget about thinking,” he
writes, “there would perhaps be no grander or more carefree spectacle than
this.”20 If only we could, he seems to say; but to stop thinking, to forget about
thinking, concepts, language itself, is harder than it sounds.
The experience of the firebombing, of watching the grand mansions of
Kōjimachi reduced to embers, stuns the witnesses into silence. Ango romanticizes the devastation, so that his manifesto echoes the futurists (both Japanese
and European) when he writes: “I loved the immense destruction.”21 Yet his
appreciation of the fantastic beauty of destruction, unlike that of many futurists, reflects self-consciously and ironically on that appreciation in the past
tense. Now, reflecting back on the “beauty,” the aestheticization of the spectacle, he sees this perspective itself as part and parcel of human weakness.
Anyone reading the essay in 1946 would have been all too familiar with the
rhetoric of willing self-sacrifice, the belief in the larger cause, the heroic forfeiting of one’s life that was dominant in the imagination and propaganda
of the war years. Ango famously opens his essay by quoting lines from the
Man’yōshū: “I set out as a shield to protect him—to die by my sovereign
without looking back” (52).22 Against the image of returned soldiers having
become black marketeers, he reminds us of the rhetoric of the “humble but
steadfast shield” (shiko no mitate). “Without wishing for a life of one hundred
years, you pledge [instead] one day to set forth as his steadfast shield” (52).
That form of beautiful destruction, youth giving up long life in order instead
to be “scattered like cherry blossoms,” is the strongest of explicit intertexts
for the subject finding beauty in destruction. Yet in the present moment we
are back to the world of limits, a situation that “falls” outside that order,
scrambling for food and survival. The abjection of the “sixty-year old generals
so passionately clinging to their lives as they were pulled into the [war crimes]
8
tribunal” (56) inspires in Ango mainly a dark identification: he cannot imagine,
does not imagine, that he himself would have responded otherwise than by a
desperate grasp for survival. How then, in the midst of trauma, can one understand this combination of retrospective spectacularization of suffering and resigned acceptance / exhortation in the end to find an authenticity even within
the banality of daraku?
One moment stands out in Ango’s description of the firebombings: he is
perched on top of the five-story building in Ginza that housed the offices of
Japan Films, where he worked part-time during the war.23 Three cameras had
been set up on the tower of the building to capture shots of the bombing formation as it passed overhead just after the dropping of the bombs. The idea of
a camera capturing the shot—while the cameramen continued to do their job,
“odiously calm, cigarettes held between their lips” (57)—resonates strongly
with Ango’s self-scrutiny, and his own subsequent enjoyment of the visual extremes that he opens to us as readers, the “strange beauty” of “the way people
look when yielding to fate.” The camera becomes a moment for the technological symbolization of that divided gaze. In the camera’s after-effects the
scene will again be replicated, disseminated, and re-viewed. The cameramen’s
gaze, Ango’s gaze, follows the bombers as they rain explosives on Ishikawajima, then the formation comes straight toward the ten people on the rooftop.
“I was conscious of the strength draining out of my legs.” At one of the crucial
moments when his own life may be closest to being at stake,24 Ango shows
a strange detachment, which represents not only the numbing experience of
trauma (though it is also this), but for Ango is linked to the defamiliarization
that takes place at the heart of a moment where life is at stake.
The crucial aspect of the essay, as it electrified readers, as it awakened and
roused a deep longing and specific need in its time, as well as in the late 1960s
and early 1990s, is that it modeled a performativity of irreverence and defiance,
even as it called in its closing paragraph for a search for the “new” and the
“self” ( jibun jishin) without regulations, and without determining the shape or
linguistic / structural contours of what that “self” might be.25 In the end, Ango
advocates a “discovery of the self” and a “saving (rescuing) of the self.” If
“falling” in the sense of daraku’s realism is both necessary / inevitable and banal, it also comes later to appear as a model for a continual re-shaping and
re-invention, precisely under the force of historical conditions and necessity.
He rescues the idea of the self (even as the “self” rescues itself in a corporeal
sense) from its own evaporation in the process of descent. Yet this “self” (or
“subject”) is not a pre-existing element but a new invention, a provisional
re-building or re-grown term ever-vulnerable to the return of the constitutive
daraku to break it down again.
9
Daraku is only possible for the moment, if it is possible at all. Ango writes
that “human beings are too weak to fall completely.” Karatani Kōjin compares
this to Kant’s Das Ding (an Sich; the thing-in-itself ), that kernel of the real that
falls outside of symbolization or the possibility of access—yet symbolization,
and its accompanying ideologies, are also inevitable.26 Though ideology has its
fissures, and cannot hold completely, human beings still depend on ideologies,
systems of belief—fictions and monogatari, as Terayama later and Ango elsewhere would call it. Readers, including Karatani, have linked Ango’s wartime
and postwar writings, reading the idea of daraku in relation to other terms such
as farusu (farce), rinraku (ruin, fall, depravity); hi-imi (“non-sense”; as contrasted
with mu-imi, meaninglessness, which still implicates meaning as its opposite),
and most importantly even the unexpected furusato (hometown), as in his essay
“Bungaku no furusato” (The Hometown of Literature).27 Literature’s quality
of bringing out the uncanny, the unexpected, leads to a vision of furusato as not
something comforting and comfortable but—as we shall see in the later uses
of furusato/homecoming in the writings of butō dancers and photographers—
something that “pierces us,” that is a “quiet, transparent oppressiveness.”28
Heavier than shukumei (destiny), it is a cliff that we come to in life that is
without morals (or amoral), or in other words, without any possibility of any
coherent belief or value system; but taking that moment itself seriously represents a kind of moraru (moral). Ango had articulated this idea of the moment
of loss of orientation as itself a kind of moraru in his brief essay “Nikutai jitai ga
shikō suru” (Flesh Itself Thinks).29 The furusato is that which pierces us when it
peeks out, in the form of a “grotesque feeling,” from the gap between fiction
and reality.30 Thus clearly, Ango is concerned already in his earlier writings
with that very gap and the feeling it engenders: a kind of deeper and inaccessible reality that nonetheless comes to surprise us. That this view of furusato is
one that can be read in relation to daraku’s fall shows that it is here precisely
a question of noting (if not precisely “searching for”) moments of the failure
of symbolic structures and ideologies.
To claim that Ango is “apolitical” is thus in keeping with statements like his
closing of “Darakuron” (“to look for rescue in politics is sheer folly”) and
may have resonance with Adorno’s mistrust of political polemics as well. If
his critique of ideology is slippery in that it questions the grounding of reality
itself, later readers were quick to pick up on both the ironic iconoclasm of
his tone as well as the potential intensity and implications of this view of the
morality that is not one, the fundamental groundlessness of the subject, and
the concomitant necessary construction (through a need for something to rely
on that he calls “weakness”)—the contingent reinstatement of ideological positions and forms. In Nuhikun (Directions to Servants), Terayama dramatizes
10
a parallel point as he shows the enslaved or subjected servants seeking and
reinstating the symbolic role of the master; there also, the chaotic fissure /
rupture lasts only for a moment, only for a brief time before the “illusions” are
revived or reinstated. In the writings of butō dancers, we see the search for the
“thought of flesh”—the ambivalent and multivalent relation between concept
or language and body—pursued or explored in dance as well as in language.
Yet the kinds of problems they raise are already foreshadowed by Ango’s early
postwar writings and its interpreters in subsequent generations.
Centers / Margins
It is a difficult task to describe a period like the 1960s and 1970s, or arts
movements including the avant-garde theater of that time, because of the dispersal of centers, the constellation-like quality of the information available.
Within the history of post-shingeki theater movements, there are several centers
from which the experimental theater arose, and each had its own impulses and
impetuses, its own institutions and practices. In addition to the Betsuyaku/
Suzuki collaboration at Waseda University, which produced works like Zō (The
Elephant) discussed in Chapter 1, key groups included Satoh [Satō] Makoto’s
69 / 71 Black Tent Theater (with members from the University of Tokyo, Waseda, and graduates of the Actors’ Theater Training academy), and Kara Jūrō’s
“Red Tent” Jōkyō gekijō (Situationist Theater) that grew out of student theater
at Meiji University. The Jōkyō gekijō held its first “Red Tent” production in
1967, the same year that Tenjō sajiki was founded and that experimental artist
Akasegawa Genpei received his guilty verdict in the case brought against him
for making a reproduction of the 1,000 yen note. As David Goodman points
out, troupes led by Satoh Makoto, Kara Jūrō, and Suzuki Tadashi (with its
early collaboration with Betsuyaku), the three mainstays of current understanding of post-shingeki theater, all had important connections to the earlier shortlived Youth Art Theater of the 1950s, and all three came out of university
theater settings.31
This book begins with a consideration of the work of Betsuyaku Minoru,
a key figure in the development of post-shingeki theater. Under the title “postshingeki’s edge,” I then focus attention on works by Terayama Shūji, a figure
from the edges or margins of the post-shingeki or angura theatrical world. Terayama’s work, one might say, has come to “haunt” my own, causing me to
return to it again and again, though it seems that I still have not reached the
end of its possibilities. My study focuses mainly on his theatrical productions
and dramatic theories, rather than the poetry, boxing criticism, photography,
radio plays, and the larger bulk of his experimental films (for a discussion of
his Video Letters, however, see Chapter 4).
11
Terayama Shūji may be included only marginally in the category of postshingeki in part because of the history of the term itself as referring to these
three groups, and in part because his modes of self-promotion, legend-making,
and participation in European avant-gardes place him in a different category.
Terayama is at times criticized for being so much the darling of the European
avant-garde. David Goodman alludes to this fact when he writes:
The fact that Tenjō sajiki was a regular at European theater festivals in the 1970s confirmed for his peers in Japan, who were striving to distinguish what they were doing
from European models, that Terayama was about something quite different from
themselves. Kara Jūrō’s charge that Terayama was a “cultural scandalmonger” (bunkateki sukyandarisuto) and “an artistic social striver of the northeastern [Tōhoku] variety”
(Tōhokugata geijutsu shusseshugi) bears this out.
Goodman further cites theater critic Senda Akihiko’s thoughts on the differences between Tenjō sajiki and the other three main participants in the theatrical underground:
[Senda writes:] “Tenjō sajiki occupies a different place in the theater world from the
Situation Theater, the Waseda Little Theater, and [Satō’s] Freedom Theater.” Senda too
attributes the difference to the fact that, unlike the other troupes, Tenjō sajiki had
originated neither in university theater clubs nor in the satellite troupes of the major
shingeki companies. “Indeed, four years older than Suzuki, eight years older than Satō,
and not a student in 1960, Terayama shared little of the political experience that bound
the other theater activists together.”32
During the student protests, Terayama was ill in the hospital and commented
in his writings, mostly in an ironic or critical tone, on the student movements.
Terayama’s political intentions were not explicitly linked to the New Left, in
contrast to the other three “origin points” of post-shingeki.33
Senda, in his vivid introductory book on 1960s theatrical trends, further
writes that at the time he did not understand the meaning of Terayama’s plays,
partly because Senda (along with most post-shingeki playwrights) actually liked
engeki (theater, with a focus on acting and script structure). In other words,
Senda at the time thought Terayama’s theatrical experiments irrelevant for the
essence of what he would consider to be engeki. He later came to understand
Terayama as an outsider of the theater who tried to destroy the form of “plays.”
(In an interview with Suzuki Tadashi that Senda quotes, Terayama says: “I am
coming to realize that, unlike you, I don’t particularly like plays.”) Rather, Senda
came to understand, Terayama had aimed at transforming society on a different
level through these “theatrical experiments”34—though the contradictions of
his theoretical project make the story more complex than such an introduction
can fully take into account.
12
Betsuyaku, a foundational postwar playwright, began his career at the very
earliest moments of the postwar experimental theater movements. His works
nonetheless are discussed far less frequently than the more physically based
theaters of Suzuki Tadashi, with whom he worked as principal playwright for
the Waseda Little Theater until 1969 (beginning in its earlier incarnations as
Waseda Free Theater [Waseda jiyū butai] and simply Free Theater), and Ninagawa Yukio, whose large, spectacular works frequently tour the international
theater circuit. Betsuyaku’s plays, with their subtle language, did not ultimately
follow the trajectory of many practitioners of the Japanese experimental arts,
from the messy world of the black box to broad international acclaim and high
commercial success. Yet the story of post-shingeki or angura in Japan often begins with the writings of Betsuyaku as a student and later dropout of Waseda
University, working with director Suzuki Tadashi and others in the small student black box theater in Takadanobaba that would soon come to be called
Waseda Little Theater (Waseda shōgekijō).
The play sometimes said to have launched the post-shingeki movement,
Betsuyaku Minoru’s Zō (1962), reflects on war memory and spectacularization,
and on the meaning of “commitment” in the postwar period.35 In a reference
to the historical that seems both pointed and tenuous, Betsuyaku shows there
that the need to “return” is radically performative and spectacularizing, even
sensationalist. The play rewrites the story of “A-bomb victim number one,”
a man who made a practice of showing his keloid scars and telling the story
of the bomb to onlookers, spectacularizing the image / vision of that moment
of “origin” and its results.
PART I
Post-Shingeki’s Edge
ONE
No Holds Barred:
Betsuyaku Minoru and the Paradoxes
of Total Commitment
In one of the most famous scenes of Betsuyaku Minoru’s play Zō, the protagonist known only as “the invalid” (byōnin) criticizes his wife’s desultory way
of eating rice balls. The man, who believes everything should be done with the
maximum possible sense of commitment and involvement, finds her style to
be too haphazard:
You see, you don’t have a plan. Let me show you something useful. This is how I always do it: when I have two rice balls, I divide my side dishes into two parts also. Until
I finish eating one rice ball, I make do with that first half. See what I mean? If you do it
like that, you don’t have to eat rice balls all by themselves without any side dishes. [. . .]
And it might seem like I’m getting too detailed here, but I think your way of eating
rice balls is too careless, too casual. You see, what you do is that you start munching
away from the top, and you eat right down to the middle. At that moment, I always
look to see what you’re going to do. As if it were completely obvious, you chomp
the good part in the middle all up, and then, a little bored, munch down the rest, the
bottom half of the rice ball. Isn’t that so? Let me show you something. First, you
munch down from the top. The good part in the middle sticks out. Then you turn it
over, see? Then you munch from the bottom. Then, in the end, the middle is left for
your last bite. This is what I’d call orderly. It’s a plan. A strategy. You don’t have that.
You wander around aimlessly, totally haphazard. (214–15)1
The husband needs a superabundance of intentionality, an overdetermination
of forethought. He requires a plan, a sense of order and commitment even
in the most mundane of everyday acts. This speech to his wife emblematizes
16
No Holds Barred
the committed, engaged point of view on the postwar experience, and on
life in general. Yet at this moment in 1962, in the aftermath of the failure of
the powerful Anpo protests to stop the renewal of the Japan-U.S. Security
Treaty—itself a reminder of the immediate postwar period that Betsuyaku
evokes—this committed position appears in an estranging or ironic light. The
play thus raises, without resolving, the questions of postwar commitment and
engagement, or (in the invalid’s words) questions of living and acting strategically rather than casually, while at the same time structuring its dramatic unfolding through a much more multivalent and experimental form, with scenes
consisting of fragments, ellipses, and poetically evocative monologue.
The invalid character in Zō, along with his nephew, is in the hospital with
radiation sickness. Throughout the play, the invalid reminisces about how he
used to bring a wagon and a mat to the streets of what he calls “that town” to
display his scars. The playwright, by his own account, encountered “A-bomb
victim number one,” the rough model for this character, in a photo by Domon
Ken.2 While the historical “A-bomb victim number one” ( genbaku ichigō) participated in “Ban the Bomb” rallies and became a mascot for the anti-nuclear
movement, Betsuyaku downplays the political context of his characters’ behavior and focuses instead most forcefully on the individual, intrapsychic
movement of the invalid, now past the effective moment of his performative
showing of the scar. The invalid speaks of the past when he used to rub olive
oil into his scars to make them shine, and of having discovered new and effective poses for the cameras:
I’d tell the sightseers about Hiroshima and what it was like at that time. I’d think up clever
jokes to make them laugh, or I’d think of new poses for the cameras. When I would take
off my shirt and show the sightseers my back, there would be a big gasp of surprise. That
wasn’t bad. And on top of that, I liked that clicking sound of the shutter falling. Each
time I moved the muscles in my back a little bit, there would be that click-click sound.
There was something so precise, so right and proper about that feeling. (209)
The emphasis on the sound of the camera makes this explicit performance and
spectacularization of his body into a kind of dance, muscles moving to the
music of the shutters. There is something right and proper, courteous, and
even ceremonious about the precise sound of the shutter click, and the feeling
it gave him: orime-tadashii, like precise folds in a garment, a formal ceremonial.
Instead of feeling discomfort with himself (for example, as “disfigured”), he
describes feeling honored by the ceremony of the clicking camera’s response,
the possibility of creating performative meaning around the bomb’s scarring
traces. Through the telling of the story of “that time,” the joke or sudden
baring of the skin, and the viewers’ “big gasp of surprise,” the invalid is no
No Holds Barred
17
Fig. 1 The invalid poses in Act II of a 1970 production of Zō by Seinenza. Photo by
Mano Yoshiki. Courtesy of Mizuyachi Sukeyoshi and Seinenza.
victim: he takes on full creative control of his art, and by extension is able
(imaginatively, at least) to control the meanings that his victimhood accrues.
For the invalid, the meaning of his work lay in the moment of being seen,
making contact with his audience. Meaning lies in the very act of spectacularization, where he makes himself into an icon. Yet this “direct contact with the
audience”—an aim shared by many theatrical works of the post-shingeki, as
we shall see—remains elusive, even in the past. Nonetheless, via the mediation
of the cameras and the performance, the invalid did have an outlet for his
commitment; he had found something he could throw himself into, “with all
his might”:
After that, I really worked hard. I threw myself into it with everything I had. For the
first time in my life, I was thinking I’d quit my laziness and really try, give it my all.
Every day I’d come home and I’d hardly sleep at night thinking about the poses I’d do
the next day for the cameras or what I’d say to make the sightseers laugh. (210)
He describes how his wife originally suggested the pose for which he became
famous, where he raises his right arm. He clearly works toward aesthetic precision in the framing of his performance. In the hospital now, years later, the
invalid dreams of the day when he can return to “that town” from the past,
18
No Holds Barred
that moment of hope in the trajectory of the postwar, once again to show off
his scars. He exercises his legs in preparation for that imagined future, and he
frequently reminisces about the one “true encounter” with an audience member with whom he connected deeply—a little girl who had asked to touch his
keloid scar and thus to move from the visual to the haptic. The status of the
little girl is as much imaginary as real. In one conversation with his doctor, the
invalid expresses regret that he did not have the courage to shake her hand in
the past; in another, he claims to hear her crying in the present moment. The
girl becomes a refracted double for himself. When his wife tells him the girl
has died (though he does not know the status of this claim), he accuses her of
murder; the very representation or description of the girl’s death becomes a
symbolic killing, foreshadowing the invalid’s own death later in the play. The
girl thus comes to represent the point, always already in the past, when connection between survivor and witness (or performer and viewer) was possible,
or might have been possible, and when the work he did “with all his might”
could create an encounter with and an impact on another. Through the imagining of her emotions at that time, and through imagining his return to “that
town,” the invalid is able to feel his own pain in the present.
In contrast to the invalid, who tries relentlessly and actively to return to a
meaningful past, most of the other characters in the play live in a realm closed
off from such aspirations. For them it is no longer possible to move forward
actively, passionately, into the future; instead, time becomes static and empty.
The invalid, while casting some doubt on the work he did in the past—did he
really connect with those witnesses? If so, why did things change?—and also
trapped in the same prison-like hospital, continuously thinks toward this imagined future in which he could go back and do an even better job: “I’ve been
thinking about it, but in the end, they had doubts. And I was hesitant. That’s
what went wrong. No, it’s got to be face to face. Straight to the point, no holds
barred [sono mono zubari de yuku]. The real thing. At its definitive point. I’m
going to shake hands with them!” (211).3 The invalid notes that in the wake
of the anti-bomb rally, he saw a certain change in the viewers’ responses:
they no longer looked at his keloid scars, but instead started looking into his
eyes. Rather than responding to the exteriority of his skin and his performative
form, they are looking for a certain interiority and projecting into that.
This description within the play is striking in view of the way post-shingeki
also moves away from the interiorized psychological realism of shingeki into a
stronger interest in performative structure and formal, coherence-challenging
juxtaposition. In other words, the reflection on the invalid’s performance and
failures echoes the issues at stake in the transition from shingeki to post-shingeki,
and the goal of post-shingeki to find something that would be a more “naked,”
No Holds Barred
19
pull-no-punches encounter, something more profoundly transformative or
authentic—“The real thing. At its definitive point.” The invalid here envisions
a true encounter, with one-on-one, authentic communication. He imagines an
idealistic engagement with the witnesses to his display: a “touch,” a “real connection.” Although this encounter is still relegated to the terrain of the future
perfect, it remains as a redemptive idea of connection that enrages and scandalizes his nephew in the present moment of the play.
John Treat briefly faults this Betsuyaku play for what he considers its
“tragic” aspirations. In contrast to the intensely meaningless form of death
that Frederick Hoffman describes (“death as a total surprise loses much of its
tragic value”), Treat points out that a tragic take on the suffering of hibakusha
(victims of the atomic bombings) can be accused of making that suffering
“‘known,’ ‘meaningful,’ and thus possibly ahistorical.”4 Within the play, this
dialectic of meaning and meaninglessness, historicity and ahistoricity, is specifically what is at stake in the interaction between the invalid and his nephew.
The nephew will comment on the absence of meaning in a death that “was
over too quickly” (255). Treat implies that it is theater—the dramatic form
itself—that in some way constitutively “represses the uniqueness of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki” by raising the treatment of hibakusha experience to the level of
tragedy, conferring meaning on their suffering. Whether or not this applies
to theater in general, works like Betsuyaku’s and those of post-shingeki are
challenging precisely such traditions of theatrical form and meaning in order
to find ways commensurate with the fragmentation and ethical complexity of
hibakusha experience.
In contrast to his uncle, the nephew represents a different kind of “victimconsciousness,” one whose agency consists primarily in withholding, withdrawing, and retreating from action. The nephew points out that his uncle’s scars
have become discolored with age: it is no longer possible to return to that past. Both
past and future are evacuated, and (as in Sartre’s Huis Clos) now the characters
are trapped together in a circumscribed hell where, for the nephew, the most
tolerable course is inaction:
NEPHEW:
Please, I’m asking you, stop. . . . Please stop everything now. I mean everything.
Don’t call out in a loud voice, and don’t make big movements. Don’t get emotional,
cry, or laugh. Stop it, once and for all. Just be quiet. And then lie here, completely still.
That’s all there is. There is nothing else, isn’t that right? (247; emphasis mine)
The nephew’s great desire (which is also his strangely emphatic shout for recognition) is to pass unnoticed, to be still. Yet in the end he finds the uncle’s
relentlessly and irritatingly hopeful attitude and even his imagined encounters
so provocative that the nephew himself finally murders his uncle. Thus, ironically, it is he who brings about the one effective “action” or “event” of the play.
20
No Holds Barred
Just before killing the uncle, the nephew gives his most explicit manifesto
of non-action, elaborating his most persistent conviction. He demands that his
uncle join his “side” and share his view of the empty future, the empty present:
NEPHEW:
Uncle, please get this clear. You see, we mustn’t do anything anymore. Nothing at all. To do something would be a really bad thing. However difficult it is, we
have to stay completely still in our beds. Not because it will make our sickness worse.
It’s not that. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not a doctor. It’s just that we mustn’t try
to do all sorts of different things. All we can do is be hated, killed, abused by everyone.
We mustn’t even think of being loved. Got it? When we are not being killed, hated, or
abused, we must wait, stay absolutely still. It’s all we can do. Sleep quietly. (254)
In part, the nephew alludes to the prescription for radiation survivors that they
not exert excessive effort, because stress was known to accelerate the course
of the disease.5 Yet, distancing himself from this trope (“I’m not a doctor”), he
elaborates a more generalized and abstract requirement for passivity and marginalization. As in Gayatri Spivak’s claim that to state “I am a subaltern” reveals that one is not subaltern, the passive victimhood the nephew calls for
here is impossible to inhabit because of the very active framing of his own
words / performance.6 Still, he may be proposing a version of what Spivak
might call the subaltern’s “strategic withholding,” a refusal to signify as a last
but powerful refuge against the inscription of meaning within the framework
of a dominant paradigm, in this case, the paradigm of the heroic or tragic victim and the testifying survivor. In some ways analogous to the effect of Friday
in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986), as he refuses to speak or be spoken, the
nephew refuses to strive for survival, recognition or understanding.7 Yet, as a
chosen mode of living (and as verbally articulated with such un-Friday-like
persistence), his non-action reveals a persistent and eventually violent agency
within this passivity that leaves open to question this play’s stance on the issues of traumatic meaning, spectacularization, and engagement. The fact that
the play begins and ends with the nephew’s elliptical monologues frames this
complex work closer to his viewpoint than to that of his uncle, or places the
audience in a position to rely on his unsteady narration as much as or more
than that of his uncle, whose shenanigans become an obtrusive and at times
futile spectacle. The idea, sometimes stated, that “nothing ever happens in a
Betsuyaku play” also shows (though it is not strictly true) that teleological action is not the main dramatic form Betsuyaku espouses, and it is this very stillness, and the tendency of the dialogue to ask for a ceasing of forward motion,
that characterizes many of his plays—perhaps in alignment or in resonance
with this argument for withholding by the nephew, which can now be read
as a kind of dramatic theory, with the nephew becoming a central “dramaturg”
of the play.
No Holds Barred
21
Yet even as he argues for non-action and victimhood (“being hated, killed,
abused”), the nephew attempts to convince his uncle of his point of view so
that his own choice of non-action takes the form of an urgent address, as he
repeats: “Uncle, please get this clear.” Confined to a hospital bed, the uncle
defies him, continuing to view the world in terms of heroic action. The uncle’s
idealism extends even to his mode of storytelling as he narrates the ongoing
(sometimes imaginary) events of the play: he describes the nurse of the hospital running away, “with all her strength [isshōkenmei], barefoot. . .” (255). For
him, powerful action and recognition remain possible, and he is willing to put
his life on the line for this belief, as a hero or a martyr.
As in the fantasy that his wife has killed the little girl, the uncle / invalid
earlier on has a premonition of his own death as a murder rather than as a
meaningless, undramatic disappearance:
INVALID:
Watch out—I might be murdered by someone.
Why?
INVALID: I’ll definitely be murdered. It’s a feeling I have. (222)
WIFE:
In addition to their self-reflexive function, these lines highlight the play’s central dilemma between meaningful and meaningless death. Yet when the audience witnesses the uncle’s death, the scene is anything but heroic. The nephew
mediates, as narrator/chorus, the representation of the murder that he himself
has committed. He speaks with his face concealed under an umbrella, so that
it is uncertain whether his address is to the doctor or the audience of the play:
NEPHEW:
Why don’t you clap? Uncle thought you would. He said, yes, they’ll applaud. . . . Why could it be? It must have been disappointing, have ended too quickly.
For uncle too, probably, it must have been totally unexpected. . . .” (255)
Acts of heroism, he implies, require an audience. The nephew undermines the
possibility of the uncle’s death as meaningful by pointing to the absent applause and to the speed of the event: the lack of proper dramatic lead-up and
denouement, proper dramatic structure. The wagon that was intended to take
the uncle back to the town where he used to show his keloid scars, to his selfdescribed most heroic moment in the past, instead takes his corpse. It seems
that ultimately the uncle will revisit “that town,” but as a corpse rather than
as a survivor. His death returns the expected to its place, and his anomalous
status (as a survivor with hope) gives way to the nephew’s vision of the status
quo (A-bomb survivors who retain hope are now dead). In the dramaturgy
accomplished by the nephew, we are left with a meaningless death, an unexpected murder, perhaps in Camus’ sense.
In the end, Betsuyaku explores the impasse of hibakusha representation and
cooptation by placing the scene of the uncle’s death within a failed or ambiva-
22
No Holds Barred
lent structure of address. By questioning the absence of applause, the nephew
points to the failed address that is this death. In contrast to the uncle who
wanted his death to signify something, the nephew attempts resolutely and as
much as possible to repress himself and his acts as legible, meaningful signs.
Toward a Casual Mode of Engagement
In the opening lines of Zō, the stage directions state, in a personal, “directorial”
voice that casts its shadow over the work as a whole: “Not everyone is ambitious, and not all survivors of failure [disaster] are necessarily tragic. Often
people are rather nonchalant [sarigenai; casual, indifferent] about it” (201). These
words place the overall “voice” of the play in alignment neither with the uncle’s
passionate desires nor with the forceful withdrawal of the nephew, but with
some other, oddly casual (nanigenai ) stance. One can hold to things like ambition
and aspiration, to ideas of engagement, encounter, and return only casually, at
an ironic distance; in the end, their achievement depends heavily on accident.
The particularity of this voice is key to the liminal terrain Betsuyaku stakes out
both in this play and elsewhere.
In 1968, about halfway between his writing of Zō and his 1972 production
of Shōgo no densetsu (Legend at Noon), discussed below, Betsuyaku was awarded
the thirteenth Kishida Kunio Prize for playwrights by the journal Shingeki for
the two plays Matchi-uri no shōjo (The Little Match-Selling Girl) and Akai tori no
iru fūkei (Landscape with a Red Bird). The years between 1962 and 1968 had
seen many changes both in theater and in social and political movements; by this
point, student protests were again on the rise, pushed by what might be considered a new wave of idealism. In the face of the demand for principled action,
in an atmosphere of increasing economic prosperity where some felt a pervasive
fear of seeming hiyorimi shugisha (opportunists, going with the waves of what was
popular or successful), Betsuyaku spoke of his structured stance of casualness
(sarigenasa). It may seem ironic that Betsuyaku received precisely this award, as in
so many ways his works have come to be understood as a transcendence or rejection of the shingeki theater movement, and the launching a new and different
direction in theater. The central history of Japanese postwar theater has often
been told in terms of the radical break between institutionalized (“psychological
realist”) shingeki and rebellious (experimental) post-shingeki, though more recent
directors, such as Kaneshita Tatsuo and Hirata Oriza, have certainly challenged
these distinctions and periodizations through their renewed interest in shingeki
works. Nishidō Kōjin has argued specifically that the putative rupture between
shingeki and post-shingeki is belied by many circumstantial factors: many postshingeki actors trained in shingeki-based groups such as Bungaku-za, and shingeki
financing and institutional support was crucial for later post-shingeki works.8
No Holds Barred
23
On receiving the Kishida Kunio Prize, named after one of the most celebrated of shingeki playwrights, Betsuyaku made the following statement:
If I had to describe it, I would say I am not like a pimple that bursts open with the
swelling of a passion from within, but rather I am like scabies [rash] that relies on the
wind to carry me, and settles someplace by chance. For me, gaining a place to settle
[inhabit] is a supreme demand. Perhaps the reason my plays have been seen as heretical
in the shingeki world is because I was trying too hard to be like shingeki. And now,
thanks to this prize, I have casually [sarigenaku] become a shingeki person [shingeki-jin].
That is a very happy thing.
. . . My next ambition, just as I casually, nonchalantly, became a shingeki person, is to
be able casually to become a Japanese person. And then, after that, I suppose it would
be none other than to be able, casually and accidentally, to become a human being.9
The casualness, the sarigenasa that Betsuyaku describes here, as in the stage directions’ commentary at the opening of Zō, comes to be a central element of his
aesthetic vision as he articulates it in this acceptance speech. Casualness retains a
strange relation to the kinds of “encounters” he describes, and to his characters’
search for a mode of fully committed engagement that figures so prominently
in many of his works. In this statement, Betsuyaku describes a world in which,
like the man in Shōgo no densetsu described below, he has no natural “home,” no
place to settle or inhabit. (This question of “inhabiting” as a mode of being also
figures centrally in earlier philosophical discourses, including Heidegger’s, as
well as Watsuji Tetsurō’s formulations of encounter discussed further in Chapter 5. It also recalls the “heartbreaking” piercing of furusato in Sakaguchi Ango
that is anything but a soft, easy return or “natural” place.) Here, Betsuyaku characterizes himself precisely as someone who is looking for a place to be, for
whom “gaining a place to settle is a supreme demand.” As such, it does not
come easily or lightly; in fact, as a supreme demand, much like the immediacy in
Maurice Blanchot’s description of automatic writing, it is in some way ultimately
impossible to achieve.10 The place to settle remains largely at the level of the
imaginary, in the form of a search for an inaccessible object. Settlings are temporary, provisional. Instead, Betsuyaku figures himself as a “scabies rash,” a contagion, by definition marginal and marginalized, even parasitic, always “carried
on the wind,” but not in a free or easy way, like a bird or a butterfly. He sinks in,
holds on, grasps. He “tries too hard.” Yet the entrance into shingeki comes, paradoxically, not through trying hard or productive, prolific, committed effort, but
through this sideways slippage of sarigenasa. It comes, in other words, without or
in spite of his conscious will.
Betsuyaku here implicates (and thus critiques) not only the theatrical establishment, but also nationalism, and the ideologies of humanism, while reflecting back “askew” on the need for “commitment” and engagement that were
such central parts of the rhetoric of political movements and student protests
24
No Holds Barred
at the time of his early theatrical works. He assumes the “naturalness” of no
affiliation or identity, not even that of being Japanese or “human”—these also
he describes as “ambitions.” As such they become temporary habitations, contingent constructions, places one can accede to only without trying, and then
never fully. “My next ambition . . . is to be able casually [sarigenaku] to become
a Japanese person [Nihonjin].” But, as declared by the stage directions in Zō,
“not everyone is ambitious” and “not all survivors of failure [disaster] are necessarily tragic” (201). Born in Manchuria in 1937, the year of the Marco Polo
Bridge Incident that ignited the second Sino-Japanese conflict, Betsuyaku first
came to Japan in 1946, at age nine. This experience of repatriation may have
been one catalyst of his keen awareness of the liminality and contingency of
a “Japanese” identity. After two years at Waseda University he dropped out,
along with many other activist students, after the failure of the Anpo protests.
His story is thus not one of settling in, of knowledge; rather, it is a story of
recognizing the limitations of any given place of habitation or defined ideological terrain.
Betsuyaku’s method of writing reflects this openness to the chance encounter. According to his own description in interviews, he prefers to write his
plays in a café, ears open to the chance dialogues of the other customers. The
habit began when he used to work in a labor union, and he would stop on
his way home to write, in a place that was separated both from work and from
home. If he did not let in these casual interruptions, he claims, his writing
would become a monologue, or become filled with “personal emotions.” In
contrast to writers who holed themselves up in rural inns, Betsuyaku says that
he needed to “have something in the surroundings to diffuse concentration,
and to write while checking himself against / within those surroundings.”11 He
eschews the monologic tirade and the lines filled with “personal feeling” (usually a positive aim for theatrical writing) in favor of an encounter of subject
and language with surroundings—a mode of opening to creativity found in
distraction rather than in concentration.
In his foundational analysis and translation of postwar Japanese theater,
David Goodman reads the relationship of Betsuyaku’s theater to the hibakusha
through the lens of the Anpo experience:
The central issue of the play [Zō ] comes directly from the 1960 demonstrations and has
specific political implications. Should one continue to struggle in the knowledge that
to do so would be futile and even absurd? Or would it be wiser (or at least less painful)
to accept defeat and resign oneself to a life of passive resignation? These were the questions young Japanese like Betsuyaku were left with after 1960, and because they were
crystallized most clearly in the experience of the hibakusha, Betsuyaku invested these
conflicts in them.12
No Holds Barred
25
Goodman concludes that the play “rejects the attitude of passive resignation
mandatory in orthodox shingeki and replaces it with a call to action.” If such
post-Anpo questions were “crystallized most clearly in the experience of the
hibakusha,” however, we might also note in the trajectory of Betsuyaku’s work
more broadly that the kinds of disasters and breakdowns that appear there become ever more abstracted from the particularities of the A-bomb experience
or other “oriented” historical events. (It is almost as if Betsuyaku were asking
us to stop interpreting everything through the lens of “that time.”) If the hibakusha became a site of displacement, almost a trope for the “crystallization”
of concerns about what it means to act in the face of absurdity and defeat (and
thus in some way falling into Treat’s accusation of “making meaning” through
a universalization)—and it is clear that the invalid is making a clear statement
in favor of “action”—Goodman’s reading of the play as a whole as a call for
action contradicts Betsuyaku’s various statements about the situation or stance
of sarigenasa, which continues to occupy him at various moments in his career.
(Like Ango’s daraku, however, it may be that Betsuyaku means casualness
more as an inevitability, a fact of the situation, rather than as an aspiration).
Still, is it possible to have ambition and then to follow it up “casually,” rather
than “passionately,” in putting it into action? As Ango’s “Darakuron” points
out, idealistically infused action clearly has its limits and dangers. Are we too
weak to retain only the light hold of the casual, the sarigenai? What would it
mean, what would it look like—Breton’s Nadja, or (as later readers of Ango if
not Betsuyaku have claimed) Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizophrenic out for a
walk”—to make a commitment to casualness, to contingency? Would it entail
a practice of flânerie, of wandering in the cities, as de Certeau describes, giving
up looking at the big pictures from great heights in order to practice walking
on the ground?
One might recall here Benjamin’s famous moment in One-Way Street that
instantiates a partly analogous approach as a mode of textual engagement. In
Benjamin’s view, to read is like flying over in an airplane, and to copy is like
walking through the forest:
The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it
has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it
is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. . . . Only he who walks
the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that
for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings,
prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at the front. Only
the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it.13
One-Way Street, in the context of Benjamin’s earlier writings, is structured as an
opening to that kind of contingency, through the use of fragments rather than
26
No Holds Barred
expository arguments—yet for increasingly political purposes. The slower and
more painstaking route here opens the copier to a receptiveness, an openness
to be “commanded” by the text and be struck by its particularity, and also to
experience its full force, described strikingly in military terms. The “distances,
belvederes, and clearings” represent as much a part of the interior landscape of
the copier as the external one of the (textual) landscape.
Although we will return to questions of mimesis and copying in later chapters, we can see here how profoundly upsetting to ideological clarity Betsuyaku’s strategy of casualness might be.14 Opening a mode of strategic and
deliberate receptivity, a reciprocity that follows the text in every detail and
captures the very soul of the one who is occupied with it, Benjamin’s “engaged” copier brings on a barrage of experiences, of echoing surprises and
unexpected powers. This vision of copying differs in subtle ways from Betsuyaku’s paradoxical mix of active movement and submission. Betsuyaku’s casualness escapes from both engagement of the full force of the “soul” and from
the nephew’s absolute negation of “doing.” Similar, perhaps, to Brecht’s “relaxed interest,” Betsuyaku’s strategic casualness allows one to slip out from
under the militaristic “commander deploying soldiers.” Instead, this new attitude might retain throughout an element of ambivalence and uncertainty that
contains the possibility for eluding command. Yet the “casual subject,” however difficult this state might be to attain, falls neither on the side of a “full
and active participation” nor of absence / passivity. Sarigenasa as a mood opens
the possibility of a simultaneous engagement and slipping away, a half-absent
presence or a half-present absence. One gains from Benjamin’s description
here a sense of such a quality of attention that would be required to attain
a simultaneous state of both “active, close engagement” and “fully open receptivity,” in the form of an encounter with the text or with an aspect of the
world.
The casual engagement that Betsuyaku invents and puts into practice on
the stage suggests a complex mode of simultaneous evasion and encounter. If
there is a call to action, it is a fundamentally ambivalent one that also explores
the complexity and possible failure of address—the failure, even, of all such
calls. This mode of action falls somewhere between the uncle’s passion and the
nephew’s murderous refusal, and between the veteran’s suicidal / heroic selfsuppression and the murder provocation as ethical-grounding speech act of
the woman in Shōgo no densetsu, discussed in the following section. In the face
of a profound and in some way unforgivable debt, sarigenasa is less an absence
of affect in the sense of “indifference” or “apathy,” as the word is also sometimes translated, and more an everyday, “casual” philosophy of what is contingent and non- or anti-teleological. It is a stance that can be a serious challenge
No Holds Barred
27
to sustain. Betsuyaku’s sarigenasa, then, can be read in relation to an increasing
understanding that there are faults and dangers to be found in isshōkenmei, in
the overdoneness of passionate engagement.
Many postwar theatrical works are concerned with what, from the perspective of some articulations in contemporary theory, could be called the subject’s
complicity in the workings of power, the dilemmas of how to effect transformation in a system in which one is already (libidinally, structurally, economically) invested. Within this frame, Betsuyaku’s sarigenasa might be seen as a
move in the direction of a strange, almost fantastical politics.
Shōgo no densetsu: Logics of Unpayable Debt
A key work that addresses similar questions in postwar theater is Betsuyaku’s
Shōgo no densetsu, a one-act play written in 1973.15 This play came after the Asama
Sansō incident in 1972, in which five members of the United Red Army held
an innkeeper’s wife hostage for ten days in an act of violence that—in addition
to being the first marathon live broadcast on Japanese television with ratings
that peaked at 89 percent on the final evening of the incident—is sometimes
credited as the turning point or moment of deep discrediting of radical leftist
movements, where they lost the sympathy of the majority. This play’s return to
the topic of war might also be linked to the dramatic suicide of Mishima Yukio
in 1970, which in the midst of “miraculous” economic growth and prosperity
for many people once again “roused the ghost” of the war. In avant-garde
movements, one might also note that by this point many experimental artists
were seen as closer to the mainstream, no longer “underground,” as many had
participated in the massive, corporate-funded Osaka Expo (banpaku) of 1970.
The specter of returning Vietnam war veterans (and fugitive deserters) plays
a role in the context in which Shōgo no densetsu was produced, since the presence
of these soldiers in Japan at the time of the production would have been a
clear intertext for the veterans’ ambivalent relation to the lost war in the play.16
Betsuyaku’s position in relation to mainstream experimental arts is, in my view,
to sustain his focus relentlessly (even as he is somewhat canonized) on the
“marginal.” Shōgo no densetsu may nonetheless serve as a kind of landmark for
the experimental arts of early 1970s, in which ideas of “total commitment” (and
its discontents and necessary limits) are interrogated in a darkly humorous way.
Shōgo no densetsu, unlike much of Betsuyaku’s post-1960s work, makes explicit and direct reference to the psychic aftermath of the losses and traumas of
World War II. The time of day in the title—shōgo, or noon—refers to the moment of the legendary announcement by Emperor Hirohito in his own voice,
on August 15, 1945, that Japan had surrendered to the Allies. Ōe Kenzaburō
famously reflected on that moment, describing how he and all the villagers
28
No Holds Barred
gathered in the center of town around the one small radio, listening to the
crackling transmission. Ōe writes:
When the war ended, I was an elementary school student in a small village, not more
than ten years old. I could not understand the words the emperor was saying to the
people on the radio. Adults were standing and crying in front of the radio. I gazed in
from the strong summer sun of the garden to the dark room where the adults were
crying. Then I got bored and went off to play. The adults were all inside the houses
listening to the radio so it was only children out on the village roads. We all gathered
here and there in the roads to talk.
None of us really knew what was going on. The most popular topic was the strange,
unexpected fact that the emperor, like a regular adult, spoke in a “human voice.” We
didn’t understand the content, but we definitely heard the voice. And one of my young
friends could imitate it very well. We gathered around that friend in his dirty pants who
spoke in “the emperor’s voice,” and we laughed out loud.17
The crying adults in Ōe’s account, as well as the play-acting children, come to
realize a moment of dramatic enactment and audience response. The World
War II veterans who appear in Betsuyaku’s play are described as “wounded
soldiers,” but from the context we gather that the war is long over. As in Ōe’s
recollection, they describe the shock of that moment in terms of a radical
transformation in their lives. Betsuyaku’s plays more broadly are structured
explicitly around the centrality of voice, so the resonance of that moment dramatically underlines what is in any case a central mode for Betsuyaku’s dramatic productions. For the veterans depicted in Shōgo no densetsu, who speak
to one another in oddly reassuring human voices, “that day” marked the end
of a definitive sense of purpose, the end of an ability to throw oneself into
anything with complete and undoubting investment.
2: [S]ince that day, we just haven’t given it everything, haven’t thrown ourselves into things.
VETERAN 1: But haven’t we suffered a lot?
VETERAN 2: We have suffered. But we lacked total effort: we haven’t thrown ourselves
into things. Do you see, we’ve been wrong. We thought we were forgiven that day. . . 18
VETERAN
Veteran 2 articulates an engagement that would involve “total effort,” or doing
something isshōkenmei. He describes the problem of obligation, guilt, and forgiveness for this very human failing of not managing to do things with all their
might, “no holds barred,” as Zō’s invalid might have said. The “forgiveness”
they evoke here (“we thought we were forgiven that day”) is not a momentary
thing, from that day, that noon, but requires continual reiteration. Betsuyaku
never clarifies what exactly they are being forgiven for. Is it for losing the war?
For not giving it their all? Or, less likely, from the perspective of a postwar
discrediting of militarism, for supporting what is now seen as the “wrong”
No Holds Barred
29
cause? Beyond these possibilities, at this post- or after-moment of 1973, at one
of several possible junctures of lost faith in student movements and political
unities—of the “freedoms” Sartre had written of and so many had believed
were possible—the issue of responsibility and the debt of forgiveness appear
as a fundamental metaphysical predicament:
2: We were forgiven that day, but it didn’t last down to today. All this time
we’ve had to go on being forgiven, over and over again, day after day, hour after hour.
You see, hey, it’s the truth. You’re dead wrong if you think you’re forgiven once and
that’s the end of it. It goes on and on forever. Every day you have to be forgiven all
over again. . . . That’s what I mean when I say we just haven’t thrown ourselves into
things. (139; 69*)
VETERAN
Rather than making a “choice” from within their circumstances, there is sense
here of inevitable failure (though, one might add, its discussion still takes on a
rather ironic or casual tone). Yet in the wake of defeat, the veterans seek something to do or to believe in from an idiosyncratic and personal point of view,
perhaps analogous to Ango’s seeking of one’s own authentic way to fall. They
attempt to create a radically individualized and actualized “self” outside the
purview of the mistaken commitments and illusions of the past. As a solution
to this problem, Veteran 2, in a radical identification with his own excrement
as a mode of self-denial, uses continual and repeated self-abnegation as a paradoxical self-assertion. He chooses as the thing he will “throw himself into” the
refusal to defecate.19 As with the condemned Korean character “R” in Ōshima
Nagisa’s film Kōshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968), who squats down and eats
imaginary tapeworms from his own excrement, using the execution chamber’s
noose as a toilet pull, such a pursuit leads Veteran 2 into a terrain of selfreflexive or psychic/corporeal violence, an internalization of abjection. In the
second scene, each time the urge hits him, he asks the support of Veteran 1,
and they talk it through until the urge passes. Over and over he suffers it out
until the need subsides—he resists “with all his might.” This choice has what
one might call a radical existentialist logic of continual choice: he must choose
it over and over again from moment to moment, just as “every day you have
to be forgiven all over again.”
Inspired by this commitment, Veteran 1 considers the possibility of imitating his colleague. “Well, what if I don’t take a crap anymore either?” (138;
69). Veteran 2 responds immediately that the choice and discovery of one’s
commitment is an ultimately solitary and inimitable one: Veteran 1 must throw
his whole being into the process of the search itself. The attempt to be committed, here, must represent a radically unique choice. Any collective act or
direction, anything dictated or replicated from the outside, would be highly
suspect. He must activate his own unique and fully engaged agency, however
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No Holds Barred
difficult that may be, in order to effect the transformation from passivity to
passionate action. And yet the passionate action Veteran 2 has chosen is a
“passionate retention”—a paradoxical form of action or “doing something”
that is at the same time a “not doing”; as in Spivak’s argument, agency only to
be found in the act of “withholding,” when language itself is complicit and
suspect. His choice embodies the convoluted logic of simultaneously doing
and not doing, acting and not acting, demonstrating Betsuyaku’s further insight
at this point in time into the problematic loss of a direct course to agentic
action as well as to collectivity. In fact, one thing that is distinct about his plays
more broadly is the way in which, though they do involve collectives (like any
theatrical endeavor), these are for the most part not huge ensemble pieces; the
characters often float solitarily on stage misunderstanding one another, performatively embodying this very different and individualized, internalized view
of the very possibility of action.
Betsuyaku’s play outlines in the figure of Veteran 1 the degree zero of affect:
the simple desire for desire itself, for a forward trajectory for action. Like the
protagonist of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Aru aho no isshō (A Fool’s Life, 1927),
who having lost his passion for living goes so far as to envy a volcano for its
brilliant eruptions,20 the characters in Betsuyaku’s plays must invent or discover
something to live for, to be passionate about. They sustain a desire to live with
commitment, to “throw themselves into something,” even if it must, of necessity, entail purely individual, destructive, or absurd consequences. When one
thinks through this desire—which is, finally, a desire for engagement—in relation to the ontological debt the veterans imply in the need for “forgiveness,”
one sees that the consequences of giving ground or failing in this obligation,
seemingly toward life itself, are not ethically neutral. Yet it is not an urge toward
protest nor the desire to contribute to a collective, cultural unfolding; rather,
the veterans’ world is one of a radically solitary contingency, a search framed
within a far smaller intersubjective scale.
Still, the two veterans’ “loss of purpose” can be identified with an explicit
historical temporality, a nameable moment of loss in the particularity of “that
day” at noon. Textually, they have an opening beyond the enclosed world of
the play, in their allusion to a social and historical moment; based on actual
social figures, the veterans who fascinated Betsuyaku in the postwar era, who
could be seen wearing white and performing patriotic songs in the streets to
make money. These veterans in the play do carry a Japanese flag and sing the
national anthem “Kimi ga yo,” in spite of the otherwise temporally ambiguous
and vaguely continuous state of their predicament. By contrast, however, the
two other characters in the play, the unnamed “man” and “woman” who appear in Scene 1 and reappear with the veterans in the final scene, exist in a
No Holds Barred
31
world devoid of historical or spatial orientations, though (as in Betsuyaku’s
statement about aspiring toward a place to “inhabit”) such an orientation is
what they say they desire. The man who opens the play carries an orange crate
with him so that wherever he goes, he will have a “place” of his own. His crate
becomes a portable mode of belonging, evincing his dread and expectation of
encountering a situation where he has no “place.” Without direction, excluded
from all recognizable frameworks, the man nonetheless insistently asks the
woman what she is thinking about him. The woman’s every comment becomes
a crucial mirroring as the man grasps for a rudimentary sense of even discursive inclusion—a “human voice” by which he can hear himself reflected (or
be interpellated). Like many characters in Betsuyaku’s works, the man has nowhere to go, nothing to do, and little sense of who he is. The characters exist
in the anonymous, unlocatable, mostly bare landscape that predominates in
Betsuyaku’s later plays. This setting, along with the incisively ironic and meandering language of his dialogues, led to frequent comparison of Betsuyaku’s
work with that of Samuel Beckett.21 (Waiting for Godot was translated in 1956,
and Beckett, Ionesco, and Sartre are cited as influences on the early Waseda
Free Theater where Betsuyaku got his start as a playwright.) In this present,
static moment, evacuated of history, the character’s identity comes into being
as it is enacted in his encounter with the woman. This evacuation of locating
details poses a contrast to the (non-tragic, meaningless) work of the veterans,
with their explicit discussion of how to proceed in relation to the war, how to
make time march forward—or perhaps to turn it backward, to loop it round—
in their constitutive and continual apology. Meeting in this late post-shingeki
frame, “man” and “woman” become accountable to one another. The woman
eventually takes up the man’s offer to sit on his orange crate. When she stands
up, the man claims that the wallet hidden in the crate’s cushion has some
money missing from it. Without admitting to having stolen it, the woman offers the equivalent sum from her own pocket to clear her name, and the man
and woman negotiate this awkward moment in which there is finally no way
to know which version of the story is accurate. The literalized logic of indebtedness thus carries over from the veterans’ scene into this one, here ever
more explicitly. The man and the woman offer money to each other, while the
negotiation generates further mutual distrust as well as a sense of obligation.
In a more transcendent or philosophical register, one might say that in the
“debt” incurred by the encounter with another there is again a continual need
to seek forgiveness and acknowledgement.
Shōgo no densetsu raises the question of how willing the characters are to devote their lives to something, to stake their whole lives—or at least, in the
radical and revealing metonymic shift Betsuyaku makes here, which reflects
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No Holds Barred
contemporary debates on injury and the logics of war, to stake a life, someone’s life—to support a particular and slippery discursive version of reality. In
the end, the woman claims that in order to prove that the man truly believes
she did not steal the money, he should try to kill Veteran 2. Only the presence
of and acting toward a body can substantiate the ungrounded messiness of the
infinitely reflexive version of her claim:
WOMAN:
You probably believe this money’s yours, don’t you?
But I told you, didn’t I?
WOMAN: All right. Do you believe the money’s mine?
MAN: OK, I believe it.
WOMAN: Then stab him.
MAN: But why?
WOMAN: Do, and I’ll be OK. I’ll be convinced. I’ll believe you really believe the
money’s mine. (144; 74*)
MAN:
Her statement also raises the specter of the logic of consumer and national
debt: the culture of consumption raising the stakes on individual experiences
of exchange and debt.22 The logic of indebtedness and exchange render ambiguous whether the money or the act of murder is “yours” or “mine,” casting
doubt on the grounding or stability of signification, possession, and ownership. The woman promises this act of murder will provide or ascertain that
“ground.” Settling on the story, or narration itself in Betsuyaku’s plays, involves a continual willingness to receive other forms of debt in a network of
relationships that expands to include the two veterans and to reflect back on
the relation between this event and the social and human remnants that linger
as a result of the war.
Betsuyaku’s dialogues often provoke repeated internal retellings. Each minievent, absent temporal or geographical markers, evokes a multiplicity of allegorical possibilities. Beginning almost always with absurd situations, by the end
they reveal a specific set of philosophically cogent predicaments: difficulties of
communication and address, the ethical constitution of the self through exchange, the untenable desire for passionate purpose. Known as a playwright
for whom language itself is the central element in question as well as the primary dramatic medium, Betsuyaku shows it to be ever too slippery a ground.
When the woman herself readies the knife to fulfill the demand when the man
will not, it turns out that even this unsteady or untenable physical grounding
for referential clarity is already foreclosed: Veteran 2 is already dead. He has
died, it seems, by holding in his excrement—but hence has truly, corporeally,
thrown himself into his commitment, body and soul, however thus foiling the
possibility of his being used to ground the discourse of the others.
No Holds Barred
33
Fig. 2 One veteran holds the other at the close of Shōgo no densetsu. By permission of
Sueki Toshifumi, director of the production by Group Knack.
Yet, like the murdered invalid in Zō, this death that serves to close the
dramatic action of the play remains both absurd and, in some deeper sense,
outside of the trajectories of meaning. With the failure of their act, man and
woman remain in a state of uncertainty. The remaining veteran, too, implies that
he may go on to repeat the story, taking on or inventing yet another absurd
act to which he can devote his life. He alone admires the loss of life that has
foiled the woman’s intent, as the play ends and he declares:
1: I’ve got to come up with something ingenious, like he did, so that I can
throw myself into life, too. (145; 74)
VETERAN
In Betsuyaku’s plays, characters like Veteran 2, passionately devoted to life in
whatever odd way, clinging to some hope of redemption or salvation, do not
survive. In Ango, salvation is survival, and it is the reality of clinging to life in the
absence of guarantees or “ground.” Veteran 2 dies before his death might be
used to anchor the other characters’ elusive sense of reality. Whereas Betsuyaku’s characters try desperately to claim agency in their own destinies, to mark
out legible stories for themselves, the structure of the plays requires that they
remain stuck in a temporal gap or empty, evacuated zone. Betsuyaku’s plays thus
frequently explore how language breaks down in a way closely associated with
a sudden and meaningless death. (If I can’t prove it to you with words, how
about murder?) Death comes to substitute, one might say, for an absent or un-
34
No Holds Barred
satisfying speech act. Death is also doomed to remain a failed substitution, stuck
in an ambivalent uncertainty. Betsuyaku’s plays imply a traumatic structure in
that the call for meaning and the murder itself can become a form of failed
address. At this moment, just a few years after Mishima’s suicide, this aftermoment of the student movements, death and loss here call for and desire a
certainty of signification that, for Betsuyaku (at least), does not arrive. Only
murder, or self-murder, performatively and excessively enacted in Mishima’s
case, seems like it may promise or prove something, may end the cycle of exchange and indebtedness. But in the end, these deaths themselves reflect on
representations and exist within the discursive frame in which they are seen.
They fail to provide a guarantee of engagement (or encounter).
In spite of Betsuyaku’s subtle work with language and interrogation of referentiality, critics might ask whether or how the dialogic structure of these plays,
with their bare-stage encounters of strangers who talk their way into catastrophe, represent a true challenge to orthodox (or modernist / shingeki) dramatic
performative modes. Although they avoid traditional plot structures with buildup, climax, and resolution—as we mentioned above, some even say that “nothing ever happens,” or almost nothing happens, in a Betsuyaku play—in performance they still function through a bare stage, an audience, and an exchange
of deceptively banal words between characters in a contingent or unmotivated
chance encounter. Yet Betsuyaku’s radical and generative vision of the breakdown of language and dialogue between his characters can best be understood
in relation to the back and forth, call and response, of theater and its viewers. As
he questions deeply what it would mean to have an audience at all, his characters, struggling with the frame by which they and their daily temporalities are
defined, open an interrogation of theatrical space and time in a literary mode
that other practitioners later carry to a more extreme performative (and corporeal) realization. Betsuyaku’s displaced characters, lacking ethical certainties,
initiate a praxis of searching that remains impossible to conclude, except, perhaps, with death; and yet, that search also opened a way for a prolific theatrical
moment and movement.
The ways in which words are exchanged in Betsuyaku’s plays breaks up the
smooth flow of dialogue as well as of dramatic structure. One of the pleasures
of Betsuyaku’s work is that his elliptical language seems at times to be motivated, in its fits and starts, by the flow of language itself, shifting ephemerally
on contingent turns of phrase. The experience of his work—and here, one can
trace further Beckettian parallels—is that it puts one in touch with the murmur
of language, the movement of attempted communication. Unlike the novelistic
style indirect libre, however, here we have embodied actors on stage speaking the
words aloud to one another; yet they give us access to a raw subjective space,
No Holds Barred
35
a presumed “interiority” staged as intersubjective exchange. The conversation
breaks down frequently as characters attempt to disinterpellate themselves or
detach from the dialogue, but they cannot. Betsuyaku thus enacts a structure
of ethical responsibility in his plays through this address from one character to
another. Stripped of most specificity of detail, the characters—who often have
no names, and are in no identifiable place or time—find themselves at a loss
for what to do, and yet long for a meaningful use for their lives, for the possibility of making an “authentic” choice, if possible, one grounded in epistemological certainty. They are embedded, “thrown” into relation with one another,
and must make their way forward with only this to go on. Yet at the same time
they claim a stance of casualness, sarigenasa, or vacillate between a stance of
sarigenasa, a radical withholding, and an apologetic, indebted attempt to achieve
full engagement with the world.
TWO
Terayama Shūji:
Gender, Power, and the Imperative Voice
Structures do not walk on the streets
—Well-known graffiti from the Paris walls in 1968
As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master.
You will get one.
—Lacan’s challenge to protesting students in 1968
He must overcome him dialectically. That is, he must leave him life
and consciousness, and destroy only his autonomy.
—Kojève on the master-slave in Hegel
Theater artists in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s conducted a powerful investigation into the roots of complicity with power. No longer believing in—and
often directly challenging—“duped victim” narratives prevalent in the early
postwar years, as well as other simplified representations of the wartime past,
theater artists probed the roots of agentic complicity. Yoshikuni Igarashi’s
work on war narrative in postwar Japanese culture provides a subtle description of this foundational “duped victim” representation of the postwar alliance
between the United States and Japan, its gendering and cultural ramifications.
This melodramatic story or foundational narrative became an effective strategy
for absolving Japanese people and leaders (beginning with the emperor) of responsibility for the war, solidifying U.S.-Japan alliances for American purposes
during the Cold War, and effacing the memories of atrocities against Japan’s
former colonial subjects. Employing the terms of cinematic melodrama, he
writes:
Terayama Shūji
37
The atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was a slap in Japan’s
face; with this slap, Japan’s vengeful gaze toward the United States was transformed
into an adoring look. . . . Facing inevitable defeat in World War II, the Japanese leadership produced a drama of rescue—the rescue of Hirohito from corrupt militarists—
in an attempt to rationalize the defeat.1
With the goal of combating the black-and-white, good-and-evil conceptualization that undergirds “victim consciousness,” many artists explored a much
more nuanced, humorous, and at times harrowing look at the subject’s participation and complicity in its own subjection. How is it that the emperor
system could have taken the turn it did? Is there something inherent in the
workings of groups and collectives that led to such energized obedience to
the militarist state? Moreover, is there something inherent in subjecthood itself
that contributes to such extremes? This forms a dark underside of the otherwise idealized “intersubjective” space, the subject constituted “in relation” to
other subjects and to its environment, or perhaps more accurately, to collective
movements. Postwar artists uncover how such relationships of power are inflected in relation to gender and sexuality. Their work approaches and attempts
to answer these questions both directly and indirectly, theoretically and in parodic performative practices.
By the founding of his troupe Tenjō sajiki in 1967, Terayama was already a
celebrity, and his work had long been both admired and reviled for its challenging of traditional family structures. Most notable in this regard, perhaps, was
the book originally titled Iede no susume (Encouragement to Run Away, 1963),
that was said to have sparked a “boom” in runaways. (Terayama came to be
known as the “runaway guru” in the press.) According to Terayama’s retelling,
he started Tenjō sajiki with the desire to do something with the energy of all
these runaways. Terayama served as “guarantor” (in locus parenti) for work and
living spaces for more than thirty runaways, some of whom stayed in his house;
many more came to sign his “runaway book” (iedenin becchō ). According to Kujō,
every day teenage runaways showed up at their doorstep, the book in their bags.
The book originally opened with the foreword, “I want anyone who reads
this to make sure to ‘run away from home.’ ” In particular, the chapter entitled
“Jiritsu no susume” (Encouragement to be Independent) mentions rural youth
leaving their families of origin as a key route to independence.2 Part of the
interest of newly formed artistic / theatrical associations, such as Tenjō sajiki,
in their (now perhaps legendary) structures, is how they both mirrored, ironically cited, and subverted the kinds of bonds circumscribed within traditional
family structures.3 Yet as we see in the two controversial plays by Tenjō sajiki
discussed in this chapter, Kegawa no Mari (La Marie Vison / Marie in Furs, 1967)
and Nuhikun (Directions to Servants, 1977), Terayama’s troupe performed a
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Terayama Shūji
strongly critical and subtle analysis of the workings of power (within and outside
the family), in relation to gender, sexuality, as well as in the formations of history
and memory.
Kegawa no Mari, the third play of the newly founded Tenjō sajiki, was first performed at the Shinjuku Bunka Center. It explores the master-slave dialectic and
its sexualization within the family as well as the contingent discursive boundaries of the “natural” and the cultured.4 The play, which traveled to Germany,
France, and New York as well as around Japan, featured the famous female
impersonator Miwa Akihiro as Mari.5 (The part was later taken over by Shimouma Nigoshichi.) Today one can see a part of the extraordinary performance of
Miwa as Mari in the bathtub in Terayama’s 1971 experimental film, Sho o suteyo,
machi e deyō (Throw Away Your Books, Go out into the Streets!).6
In the opening scene of Kegawa no Mari, also included in the experimental
film, Mari sits in a large bathtub, speaking to her male lover-slave (who also
serves as the voice of her mirror):
MARI:
Mirror, mirror [on the wall] who is the fairest of them all?
Mari-san. You are the fairest of them all.
MARI: Really?
SLAVE: The mirror does not lie.
MARI: Oh, that’s good. So Snow White hasn’t been born yet I suppose.
[She pokes her leg out of the tub . . .]
MARI: Look how much it’s grown! Evercream [depilatory cream] doesn’t work too
well. . . . Bring the razor! [To the audience] Really, I just shaved, and it’s already this
again . . . [looking under arms] Oh, here too! (39)
SLAVE:
Miwa’s art as a female impersonator complements the camp sexuality of the
character of Mari in Terayama’s play. Critics often link Miwa’s gender-crossing
art to the place of onnagata in kabuki (or otokoyaku in Takarazuka), as a theatricalization of sexuality that opens a potential space for critique of dominant
modes of sexuality.7 David Desser writes that “Akihiro’s sexual attraction . . .
‘is enhanced by a certain amount of ambivalence’ . . . Sex roles are deliberately
theatricalized, highlighted in their social essence, and so provide a starting
point for a radical critique of the dominant culture’s attitudes toward sexuality.”8 The character of Mari is a transvestite in her 40s who, as we see later, is
bringing up a boy in her apartment, keeping him inside like a greenhouse plant.
A controlling mother figure, one of the many domineering mothers in Terayama’s work,9 Mari plays out the relation of power with both her slave boy
and son, in an edgy parody of sexuality and parental pedagogy. Mari is exaggeratedly fascinated with beauty, particularly her own. She impersonates Snow
White’s evil stepmother, pointing to the inevitable erosion of this ideal beauty
Terayama Shūji
39
Fig. 3 The front of the Shibuya Tenjō sajiki theater, designed by Awatsu Kiyoshi,
Courtesy of Kujō Kyōko.
with the passage of time. Mari / Miwa evokes multiple layers of masquerade:
as a “man”—a female impersonator—playing a female impersonator as evil
stepmother. The multiple layers of her performance destabilize this citation
of the female beauty myth. Mari amuses Kin’ya by releasing butterflies in his
room; he is to catch them and relate his adventures in the distant Amazon or
wherever he has been (in imagination) to capture them. When the slave objects
that this exercise seems pointless, she counters: “Yes, just like all education
and discipline are pointless!” (41).
The obsession with beauty and its relationship to lost time arise in many
scenes of the play. Mari keeps Kin’ya in shorts in spite of his protests that “I
am already [14 or 18] years old” (the age varies from one production to another). It is as if the shorts would stop him from growing up, maintaining the
illusion that he was still a little boy. Mari claims that the butterflies that Kin’ya
catches are unique in the world. She puts makeup on them to ensure that they
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Terayama Shūji
are unlike one another—perhaps in an analogy to herself, the “fairest of them
all,” if not necessarily by “nature.” The boy kills the butterflies and pins them
into his specimen book, because, as he explains (in a way that might call Ango
to mind), he does not want to see their beauty frayed or damaged with time,
but wants to catch them now just as they are, in their perfection.
Terayama quotes clichés of beauty, loss, and the passage of time through
Mari’s extravagantly physical performance. Mari shows us herself “becoming
woman” as she performs, in public and on stage, the moment of taking on
the socialized gender norms of femininity; and, from within the perspective of
himself becoming woman, the moment of enactment of a dislocation of gender’s “nature.” Mari’s grammar and voice are already feminized (kono yo de ichiban no bijin wa dare kashira? ), except for occasional dips to a baritone in moments of pain or anger; her makeup and hair and face are complete. The
remaining persistent mark of masculinity—Mari remains in the bathtub so we
can’t see any further details—is the lush growth of body hair, distinctly marked
in the play’s title.
One might recall how, in Mishima’s early novel Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1949) the virile masculinity of an older high-school boy
is impressed unbearably on the narrator’s mind when he sees the surprising,
thick tufts of hair under his arms. The hair is figured as a kind of lush and
extravagant nature, the abundant life of the natural world invading or taking
over cultural boundaries, such as a summer garden, or the carved edges of the
older boy’s sculpted body:
[This opulence of hair] seemed almost prodigal, like some luxuriant growth of troublesome summer weeds. And in the same way that such weeds, not satisfied to have completely covered a summer garden, will even spread up a stone staircase, the hair overflowed the deeply carved banks of Ōmi’s armpits and spread thickly toward his chest. . . .
Life-force—it was the sheer extravagant abundance of life-force that overpowered the
boy. The [schoolboys] were overwhelmed by the feeling he gave of having too much
life, by the feeling of purposeless violence that can be explained only as life existing for
its own sake.10
For Mishima’s narrator, hair signifies a powerful and violent life force, a masculinity that consumes him by turns with jealousy and desire, but which is out
of reach of his own frail body, trapped in its childhood and its (emasculated)
intellect. Such a purposeless violence and excess—this direct, rough, but ideally
beautiful masculinity—triggers the narrator’s erotic imaginings of a heroic and
violent death. He is fascinated with a frozen moment of beauty that precedes
a violent sacrifice.
In Mari’s shaving ritual, the hair is unwanted for the ideal of feminine
beauty, but at the same time, like Ōmi’s hair, it is a sign of abundant life and
Terayama Shūji
41
uniqueness. Mari’s sheer silliness in contrast to the intense seriousness of Mishima’s narrator is striking, and her surprise at her new growth of hair is almost delighted: “Look how well-nourished it is [nante eiyō ga yukiwatatterundeshō ]!” (39). There is a residue of pleasure in the ritual of femininity-making
that exceeds its result. The razor against skin takes on an erotic resonance like
the arrows of St. Sebastian in Mishima’s novel, the idealized softness of skin
all the more in evidence by contrast to the eroticized sharp razor that could
hurt it at any moment.11
The shaving ritual of Mari and her slave, then—highlighted or placed in
relief as a performance—enacts in gestural form, in quotation marks as it were,
a power dynamics and an erotics of dominance and submission. Meanwhile
the boy in his room, instead of going to school, listens to recordings of Mari’s
voice. The room transforms into a “garden of Eden,” where the booming omnipotent voice scolds and offers amusements: “Go ahead,” says Mari’s voice
in the recording, “you can eat that apple on the table” (47). Voice-over Mari
comes out of the tape recorder, the voice doubling as God and Eve (or the
serpent?).12 Mari eventually releases a corrupting butterfly girl into the boy’s
garden, a butterfly girl whom the boy kills, replicating the (indirect) murder
of a woman that initiated Mari into femininity and motherhood.
In the essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1974), Susan Sontag condemns the rehabilitation of Leni Riefenstahl, claiming that avant-garde filmmakers had discounted the purposes and circumstances of Riefenstahl’s work in favor of a
disquieting emphasis on their search for a spiritual form of aesthetic beauty.
“In Olympia,” writes Sontag, “one straining, scantily clad figure after another
seeks the ecstasy of victory, cheered on by ranks of compatriots in the stands,
all under the still gaze of the benign Super Spectator, Hitler, whose presence
in the stadium consecrates this effort.”13 In the same piece, Sontag posits that
the fascist combination of an obsession with ideal forms of beauty (spiritually
uplifting for the community) and its ultimate violence provided a ready-made
cultural iconography and symbolism for alternative sexualities of the late twentieth century. “Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link,”
she writes. “ ‘Fascism is theater,’ as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality:
to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of
sexuality” (103). She continues: “Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone” (105).
Sontag quotes Riefenstahl in an interview: “I can simply say that I feel spontaneously attracted by everything that is beautiful. Whatever is purely realistic,
slice-of-life, which is average, quotidian, doesn’t interest me. . . . I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living” (85). Sontag then
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alludes to Mishima’s complex interest in pure and unsullied beauty and his fascination with the trappings of military dominance.
Mari, too, though in an ironic and campy way, performs both sexual dominance and the obsession with ideal beauty. Mari has affairs with a series of
tattooed sailors who would perfectly fit the description by Mishima’s narrator
of his ideal, swarthy, inarticulate male who would represent “pure brute lifeforce.” Yet, in the case of Mari’s world and even, in a different way, in the
early Mishima of Kamen no kokuhaku, the aesthetic attraction to the “inarticulate, brute male” remains self-reflexive and ambivalent about its own layered
artifice. Mishima’s narrator reflects on, and Mari celebrates, the status of this
attraction as fantasy, illusion, and staged artifice within a confined (and marginalized) underworld. What is important here is not only the marginalization
of these “theaters” of sexuality, but also, this crucial turn of self-reflection,
the critical self-awareness, the “wink” (of complicity) that they enact / perform.
The characters in Kegawa no Mari comment on the necessity and status of these
fantasies as artifice, and hence are particularly obsessed by, and return frequently to the subject of the fluid and contingent distinctions between the
truth and the lie, the natural and the made.
When the butterfly-girl (in the form of a girl actress) descends to the boy’s
room, she tries to tempt him to escape from his cage. The boy claims that Mari
will be home at any moment, that in any case he likes his cage and does not
want to escape. The girl says: “You don’t like it here, you are just afraid to go
outside.” She enters into an argument about the relation between the real and
the artificial: “Out there it’s not just fans,” she says, “you can feel real wind!” As
she pushes the boy to leave his cage, she claims that lies and masks are necessary in order for truth to be possible, in a logic that depends upon privileging
“truth” over lies or masks. In the end, she shows the mutually dependent definitions of the two: “If there were no lies, truth would also disappear. If there
were no masks, one could not see the real face” (54).
In contrast to the butterfly girl’s vision of inside / outside, and truth and
lies, the play gives us Mari’s version of these oppositions and definitions. The
sailor she brings home as a lover asks if she knows how the outside world
gossips about her, and she answers, “Of course, they call me okama, homo,
danshoku, gay!” The sailor adds, “hentai” (deviant / abnormal / pervert). She responds, casually pouring him champagne, “Yes, the people of the world say
that I am unnatural. Tsukurimono [artificial; a made thing], contrary to the will
of God. But it is just such people who unthinkingly and without any problem
toss flower seeds in their gardens. Spreading those 20-yen-a-bag seeds that have
nothing to do with God, they do not consider that a defilement of nature. . . .
no, in any case, there is not a single thing in life that is any good just as it is, in
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43
its natural state. . . .” (64–65). In an almost theoretical yet casually delivered
disquisition on the matter, itself part of a scene of seduction, Mari argues the
positive value and in any case the inevitability of artistry and artifice, as well
as the hypocrisy of noticing artifice only when it is deviant from normative
socialization. The best things in life, she tells us—in fact, all things if one thinks
about them at all—arrive through mediation, and are thus not “natural” but
made.
Here appears the “gendered history” of Mari: she recounts to the sailor
the first times she came to dress as a girl and began her feminine identification,
and became the “mother” of Kin’ya. In her story, Mari is betrayed by her collaborator in cross-dressing, a girl named Katsuko who, in a kind of reversal
of Freud’s penis-envy, had told the whole world Mari’s deepest shame: that
he did have a penis, that in fact his body was not the body of a girl as he would
have wished. In revenge for this violation and shaming, he recounts that he
bribed a laborer, a regular customer in the cafeteria his parents ran, to rape
Katsuko above the railroad tracks of the Keihin Tōhoku line. He tells the sailor
(again, this story is still part of an alleged scene of seduction) that he watched
this rape scene, and describes Katsuko’s grip on the rapist’s back with her nails,
her shudder. He watched “in order to steal her expression,” or “the expression
of Woman herself [onna sono mono no hyōjō o sokkuri nusundeyaru tame ni ]” (69).
Through the rape, Katsuko became pregnant and died in childbirth. Mari
“stole” from her the “true” expression of “Woman herself” in rape, which
he conflates with sexual desire, and which he will subsequently rehearse, presumably, with this very sailor.14 Mari also takes over from Katsuko the role of
mother, aspects of so-called “feminine nature” that she consciously performs.
She requires that the child call her “Okaasan” (mother) rather than Mari-san,
enforcing the child’s collaboration in this role-playing.
After telling this story to the sailor, Mari says that she is bringing up the
child very carefully in order to make him a woman, and to make him a prostitute, or, as she puts it, the “trash can of flesh where sexual dirt is thrown.”
SAILOR:
Is that true? It must be a lie.
Have you ever thought about what the world is made of, dear sailor? The surface
is made, for the most part, of lies. Not just the labels on cans of beef. . . . Life itself
is all like that! The surface is lies, but inside there is truth. If you want to believe that
the inside is truth, you have to say that the surface is all lies. Isn’t that true?
So that the spirit can take a distant ocean voyage [en’yō kōkai; in other words, to
be free], the body is always in a fuss about nothing. . . . The two are always playing a
game of chase, and the one that loses by chance, by janken [paper, rock, scissors] in the
beginning of the game becomes the lie, constantly chasing after the one that became
the truth. History is all lies; that which is passing is all lies. The only truth is the demon
of tomorrow! [Smoking] That’s enough, finished with my life story. (70)
MARI:
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By saying that history and the past are all lies, Mari also places her own story in
doubt, as well as her version of her plans for Kin’ya. At the end of the story,
Mari claims that only a game of chance ( janken) determines the distinction between what is perceived as “lies” and what is “truth.” This game is a contingent
event that nonetheless determines the course of lives. The lie is fated “constantly [to] chas[e] after the one that became the truth.” By the same token,
however, the “truth” will then always be chased by its lies—the other alternatives and possible trajectories for the story—and can never rest fully secure.
Mari challenges normative relations between sex and gender, and between
“natural” and “cultivated” gender, in bringing up the child as girl. She points
to the contingent and oppressive (or, to take on Mari’s attitude, annoying and
inopportune) game of chance, much better replaced by a more playful and
open notion that accepts a looser and more pleasurable—though at times also
more violent—combination of options. Even maternity itself, one of the key
cultural demands linked to femininity’s “essence” can be played according to
Mari as a staged role, an orchestrated power structure: lullabies and bedtime
readings, presents and dressing the child like a doll.15 The element of masterslave dominance, generally unspoken (or unspeakable), can be played out and
eroticized as an excess, a fetish, denaturalizing itself even as it is cited in Mari’s
enactment of smothering motherliness.
When she says, “the body is always in a fuss about nothing,” Mari’s character reiterates yet another in the series of binary oppositions upon which her
discourse relies, oppositions such as spirit and body, truth and lies, real face
and mask. Yet throughout Kegawa no Mari, she and the other characters undermine ontological assumptions about these oppositions, allowing them to vacillate and revolve, a high-stake gambler’s version of de Man’s tropic “revolving door.” The two play at janken to determine which will ultimately take the
prior or privileged place.
In her relationship with Kin’ya, Mari reenacts the power dynamic between
those who make the rules and those who are forced to follow them, creating,
like the servants in Nuhikun, a miniaturized version of the power structures
of the social. Because this is a deliberate reenactment, it emphasizes the structured, institutionalized, resilient, and yet in some ways contingent structure of
these relations. The theater itself here becomes a metaphor for the confined
space of social constraints and predetermined (given) narratives, while it also
becomes a performative space for the repetitions that may challenge them.
In the Yves Montand song after which the play is named, “La Marie Vison”
(Mink Marie) cries as she confesses her secret: “Elle s’est mise a pleurer . . .
et son secret, son secret trop lourd pour elle, dans un bistro, me l’a confié . . .
Que la vie était belle, elle portait des dentelles / et tous les hommes et tous
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les hommes étaient fous d’elle.” In its allusion to this song, the play sets us
up for a scene of loss. In the penultimate scene the boy Kin’ya fulfills this
premonition by running away, devastating Mari by seeming to escape from her
grasp.16 If the audience might hope that his escape from the structures of
power will be successful, the loss of the structures also entails a loss of the
primary relationship. In the end, escape is impossible and the replication is
predetermined. Mari calls the boy, confidently at first, and then with the melodramatic excess and desperation of abandonment, until, finally slowly, he steps
back onto the stage. Her good cheer is instantly restored, and for the first time
we see her clothe Kin’ya in a dress and trace his lips with lipstick. The boy
is limp, doll-like, lifeless, and a tear makes its way down his cheek. Mari, too,
begins to cry. “Why are you crying?” she asks. “Soon you will be the fairest
of them all. . . . I’ll let out lots of butterflies for you” (77). These tears, in one
version of the story, might represent a “true” emotional response to the layers
of domination, loss, impossibility, and isolation. But the tears might also represent yet another layer of enactment, of citation of emotion—like that of La
Marie Vison in the song, “elle s’est mise a pleurer”—Mari, who once was the
fairest of them all, driving the men wild.
By embracing artifice and enacting the eroticization of familial power, Mari
within the play proposes one alternative way to deal with questions of complicity and normative constraint. She models a form of engagement as an embracing of artifice, the active and affective appropriation of structures of desire,
the replication of norms with a twist. Yet the play does not allow this embrace
to be a purely liberatory one; instead, it ends in a space of constraint, violence,
and unending repetition of the nearly-same, the promise of reiteration of the
existing constraints and secrets, passed on to the next “generation,” which, by
ties bound in affect, “habituated to imperatives,” cannot escape them.
For I have greatly sinned, at all times, greatly sinned against my prompters. And if I cannot
decently be proud of this I see no reason either to be sorry. But imperatives are a little
different, and I have always been inclined to submit to them, I don’t know why. For they
never led me anywhere, but tore me from places where, if all was not well, all was no
worse than anywhere else, and then went silent, leaving me stranded. So I knew my imperatives well, and yet I submitted to them. It had become a habit.
—Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Ten years after Kegawa no Mari—after Terayama’s extensive travels in Europe,
including his meeting with Foucault around 1976,17 and the blossoming of the
troupe’s local and international reputation—Tenjō sajiki produced a particularly striking and controversial work that focuses explicitly on the master-slave
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relationship as a paradigm for other kinds of social hierarchies. Nuhikun parodies and performs the machine-like obedience and rebellion of a group of servants in an imaginary master’s house, and the play shows the servants’ powerful desire for a master to whom they can submit their wills. The master’s role
here is a place-holder in a resilient cycle of power generated in a constitutive
process that cannot be located or exclusively found “within” or “without”
the subject. Like Kegawa no Mari and Hyakunen no kodoku (One Hundred Years
of Solitude), discussed in Chapter 4, the play further mediates this exploration
through dramatization of the role of technology and the machine in maintaining these social structures of mastery.
Nuhikun, loosely inspired by Jonathan Swift’s parodic manual Directions for
Servants (1739), began as a workshop in Tokyo and by 1978 had toured to
Amsterdam, Belgium, and London. It was staged at La MaMa in New York
in June 1980,18 and was produced again in 1989 after Terayama’s death by his
collaborator and composer, J. A. Seazer.19 Swift’s version of Directions to Servants
is a compendium of tricks and bizarre suggestions for making the most of the
position of servant, while seeming to look out for the benefit of the master.20
Terayama’s “Director’s Notes” places his adaptation in a somewhat ironic genealogy that includes Desiderius Erasmus’ serious yet amusing etiquette instructions, De civilitate morum puerilium (On Good Manners for Boys, 1530), as well as
Swift’s work and Norbert Elias’ History of Manners (1939), a book that chronicles
changes in attitudes toward proper behavior over time. The play takes place in
a rural mansion ( yashiki) where the master’s chair is an imposing presence that
should look, according to Terayama, like the throne of the Meiji Emperor. Yet
there is no emperor, and the many servants take turns playing the role of master
to command, punish, discipline, and give pleasure to the others.
The opening scene of the play shows us the “creation” of a master. A naked
man with a shaved head is literally made into the master by a machine: his beard
and his wig are attached by the wig-and-beard-giving contraption, named the
“Saint-Master machine” in the script. His robes are placed on his body by the
others, who are now his servants. The question of who will be the master is constantly negotiated throughout the play. Terayama writes in the program notes:
“Our revolt is not against this absent master . . . The tragedy is not the absence
of the Master but the Servants’ need for a master.”21 The master’s shoe, which
fits no one, becomes an imposing and absurd symbol of the master’s absentpresent power. The play thus shows the desire to become master matched or
surpassed by an opposing desire to be dominated by a strong and forceful
master’s presence. Many of the servants surreptitiously try on shoes that are
considered to be the “master’s shoes” as if they wanted them to fit; but when
being tortured and disciplined by other characters, they also cry out for more.22
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Fig. 4 Saint-Master Machine from Nuhikun. Courtesy of Terayama World, by permission
of Kujō Kyōko.
Nuhikun examines the ideologies of servitude and self-sacrifice that are significant parts of Japanese cultural life, implicitly drawing into Terayama’s web
the role of the salaryman and the cram school student, the overworked housewife and the loyal (or domineering) mother. Further, his play reflects on the
literary intertexts of the ideology of self-sacrifice. Servants quote, for example,
from the famous poem by Miyazawa Kenji that begins: “Defeated neither by
rain / nor by wind” (ame ni mo makezu / kaze ni mo makezu) and they revise it,
take it out of context, and blow it apart. Viewing “Japan” and its “Others” in
a pure historical allegory, however, runs the risk of reducing them to single
characters in a historical “grand narrative,” which would reiterate a vision that
Terayama’s work aims to rethink and question.23 Emphasizing a reconsideration of the body in labor and private life, difficult to subsume under the rubric
of historical allegory, here I would read Nuhikun in terms of its demand for
a reconsideration of smaller, multiple histories, making them anew in the light
of considerations of the body, desire, and power.
In one parodic segment of the play, the many servants literally act out the
part of dogs before the provisional master, picking up the bone he throws them.
Human beings fetch the bone between their teeth. The audience recognizes
the master by the red carpet rolled out before his arrival. In the stage directions,
Terayama points out the contingency of his identity: “Someone whom one
would think is the master, because of his beard, enters.” (Power here is thus
not identified in its supposed wholeness but through smaller, mobile metonymies, like the beard, the shoe, or the carpet.) Terayama plays out the structure
of a social contract: with or without words, the master makes his command,
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throws his bone. Like the Althusserian moment of interpellation in “Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in which the policeman hails the man on
the street and he turns around, recognizing himself in the call of the law, here
each servant knows that the bone is a call to himself, and knows when it is his
moment to fetch. The master encourages each successive servant-dog: “Yoshi,
yoshi [good job!]” and upon successful completion of the mark of obedience (the
characters stand back up from all fours to take a human bow), the other servants
provide social pressure and reinforcement with their polite tennis-match-style
applause.
The servants behave like dogs, but at the same time like humans—and not
without what seems to be a conscious moment of choice, even as their response
seems also to be irrepressible. This moment occurs as they turn toward the
call and bow to the master; the dogs/servants show a certain self-awareness,
and even a great deal of freedom in how they obey, so long as they do so in
the end. The servants know perfectly well that they are quoting the canine,
“Caninity,” as Roland Barthes might say, as each servant says “wan [woof!]” in
Japanese, using onomatopoeic language as he stands on two legs even while
the very performance of being dogs is displayed before the audience. They leap,
they bound, they turn somersaults on their way to the bone, using their bodies
with great agility and acrobatic ebullience. Nonetheless, all bring the bone, one
way or another, in the end. Even one deviant pup who refuses and pretends
to be asleep becomes an odd confirmation of the others; while protesting and
misbehaving, he, too, is finally forced to comply.24
At the close of the scene, the master poses the ultimate challenge: he throws
the master’s shoe from his own foot—the very symbolic instrument of his
legitimacy, the proof of his power. At first, none of the servant-pups makes a
move toward it. Yet rather than restoring order and dignity, the master jumps
directly into the fray, barking and leaping. The new master is chosen by the very
competition he began; in the grab for the shoe, implicitly, the whole process will
start over again. There is no inherent difference between servants and master.
Leaping into the pack, the master too desires to be subjected, to have someone
or something to fetch for.
Questioning and overturning the given oppositions between “external” social norms and the “interior” space of the psyche, recent critical writings describe how the process of internalization of social norms is crucial to the production of the distinction between interior and exterior,25 in a way parallel to
the inversions that fabricate interiority in Karatani Kōjin’s argument in Origins
of Modern Japanese Literature. In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler discusses
how the renunciations and refusals of the body, aimed at holding back the
body’s desires and instincts, ultimately gain an excessive force from the energy
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of that very body turned against itself. She cites the moment in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents where he writes: “Conscience (or more correctly, the
anxiety which later becomes conscience) is indeed the cause of instinctual renunciations to begin with, but that later that relationship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every
fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and intolerance.” The power
that would have been expended in instinctual expressions is now inverted to
become what Freud here calls “a dynamic source of conscience,” fueling the
very process of increasingly severe renunciation.26 Like Molloy’s inner imperatives in the above epigraph, internalized norms are the work of conscience
and guilt, the commands the subject “makes (or takes) within itself” that come
neither precisely from within nor without but construct this very distinction:
get up, brush your teeth, go to work, be good, don’t steal. Legal, social, and
theological imperatives are part of what make and constitute the subject, as
specific instances in which the presence of power is made visible, translated
into actions and their prohibitions.
Unlike the slippery strategy toward power relations that is enacted by Betsuyaku’s casualness, Terayama’s work here dramatically performs the ways in
which the libidinal force of a prohibition toward the body itself contributes
to the energy of the process of command and obedience, or, in a parallel but
still dependent reversal of that energy, explicit disobedience. The master issues
commands that the servants in one scene emphatically disobey. Even as these
servants seem to be providing a model of perfect rebellion, like Swift’s exploiting and sneaky bondsmen, they show an excess of energy released precisely
by having an interdiction to disobey. Spitting, scratching, sucking, dancing, eavesdropping, showing body parts, eating standing up, cussing, laughing, and escaping from the house—all of these actions are constituted in direct opposition
to the boundaries laid out for them of what is forbidden. In the end, the play
may even be suggesting that perhaps there is no pleasure without the master and
his orders—or at least, that the production of desire and pleasure cannot escape
them; they intensify the desire and play a direct role in the formation of “subjects of desire,” even in negation and contradiction. In the end, the servants
depend all the more on the master for these contradictory pleasures.
In one of the most evocative scenes of the play, in which again the voice
of the master is mediated by a technological apparatus, a servant approaches
a lone tape recorder that he finds sitting on the master’s chair. In this scene
entitled “Who Killed Cock Robin?” he begins to record his voice, whispering
into the tape: “I am this mansion’s true master.” When he rewinds to listen
to that welcome news again, suddenly, his voice has ceased to record and the
master’s voice taunts him in its place: “It didn’t record! Your recording is a
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failure!” Through his use of the tape recorder, Terayama dramatizes the action
of the command arriving neither exactly from the interior nor the exterior of
the subject, but, via the recording, in a strange way from both at once—and in
a way that contains and dramatizes a temporal displacement of the time of the
command. What seems to come from outside comes from a space and time
that cannot be discretely located in either the internal or the external. The play
here evokes the disembodied intimacy of this master’s voice that comes through
the tape as both the voice of the self and the other.27
In Nuhikun, the machine reinforces the illusion of disembodied external
power, where the master’s authority is partly located in the fact that he is not
a body, but merely a voice. One thinks of the famous ad for RCA Victor, “His
Master’s Voice,” and how that has become a critical centerpiece for explorations of mimesis and mastery.28 This structure of disembodied, mimetic power
is overturned in the end, as we shall see. Terayama shows how the voice, so
difficult to locate, and the inner imperatives in combination with machines
make it possible for the servants to punish themselves. For example, in the
milking machine (in some ways reminiscent of today’s breast pumps, intended
as a source of multitasking liberation), a female servant pedals a bicycle attached to a machine on her upper body that milks her breasts, while another
servant holds the jug to receive it.29 Yet the machines in the play mediate and
make apparent that turning, as one half of the body (the legs on the bicycle)
give power to the machine that “exploits” or acts on the other half.
As the scene progresses, the servant tries to stop the master’s voice from
playing out of the tape recorder by stopping the machine. Yet when the voice
shouts, “Don’t touch!” the servant obeys. The voice will not let him escape.
It even asks him to turn up the volume, in this scene that makes explicit the
dependence of the master on the servile body.
The master says: “I have been watching you all the time. But all this time,
there is one thing I don’t understand: what is your real aim [hontō no nerai wa]?”
The servant answers: “Aims? I don’t have any of those. . . .” The sound cracks
and the master commands: “Turn the volume down!” At the moment when
the servant declares the absence of his own intentions and aims, he seems to
enter fully into the relation of servant to the voice, no longer resisting anything
the master voice commands. The master says: “Breathe deeply. In, out, in, out,
in-out-in-out-in-out. . . .” The master controls and regulates the servant’s body:
“Suck your fingers. More, more. . . .” He makes the servant gag on his fingers,
and dictates even his emotions: “Isn’t that fun? If it is, then laugh! Laugh!”
The voice of power regulates ever more intimate areas of the servant’s
world, as one by one these “private” spaces are brought into the discourse of
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Fig. 5 “His Master’s Voice.” Courtesy of the Camden County Historical Society
the voice’s imperatives. As it moves further into the servant’s interior realm,
the voice orders the servant to take off his pants, and to face forward, to lie
down and get up, to kneel facing the master-voice and pray. Terayama writes
of his work with the troupe at this time: “Currently Tenjō sajiki is trying to
develop its performances by concentrating on physical elements. Not only
the relationship or conflict between two bodies, but rather an exploration of
the relationship between a body and a machine, a body and a concept of the
Absolute, like God, or a body and society at large.”30
The servant boy seems to understand the nature of his relation to this
strange voice, to recognize it. “Whose voice does my voice sound like?” asks
the master.
BOY:
It sounds like my voice.
Yes, because, I am my own master. . . . While I was saying that without collective happiness in the world there can be no happiness for the individual, and things
like that, what have you been doing? Putting your two hands together in prayer, you
crushed and killed a butterfly. Oh, white-washed youth [voice spits] why don’t you try
remembering the dream you dreamed in the sleeping car of Milky Way Railroad?31
Come on, we are all adults here. You know, the factory girls from the silkworm gut
plant were sleeping all jumbled up in a group, and with just one layer of chemise on.
Their plump bottoms sticking out [servant shakes his head, denying the dream, but with a smile].
It’s so clear: nobody wants to hear the voice of his true self [hito wa dare demo, jibun no
honshin no koe wa kikitagaranai monda]. . . .
VOICE:
The master no longer says “you,” but “I am my own master.” That “I” is the
servant’s and master’s voice at once. He knows the servant’s dreams, and is
the voice of the servant’s own “conscience,” telling him things he would not
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otherwise want to hear, his forgotten crimes and repressed sins. Here the voice
seems to locate itself in the servant’s interior, but at the same time remains
stubbornly exterior in a physical sense, as well as through its shift in pronouns.
This ambivalent relation is demonstrated physically: although the voice has no
body and is made only of a sound machine, the servant still feels the spit hit his
cheek. The voice then orders him to get into the beating machine, a machine
that spanks him when he pulls a string. The voice orders him to close his
eyes and say, “I was very bad” while pulling the string that causes him to be
spanked. From this the voice alone announces its satisfaction in a singsong:
“Do it like that, it’s great! So satisfying [manzoku da]! Do more!”
After the increasingly loud self-spanking of the boy, four maids arrive to
sing a poem-song. Their song ends, “Who will be the next master?” They then
approach and undermine the power of the voice, caressing the magnetic tape
machine until it too, fantastically, can feel, and has a body whose desires are
revealed, just as it was asking for the true desires of the boy. “I feel it! It’s no
good any more! Don’t touch me! I feel strange! Don’t stop touching there,
please keep going!” The women sing and caress the mechanical “body” of
the voice until it is forced to give in, seduced and disempowered. If only for
a moment, Terayama gives the audience a taste of a form of sexual revolution
as a scene of the master’s murder: the maids caress the master until he begs
for more, and then they cut the switch. They even go so far as to rewind and
replay the scene of its submission, of the orgasmic reversal they effect. Suddenly, the song of the maid that began the scene takes on new significance, as
she sings again: “Who Killed Cock Robin?”
The mark of the maids’ triumph is in their very control over the master’s
voice, in their power to manipulate the workings and timing of the voice’s
repetitions (via the tape recorder). Still, the master and his repetitions are all
that remains behind, along with this scene of their ever-so-brief triumph. Even
as the maids turn off and overthrow the voice of this particular master, the
maids ask the question in their song: who will be the next master? The hierarchical relation, or one might say, the master-slave dialectic, persists even while
they have shown that its workings can be overturned temporarily through the
movements of desire of the physical body (via the very energies that initiated
the interdictions in the first place). The maids’ performance shows the place
of excess and seduction in momentarily shaking the structure of power and
mastery, and in effecting a reversal. All the while, however (as in Gramsci’s
description of hegemony as a moving equilibrium), the susceptibility of power
to being overturned is both its Achilles’ heel and a crucial part of its resilience,
as they realize in their anticipation of the “next master.”
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Fig. 6 Self-spanking machine in Nuhikun. Courtesy of Terayama World, by permission
of Kujō Kyōko.
In Nuhikun, Terayama makes visible the mechanisms of social control,
while exploring symbolically the ambiguous location of its source: the absence
or vacillating place of the master. Each subject has a “master in residence” that
is neither fully external nor internal, but is echoed by numerous mirrors and
recorded likenesses, technological mimeses and extended mediations. Through
his use of machines, Terayama shows how servants serve as masters for one
another and themselves. At the end of the play or even in this particular scene,
though, Terayama does not revert to a utopian model of individual freedom—
though there are utopian moments here—nor does he provide a moralistic
tale. Rather, his work takes into account the mutually constitutive structuring
of the positions of master and servant, with their rewards, necessities, and
costs. Through performance, he gives a subtle analysis of the corporeal gratifications of obedience and the chaotic (if ultimately subsumable or incorporated) results of deviation.
In a text that was published as a theatrical manifesto before Nuhikun was
produced, Terayama writes that the script, the text of the play, is like a map,
but that the theater ultimately should transcend that map to become a space
without contours. “By investigating thoroughly and fully the opposing concepts
of interior and exterior that emerge here in the fabrication of a single door,
I am attempting to make a little bit clearer the ‘theater’ as a space that has
no contours [rinkaku].”32 His very description of the theater begins, perhaps
necessarily, with the opposing concepts of inside and outside, but ends as a
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world without contours, like the “body without organs.” Later, in a way more
reminiscent of landscape theory, he writes that the text should be like a diagram or map of a territory that remains in the realm of the impossible:
If the territory noted down as a map is within the range of “that which can be tread
upon by [human] feet,” it is of the same type as [belongs to] history; and if it is in the
range of “territory that cannot be tread upon by [human] feet”—for example, if it extends to include things like an imaginary garden, the interior of a room, the wilderness
of human connections, or the close, warm zone of the intimate human body [warm
zone of intimacy]—then it belongs to the realm of dramaturgy. . . . At the very least,
just as the various ways of reading a map create a multitude of possibilities for chance
encounters [or, multiply the “chance” aspect of the encounter], the script of a play is a
theatrical imagining shared with the audience, a “trip” that is a guide-map for travelling
back and forth between an interior realm and an external geography.33
Terayama holds to the image of a specific type of map, but this map quickly
moves into the terrains of that which cannot be mapped, areas in which he includes “intimacy,” and the “wilderness,” this time the wilderness that is created
precisely in the space of the encounter with another person. Resisting a version of “history” here that would be easy to categorize or that could be fully
grasped (and perhaps this is the version of “history” he rejects more broadly
in his rhetorical stance), he is more interested in that which resists mastery and
categorization. “Dramaturgy” should enact a “shared imaginative trip,” that
involves a mutuality of acting and being acted upon, and a reversibility of interior and exterior realms. This dramaturgical imagination would ideally transcend the opposition of the “doing” and the “done-to,” the historical categories and narratives that keep agency located and fixed, and instead would
open them up to reversibility and complex networks of mutual impact.34
Nuhikun ends in a space of improvisation, allowing for those chance encounters, as Terayama relinquishes some of his own master-role as director
and playwright in the performance itself. The actor-servants, having all become
masters, strip off the garb of the master and do a wild dance. Then the stage
goes dark and the actors strike matches to illuminate themselves as they improvise lines that overturn any narrative thread the audience may have been
attempting to construct in the work.
This play uses the space of theatrical imagining to reconsider the workings
of the body, desire, and power, revising views of dominance and obedience
within a fragmented, multilayered, and micro-historical vision. Searching for
deeper understanding of how violence can happen both within and between
individual subjects, the play shows self-divided subjects constructing and deconstructing narratives of their own multiple histories. Both plays considered
in this chapter perform a subtle analysis, via imaginative dramatic enactment,
of the workings of power and gender in a way that frames, as did Betsuyaku,
Terayama Shūji
55
an alternative view of the possibilities of critical socio-cultural engagement. In
the next chapter, we follow Terayama’s later works both of theater and video
that continue to pursue the view of a disoriented subject, the loss of stable
groundings, and yet, still hold out a somewhat hopeful view for collaboration
and intimacy. In those later works, we see a slightly more optimistic vision than
the nearly inescapable master-slave dialectic of these plays, redeemed here (if
at all) mainly by the sheer theatrical imagination and libidinal excess that occasionally, or rather frequently, erupts within them. Kegawa no Mari and Nuhikun
focus strongly on limitations, on the subject-constituting and punitive boundaries to the possibility of escaping the pervasive structures of the family, sexuality,
and power relations. But in their parodic wildness, they also enact a “devil-maycare” attitude that itself embraces the challenge to all rigid orthodoxies, to the
structure and process of internalizing such orthodoxies (including, one might
imagine, even those of the political left).35
THREE
Blindness and the Visuality of Desire
Darkness precipitates the loss of Being because it is only insofar as creatures and things
appear that they can Be. Finally, it is we alone who determine whether the world will appear, and so Be, or languish in the darkness of non-Being. We bring things into the light
by looking, in the strongest and most important sense of the word.
—Kaja Silverman, World Spectators
I now maintain that a genuine work of art is enclosed, inaccessible.
The role of the viewer consists in keeping in the shadow of that work.
—Tadeusz Kantor, 1979
When the nearly 80-year-old Takehara Han, a seasoned practitioner of traditional kyōmai dance, performed her famous thirty-minute piece, “Yuki” (Snow),
she moved across the stage to the light of a single, flickering candle. Viewers
said that when one watched her movements, illuminated by that tiny flame,
one would shiver with the cold of the snowy landscape she evoked. Beside that
solitary candle in the large empty space, her movements had a surprising power
to shape the frozen darkness, to chill the still emptiness that surrounded her.
Darkness can have a tactility, a weight.1
Butō artist Hijikata Tatsumi disparaged even the so-called underground theater of his day for being too public, too much in the light, bowing to the necessities of popularity and commercial success. For him, darkness, and by extension the underground arts, should be something private, covert. Darkness
had not a specific temperature but rather a flavor: it reminded him of the taste
of Japanese sweets that he ate alone under the covers of his futon, even as
an adult; and he used this image to explain his understanding of a true underground sensibility.2
57
One can easily imagine models of engagement and social transformation
that would take for granted the positive value of visibility and visual representation, affirming or assuming a certain positive valence for perceptibility or “apparence” of the subject in the world.3 Yet many underground theater groups
and artists in Japan attempted to revalue the invisible world, that which one
can grasp only when one loses or restricts access to vision. For these groups,
darkness and the imagination of blindness transform perceptions of both time
and space. As part of such experiments with perception, experience, and theatricality, they explored the meanings of darkness and blindness. This chapter
focuses on one key work that holds this as its central mode of exploration,
Mōjin shokan (Blind Man’s Letter, 1973–74), in which darkness—both within
the “story” of the play and in its performative structure—challenges that notion
of available, fully perceptible experience.4 We move back here a few years from
the developments of Nuhikun discussed in the previous chapter; Mōjin shokan is
part of Tenjō sajiki’s experiments with enclosed spaces as well as with international presentations of their work. Yet in all its multiple versions and venues,5
Terayama worked to disrupt the traditional structure of theater as a presentation
of a visible spectacle for the audience’s controlled consumption. Aiming toward
an “encounter” (the theoretical basis of which we will explore further in Chapter
5), Terayama’s troupe continuously worked to introduce elements of uncertainty, danger, and chance into the performative process.
Placing matches in the audience’s hands, Tenjō sajiki opened the performance to chance illuminations or conflagrations and also, importantly, elicited
spectators’ complicity in the events they witnessed. Yet not all is left to chance:
Terayama inscribes the form of the audience’s participation. The mode of their
interaction with and intervention in the spectacle is “scripted” in advance, even
if it is not determined or necessarily limited by this scripting. The darkness,
rather than what is seen, would become the gift or presentation of the play,
its weight. In the prologue stage directions to Mōjin shokan, Terayama writes:
“By ‘giving darkness’ to the audience, we bring forth an alternative state of the
world. The audience, freely lighting the matches given out by the actors, is able
to ‘see.’ But if one is able to ‘see’ even without striking a match, then one
comes a step closer to common ownership of the play.”6 The aim of darkness
here is to create an alternative world that opens the poetics of another kind
of “sight.” This sight would be collective but not coercive, and in Terayama’s
formulation could only be reached by opening up to the unexpected. In this
metaphysics of vision, the visual is waiting to be interrupted or shot through
with the invisible or immaterial, by a more complex theatrical experience that
cannot yet be grasped. Through intermittent vision and invisibility, the experience of darkness can come into its own.
58
Mōjin shokan, which takes place almost completely in the dark, furthers
Tenjō sajiki’s theatrical examination of power, gender, and violence. The play
takes its title from Denis Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles (1749), a controversial
work that, at the time of its publication, led to Diderot’s imprisonment for
three months at Vincennes. Terayama writes that the idea for the play was
sparked by a conversation about Diderot that he had in a bar near Vincennes
in 1971. In a subsequent workshop, he asked actors to improvise dialogues
between Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, co-editor with Diderot of the
Encyclopédie. Terayama writes that in Mōjin shokan he wanted to give audience
members the experience of “darkness” as a tangible sensation.
This alternate form of perception, he claimed, was missing from the contemporary world filled with electric light. Terayama’s notion of darkness here
configures a very different constellation from that of Tanizaki in his curious
essay “In’ei raisan” (In Praise of Shadows, 1933). Tanizaki had used the idea of
shadow to praise a premodern Japanese cultural essence in opposition to the
brightness of modernity and Western culture, most famously through the opposition between dim Japanese and bright Western toilets. Far from Tanizaki’s
frame of reference (still operative if misinterpreted in orientalizing views of
Japanese culture and theater), Terayama’s darkness moves instead in dialogue
with New York’s underground theater, as well as with post-Enlightenment
history and classical legend. He writes, for example, that he did not want his
work to construct darkness merely by blindfolding the audience members one
by one, as Megan Terry and Tom O’Horgan had done in their 1968 La MaMa
production. The blindfold, he writes, created not a “play that couldn’t be seen”
but a “play that we refuse to show,” a play that would “steal experiences” from
the audience, creating what he called “one hundred eye-prisoners.”7 Instead,
Terayama wanted to create a world of “tangible darkness,” one that would,
he hoped, put the audience in touch with an alternative experience, like that
of the legendary ancient poet who wrote by the light of his cat’s eyes.
In Mōjin shokan, Terayama divided the Tenjō sajiki actors into three groups.
The first group, dressed in black jeans and black shirts like stage hands, created darkness by shutting out all light: from the windows, from the theater
lights, from the exits and doors. They barred the doors and the windows at
the start of the play, locking the audience into a room in complete darkness.8
The second group, which would conflict openly with the first, worked alongside the audience to bring light with matches, flints, and lighters. The second
group also had texts written on their bodies that were made legible through
these small sources of light. This group would have rough match-striking
paper stuck all over their bodies, so that wherever on their bodies the audience
struck a match, it would light. Meanwhile, a third group performed the “story”
59
of the play, one part improvisation based on predetermined situations and
another part performing scenes that were strictly timed and scripted.9 The
darkness Terayama aimed to create with this play, the forms of invisibility and
blindness, thus exists in a continual and complex dialectic with changing notions of vision (literal, figurative, sensorial, conceptual).
Many happenings in New York had incorporated the audience’s movements and limited visual capacities (the ability to see from only one place at
a time) into multilayered choreographies. In one fundamental example, Allan
Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (New York, 1959) used the audience to walk
through the several parts of the Reuben Gallery at set times so that they became
a part of the happening; the program notes even included them as part of the
cast. Or a yet earlier example from another medium might be Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés” (1946–66), with its peephole hidden in a dark corner
of a brightly lit museum. “Étant Donnés” pushed audiences to express curiosity,
to seek out the peephole, in order to see. In Terayama’s own earlier work, Garigari hakase no hanzai (The Crime of Dr. Garigari, 1969),10 Terayama split audience members into different “cabinet” spaces of a small apartment so that
none of them could see all of the performance at once (as he would do later
in Hyakunen no kodoku, but in a more captive form). In this way, the audience
would be forced to recreate the action through imagination.
In earlier works Terayama had demanded the audience’s engaged participation in the act of seeing, but in Mōjin shokan he highlights audience vision and
its absence as the explicit goal and aim of the work itself. The audience,
through its participation, might express a variety of unexpected sentiments—
from curiosity, to desire to see or be seen, to a resignation about the impossibility of seeing. The lighting of the match would engage other senses beyond
the visual, with its accelerating, explosive rise and the hiss of settling to extinction. It would leave behind a spreading, sulfurous scent that the audience
members and performers together breathed into their lungs.
Tenjō sajiki performed Mōjin shokan in multiple versions. The play premiered
at the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam in September 1973, and it was staged
again in October in a new version at the Poland International Theater Festival.
In January 1974, Tenjō sajiki produced another version at the Athenée Français
in Tokyo, and then revised it in July 1974 at the Hōsei University Student Union
in Tokyo in what is known as the “Shanghai edition.” (A transcription of the
recorded version of this last performance was then published.). Although set
in the Japanese concession in Shanghai, apparently during the Japanese occupation period (1937–45), the “reality” of place in the piece nevertheless remains
in question; as such, it is collected as one of Terayama’s gensōgeki (fantasy plays)
and contains strongly fantastical elements.
60
According to Terayama’s stage directions, the work takes inspiration from a
passage in Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones: “The cave had nine entrances. Of these,
eight led to a labyrinth that mysteriously ended up back in the same room” (163).
Indeed, Mōjin shokan loops time like a labyrinth, and in the process delves into
questions of collective remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on the dynamics
of darkness, the play does not offer any straightforward illumination of historical narrative, in spite of its frequent references to key historical events and
locations. Periods of darkness in which the audience cannot see the action at
all punctuate the fragmented plotline, itself only one of the play’s performative
elements.
The story draws from three novels by Edogawa Ranpo, each of which involves disguises and hidden identities.11 Characters’ identities shift from scene
to scene as they reappear in new guises and then reveal themselves as familiar
figures. A boy named Kobayashi Hideo,12 chief of the “Boys’ Detective Club”
(which no longer has any members but himself ), has undergone an eye operation in which it seems he has become blind. The action of the play centers on
his overbearing mother, as well as a girl named Masako, and the detective Akechi Kogorō (a version of Edogawa Ranpo’s famous detective) who is the boy’s
sensei, “guarantor,” and perhaps also his lover. The boy’s blindness remains
in question throughout the play; if he opens his eyes, the doctor suggests, he
may be able to see again. Through only occasional illumination of its action,
the play gives the audience the experience of a kind of “selective blindness” and
explores the relation between the desire to see and the possibility of seeing. This
relation in turn intersects with questions of representation, cultural memory,
and historiography. With its multiple subplots and character sketches, the play
interrupts our ability to “see” the story and pushes our perceptions toward the
metatheatrical, to the story beyond the story.
The play begins with an act of shutting out all light. The performers from
the first group nail boards over any cracks in the walls and doors and edges of
the theater, in what Terayama calls a “house arrest.” For the remainder of the
play, there is not to be a crack of natural light, and no way out of this locked
black box of the theater, this camera obscura, with its strange and sometimes
invisible acts. For the moment, the audience has entered a world of darkness.
In the various versions of the play, the group marked this transition differently;
in the Polish theater, which seated 1,500 people, they had a large bird fly over
the heads of the audience to mark the closing of the space. In the Athenée
Français in Tokyo, which seated only 140, the first group improvised dialogue
while one performer opened a bottle of disinfectant liquid to spread a medicinal scent throughout the theater.13
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If, as Benjamin wrote, beauty “reflects back at us that of which our eyes
will never have their fill,”14 then by refusing to fill the eyes, by refusing to give
that phenomenal satisfaction, Terayama provokes not only the “desire to see
more” that would give rise to the sense that there is something of beauty to
behold, but also brings the audience face to face with its own desire. The
match then does not simply oppose light to darkness, as it might at first seem.
A match struck by an audience member would illuminate most brightly the
person who desires to see—making him or her an object, rather than subject,
of vision. To the extent that it illuminates the objects or performers, it may
do so much more effectively for other viewers than for the one momentarily
caught up in the act of striking the match. The match-striking spectator is
anything but the sated and fulfilled, “enlightened” spectator; she is, rather,
becoming a creator, a participant, a subject of visible desire and also an object
of vision, that which comes to be seen. Through the play, the audience sees
others’ desires for vision enacted before it, and comes to understand the other
spectators and itself as the subjects of visual desire. The match-striker stands
in, momentarily, for all unsated, desiring subjects. Other viewers are given the
opportunity to replace him or her in this act at their own chosen moments.
In World Spectators, Kaja Silverman writes: “To be lit up means to be seen
from a vantage point from which we can never see ourselves. It also allows
us to embody not our own but rather someone else’s idea of beauty.”15 Here the
match-lighter might take a playful stance toward her own illumination, relinquishing her place as subject of desire except as subject of the desire to be
seen. A microcosmic creation story: the subject takes radical control of her
own coming into Being. This is, of course, impossible, as Terayama allows us
to experience; we can invite but cannot force others to attend to us, to recognize our momentary spark. (What if someone else lights a match at the same
moment, or what if too many go off at once?) His plays themselves might be
seen, like a match lighting, as just such offerings or invitations to a specific
kind of vision. They play wildly to induce recognition, experiential participation, and spectators’ bringing of themselves into the light—or into darkness.
The “enlightenment” Terayama’s plays offer is not rational, but can also be
a strange relinquishment of vision, a “relinquish[ing of the] eyes,”16 in favor
of something else, which might be described, in Heideggerian terms, as an experience of Being, through the practice of a giving up control over our own
embodiment, giving ourselves over to the gaze of others.
A further view of the match strike might transcend the binary opposition of
seeing and being seen to relinquish both poles of the desire. Instead, one might
embrace the event of a certain blindness that comes hand in hand with illumination: a blindness to what one is, a release of the power of sight to other eyes.17
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I argue that this is, paradoxically, the version of “darkness” Terayama attempts
to evoke in Mōjin shokan: that one might recognize and affirm—in fact, perform—the impossibility of desire’s fulfillment. This acceptance of finitude and
limits of power has something in common with the ethical accession to Being
of which Heidegger writes: the affirming of what comes after the desire remains
unfulfilled, affirming the impossibility of truly returning to the origin of the
desire. That affirmation, however, takes place not after a long reflection or
temporal delay but at the very moment, in fact simultaneously, with the sensation of that desire. It is that almost immediate coincidence of desire and its
relinquishing that makes this performative hypothetical almost impossible in
itself, an a priori line of flight (an edge or border line) that cannot be crossed.
Instead, the line marks the threshold of a possible terrain of the subject.18
The darkness broken by the match thus reveals the unresolved position of
the subject with respect to seeing. It affirms the impossibility of returning to
the point of origin (das Ding) and suggests the possibility of something new,
a productive generativity of that loss. The match strike paradoxically highlights
the darkness, and becomes an act of “giving darkness” to the audience by the
actors. This giving of darkness, for Terayama, allows an “alternative world”
to come into existence. Terayama thus uses both the metaphor and the literality of darkness to explore the nuances of the subject’s encounters with the
world, highlighting the movement of performative desire and the foreclosure
of return.
In a scene near the end of the play, a character named Kurotokage (Black
Lizard), from the Ranpo novel by the same name,19 appears on stage, not in
character, but as the actress who plays that character. Terayama has been creating multiple veils and guises for each figure, but here he interrupts any remaining suspension of disbelief by allowing the “actress,” or the actress playing
an actress, to seem to speak to the audience “directly.” She tells the following
story about a tale she read in her childhood, the very tale on which much of
the story is based:
When I was in elementary school, I lent a friend my copy of the February issue of Shōnen kurabu, while I was still in the middle of reading page seventeen of Kaijin nijū mensō,
and the magazine got lost. Several years later, by accident, I found the same issue of
Shōnen kurabu in a used bookstore. Overjoyed, I opened to page seventeen and began
to read. But it had no connection to what I had been reading before. Someone had rewritten the past [dareka ga kako o kakikaeta no desu]. (Scene 25, 204)
In the midst of a play in which the audience has seen many versions of characters from Ranpo’s detective stories, the actress “as herself” suddenly remembers a scene of reading. Yet reading the tale from her past does not proceed
as expected. These remembered stories are open to unexpected revision.
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The actress continues her monologue:
My father went to war and died in Shanghai. I wanted that same Kaijin nijū mensō story
to be returned to me. Facing the historical past was like understanding death. Every
time I went to a funeral I remembered the darkness of the night. If one hides one’s
eyes, anyone can go to that kingdom. Everything has become a monogatari [narrative /
tale]. That is, everything is open to revision, but nothing is ever the same twice. I
wanted to read further and further ahead. The Kaijin nijū mensō story ten years from now,
one hundred years from now, one thousand years from now. . . . Give me darkness,
I thought. More darkness, so I can see! Endless darkness! More darkness! (204–5)
The actress begins with parallel stories of loss: the loss of the magazine
echoes the loss of the father, who went to war and died in Shanghai. Just as it
is impossible to see continuity between the past and present in the two copies
of the magazine—the very objects transform uncannily over time—here the
father’s death marks a rupture in which she is no longer capable of seeing the
past as anything but a monogatari, a fictional story. Stories are capable of being
rewritten, and Edogawa Ranpo’s characters can appear in a new guise; just so,
the past itself is not stable, but is subject to transformation, not only in how
we read it, but in the “text” of the past itself.
In Terayama’s theories about the dramatic relation between fabrication /
fiction and the “real” world (as Mari also articulates in the earlier play), the
world outside the play is just as capable of being a fiction as the world within
it. So, too, for this character, the world in which her father died seems as much
a monogatari as the world of Edogawa Ranpo’s story, which is itself in part a
story of the unreliability of identity and vision. Put in a reverse formulation,
the reality of Edogawa Ranpo’s world can be as convincingly authentic and
“real” as the distant and ungraspable loss of the father. The ambiguity of “the
authentic” becomes even more emphatic in that it is now not the character,
in this estranged moment at the close of the play, but rather the actress revealed by her real name as the person playing Kurotokage who speaks of this
uncertain reversal of the real and the fictional, this instability of the past and
the present.
To review or remember the past is like rereading an ever-changing magazine issue. The past has twenty faces, twenty guises, and is forever reappearing
in another form. It is, on one level, like the remake or adaptation of a story,
never the same as the original—or like the play Mōjin shokan itself, which goes
through so many re-editions or revisions that it is difficult to know how to
grasp it. Should we see it as a historical piece of theater to be reconstituted
from its traces, as multiple unrecorded versions that exceed our grasp, or as
a work still open to its own remaking? The actress goes so far as to claim
that the same issue of the same story will be different ten, one hundred, one
64
thousand years from now, and in that sense, it has no stability or necessary
continuity with the “past.” Are these changes motivated or arbitrary? Are they
political responses to the needs of the present? Terayama brings these problems of reading to the fore, without evading the sinister and violent aspects
to this process of rereading, erasure, and transformation.
What is the darkness the actress demands at the end of her monologue?
Every time she goes to a funeral she thinks of darkness: “facing the past is
like understanding death.” Ever fascinated with death as a very specific process
of “encounter,” Terayama implies that facing the past, or encountering the
past, is something akin to encompassing death. Both involve multiple attempts
and are impossible to realize fully. Terayama directs our attention toward
moments of disappearance and reappearance: the past slips away and changes
its guise. Having passed through a moment of acute critical / historiographic
awareness, the play reaches closure through a return of a romantic rhetoric.
Remembering means invoking what can only be seen by means of darkness,
or at the contradictory threshold of visibility: “more darkness,” she cries, “so
I can see!” (205).
What remains to be seen about the past is not something fixed or given.
A reliable version of page 17 of the story does not exist: the continuity and
homogeneity of time shatters. Although we may think it should well stay
the same no matter how much time passes, that is not the way monogatari here
relate to time. (And here, she says, “everything has become monogatari.”) Facing
the past, like facing death, involves adapting a story that continually changes
and responds to the speaker’s desire to read, see, and discover it, however impossible it may be to grasp completely. In the process, paradoxically, she reads
further and further ahead into the future of that story, and into her own future.
Looking at the past, simultaneously a form of reading the future, involves
readapting the story of a primal loss. “Seeing” the future involves facing this
loss and pushing forward, with the help of darkness.
The play is replete with strange, magical images that invoke light and vision,
darkness and blindness. A woman forces a man to ride a light-generating bicycle until he drops with exhaustion (Scene 6). Two blind men play a game
of cat’s cradle, using a rope and their whole bodies for the game. They claim
that only a certain number of eyes can be open on the earth at once, and so
if one of them opens his eyes the other needs to close them (Scene 12). In
one among several scenes of blindness, an idiot boy goes to a prostitute to
have his eyes licked, collapsing the visual and the haptic / erotic (Scene 20).
We here consider one important subplot of the play that opens questions of
power, time, and subjectivity, a series of scenes about a girl who loses her
shadow (beginning in Scene 7, continued in 14, 19, and 24).
65
A young girl squats under a pole on a moonlit night, hiding her eyes. Behind
her stands a man wearing a mask with the face of a white dog. Two “dark
men / coolies” pass by.20 They discuss whether or not one can go to hell without
shoes. One of them worries that it would be hard to walk in hell barefoot.
The other counters that it might not be necessary to walk there; you could take
a rickshaw. “I didn’t know there were rickshaws in hell,” replies the first (170).
All the while, they rhythmically punctuate their conversation by spitting, as
they had done earlier with the match-lighting. Suddenly, reciting a rhyme about
various visions of hell, they happen to tread upon the girl’s shadow.
GIRL: “You stepped on it! You stepped on it! You stepped on my shadow! I’m going to
tell the police!
COOLIE 2: [Shrinking back] It’s your own fault for leaving your shadow in a place like
that!
GIRL: It wasn’t me. It was the moon that cast it there. Going to die.
COOLIE 2: Die? Who?
GIRL: When someone steps on your shadow, you die within a year. It’s me; I am going
to die.
COOLIE 2: . . . .
GIRL: Killer! [Pointing her finger]
COOLIE 2: [Looking at the shadow] It hasn’t got a scratch on it, the shape hasn’t changed at
all! [He steps on it again]
GIRL: Killer! (170)
In the end, the two men stomp on her shadow aggressively, as the girl screams
“Killer! Murderer!” She tries to run away and they chase her around the stage,
gradually joined by other coolies in the darkening wings. Although the girl associates her loss with impending death, the resonance of this murder goes
beyond superstitious premonition. When, in a later scene, the girl goes to a
“shadow shop” to replace her old shadow, she has already reached middle age.
The shopkeeper sends her away, complaining that she has not even finished
paying for the last one and asking what happened to it. By the end of the play
the young girl has become an old woman (200).21
As her trouble with shadows continues, the woman ages rapidly, creating
an echoing relation between darkness, death, and the contingent rate of time’s
passage. Rather than the light forming the guarantee of Being, as in the epigraph with which this chapter began, it is here the shadow that seems to guarantee “presence.” Instead of her image, or her body, it is her shadow that most
concerns her. It is as if it were her own contribution to darkness, the amount
of light that she displaces or interrupts, which would constitute the most important aspect of Being. The loss of the shadow thus reiterates the loss of the
promise of being seen in the deepest sense, and Terayama’s troupe literalizes
this loss as a foreshadowing of death.
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The scene also dramatizes the violent power relations that undergird the
workings of darkness and the way in which they inflect temporality and identity.
Like many postwar theater practitioners, Terayama almost idealizes (fetishizes)
darkness as a source of access to the unknown / invisible. How then does this
exploration speak to his exploration of collectivity and the quest for an “authentic” intersubjective space? On the one hand, the world of his plays (as in those
of Betsuyaku) demonstrates a principle of collectivity: while the men do violence to the girl, raping her shadow, all here in this theatrical universe, including
the shopkeeper, agree that a shadow holds priority over a body. Shadows are
“violable,” as well as purchasable and for sale. Hell is a “real” place, with logistical worries attached—should one wear shoes or can one ride in a rickshaw?
Where is hell located: in time, as in the past (the era of rickshaws), or on the
ground, where feet can be hurt? This hell, like the shadows, addresses and
questions the idea of the ground, the possibility of being positioned on or against
a ground (a footing), for a collective or intersubjective psychic understanding.
The violence of darkness and the intricate intersubjective workings of affective power relations in this play come to be closely linked to the act of reading. The key figure here is the “guarantor” of identity [mimoto hikiukenin], also
identified as Akechi-sensei or Detective Akechi, famous from Ranpo’s detective
novels. He first appears in the play in the waiting room of a hospital, waiting
for the boy Kobayashi to emerge from his failed eye operation. A second guarantor (his double) reads the Shanghai Diary newspaper, relating the movements
of the Japanese army and scatterings of international news (Scene 5). The first
guarantor commands this second man to read aloud. He then orders him to
skip ahead and read a different part of the paper further on. The second guarantor complies quietly, until finally the first guarantor / Akechi admonishes his
smiling companion:
GUARANTOR OF IDENTITY:
It’s amazing that you can so calmly follow another person’s
orders. You should have more self-respect!
THE OTHER ONE: Yes [hai].
GUARANTOR OF IDENTITY: When you are reading the newspaper, you should read the
parts you want to read; don’t pay attention to what anyone else says.
THE OTHER ONE: [continues to smile dumbly].
GUARANTOR OF IDENTITY: Don’t smirk like that, stupid [baka]! . . . .When someone criticizes you, you should get angry!
THE OTHER ONE: [continues smiling nonetheless].
GUARANTOR OF IDENTITY: I told you to GET ANGRY!
THE OTHER ONE: Ha, ha, ha, ha!
GUARANTOR OF IDENTITY: [startled] He laughed! (168)
Akechi / the first guarantor takes control of the process of reading of the news,
but cannot control the other reader’s reactions. The stereotypes of the com-
67
mander and the obedient subject ironically echo the democratic/progressive
rhetorics, expounded frequently by postwar intellectuals, who argued for affirming stronger individuality/subjectivity in Japanese citizens as the foundation
for overcoming militarism and developing true democracy. The reader mocks
the first guarantor, and the two are each others’ doubles. He unwittingly traces
an ambiguous boundary between submission and escape by simply smiling and
laughing at the other’s anger. Refusing the command to get angry about his
own domination, he finally shows a perverse, detached resistance, modeling
an alternate approach to the model of dominance and submission in which pride
or self-respect would consist primarily of asserting “personal preference” and
refusing to be commanded.
The questions surrounding complicity with power structures that so strongly
dominate postwar theatrical experiments find a particular answer in this scene.
How is it possible to continue to act while also dismantling (simplistic) oppositions of power such as dominator and dominated? In this case, the first guarantor explodes with the rage he thinks the other man should feel. The second
guarantor guarantees nothing: he refuses while complying, seeming to escape
the affective bounds of the relation. He models a compliance that fails to comply, because it fails to be intelligible within the framework of identity, the power
structure of the command. There is nothing there to grasp—no intersubjective,
collective belief, and thus no space for power or identity to take hold. Viewed
another way, his actions could seem to be an allegory for the “blind, dumb
obedience” of the subject under militarism, but his acts also exceed that limit.
As such, they open up a way to show that the requirements of “individual
agency and subjectivity,” the rhetoric of self-affirmation, contain their own traps.
They can also become an imposition of yet one more system of subjectivization
that paradoxically constrains idiosyncrasy even as it prescribes it. The system of
imposed agency is agentic only in a limited way—this discursive query underlies
the play’s focus on darkness, and the strange temporality and power relations
in its individual scenes. As we saw, these questions continue to preoccupy Terayama in Nuhikun. If one can be commanded, required, to take on agentic action,
to become engaged through the force of another’s demand (“see! act on that
vision!”), then what form of vision would be “authentically” one’s own? The
space of a subjectivity constituted through an unequal power relation might
make one question how “unconstrained” or “free” such a subject’s actions can
ultimately be.22 The play shows a rupture in the implied solidity of that subjective space as well as in the linear progress of time in order to reveal the implications of the power relationships that underlie and condition engaged action.
Scenes of reading return to haunt the play as it draws to a close. In Scene
24, the mother of the boy Kobayashi brings him together with Masako, the girl
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for whom he has been searching. She tells him to open his eyes: suddenly he
is no longer blind, but can see her! They embrace. Just as things begin to move
toward a romantic happy ending, the guarantor Akechi intervenes: “It’s no
good, it’s no good, we have to redo it” (201). The Black Lizard character, in
the director’s role, here acquiesces: “We can do it over as many times as you
want!” (201). The guarantor asks them to rewind the plot. Just as earlier he
commanded the newspaper reading, he here overturns the entire play, ordering the return to an earlier scene (Scene 21), just before Kobayashi boards a
magical train that had departed without him. This train is the Milky Way Railroad, to which Terayama had also alluded in Nuhikun—an allusion inspired by
the tales in Miyazawa Kenji’s Ginga tetsudō no yoru.23 In that scene, Kobayashi
had encountered a ticket taker who had explained the workings of the magic
“oblivion train”:
TICKET TAKER:
They say that all memory is form / shape.
A blind person can’t see shapes.
TICKET TAKER: A blind person has no memory.
KOBAYASHI: That’s why I can’t remember Masako anymore.
TICKET TAKER: Isn’t that good?
KOBAYASHI: Why?
TICKET TAKER: Because all the sickness of humanity begins from the fact that we have
memories. (195)
KOBAYASHI:
Kobayashi clings to his memories of Masako, but the ticket taker suggests that
if he catches this special train, he can get rid of all his ills and make time run
backwards. All he must do is “close all his memories into the interior of his
eyes” (195) and thus, it seems, make them disappear. Here, memories exist
only in the sphere of the visual; in other words, they have to be recalled, or
reclaimed in some fundamentally visual way in order to exist and to cause pain.
The only way to make them disappear is to close them up into the interior of a
blind man’s eyes, where they lose their power to cause pain. “Close your eyes
tightly,” says the ticket man. “When I have counted to one hundred, you will
be free” (195). While the ticket man is in the middle of counting, Kobayashi’s
mother appears and orders him to open his eyes, to step out of the dream, to
see the fact that he is only pretending to be blind. She reminds him that she
brought Masako with her for him to see. Thus, at the first version of the ending, he is able to reunite with Masako and regain his vision.
But the first ending does not settle into the final ending, because of the guarantor’s command. He orders the rewriting of the story, “as history, as monogatari,” as in the Black Lizard’s tale (“everything has become monogatari ”). Just
as the train itself is said to make time run backwards, the characters replay the
scene in which Kobayashi and Masako come together, but this second time,
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when his mother commands him to open his eyes, all remains in darkness. Instead of leading into a romantic embrace, in this scene the “coolies” emerge
from the wings to tear off Masako’s sailor suit and assault and rape her, in a
literalization of the shadow-assault they performed earlier. All the while they
light matches that crisscross and move through the darkness chaotically.
What does a rape “guarantee”? As with the murder in Betsuyaku’s play, one
might think that violence against a body could proffer a “ground” (however
illusionary) for some kind of symbolic exchange. Yet the rape here marks not
a violent reinstitution of power relations but rather a rupture of the frames that
hold this story together. It shows (on the woman’s body, as later in Hyakunen no
kodoku) the absence or contingency of the proffered guarantees of the social,
as well as the limits of the theatrical, though these limits are not truly escapable
either. The actors express a trappedness inside the play’s structures too—escape
is at least not easy. From that moment, the whole story fragments into a kaleidoscopic hell scene, as the flats of the stage come down, and the actor playing
Kobayashi calls out to the guarantor by the real actor’s first name, as if the part
itself were becoming a living hell: “Kiyoshi-san, how long are you going to keep
playing Akechi-sensei? How long do I have to play this boy Kobayashi?” He
repeats again the central image of a kind of memory that belongs not only to
the individual psyche: “How long do I have to keep playing a blind person, stuck
inside of someone else’s memory?” The guarantor actor calls to the Kobayashi
player by that actor’s real name, “Ah Yoshida, it’s already too late!” (203)
According to the Kobayashi actor, the play itself becomes a performance
of “someone else’s memory.” Yet even this breach of the imagined bounds of
subjectivity refuses to remain still: at any moment, time can be turned back
and events recreated according to a new logic. Kobayashi’s vision can be revoked as he loses his happy ending in a violent return to blindness. The play
implodes on itself, as the actor protests his fate, stuck within this world of
both memory and delusion. No event is ever final or immutable: only the impossibility of truly seeing can be performed / illuminated fully.
When the guarantor turns back the story at the end, he says: “I’ll show him
what a blind person sees when he opens his eyes. It’s hell.” To which the
Black Lizard replies: “No, it’s history” (202). This is a version of history “under
erasure,” there but not there; impossible to sustain within sight, it requires blindness and induces unendurable pain. To forget, as one would if one boarded the
train backwards to oblivion, produces an empty or ultimately foreclosed kind of
freedom. To see history and memory, to see the paradoxical and impossible—
“what a blind person sees when he opens his eyes”—would, in Terayama’s view,
destroy all stories, as it topples the walls of the theater and makes darkness come
crashing down.
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Yet, as described in this prologue, darkness must allow for a certain vision
that would not be possible if one were using one’s “usual eyes,” the everyday
eyes which, Terayama suggests, are already subject to a certain unrecognized
blindness. As we saw in Karatani’s later analysis of Sakaguchi Ango as well, there
is an opposition framed between what passes as truth or reality, which is in fact
simply that which can be easily articulated and understood, and some deeper
genjitsu or actuality that emerges, terrifying, from the fissures in the otherwise
smooth surfaces of the former. The critique of the social here then, of the visible
articulated terrain, is framed and enacted dramatically in terms of this dialectic
of visibility and darkness.
Just as the match strike has many different facets, clearly here blindness
and vision hold multiple uses and meanings: the return of vision, like a romantic happy ending, may be a mere twist in the plot, a new turn of illusion.
Terayama suggests a paradoxical blindness that in the end sees and feels the
full “hell” of history: this kind of blindness, like Zoom’s lens and stories in the
next chapter, inherits and performs the memories of others that otherwise had
been possible, or necessary, to forget.
In the final moments of the play (202–3), each Tenjō sajiki actor shouts his
own aphoristic slogan, like a poetic and political demonstration for darkness
and match light:
Let darkness illuminate darkness, then we will be able to see history! (Tenjō sajiki Koike
Kōichi) . . . .
Now the play is over, and only demons are left to come! (Tenjō sajiki Ono Masako)
More darkness! More words! (Tenjō sajiki Hirakawa Katsuhiro)24
Open the roads! Shadows are passing, night is blowing through! (Tenjō sajiki Tsuda
Wataru)
Not beloved darkness, but terrifying darkness! (Tenjō sajiki Ōi Ken’ichi)
One match is the beginning of a huge fire! (Tenjō sajiki Sasada Sueji). . . (205)
This closure returns to wrap the play in a positive vision of “darkness,”
“night,” and an alternative version or promise of a “dark illumination.” It gives
a sense of resolution to a play that otherwise remains fragmented. Still, the
vision of Masako may represent the remainder, the unaccounted for, in this
celebratory closing.
In its moments of greatest complexity, the play hovers precariously between
two possibilities: the performance of darkness as a blotting out or obliteration,
and the manifesto in favor of darkness as a desirable form of “hell.” Is this a
hell that, as in Brechtian theater, should make the audience think critically about
the sorry state of their own vision of history? Should they “open their eyes” and
see the contemporary hell that their current blindness denies? Or, on the contrary, is this a hell they should try to reach for, a darkness that is itself the search?
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Layers of past and present in such postwar theatrical works have an oneiric
quality: everything is a dream within a memory within a dream. Yet, to invoke psychoanalytic terms, it may be precisely from within a particular kind
of dream that an alternative consciousness can be awakened, as in Freud’s
phrase: “it is the dream itself, that is, that wakes the sleeper.”25 Here each layer
of the play cracks open to reveal a further layer that the prior would rather
not face. It evokes Lacan’s sense of an encounter: “an appointment to which
we are always called with a real that eludes us.”26
One of the striking features of the temporality of Terayama’s work is its
fundamentally textual quality: time is subject to rereading and rewriting in a
linguistic sense, and the narratives take place in the “impossible space,” the
non-place, of language. The guarantor asks the reader to skip ahead and skip
back in the reading of the world news: just so, he rewinds the plot of the
play and has it end with a new and cruel kind of torture. The title itself, Mōjin
shokan, emphasizes this performance as a kind of text, a note or letter, about /
to / from a blind person. Like language, like Borges’ cave, it seems to have
many entrances and exits—but the labyrinth leads always back to the cave, to
the language, to the play itself. Like Ranpo’s detective story Kaijin nijū mensō,
the past changes and transforms as it makes its way into the present, opening
trap-doors in time, passages that lead, mysteriously, back to the same place. In
this darkness, the tenuousness of any present moment becomes explicit before
one’s eyes. Taking its place within the web of time, language, and performance,
it pops out of the continuous flow of time, like Benjamin’s moment of reflux.
Darkness shows how much any event is conditioned by the light that one
throws upon it, the ephemeral light of the present day.27 But for Terayama, the
past in its disappearance threatens to bring the present with it as well into that
realm of darkness.
We can read these vanishing stories according to our preference, order
others to read in our place, or smile dumbly, laughing them off like the rebellious yet obedient listener. Only the laughing listener exists in a realm of
blankness, taking a certain pleasure in the moment, outside the mundane urges
of the everyday world. He laughs at the game of reading, accepting it all,
without imposing a single one of his own thoughts; he laughs at the attempt
to do anything other than that. The smiling reader becomes the ultimate outsider, devoid of any words of his own, expecting nothing, taking up no challenge. Meanwhile, the other characters are caught on the merry-go-round (or
the whirligig) of desire and time, time and desire, trying to control the events
of the world according to their will, and trying to be seen by those around
them. Or is it the case that what surrounds them, including time itself, is dark
as far as the eye can see?
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The theater, in Terayama’s formulation, becomes a space of darkness in
which one encounters the elusive, the impossible, or the invisible, and thus
opens oneself to a new, stronger kind of insight—a kind of sight that, according
to his view, might best be carried out with one’s eyes closed. By performing
what they call the “memories of others,” Terayama’s troupe structurally evokes
the ways one can be trapped within the legacy of events one may not oneself
be able to see. The only way out, it seems, is to intervene in these foreclosed
histories, to perform them and recreate them, however violently, and thus to
affirm or to interrogate the stories into which one has been “thrown.” This
performance intervenes in the given narratives of a past—narratives of war, of
identity, of loss—that the performance necessarily alters in repetition: “the story
never happens the same way twice.”
Clearly, for Terayama the meanings of darkness and blindness are manifold,
and go far beyond the literal into a diversity of figurative possibilities. Since
darkness is linked with the past, with memories, with the repressed terrain of
material that is beyond the possibility of access, it comes to hold a privileged
place as a metaphor for the psyche. Blindness then becomes one kind of relationship that the subject can have with its own psyche. On the one hand, this
is a relationship of non-seeing, of missing something crucial; or, on the other
hand, it is a path toward transcending or breaking beyond the well-worn routes
of psychic and linguistic knowing. In this latter possibility, blindness has something in common with certain of the interpretations of daraku, as a temporary
suspension, a breaking through or down below the structures of ideology—
blindness represents a chaos where the ordered if not orderly structures of
power, language, and subjectivity are at least temporarily suspended. It represents a realm for those things to which society refuses permission, or those
things the psyche itself prohibits the subject from knowing.
Yet this figurative blindness goes beyond the realm of the individual psyche.
It comes to emblematize elements of a cultural consciousness that has been
blocked or closed off through a dynamic matrix of actions and representations.
The fact that Shanghai plays a prominent role in Mōjin shokan, in however abstracted a form, points to the terrains of Japan’s aggressions during the Pacific
War, an area that at the time of Terayama’s work and still today can index a
realm of terror and silence only beginning to be accessible to public discourse.28
Blindness becomes a figure that traces the edges of that opening—its failures,
its fissures—like the doors and walls that keep some parts of the mind from
knowing what the other parts do. While a “fact” can seem known, there can be
a way in which it is still profoundly not known, not seen fully, or not available
to the point that it can become the basis of choice or action.29
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Blindness and vision, darkness and illumination form a set of binary oppositions that do not remain stable in their order of priority. In other words,
at times illumination and vision, at other times blindness and darkness, make
their way to the privileged or desirable position, and become the goals for
which these theatrical works aim. The angura (underground) tends to privilege
the dark, as we saw with Hijikata Tatsumi’s image of diving under the covers
to taste the sweetness of manjū more fully. At times, the conflicts among various practitioners can become a competition where each vies to be the one that
more fully embodies that “true” underground, the true darkness—especially
around the time of the Osaka Expo—accusing the others of being too much,
precisely, in the limelight. This competition raises the odd question of the acceptance of experimental work: in order to survive, it needs a certain degree of
support and access; but at the moment of achieving that support, success, and
(seeming) intelligibility there is a way in which it ceases to be “underground.”
It may then perform a spectacularization of that darkness, as Terayama himself
has at times been accused of doing.30
Figures for seeing and not seeing often blend in paradoxical ways: a work
might aim for the darkness within vision, or illumination within blindness. These
are among the most striking moments in Mōjin shokan, where the characters or
dialogue attempt to delve into those destabilizing paradoxes rather than upholding a binary ontology. Like the breakdown of directionality within political
movements that nonetheless aim for an authentic “engagement,” this dissolution of binaries can reveal alternative ways of creating movement and transformation after it is no longer clear which way is “forward,” generating opportunities from within the loss of certainties surrounding teleology, agency, and
subjectivity.
FOUR
Intersubjective Spaces, Communal Dreams
Postwar Japanese experimental artists often relied on the idea and practice of
collective activity as a place to explore the relationships between subjects, the
intersubjective “encounter,” and to challenge the assumed structures of truth
and power. The idea of the collective, drawn in part from Marxist understandings of a revolutionary gathering that might be violent but that would ultimately
effect a fundamental change in society, held a radically privileged place. Many
artists believed that their collaborations could be a model for a transformed
society, in a collective that reinvented power distribution and overturned hierarchies. In theory, if not always in practice, Terayama Shūji’s dramaturgy focused
on the principles of collective participation and mutuality, where the “connection” or “encounter” would, sometimes in violent ways, “reject the hierarchical
thinking that separates ‘audience’ and ‘actor,’ and instead build a collaborative,
mutual connection.”1
One of the central methodological difficulties in writing about the theater of
this period emerges from these efforts at collaborative, improvisatory structure.
Betsuyaku Minoru is an “author” who writes his plays, relying on chance in
cafés and overheard conversations, some of which may make their way into
his dialogues; his plays also profoundly explore chance encounters on the level
of character. Yet many playwrights and directors of the post-shingeki period
relied on situational improvisations to complete or create their work, and allowed for a good deal of improvisation by the actors during the performances
themselves. As noted earlier, much of Mōjin shokan as well as Nuhikun and Terayama’s other works consisted of improvised dialogue on pregiven situations
only later recorded as a “script.” (This links to Terayama’s idea of moving
toward a theater that functions as a “map without contours,” a cartography
without the underlying reliance on a settled script.) Tracing a trend in the use
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of improvisation, it would probably move from “most messy,” or highest proportion of improvisation in the early phases of post-shingeki, underground performance, and butō, toward a higher degree of rigor in the repetition and the
closest synchronization in each reiteration later. These shifts coincide with the
performances’ increasing institutional success and prestige.
Nishidō Kōjin points out that the discontinuity / rupture between shingeki
and post-shingeki is exaggerated, or even partly illusory, and not only because
of some continuity of individual actors and actor training from one movement
to another. He argues that, as the “small theater” groups grew and developed,
there was simultaneous pressure from within shingeki and institutionalized theaters to look for new talent and to foster new theatrical trends. This conglomeration of forces led to a collaborative relationship between shingeki and some
practitioners of post-shingeki and experimental theater, where shingeki institutions would provide financial support and space as the younger artists provided the new work and ideas.2 One might even claim that by the post-bubble
period of the early 1990s there was no longer as significant an institutional
difference between shingeki and (second generation) post-shingeki productions.
The latter, while aesthetically complex and formally innovative, were canonized as part of mainstream theater and even at times viewed more broadly on
television rather than as live theater as part of arts programming.
At the outset, Nishidō observes, post-shingeki aimed to overturn not only
the aesthetic criteria of shingeki but also the hierarchical processes by which
theatrical institutions had been run for so many decades. Instead of a company
headed by a director (or directors) at the top, with a series of levels of seniority
of actors below, and the efficiency of a corporate staff, these artists aimed for
and attempted to embrace a more marginal, deliberately “inefficient” process in
which the “author” function would be supplanted by collectivity. The practical
implementation of this ideal varied widely; gender roles, for example, were often
rigidly maintained, and many notable women directors and women-centered
troupes did not emerge into the spotlight until later decades from the ranks
of the great post-shingeki actresses and collaborators. Yet it is important to remember that the questioning of hierarchies and traditional structures, such as
class and familial lineage, was indeed one of the stated intentions and practices
of many who participated in the shōgekijō (small theater) movement3—and at
both the centers and margins of post-shingeki.
If the process of making a play aimed to transcend the creative power of
a given individual, and to model new modes of intersubjective encounter, so
also in the play’s reception did many artists experiment with simultaneous and
multiple models for theatrical viewing. Expanded cinema with multiple-screen
projection in the 1970s created opportunities for chance variations in a com-
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plex montage, with the multiple projections not necessarily beginning at the
same precise moment with each screening, and with too much to grasp in
one viewing, thereby opening up the work to a non-mastering gaze. In theater,
too, troupes explored the possibility of multiple events occurring simultaneously, so that not every viewer would see every aspect of the performance.
Post-shingeki, which had chosen to challenge or break the integrity of the theatrical “fourth wall” through street performances and happenings, through interventions into the audience’s space by the actors, and through various forms
of audience participation (or in some cases, at times, audience assault), created
an “improvisation” or openness to chance that would produce or rely on a
different vision of spectatorship as well as “memory”—that is, the “event
itself” would exist only through the collectivity of all of the spectators at once,
never to be gathered into a single unified narrative or picture. At times, this
exploration was framed explicitly in terms of explorations of the workings of
“memory” and performance; at times, the mediations of technology, historical
record, or language itself came to the fore.
Terayama’s and Tenjō sajiki’s Hyakunen no kodoku (One Hundred Years of
Solitude), which takes us into the early bubble period of the 1980s, is one
production that explores these questions most explicitly. By this point, Terayama’s work was very popular and even quite thoroughly canonized. One of
the most ambitious productions of Terayama’s career, it is one of the last
few productions he directed. Freely inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s novel
Cien años de soledad, the play tells fragmented stories of the lives of an array
of characters from different generations in a village. First performed in Tokyo in
a large warehouse-like theater in July 1981, it incorporates five independent but
related stories unfolding on five distinct but interconnected stages. No single
viewer sees the entire performance perfectly: each watches from a different
angle as some of the intertwining events unfold simultaneously, others in sequence. Depending upon which stages are closest to their seats, the audience
members follow one set of stories more closely, and almost certainly miss
parts of other stories that are taking place on the other side of the village. With
no omniscient gaze, each audience member perceives a range of events from
a contingent, individual position within the collective. In this way, the audience’s
positions around the village replicate those of the characters in the village themselves, whose attentions also wander and who move to watch the most spectacular or exciting event as it takes place on stage at any given moment. For
example, villagers waiting endlessly for a wedding to take place are distracted
and move to the center of the stages to watch a cockfight instead.
The incorporation of both choice and chance in the audience’s perspective
allows for no unified collective experience, and no single interpretation of the
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work; instead, a combination of overlapping perspectives make up the whole.
The experience of the audience reflects the multivalent view of historical transmission that the work will enact within each of its separate narratives. The
play thus performs an enactment of the collectivity, and an instantiation of Terayama’s emphasis on chance: “The element of ‘chance’ that exists within the
consciousness of the group comes to be organized through this [collaborative,
mutual] connection.”4 With a balance of chance and organization, a collective
is created. Yet, what kind of collectivity is Terayama theorizing and attempting
to mobilize? The parts of the show that each audience member views and remembers act as fragments of a whole, but the whole, the collective itself that
would see all of the play, remains impossible to access. Rather than a united
collective, we find a collection of significant fragments.
This fragmented “collective” bears upon the structure of the play, in particular through the character of Zunmu (translated here as Zoom because of
this character’s distance vision), the wandering narrator or “seer” of the story.
Zoom, who carries with him a strange lens, remains an outsider to the village
and corresponds loosely to the gypsies who come to the village in the opening
scene of García Márquez’s novel, selling new technologies (magnets, telescopes)
and magic to the dazzled villagers. Zoom shows the villagers how, with the
close-up view through his lens, they can see the other side of the village as if
it were directly in front of them: “Thanks to science,” he claims, “there is no
more distance.”5 The lens makes distant events visible—and the audience shares
the villagers’ desire to see events taking place on the “other” side.
When the villagers ask who he is and why they have never seen him before,
Zoom responds: “I died of fever in Singapore. My corpse was washed away
by rain, and got caught in a bend at the mouth of a river. That is, ten years
from now.” The villager Kona asks, “He says he died ten years from now. . . .
But ten years from now hasn’t come yet, right?” Zoom replies, “Yes, that’s
right. Look in the lens.” Thus Zoom claims that his lens can also see into the
future (52). In Terayama’s village world, as in García Márquez’s Macondo, the
order of linear time, and the clear boundaries it creates between the living and
the dead, do not apply. The events of the story are legible outside of the usual
modes of understanding, as García Márquez writes:
Melquíades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.
Fascinated by the discovery, Aureliano read aloud. . . . He began to decipher the instant
that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.
Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood. . . 6
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Terayama’s play too engages in key questions of memory, history and identity
from within this counterintuitive perspective. Zoom states it explicitly: “I’ve
died more than three or four times. Each time I die, I come home in order
to write about events still to occur, in the as-yet unwritten records of a village.
It is said, ‘Even things that haven’t happened yet are a part of history’ ” (52). The
other stories of the play, itself a collection of interwoven fragments, also focus
on questions of historical, personal, and cultural memory and identity. How do
we remember who we are? What is the relation between our place, our village,
and the possibility of our knowing who we are? How do language and technology, and in particular photography, affect our understanding of our identities?
For Zoom most explicitly, and implicitly in the rest of the play, technology
(a kind of low-tech with mystical powers) plays a notable role: “You in the village haven’t discovered it yet; this is a lens,” he announces (52). As the narrator, he brings the outside world into the village, and thus introduces a perspective beyond their own; he introduces a role for technological vision that enters
the world of spirit, transcending time and the orders of memory, collapsing
distance and boundaries. The logical limits of human life and of linear time are
waived, even as technology marks precisely the entry of the village into written
history, into some other order of time: “I write events that have not yet happened, in the unwritten records of the villages.”
The troupe’s village is a world inhabited by strange inventions, answering
not only to practical needs but to deeper questions of subjectivity and the relation of the body to objects. Zoom, presented to the audience simultaneously
as visionary and as wandering quack, announces to the villagers, “Objects too
have spirits. . . . This stick will startle those spirits awake. If you use this as
a walking stick, it will awaken metal objects from their places, and they will
follow after you” (51). Beyond the scientific explanation of the magnet is the
startling vision of the object-spirit. In another story an evil priest holds a detached doorknob that he claims is the door to the world of dreams. He locks
it so that people will stop wandering into each other’s dreams (77–78).
In a story featuring twin brothers, Kome (Rice) claims that a camera can
photograph any person or object in its true form, even if that form is not visible
to the naked eye: the camera will even capture God on film. His twin Mugi
(Barley) challenges him to take a picture of the player of a player piano—a piano
that is producing a tune by itself before their eyes. Wary of having a part of
his spirit stolen, his self “worn down,” by this mysterious device that can “show
things in their true form,” Mugi does not want to pose next to the “player” for
the photograph. He protests, “I don’t have a true form!” Kome objects: “Nonetheless, it will be captured there. There is nothing whose true character will
not be exposed by this photographic technique” (21–23). When they do take the
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photo, a village girl, Temari, an “idiot girl” who is “rumored to smell of death,”
tumbles out of the camera. The twins rape her, simultaneously so that neither
will succumb first to the premonition of death she carries. She bears a child,
but in great pain. Finally, through another mechanical invention, “the machine
for taking on another’s pain during difficult labor,” they take on the pain of her
childbearing, and ultimately both of them die during the birth, leaving Temari
and the child to survive them (45–46; 67–72).
Was their death in some sense caused by that initial act of photography?
By the rape? Was the “smell of death” she carried with her linked to her emergence from the camera, to her photographic origin? Just as one twin feared
that the camera would steal a bit of himself when it showed his “true form,”
thus undermining identity even as it fixed and captured his “essence,” this
machine that takes on the pain of another’s childbirth undermines even that
fundamental cornerstone of the subject that is its own sentience, the incommunicability of “one’s own pain.”7 The twins, through the machine, are able to
“take on the pain” of Temari, an “idiot child,” with her non-mastering relationship to language, her vague and playful talk, her inability to “understand.”
Through the medium or “translation” of the machine, and by way of the twins’
cries, this pain enters a shared realm.
Linda Haverty Rugg writes in Picturing Ourselves that “photography has been
conceived both as a means of capturing the precise details of the exterior world
and as a sorcerer’s instrument for plumbing beneath the surface of appearances.
But the key to understanding such polarities lies in perceiving . . . that the
two poles are not antithetical but dependent on one another.”8 She writes of
August Strindberg’s continuing quest through self-photography for the unseen
essence of things, for proof of his own nature, a true self-image; what he
un_covers instead is an anxiety at the inevitable disintegration of the self, “light,
divided, dispersed.”9 Similarly the twins in Hyakunen no kodoku believe and fear
that photographs have just such an uncanny power to capture the invisible.
Photography, as a form of capturing a moment in time, and subsequently as a
record of the past, works in unexpected ways within this play where the characters are both rooted in their village and uncertain where the limits of reality
lie. They negotiate uncertain boundaries and orders of place and time. The fragmented workings of village memory, the “light, divided, dispersed” development of events and their recollection, mirror Strindberg’s ultimate discovery
about the photograph and its dispersals of the self, which he attempted to resist
(but in the end exacerbated, or productively and beautifully instantiated) by his
repeated attempts at self-photography.
Here, and at different moments, the play takes that which one might assume
to be the unbreachable terrain of “interiority,” the psychic space of the sub-
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ject, and shows how this realm—inhabited by dreams, memories, and pain—
transforms into an intersubjective space. In the story of Tsubana and the two
Kakesus considered next, the doubling of the character of Kakesu challenges
the ontology of the self. The reproducibility of personhood or identity undermines distinctions between real and fake; instead, it creates a logic of simulation. Terayama’s intersubjective psychic space also violates the “unbreachable”
bound between life and death, or between live subjects and dead ones. For example, a “mailman” carrying messages to the realm of the dead is literally buried
by a corrupt priest, in order successfully to convey his messages to the other
world, and a woman haggles with the priest over whether it is possible to send
not only words but also tangerines to her dead husband (28-29). Life and death,
dreams and reality, past and future mix and mingle in the fragmented and fantastical stories of the village.
The complexities of the stories in Terayama’s play, woven of rumor spoken
in the characters’ dialogues, events that occur on stage, past events recalled by
characters, and imaginings, work according to a logic of their own that is the
preposterous, magical logic of the village, beyond the reach of accepted unities
and common sense. The characters themselves doubt which parts of village
memory and rumor are real, and which are simply hearsay. Even with the full
script, transcribed from the audiovisual recording of a performance that contained numerous variations and improvisations, the abundance of detail and
fragment is rich and at times overwhelming; how much more so for the audience that hears only a limited segment of each of the stories. Although not
functioning according to the logic of realism or the everyday world, the
subtly intertwining tales come to function within a logic taught to us by the
play itself, through its fragmenting of time, history, and memory. Terayama had
posited that theater should place question marks around the presumed realities
of everyday life. Here he humorously overturns the boundaries of life and death,
with an underlying seriousness that looks unflinchingly at the contingencies of
human perception, the discursive structures of kinship, and the workings of violence, solitude, and community.
The audience’s experience of perceiving the production, with intertwined
fragments of partially unreliable stories, nonetheless fixes for each audience
member a particular view or set of views of the village; the combination of
views makes up the whole. The relation of the village stories replicates the
photographic logic of fixity and dispersal—both holding fast a particular perspective and, by the very multiplicity of these visions, confirming their multivalence and the impossibility of confirming or rejoining a single, unified story
not subject to the reopening of its fragments. Each person in the village has a
connection to the village, to a particular spot within it, but as the unity of the
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village begins to dissipate and people migrate to and away from it, the certainty
of those memories and their attendant identities is shaken.
The most striking example of this migration occurs in the story of Tane
(Seed) and Hatake (Field), two cousins who (they tell us) married against their
grandmother’s wishes. As cousins, they are forbidden to sleep together while
they remain on their land, and they appeal repeatedly to their grandmother for
permission. Or rather, they appeal to her photograph, which they must literally
dig up from its burial site in the field on which they live. The photograph does
not respond or give permission (although they speak to it and seem to expect
an answer) so in the end they decide they must leave. When they migrate, they
refuse to buy the census registration (koseki) that Zoom tries to sell to them (17–
20; 36–40). They remain, then, without attachment to any new identity or place,
and they move to the stage where we have seen the twins with the camera
and the player piano. Now Tane (the husband) and Hatake (the wife) can sleep
together. Yet Tane gradually loses his memory for the names of objects and
people, and Hatake must write labels on everything. (On the camera itself is
a large wooden character watashi, “I,” as the words themselves become imposing objects, props on the stage.) Soon Tane forgets and begins to mistake
the word for the thing, the language for the object (61–63; 73–76). The logic
of his forgetfulness mirrors that of the camera’s power to steal the soul and the
self. As in García Márquez’s novel, the constructed / arbitrary relation between
signifier and signified is broken (including their own names and roles) just as
the relation between the couple and their home in the village is lost.10 It is as
if the logic of the stories recognizes that kinship relations depend on notions
of memory and identity that are arbitrary structures, and therefore susceptible
to being broken, but also that the consequences of such a rupture extend all
the way to the structures of the memory of language itself. Terayama does
not advocate therefore remaining “true” to the land and to one’s unified village
community; rather, he is fascinated with the results of these displacements, and
throughout the play reveals a fundamental dispersal and fragility in identity,
place, and history. Putting question marks around everyday realities and assumed identities, the play shows their contingencies as mediated by technological and other visual doublings. The intersubjective or collective space of
language conditions the interiority of the subject in ways playfully demonstrated
through the breakdown of these structures.
The logic of uncertainties and the photographic double continues in the tale
of the unmarried woman Tsubana and two girls who arrive at her home claiming
to be her daughter(s). Tsubana sits at home weaving when a young girl, Kakesu,
emerges from the floorboards. Claiming to be Tsubana’s daughter, carrying the
bones of her own father (whom she claims is Tsubana’s husband), the girl says
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that she would like to bury the bones in “their” home. The woman is mystified
by the girl’s claim: how could she bring home the bones of a husband who does
not exist? But gradually, Tsubana is drawn into the girl’s story, in particular
seduced by a last will from the father that addresses (her) as “dear beloved wife”
and claims that although they have been far apart, their feelings have always
been as one. Tsubana repeats the words to herself in private, giggling: “dear
beloved wife, dear beloved wife” (itoshi no tsuma yo; 32–35). Another girl, also
named Kakesu, then arrives carrying another bag of bones around her neck,
along with the same letter, making the same claim as the first. The first Kakesu
exclaims: “That’s my name . . . . You are a fake!” The second girl replies, “I don’t
understand you at all. I am you.” First girl: “What?” Second girl: “I am you”
(47–50).11
Here the strength of the conventional war narrative of the long-lost husband, the written will, and the “picture perfect” marriage in fact overwhelms the
reality of the single woman and becomes or replaces that reality with a new,
more powerful one. The image of Kakesu, in which the photograph / perfect
double speaks and takes on the whole life story and identity of the first, extends
the logic of the photographic doubling into the very notion of identity, just
as the twins feared that capturing the image on film would damage their integrity
as individual beings. This case is not a fully symmetrical doubling, but one that
leads to a misunderstanding and misrecognition (“I don’t understand you at
all”). Still, in this world, both photographs and letters have the power to alter
the conditions of life and death, and the movement of events. Can a subject’s
identity and memories be changed or challenged by contact with the contrary
claims of others? Can the woman come to live with these contradictory realities?
As in the play’s other stories, such events as these undermine and rewrite seemingly incontrovertible facts of identity. In the end Tsubana accepts both girls,
and, as if in response, an absurd delivery man appears repeatedly to bring the
personal effects of the (nonexistent?) father to their inheritors (64–66).12
When the corrupt village priest buries the mailman so that he can take the
villagers’ letters to the land of the dead, he strikingly literalizes the ways in
which the boundaries of life and death are crossed through the soil. When
a grandmother attempts to dig up the mailman because she did not give her
letter to him on time, the soil, represented on stage by little plots of dirt, becomes the literal space of the dead, of one’s ancestors, of the village past. At
one point after the twins step on the photograph of the grandmother, an
actor’s head (as the character of the grandmother) pokes out of the soil plot
onstage and shouts, “Quiet down! It’s so noisy here even the dead can’t rest”
(69–70). Tsubana speaks of a man who appears in her dream claiming that he
had died in that house twenty years before, although the house was not built
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twenty years ago. She explains: “Even the dead make mistakes” (47). Words,
objects, and spirits link in a complex relationship not always within human
control; they can have magical powers and their misplacements can have unsettling effects. By the time the grandmother’s head pops out of the soil, her
grandchildren (Tane and Hatake) have already left their land. Those who are
still there tell the grandmother she has mistaken the spot but she insists, confusedly, “I was quite certain it was here” (70). The story shows the contingency
of intersubjective understanding, as it abounds with images of misplacement
and forgetting, lost homes, and lost, mistaken, or doubled identities.
As part of an avant-garde vision of theater, Terayama questions assumed
notions of identity and memory, while at the same time depicting cruel and
terrifying sides of human interaction and communal life. This is not an unreflective nostalgia that would look back on the magic of an idealized representation of village life; instead, Terayama uses the village as a metaphor for communities (including urban communities, political and theatrical collectives) and
the ways that memory is perpetuated and spoken, preserved, forgotten, and
reinscribed there, through images and technology, telling and remembrance.
There is a character in the play named Ningen-sama (Mr. Human) who wanders through the village singing the stories of the people, spreading the word
that others ask him to spread, without regard to historical truth or falsehood.
As he claims, and as Terayama might reiterate, “There is nothing in this world
that cannot be made into a song” (57).
In the center of the village in Hyakunen no kodoku is a “deep hole” that instead of going down into the ground rises up toward the sky. This hole—into
which people enter as children and exit as adults, and a funeral march enters
and a wedding march exits—symbolizes this contingent or reversible realm of
time of which Zoom also speaks through his lens. This is a realm in which
the future is also part of history, death is both within and outside of life, objects have spirits, and dreams and reality mix. This is both a culmination and in
some ways a summation of the many experiments in avant-garde theater that
came before, by Terayama and others, in which these themes arose as individual concerns, but without the integrated reflection of this complex piece. This
central vertical hole itself mirrors the barrel of a camera, the space between
lens and film. Located at the center of the five stages, it reminds the audience
of how the events they have been seeing and the play itself can be dislocated
like the uncanny dislocations provoked by the photograph. Through the vertical central hole, the apparent center of the village remains an uncertain emptiness, one that nonetheless aspires to reach for the skies. In this sense, it
is much like the technological contraptions that both capture and unseat the
stability of the self.
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If one person can move into the realm of another’s memories the way a
person steps on another’s shadow—if, as the actors would say in Mōjin shokan,
the world they are depicting is a world “stuck inside of someone else’s memories”—then the terrain of individual subjectivity is opened, and the boundary
between self and other is breached, challenged, or interrogated. Around the
same time of the production of Hyakunen no kodoku, in another work known
(retroactively) as Video Letters, Terayama and the poet Tanikawa Shuntarō explored the visuality and the language of subjectivity and its reproductions. On
the border between public and private space, on the border between the recording of memories and the making of memory, Tanikawa and Terayama construct this series of edited video “letters,” a performance of intimacy that is now
open to a wider audience’s gaze. Made between 1982 and 1983, the video letters
look back on the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of the end of the “underground” and the beginning of new alternative modes of performance, near
the end of Terayama’s career ( just before his death in 1983). The video letters
perform the gaze of the self on the self addressed to another, opening up an
exploration of subjectivity (intrasubjective and intersubjective spaces), photography, and video.13
In its role as a record and a mechanical reproduction, video here poses a
specific challenge to the originary self. If replication implies or retroactively
constructs an origin, Terayama and Tanikawa here explicitly explore and challenge the status of that origin. Not only the past, in its particular facts, nuances,
and narratives, but also the present, the very speaking subject, are challenged in
the vertiginous space of reproduction, in the movement lines of the video as
used in these works. In the context of Japan in the 1980s, at the beginning of
the economic bubble, Terayama and Tanikawa speak intimately of an absence
of meaning, and they perform visually the ambivalences of this absence.
In Video Letters, they record objects and people from their daily lives (brushing their teeth, taking medications); they record their bodies, their books, their
photographs, and their rooms, with sometimes incongruous and philosophical
voice-over. They capture images both abstract and concrete, avoiding drama
and conflict, plotlines, or events. Instead, the series becomes a record of an
intimate self-contemplation, in the medium of video, for a specific other. Because both Terayama and Tanikawa are famous public figures by this point, they
display an awareness of a larger potential audience, and a reflection back—
an archiving as an act of performative editing of their own pasts. But the exchange is framed specifically in terms of intimacy with one other person, with
each other.
Contemporary critical theory often evokes the movement and migration or
transport of language and objects in a global commodity culture. Terayama and
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Tanikawa focus on the ordinary, the everyday, at a pace and with a concentration that slips into the realm of the extraordinary. It is hard to describe accurately the intimate sense of this work, its balance of editing and improvisation.
Tanikawa and Terayama together focus on the groundlessness of language, and
the layers upon layers of language in dialogue. For Terayama and Tanikawa,
as for many video artists in this increasingly accessible medium, this technology
speaks to the ravaged self, in a specifically intimate screen that pushes against
(but also, at times, cites) the view of mass media as an impersonal place of loss
of agency. They critically interrogate the endless reproductions and representations that are a part of mass media’s reification of culture, while at the same time
both have roles as central figures within media representations. Destabilizing
the division between the sites of production and the sites of reception, they
also invoke intimacy as a specifically constructed illusion of the screen, a space
that, like the theatrical works of Terayama, and in other ways like works of
New Wave cinema, engage in a metatextual reflection on their own performative procedures and on the workings of voyeurism and visual desire. At this
moment in which the experimental movements of the 1960s and 1970s had
begun to enter a “boom” phase of their own in the mass media, being narrated
and represented on television for an ever wider public, Terayama and Tanikawa
self-consciously question the status of this endless media replication through
their dialogues on meaning, language, and self-representation.
In his 1990 book, Uchino Tadashi had warned of critics’ naïve tendency to
play into the legend of Terayama by following him in his own self-constructed
myths. In Video Letters, Terayama and Tanikawa make explicit that construction
of the self, opening the illusion of privacy on the screen, to make their later
audiences aware of the pleasures and the playfulness of editing the archive of
the self. This is a self in dialogue with its own future remembrance—a building
up and a breaking down at once, an uncanny hovering between cohesive and
ever-fragmented meaning. In response to Tanikawa’s letter full of “empty”
words (um, er, well) and his reflections on emptiness, Terayama’s reply shows
hands opening a box, which opens another box, which opens another box
that continually contains only further boxes. Where is the center?14 Bird songs
play in the background as a contrast to the ever-empty boxes, but the lingering images are the hands opening the boxes. The viewer is given to watch the
process of their continual opening.
In a video letter from September 10, 1982, Terayama opens an explicit discussion of the themes of language and the body. In close up, he records his—
or someone’s?—body parts, and we see the hairs, the pores, the small moles.
His voice-over says, “kotoba, kotoba, kotoba [words, words, words]” with each
Fig. 7a–c Boxes inside boxes, from Tanikawa and Terayama’s Video Letters. Courtesy of
Kujō Kyōko.
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shot of his knees, legs, and the back of his head. “Tanikawa-san, you said that
everything looks good when you put it into words, but sometimes there are
things also that can’t be tolerated unless they are put into something like words.
Words, words, words. This is my present situation” (vol. 2, 0:05:19–0:06:16).
Terayama is interested in referentiality, but also in language, visuality, the body,
desire, and things. The next shot takes place in his room, where there is no
voice-over, only a large wooden object, the character 物 [mono, thing(s)], the
same character that was used in Hyakunen no kodoku when Tane lost his memory of language. The objects of a personal life here stand in for the world of
things. But the unspoken story of a body, shown on the video screen, evokes
the affect that infuses the need to bring things into language.
In the world of poststructuralist theory (or now, perhaps, in its aftermath),
the idea that narratives are unstable and language and meaning are contingent
might seem tiringly familiar. Yet Terayama pushes such allegorical reflections
further through his use and creative editing of the video footage of the concrete objects of the world, the body, with his own voice-over. The specificity
of the images and objects—the dripping of a faucet into a bucket, the sounds
of a telex machine and morse code, broadcasts and language lessons in various
languages—pushes the viewer to construct meaning by adding contiguous and
metonymic sense, making the images and objects intelligible by the contexts
that surround them or the words that caption them. Most strikingly, in the
context of this exchange with Tanikawa, meaning or its absence is contained,
held, in the space of interlocution between two recorder-performers in dialogue.15 The space of the witness is held for each. Terayama looks into the
camera at certain moments and says, “Isn’t that so, Tanikawa-san?” (“ne, Tanikawa-san”); “I’d like to think so, but what do you say, Tanikawa-san?” (sō
omoitaindesuga, dō deshō, Tanikawa-san; vol. 4, 0:13:45). Self-conscious meaning
or meaninglessness, and even (or especially) the option that is outside of this
binary opposition—as in Karatani’s description of Ango’s hi-imi (non-sense)—
often represented by the world of dogs, bird-songs, and animals, is a world
within an intersubjective agency and mutual perception. It creates the occasion
for an intimate portrait and dialogue on the very rupturing of the idea of self.
Terayama often writes about mothers, but in this work his mother becomes
a representative figure for what it means to create something out of destruction. He shows an old photo to Tanikawa (or to the camera) of his mother,
a photo ripped apart in one shot and then stitched back together in the following shot,16 with the voice-over: “Only meaning can rebuild what is perishing or what is breaking apart” (imi dake ga, horobikaketeiru mono, kowarekaketeiru
mono o tatenaosu koto ga dekiru; vol. 4, 0:12:25–0:12:54). Then the shot fixes on
Fig. 8a–c Torn and resewn photo of Terayama’s mother, and photo of mother and boy
moving apart, from Tanikawa and Terayama’s Video Letters. Courtesy of Kujō Kyōko.
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a picture of Terayama as a toddler with his mother, where the photo slowly
divides and he is “torn” from her, although the photo is already pre-torn:
the separation or loss has (always) already taken place (vol. 4, 0:12:54–0:13:34).
The camera focuses on the dramatic and dark gap between their two images.
Later, Tanikawa’s voice-over asks: “What is between meaning and meaninglessness? Do you know, they say it’s the appearance [semblance] of meaning”
(muimi to imi no aida ni nani ga aru ka, shitteiru kai? Imi arige tte mon ga arundatte sa).
Tanikawa’s voice-over speaks with an image of a spider crawling down into
the darkness, resembling very much the movement of dark letters on a page
(vol. 9, 0:31:40).17 “Still,” he says at another moment, “perfect meaninglessness
[muimi ] cannot be found” (vol. 8, 0:28:26). In these video letters, the discussion
of meaning takes place partly in writing (videos of written texts, and videos
of the act of writing), as if the graphic force of language would add another
dimension to the clarity and layering of the problem. What can be reproduced?
What can be rearranged? What is the relation between taking a video of a dog
(as Terayama and Tanikawa do at various points), taking a video of photographs of dogs (as Terayama does at another point), and taking a video of the
word “dog” (inu) as he rearranges its hiragana characters in crossword form?
(vol. 8, 0:25:41; 0:25:24).
The dog, a representative of the “creaturely” outside of language, can no
longer provide an escape route from the vagaries and vicissitudes of representation and signification; but neither are signification and representation shored up
confidently under the term “meaning.” Where does the “meaning” reside? Does
not the multiple layering of the reflections and reproductions, while playing
on the one hand with the contingent signifiers of language, also highlight and
draw into relief the layering of the self that is speaking and recording these
insights, as in the image of boxes inside ever more boxes?
Many postwar experimental artists focus on the breakdown of originary
narratives and the ways in which these can be manipulated, while also suggesting the necessity of recording this very breakdown and presenting it before
a witness. It is not just the making of the narrative but the structure of intimacy itself that is in question. Given a self that is a contingent construction,
from what point of view can one “ground” an intimate relation—or is such a
grounding even necessary? Does the shaking of the hand that holds the camera
(as the voice-over states in the ninth letter; vol. 9, 0:32:14), the impossibility
of holding a clear focus, frame evidence of the “aliveness” and “presence” or
movement of the speaking subject? Does the contingency of the subject cause
a rupture in intimacy, or could it rather cause an opening to communication,
to a social vision of subjectivity, even a newly structured conglomeration of
Fig. 9a–c Terayama with a dog, a painted picture of dogs, and the hiragana word inu
(dog), from Tanikawa and Terayama’s Video Letters. Courtesy of Kujō Kyōko.
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speaking selves that speaks collaboratively? Is the contingency precisely what
allows for intimacy, building a narrative or anti-narrative from within the very
ruins of a stable, originary self?
In 1929, the emergent Marxist Miyamoto Kenji accused the late Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke of intellectual solipsism, of coming to think of reality as “only his
own self.” Miyamoto famously criticized Akutagawa: “He could not even satisfactorily write a single dog.”18 A dog here stands in for an external reality,
a part of the world, a convincing referentiality outside the self. Terayama and
Tanikawa, from a very different perspective, play with images of dogs as a way
of hinting at the liminal space where the representation of the world and the
representation of the “self” break down. In other words, they seek a form in
which to depict the very breakdown of representation itself. Terayama changes
the word “dog” (inu) to “meaning” (imi ) by removing one hiragana crossword
tile and replacing it with another (vol. 8, 0:26:33). Here, then, language’s capacity for reference to the world of the real, and reality’s capacity to hold meaning
(imi )—to allow for construction rather than destruction and death—find their
ambivalent pivot. It is the moment between a pure devolution to empty lines
and quakes and squiggles, blurs and abstractions, and the moment of linking,
understanding, and caring between one being and another.
A woman watches a dog eat. The camera focuses on a graveyard. What is at
stake in this moment, in the months before his death, when Terayama places
this recording of a phone discussion with Tanikawa in his video letter?
TANIKAWA:
The word “meaningless” seems like just a name in a picture book to me.
When is meaninglessness useful to you?
TANIKAWA: When I think about my mother.
TERAYAMA: How?
TANIKAWA: When I encounter something that can’t be grasped by my prior system of
meaning and value. . . . In other words, it’s useful if I think in the frame of “meaninglessness” about what kind of meaning meaninglessness has. . . . (vol. 8, 0:26:41–0:27:15)
TERAYAMA:
Tanikawa describes a very logical idea of meaninglessness; that is, the negation of meaning, still within the frame of language. Terayama poses this challenge: “What if a girl asked you to give her meaninglessness?” (muimi chōdai;
vol. 8, 0:29:26). With humor, he breaks the frame—he is interested in desire,
in the “looking awry” (in Žižek’s sense), where meaning is formed precisely
in the interested look, the look of desire at an object. He is interested in the
way context transforms meaning. A woman watches a dog eat. A discussion of
meaninglessness takes place in view of a graveyard. Meaning accumulates like
water in a bowl under a dripping faucet. The meanings that accumulate, Terayama and Tanikawa seem to say, come to matter in the uses one makes of them,
the desires and relationships they function within, and the frames and closures
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they mark—or that mark them. One looks through a window at a cemetery, or
one thinks of one’s mother, and the limits of meaning and understanding come
into plain view. Those are the moments, perhaps, when it becomes a necessity,
or in some odd way, a relief, to call upon meaninglessness, upon contradiction,
upon the empty signifier. There is an affective purpose that holds in this attempt
to grasp and categorize something that exceeds comprehension.
In these Video Letters from the early 1980s, a temporality arises that is no
more stable than that which we see evoked in the heyday of the idealistic underground avant-garde that Terayama and Tanikawa look back upon. If anything, things have become all the more complex; the world sways with contingent readings. Words and pictures may contradict each other, or cross over
one another as in a crossword puzzle, or they may land in a ditch (mizo) as the
voice-over says at one point. Neither perfect meaning nor perfect meaninglessness is possible. Yet, they say, one eats, one looks, one desires, one thinks of
one’s mother. One builds puzzles and destroys them—or rebuilds things that
are in the process of breaking apart. Similarly, it seems, Tanikawa and Terayama
reflect back on and build a friendship from the space between images, from
the layered representations of intimate thoughts, intimate selves. They build a
dialogue—indeed, a narrative of sorts—out of fragments of objects, moments,
technologies, and reflections.
Terayama records himself in a curved metal mirror. He records the view
out the window through a blur of rain. The camera itself, at times, becomes the
deliberate agent of blurring. Viewers know they are watching a construction,
indeed a reconstruction, of solitary selves aimed at a dialogue about the nature
of the self, yet out of this edited reconstruction comes a space that also calls
upon the viewer to perform the work of watching and listening. The blocks and
limits (and visual obstructions) to this private dialogue become apparent, along
with spaces of freedom, its moments of what it calls “meaning’s semblance,”
of floating between meaning and meaninglessness. The viewers follow its frustrating and lyrical construction of boxes within boxes, its own private languages
and stories. The resistances, then, come in the moments when it is possible,
nonetheless, to mean or make stories without relying on origins, essences, or
fundamentals. A dog stands in for itself, in the endless round of replications.
In the signification of the most basic—a dog is a dog, is an image of a dog—
the nostalgia for meaning and reference becomes transformed into a dialogue
of endless repetitions, transformations, and generative mutations.
Video Letters, as a central example of what we might call a later flowering
of experimental performance in the early 1980s, raises the question of the “encounter” into the alternate medium of video. Critics and artists alike have
pointed out the “intimacy” of the space of video.19 The world of video, on the
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one hand a mode of capture of an “inner world,” also reflects on possibilities of
mass mediation and reproduction. Like Strindberg’s photographs, Video Letters
is a site of the multiple and dispersed images of the self that leads to a contemplation of loss: loss of essences, loss of origins, and perhaps in parallel
with these, potential losses of the objects of caring. That contemplation becomes a site of connection, of productive and proliferating dialogue. Where
in Terayama’s Hyakunen no kodoku the broadest collective of fragments forms a
play that cannot be grasped in its totality, here the dialogue of two opens itself to
the audience’s inclusion. Like Hyakunen no kodoku, the fragment-videos generate
a proliferating complexity beyond any fixed point of orientation. What connects
them are simply date marks on each “letter” and the threads picked up by
each of the interlocutors responding to the last. There is the sense of a momentto-moment unfolding, as in a life, a contingent and multi-accented evolution,
in which the “full” picture is not completed until the last frame. One sees the
careful framing as well as the improvisations of the artistic spirit of a moment,
beautiful and perhaps (as Uchino Tadashi warns) too easy to fetishize after the
death of (one of ) the artists, or as a last work before the future perfect of a death
not yet fully visible to the work and its makers.
Here we may explore these works for the forms of “encounter” they construct, for the imaginative returns they envision and whose foreclosure they
explore, and because of the ways they establish performatively a space as well
as a technological mediation of dialogue that we might call “intersubjective
space.” Neither within nor without, undermining the priority of both “self”
and “world” in favor of some other ontology of mutual engagement, the intersubjective might inform a hope, not without its pain and losses, for transformative modes of understanding and realizing the social. The “intersubjective”
here creates a productive frame for a mode of engagement without grounding
in ideas and definitions that can easily harden into norms, and may thus suggest
an alternative mode of commitment of the self—or commitment of subjects to
one another.20
PART II
Theories of Encounter
FIVE
Theories of Encounter:
Breaking the Everyday
One of the key issues in the thought of postwar artists and theater practitioners
centers on the idea of the “encounter” (deai). Although the term deai might more
immediately evoke online dating services in contemporary Japan, its various
permutations were nodal theoretical and conceptual points for many artists,
from post-shingeki to the visual arts movement of Mono-ha (literally, “school of
things”) in the 1970s and beyond. The problem of encounter—the immediate
or direct interaction between the subject and either an object or another subject—has been formulated variously through philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, theater, and cinema studies. The way this interaction relates to the
process that takes place between theatrical audience and theatrical performer,
viewer and painting, spectator and screen, has been theorized in many ways for
each distinct medium. Yet in its varying guises, the concept of an “encounter,”
theorized through an understanding of the workings of subjectivity, and in
particular as an idealized mode of interaction with a work of art persists in
particularly forceful ways in the works relevant to this study, in the theorizations
of twentieth-century Japanese artists and performers. The idea of encounter has
a complex genealogy and takes varying forms. An examination of key points
within this genealogy can illuminate underlying assumptions in postwar artists’
conceptions of subjectivity as well as of artistic production.
On the one hand, the effort to stage an “encounter” can stem from the
aim to break down the distinction and boundary between “art” and “life” (in a
way reminiscent of the surrealists’ sublation of art into life). It can be a way for
work to break or challenge the frame that holds it institutionally or structurally,
to distinguish it from the “rest of the world” (the proscenium stage, museum
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wall, or screen, moving toward a marker as frail as a postcard or map in the
case of street happenings). The obsession with “encounter” is one legacy of
the modernist effort to “break the frame” and to challenge the institutionalization of art. On the other hand, however, the ideal of “encounter”—and in
particular the emphasis on a “direct” or “immediate” encounter—conceals or
deflects a simultaneously occurring theorization of mediation, repetition, and
the complex and dialectical structures of engagement. This latter theorization
suggests, in contrast, a complex relationship with the idea of mimesis that
renders impossible the pure epistemological opposition of “art” and “life”
upon which the ideal of its breakdown depends.
To attack all prior work as having been unsuccessful in achieving a direct
encounter, in making that “direct hit” on the audience, and to claim that one’s
own work has succeeded or will succeed in doing so, can appear as mere bravado. Terayama at times enacts such a claim and critique:
It is a reasonable way to endure one’s boredom to go watch the ecology of feelings
[ joy, anger, sadness, happiness] of the class of mammalian human actors inside cages
by the names of “Shakespeare” or “Strindberg,” just as one goes to see the monkeys
or the tigers [at the zoo]. But they always stay within their cages, and it always remains
a world insulated from the principles of everyday reality outside the cage.1
The classic plays become cages and the actors remain inside. The “mammalian
actors” with their “ecology of feelings” make going to the theater like a visit to
the zoo. Terayama alludes to Peter Handke’s self-reflexive “speak-in” (Sprechstücke) Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience, 1966), a play that takes
the audience’s response and expectations as its explicit subject, heaping invectives on the audience at its close.2 Theater can become a voyeuristic observation of the life forms of actors inside a cage, behind a fourth wall—not
a more radical notion of voyeurism that would deeply engage the subject, but
a mode of spectatorship that fails to touch or transform the viewer in any
real way. Yet Terayama’s bravado leads him quickly to a more subtle analysis
of what the encounter would mean, and what its failure evinces. The failure of
the encounter leads less to a revelation of the limits of the theatrical and more
to a critique of the fundamental mechanisms of subjectivity, which in this view
consists in the production of a series of defenses and “cages,” invisible cages
that precisely prevent the true “encounter” from taking place.
As I have explored elsewhere, the surrealists’ attempts to theorize, perform,
and provoke “chance encounters” were in part intended to challenge Enlightenment science, rationalist logic, and the conceptual frameworks of philosophical language: there was something “beyond” about the world, or about
“reality” (Strindberg might call it “presence”) that could not be experienced
through those rational frames. In Les Paysans de Paris (1926), Louis Aragon had
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described multiple layers of mythic chance encounter with the space of urban
Paris, and Walter Benjamin wrote of this work: “Evenings in bed I could not
read more than a few pages of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had
to put the book down.”3 Benjamin, intoxicated with Aragon’s Paris, attempted
to understand this dreamlike process of encounter as it pertained to a dialectical view of historical culture. In 1928–29, Watsuji Tetsurō, a student of
Nishida Kitarō and member of the Kyoto school of philosophy, gave a series
of lectures that, among other aims, attempted to reread Heidegger’s Sein und
Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) within a broader cultural frame. The series, later
published under the title Fūdo (Climate and Culture, 1935; revised 1943), pursued a philosophical inquiry into the nature of the environment and its relation
to the social subject; in this sense, he wrote an interwar Kyoto theory of the
subject’s encounters. Given the Kyoto school’s fundamental place in shaping
the language of subjectivity, the encounter, and social space available to later
Japanese artists, it is useful as one example of the genealogy of ideas of “encounter,” to examine in some depth the complex provocation of Watsuji’s
formulation in its dialogue with continental philosophy, as a way of opening an
understanding of postwar theatrical encounters and concepts of subjectivity.4
Watsuji Tetsurō: The Subject in Relation
For Watsuji, the subject exists always already in relation to its environment. He
proposes a complex theory of this relatedness, the subject’s “in-betweenness.”
His views resonate with contemporary understandings of subjectivity in which
the subject is viewed not as an essence, by what it “is,” but rather as constituted (retroactively) by its interaction with and in relationship to an unstable
world: it has, at its “heart,” a rupture or instability. Ernesto Laclau wrote that
“the subject is nothing but the distance between the undecidable structure and
the decision.”5 If, as Laclau argues, the subject is not a preexisting essence but
is formed “situationally and contingently” on the structure’s uneven edges,
contingency, chance, and conflict become particularly important to the making
of those edges. What happens by chance, in the “encounter,” becomes a central part of what determines both system and subject. 6
Earlier, in a precedent for such modes of thought, Kierkegaard had described the process of the subject’s striving and becoming in terms of a “leap.”
Watsuji himself had been fascinated with Kierkegaard’s “absolutely paradoxical
dialectics” (zettaiteki paradokusuteki benshōhō) that resist Hegelian synthesis.7 In
his extensive 1915 essay on Kierkegaard’s life and thought, based on works
available in German translation, Watsuji elaborates on his interest in actual existence and lived experience (sei no taiken = Erlebniß ), thinking existentially ( gensonzai-teki ni shisaku = existenziell denken) and “existential subjectivity” (sonzaiteki
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na shutaisei) as opposed to abstract thought.8 He writes of a “moment of leap”
(shunkan no hiyaku) so direct that it defies description in language though “it
is possible to grasp the mental state [of fear or dread; fuan] that precedes and
follows the moment of leap.”9 Here, too, the idea of a “moment” or instant
(shunkan = Augenblick) of the leap takes a central place as that which mediates between limited human temporality (das Zeitliche) and the infinite. It is interesting
to observe how Watsuji struggles to articulate this unique limit moment of the
“leap” in relation to the idea of repetition or reiteration, Kierkegaard’s Wiederholung (the German translated here as hanfuku, repetition) even as the leap introduces something completely new. The repetition here represents a layering
of reality that conditions the possibility of leap, rather than something actually
experienced in the past.10 This “moment of leap” as a limit point, linked to the
“moments” in this book’s title, can for our purposes show some of the genealogical links between the idea of the “leap” and the “encounter” elaborated and
articulated as an ideal by later artists and thinkers.
Through his exploration in the first chapter of Fūdo, as in his writings on
Kierkegaard, Watsuji challenges common sense notions of temporal priority.11
He engages questions of interiority and exteriority, subject and object: what
is it that we understand when we say “self” or “world”? The idea of an encounter between the subject and the world contains within it numerous paradoxes involving the structures of causal language, sensory perception and its
systems, as the narrative of how the subject comes to be constituted, to experience, has shifting or unstable origins.12 Through his engagement with philosophical language, Watsuji delves into these paradoxes in the first chapter of
Fūdo, even while he (or his text) is then unable to sustain such a liminal, unstable place of understanding.
Watsuji used the idea of fūdo—a term for climate or atmosphere that can also
include cultural / spiritual elements—to generate an idea of culture that was
naturalized and mystified in relation to climate. As a consequence, his reading
of subjectivity and environment (or structure) lent itself to appropriation for
disastrous political ends. (The complex valences of his writings lent themselves
to multiple interpretations, including his being attacked by the right wing during
the war and attacked by the left after the war.) The idea of the “common
climate / fūdo” of Asian countries (“monsoon culture”) could be co-opted in
defense of the creation of the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere [Dai-tōa
kyōeiken].13 At the same time, and as Yoko Arisaka points out, the very same
arguments by Kyoto school philosophers have been criticized as deeply reactionary (as the philosophical underpinnings of the militarist / fascist state)
have also, sometimes by the very same critics, been praised as having a fas-
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cinating affinity in specific details with post-modern thought as well as some of
the most progressive movements in contemporary criticism.14
Certain strands of Marxist or materialist thought, contemporary with Watsuji, opened themselves up to the critique of a too-direct, easy, or causal relationship between substructure and superstructure. Substructure or base—the
economic ground, the material conditions of labor—would therefore be misinterpreted as unproblematically determining super-structure—culture, social
relations, representation. Yet other critics sympathetic to Marxism, including
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, criticize the notion of a simple causal
relationship and attempt to refigure the base-superstructure relationship as a
more complex, mutually constitutive interaction. Benjamin, for example, imagines this relationship through idiosyncratic images of the body, of contingency,
and of dreams.15 In the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes: “The economic conditions under which society exists come to expression in the superstructure—
precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but
its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view,
it may be said to ‘condition.’ ”16 He structures his description through the image
of a more open, non-predetermined expression, as opposed to a mimetic copy.
Benjamin allows the filled stomach to condition the contents of the dream but
not ultimately in a predictable or stable way. He calls here for a careful reading
of forms that would speak indirectly to the material conditions, not merely reflecting them.
Expanding the concept of substructure to refer not only to the material
conditions but also “context” (including discursive contexts) more broadly
speaking, Benjamin’s figure helps us to understand the challenge to conventional notions of subjectivity that Watsuji puts forth. For Watsuji, there is a
profound and complex relationship between what one might call substructure
and superstructure. Further, Watsuji explicitly challenges the division between
subject and object and the common sense idea that the subject does to / acts
on / perceives the object. Foreshadowing Mishima, who later wrote that butō
revealed the “terrifying relation” between subject and object otherwise covered
over by the deception of conceptual thought, Watsuji considered it a form of
false consciousness to think that an autonomous subject uses the object to attain
its will, that the subject imposes its will on the object. It would be a mistake,
he argues, to think that the subject has a determining role or will that constitutes
its relation to objects or to the world. The subject is not alone, nor is it temporally prior to its relation to objects. Instead, the subject is constituted through
its intimate relation to objects, within a matrix or system of relationships that
includes both the world and language.
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Watsuji gives us two examples of “encounters” that condition subjectivity:
the subject’s relation to physical sensation and to tools. “How do we know
that something like ‘cold’ exists apart from [outside of ] our feeling of cold?”
(3). He argues of the sensation of cold that we discover it [miidasu] by the fact
of our feeling it.17 He does, though, explictly say that we then misunderstand
as coming from the outside something that we first experience from the interior
realm of sensation. The logic of his description, on a subjective level, follows
the reversal of temporal priority in Kierkegaard’s experiential description of
the gap between lived existence and conceptual understanding, in which “one
lives forward but comprehends backward.”18
Within a distinct flow of statements and counterstatements, Watsuji leads
us into a description of the cold by adding this key term yadoru: to reside within,
or inhabit. The environment, fūdo, is what “ ‘envelops’ us, whether we desire it
or not […] All of us live in some land or other,” he writes. The contingencies of
the place we live help determine us as subjects (1). We reside within the cold, we
inhabit the cold: cold is thus a kind of spatiality that “envelops” us.19 Through
the term yadoru (inhabit; dwell), the distinction between the “cold” and “us”
finally disappears. In his closing (linguistically deft) move, he argues that we
“go out into the middle” of the cold (naka ni deru), just as we “exist”—here,
he cites Heidegger’s term (“ex-sistere”) in roman letters, so that existence is
itself a kind of “going out” (ex-sist) into the world (5).
Through the idea of appearance, of bringing into perceptibility, Watsuji
shows how the subject itself has an effect on the world. Without the subject’s
presence to make the world appear, could one say that the world would, in
some counter-intuitive but profound sense, not “exist”? Watsuji uses terms that
resonate with the visual, so that the act of the subject’s discovery is a bringing
of the world into view. Could this also, then, involve bringing out the world
into the self?20
For a moment in the early pages of Fūdo, then, Watsuji’s argument retains
a certain radical force around the idea of the encounter, where the contingency
of culture again seems most central. “As we go out into the morning air,” he
writes, “at the same time we put onto ourselves [or, take on the burden of ] a
particular way of being.” The way of being (sonzai no shikata) becomes a burden,
a weight where one “puts on” culture (as one “performs” gender, neither a
matter of choice, because the structures and norms within which one does
so are already extant, nor fully predetermined, because the act of assumption
contains its own possiblity of change within reiteration). Thereby, with this assumption of culture, one “puts on” or takes on the self. The self, in relation,
constitutes itself not only with ‘nature,’ but more particularly with a nature mediated through culture, language, history, and the very relationality of the subject
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in the exterior world. Through misunderstanding as exterior something that
comes both from within the self and (prior to that) from an internalization of
a cultural mode of interacting with others in the social, one takes on culture—
in this act of “putting onto ourselves a particular way of being.”21
Postwar theater artists and dancers, without directly quoting Watsuji and
other Kyoto school philosophers, go on to extend and reconfigure questions
deeply related to those Watsuji raises in his interrogation of the mode of intimacy with objects. Contemporaneous with the Kyoto school, Japanese surrealists had taken such interrogations of language’s limits to a complex level,
and like Watsuji they had analyzed the layered temporal status of this encounter
while themselves performing a playfulness in their language and associative
arguments. If there are ways in which the promise of Watsuji’s argument fails
to be realized in his own work, it may be on account of the absence of “other
subjects,” or, as has often been noted, for misreading or excluding non-Japanese
subjects from his universalizing “we.”22
Although later experimental artists delve into the problems opened up by
Watsuji and other early twentieth-century philosophers, they move the focus
of their praxis from the performativity of language to the realm of the body
in relation to that language. These artists explore a notion of radical intersubjectivity, a relation between subjects, as a way of moving forward from the destabilized yet still binary relation between subject and object. Like later demystifications of power, Watsuji’s critique shows how social normativity perpetuates
itself within a culture while concealing its origins. His thought breaks down at
moments where it forecloses the revelation of some “others” as subjects in their
own right, subsuming them into the activity of the self “discovering” the self.
Still, his theory of encounter describes a fundamental contingency and radical
“in-betweenness” of the subject in its context. In radical moments, he outlines a
theory of “overcoming” and of “in-between-ness” in which the space between
one person and another (aidagara) must be a space, or a scene, of “overcoming”
(chōetsu) or even of “leap.”23 This in-between space should be the basis for bringing out in a more balanced, ethical way, both the self and the other, because it
is originally and already the scene of existence or “going out” (naka ni deru /
ex-sistere) and at the same time the moment of going in to the world.
Watsuji proposes overcoming as a temporal structure of this “in-between”;
that is, he elaborates how aidagara “goes out toward the future.” Contrary to the
conceptual notion that the self moves forward in time, Watsuji proposes that it
is relationality itself that approaches the future (perhaps like Gramsci’s “moving
equilibrium”?).24 What takes on the future is, here, not a person, nor a collective
“we,” however inclusive or exclusive, but relationality itself. This proposition
shows how much of Watsuji’s understanding of the movement of time—
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historical movement, which includes the idea of overcoming / transcending—
is centered in relationality. This relationality, enacted daily through the encounter with climate, with tools, and with other subjects, is ultimately not grounded
either in time or in space. Neither fixed nor stable, it moves forward through
time and history.
Furthermore, Watsuji writes that this movement toward the future is a scene,
or the fundamental scene, of existence. Watsuji here privileges the language of
the “scene” (bamen; occasion, moment, but also, theatrical scene). The movement toward the future, a “going out” into something as yet unknown, takes
place in a scene or scenario of overcoming. This is not a transitive overcoming
of something, but rather the scene in which the self and the other are defined in
relation to one another: this is itself the “overcoming.” Watsuji does not eschew
the terms “self,” and “other,” but the two are inextricably linked, in that the
self is defined retroactively after the establishment of an overcoming of what
preexisted it. The self never does catch up to this relationality, which is the continual movement of overcoming existing within a larger history that includes
both self and other. Like Benjamin’s schoolboy in Berlin Childhood around 1900
who arrives always too late, after his name has been called, the self never arrives
on time.25 The encounter between self and other creates an “in-betweenness”
that itself becomes the agent of a movement in time, and the scene of a movement of overcoming. The future depends on this encounter, this link, at once
temporal and spatial.
Although this idea may seem paradoxical and difficult to grasp, through
Watsuji’s argument one can begin to get a sense of the philosophical complexity
of the “encounters” of subject and object, as well as the contradictory mutual
construction of interiority and exteriority. Such a philosophical opening can
help to orient us within the disparate philosophical references implied, but rarely
so logically explained, in the dramatic field and theories of postwar artists. In
fact, many postwar dramatists and artists push against the mode of linear philosophical argument, choosing instead to perform the leaps, juxtapositions, and
encounters to which they allude both in their written work and in their art. Such
juxtapositions themselves become scenes of experiment, openings in theoretical
reflection that provide models of productive nonlinearity, performing temporal
reversals where the mutual anticipation of subject and object make each constitutive of the other. Yet these aesthetic interrogations often take up where
Watsuji left off, questioning the very possibility of encounter. Lacan writes of
the encounter with the other as a missed encounter.26 One artist who does
choose the genre / mode of direct philosophical writing as part and parcel of
his artistic process, and who thus becomes a theoretical spokesperson of his
movement, is the Mono-ha artist Lee U-fan. Postwar artists like those of the
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Mono-ha movement of the 1960s and 1970s theorize and posit a “missed
encounter” as a fundamental condition or preconception that underlies their
praxis.
Mono-ha: In Search of Encounter with the World “As It Is”
Lee U-fan, though not an artist in the theater, provides a key example and point
on our genealogy of the language and conceptualization of encounter. The
Mono-ha movement in which he played a central role includes several distinct
groups of artists; the name “Mono-ha” began as a dismissive critique of these
inert, “thing-like” works but subsequently the groups embraced the potential of
this attribution. His own work falls in the disciplinary space between philosophy
and visual art, and he combines written “theory” and visual artistic “practice”
in a way that presses each to engage deeply with the other. Lee was born in
Korea in 1936, immigrated to Japan in 1956, and studied philosophy at Nihon
University. In his collection of essays Deai o motomete (In Search of the Encounter), one of the central theoretical texts of Mono-ha, Lee outlines an aesthetic philosophy centered on the terms of relationality with things as exemplified by the encounter or deai. Drawing deeply on Heidegger (as Watsuji also
does), Lee posits the encounter with objects as central for its revelation of
“Being” itself. All but one of the essays were published in various art journals
between 1969 and 1971 (and collected in 1971 as a book), and his writings
had an important impact on the art world at the time and even more so in
subsequent decades.27 Rather than aiming at an expression of the artist’s subjectivity, a work of art should instead create an encounter between the viewer
and the world “as it is” (ari ga mama). Rather than “representing” the world, or
expressing the conceptual will toward a particular intention, an artwork in Lee’s
view would “turn [the earth] into a thing of moving expressiveness that vividly
conveys the world ‘as it is.’ ”28
Rather than remaining raw materials used as “objects by means of which”
(suru tame no mono) to express the feeling or subjectivity of the artist, art materials in this view should be placed at the center of the artistic project, so that
they overturn or supplant the emphasis on the artist in favor of something
more concrete. Watsuji saw the use of objects or tools as a fundamental aspect
of the formation of subjectivity “in relation.” Mono-ha artists, agreeing with
this basic premise about tools and relationality, implicitly take an insight like
Watsuji’s about tools and relationality in an oppositng direction: they attempt
a contrary and paradoxical movement of separating out the objects from their
linguistically and culturally conditioned uses, in order to make possible an encounter with what they called the object “left alone” (mono o hōtteoku, “to leave
alone,” are key terms for the movement).29 This paradoxical concept of the
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“left alone” that is nonetheless a work of art (the encounter with it not nullifying the idea of the “left alone”) is indeed a difficult one to imagine, and
the reasons for these theorizations—how this can work, or if it even can—
are drawn out further below.
Another prominent Mono-ha artist, Suga Kishio, also focused on this idea
of leaving alone—finding a way to display or frame or reveal the object so that it
will be seen in its “left alone” state.30 This project, resonant with the surrealists’
asymptotic quest for a “direct” access to the productions of the unconscious
(without the interrupting intervention of the will), addresses the difficulty of intending (willing) that which is outside of intention, and of presenting / framing
something so that it will be seen “in itself”; in this case, making an art that brings
out the “left alone.” Rather than controlling or mastering the industrial environment, then, the kind of encounter Suga describes would finally reveal the
absence of a relation between the “self” and the “thing.” Suga writes: “Moving
things into the state of ultimate ‘Being’ is to move them into a state where they
stand alone, isolated.” In other words, ultimate “Being” does not permit relationship.31 As in Watsuji’s writing, or in Terayama’s theories discussed below,
the encounter is a matter of a relation or non-relation, a relation that is a nonrelationship, of subject to world. Yet in some sense, the theories of the Mono-ha
artists move in a contrary direction from Watsuji’s embedded in-betweenness
and relationality. Here, at best, the thing encountered remains “other” and holds
its otherness intact, so that the encounter produces a dislocation rather than, or
as much as, a connection or entry into relationship.
Lee’s Deai o motomete exhorts the artist to “ ‘dislocate’ [zurasu] things from
representational space, breathe fresh air into their externality, recognize their
otherness, open a site of active interaction” in which “what is from there might
encounter what is from here” (mukō kara to kochira kara ga deau; emphasis mine).32
For Lee, in other words, as distinct from “leaving alone” in Suga’s writings,
“what is from there” and “what is from here” (the exterior and the interior)
do, in the ideal case, come into interaction, but this interaction is predicated on
difference (zure) or skew. It is a complex demand that the artist would “breathe
fresh air into their externality,” or “re-wash the external world with consciousness” (57; 231) as he also phrases it, without making these objects the result of
the subject’s expression rather than, precisely, external to the subject—so that
they will remain “what is from there” and not become “what is from here.”33
Lee follows this paradox to its logical conclusion when he writes: “to dislocate whatever happens to be around—the as-it-is [aru ga mama]—into ‘as-itis,’ [ARU GA MAMA] becomes an act of expression” (57; 231).34 The second
“as-it-is” appears in katakana script and in quotation marks, running up against
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Fig. 10 Image from Lee U-Fan’s Correspondance series, Tokyo Gallery, 1999. Courtesy of
the artist.
the limits of language to express such a difference. The act of seeing, which is
an act of dislocation so that something might come to be seen “as it is” (within
quotes, in a frame perhaps)—this is the act to which Mono-ha would aim, in
the place of, and distinct from, what would be called “art.” Whatever object
chance brings into contact with the artist / subject is to be dislocated into itself,
into being “as it is.” By moving it, framing it, or by showing it “left alone,”
the artist would make it possible for the viewer to “perceive in a reflective
manner” (57; 231). The viewer becomes open to seeing things in their “externality,” or their precise outside of relation, and thus begins to gain reflection
on ultimate Being, which is beyond any relation.35
This idea of the encounter would not resolve the strangeness of the other,
but rather reinforce it, and allow it to be perceived. It would refuse to colonize
the other or remake the other (the external world) into a version of the self. As
a result, the self, then, becomes reciprocally dislocated: there is a double dislocation, in the object and in the self, as they both come to be seen in relation to
“Being.” Lee emphasizes the fact that this is not only an encounter of the viewer
with the art work, but also with the world outside the painting. The canvas
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creates a kind of “resonant space” that extends beyond the work: “I draw one
dot on a blank canvas . . . that is a beginning. It creates a relationship between
that which is painted and that which is not painted. The phenomenon of resonant space evoked by this act of interference—the competition between touch
and non-touch, the mutual penetration—that is what opens up the painting.”36
Drawing, the act of touching, opens up a relation between what is and is not
painted, touched, dotted. This relation is also “competition” and “mutual penetration”—where what is painted may “breathe life into” what is not painted, and
what is not painted penetrates and reveals, and thus becomes part of, what is
painted. This encounter or relationship is neither peaceful nor easy; it is as much
skew or dislocation as connection between what is inside the canvas and the
unpainted canvas of the world. As a “beginning,” as Lee writes, rather than
an “expression”—as an “interference” or provocation rather than a completed
act—these works, like experimental theatrical performances, aim to bring about
an encounter they themselves cannot predict, however controlled the work
might appear at first glance. This does not, as one might at first imagine, produce works like the messy or “improvisational” Gutai “action” paintings, such
as Shiraga Kazuo’s works painted with his feet while hanging from a rope in
the center of the canvas, or writhing with his whole body in the mud (Doro ni
idomu [Challenging Mud], 1955), nor like Murakami Saburō’s act of fighting his
way through six canvases (1956)—acts themselves, however, framed carefully
for viewing and photographic record.37 For Lee, perhaps those works were still
too centered on the act of the artist, on the artist’s subjectivity via corporeal
presence. The quiet, understated works Lee imagines and creates would instead
allow the work to step forward in the place of the subject, a subject already dislocated in its encounter with the world.
The result of this carefully staged encounter remains open and inconclusive—open, if not to chance, then to the results of the “resonant space” that
has been created by the work. Lee describes the sight of the “as-it-is” as “nearmiraculous,” “almost mythological.”38 Whether it will be possible to see it cannot be determined by the artist. Lee claims the work is about “relationship”
as encounter. But in his provocative view, encounter becomes also missed encounter or disconnection, a site of the loss of wholeness, and a longing toward
“something” (das Ding) that one can only skirt; an encounter with Being through
a loss of connection with both other and self.
Terayama Shūji’s Dramatic Theories: Defense against the Encounter
Although Lee U-fan focuses on the missed encounter, and points to disconnection as much as to connection as an aim of his work, theater artists of the
post-shingeki (and its edges) often seem to believe in and affirm the possibility
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of direct encounter, of “authentic” or “direct” engagement between performer
and audience, and between self and world. With Watsuji’s and Lee’s versions
of the encounter in mind, we may now take up Terayama’s dramatic theories as
a paradigmatic example of such thought. We begin with his general theoretical
framework that outlines a vision of subjectivity as defense against encounter.
In the next section, we explore his later, more expansive theories, which go
beyond theater into the realm of crime, television, and the everyday urban
environment. One of the more concise statements of his vision of encounter
appears in his essay, “Haiyūron,” written some years after the height of the postshingeki movement: “Dramaturgy is ‘making a connection.’ With the encounter
[deai ] that takes place through the play, one rejects the hierarchical thinking
that separates ‘audience’ and ‘actor,’ and instead builds a collaborative, mutual
connection. The element of ‘chance’ that exists within the consciousness of the
group comes to be organized through this connection.”39 According to Terayama, the connection that theater creates between audience and actors aims
to dissolve the barriers between them and to overturn traditional hierarchies.
Principles of collaborative participation and mutuality circumscribe the ideal of
this collective “encounter.” If from this statement alone, the encounter sounds
like a pleasurable, equitable, and fulfilling possibility, almost immediately Terayama makes explicit the violence and terror that are an inherent requirement
of a true “encounter.” He draws on existentialist discourse to make the question
of “audience” and “actor” into a problem of “self” and “others”: in the sentence
following the passage cited above, Terayama suddenly interjects the quote from
Sartre’s No Exit: “Garçon, hell is other people” (65).40
In Terayama’s view, encountering the other can be a destabilizing and painful
process that threatens the fundamental boundaries of the self. Even with the
best of intentions, the ideal of connection with others is difficult to achieve and
to tolerate. People understandably cut themselves off from it, Terayama argues,
preserving their stability and protecting themselves from the connection theater
aims to provoke. As in the images of zoos and cages at the beginning of this
chapter, the mechanisms of self-defense that ward off the encounter interest
Terayama almost as much as the encounter itself, because they reveal the ways
the “self” establishes and activates its separation from the other. The self is
not so much built or constructed as torn out, in Terayama’s words, ripped by
the skin of its teeth, from the surrounding world. The mechanisms of selfpreservation (which are in fact the mechanisms of self-definition) hinge on an
“interest” in the other that serves primarily to buttress the contested boundaries
of the self: “We frequently draw ourselves apart [ jibun jishin o hikihanasu] by establishing [mōkeru] something as a ‘problem of the other.’ By preserving that
interval of distance, we secure the sphere of the individual.”41 Repeating Sartre’s
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words, Terayama exhorts his actors: “If it is true that hell is other people, then
a play is a visit to those other people [tanin meguri ]. Within a reality that is
mixes the truth with fiction to fabricate an ‘encounter,’ the play makes the intermingling [entanglement] of self and other into a spectacle; in other words, it
is a tour of hell.”42
Although the “visit to other people” can take place in many situations,
theater structures this encounter and makes the intermingling of self and other
“into a spectacle.” Yet for whose benefit is this spectacle? There is no outside
or “third eye” or transcendent gaze—a term that came up contentiously as a
site of misunderstanding in Foucault’s interview with Terayama, an interview
fraught with layered misunderstandings. The spectacle according to Terayama
would allow for a reflection, on the part of its own participants (those in the
audience and those on stage, though these distinctions themselves are in question) that would not otherwise be available, and theater makes these relationships visible, exploring them systematically with the deliberateness of a “tour.”
For Terayama, the encounter is not simply a momentary temporal event; it
is envisioned spatially, as a terrain and a process through which one can move
and explore. Within the “encounter” is a whole world.
Persistently in his writings on theater, Terayama marks off the term “encounter” (deai ) in quotation marks, like Lee U-fan marks off aru ga mama (“as-itis”). The marks separate this term from ordinary language, and place it outside
the word’s everyday meaning of a meeting or get-together. He raises the “encounter” to theater’s highest ideal, separating it out from within the everyday.
In so doing, he opens it up to a gathering of meanings and sometimes contradictory attributions that accrete through a concatenation of anecdotes and allusions. At times Terayama’s “encounter” follows a fetishistic logic of desire and
investment, and plays its role in a vacillation between display and absence. Like
a fetish, the encounter comes into its own in the world of the visible. In theater,
the encounter would make itself available to be seen—relating to visuality as
well as to discovery, though again not intended to imply a transcendent viewing
position. Rather, it becomes an opportunity for that which would otherwise be
imperceptible to enter the realm of the participants’ perception and experience.
At the same time, for Terayama the fetish connotes also the magical power of
that which is “structured” or created by human hands.
David Goodman argues that the artists of postwar Japan were engaged in a
“dialectical encounter with the premodern Japanese imagination,” by which he
is referring to folk beliefs, for example, in the irrational and the supernatural.
They rejected the “modern,” “realistic theater” model, and “developed an alternative formulation, a new myth that they hoped would animate a new movement in politics and the arts.”43 This interest in folk beliefs and revalorization
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of a pagan spiritual imagination was pervasive in post-shingeki and postwar experimental theater in part because it represented one possibility of an animating
“encounter.” To touch the supernatural, to break the bounds of “this world”
becomes a way to access a realm that transcends rational conceptualization and
the modern grip of “thought.” The interest in Yanagita Kunio and Origuchi
Shinobu’s later ethnological work—the “ethnography boom” discussed, for example, by Marilyn Ivy and in its earlier historical precedents by Gerald Figal,44
arises at this time because of desires to break with rationality and to resist the
impact of (American) capital while at the same time not reifying a notion of
“Japanese culture” that could still hold problematic implications. The “gods”
of premodern folk beliefs were both, on the one hand, an affirmative site of
anti-Americanism and, on the other, a realm of exploration that carried a history
within theories of Japanese exceptionalism (nihonjinron) and nationalist ideology.
As Goodman puts it, the post-shingeki movement (in which Goodman would
only peripherally include Terayama, and in which Goodman himself participated in the 1960s and 1970s) “was quite literally a movement to liberate
Japanese ghosts, not to affirm them, but to acknowledge and negate them. . . .
[U]nless the Japanese could come to terms with the subliminal impulses of their
culture, then the souls of the dead would indeed stream back to repossess the
living.”45
Yet, as Goodman’s idea of the “dialectical encounter” with these ghosts
implies, there is a simultaneous engagement with and negation of these terrifying realms. Perhaps Goodman calls Terayama “sinister” in part because of the
attraction seeming to overwhelm the negation in his work, just as the relation
between the “real” and the “fictional” becomes deliberately blurred there (kyojitsu no irimajitte shimatta genjitsu). But all of the playwrights of post-shingeki engage,
directly or indirectly, with ghosts, with the dead, with dreams, fantasy, and the
cultural or individual legacy of the past. “Encounter” marks that setting aside of
a special event—an interruption or rupture in the everyday and the entrance into
another world, another space. Yet that “other world” is always already there,
“covered over” by conventional thinking and the defenses of the provisional
formations of the social. That encounter may be always already a missed encounter, with the attraction and repulsion of an unattainable ideal. For postshingeki playwrights, such assumed borderlines, like the quotations marks outlining the word “encounter,” exist to be challenged and eventually, or momentarily, overcome.
Interrupted Gestures: Brecht, Benjamin, Terayama
The encounter as an act of “mutual penetration” (to borrow Lee U-fan’s sexualized terms) plays a central role in postwar artists’ philosophical cosmologies.
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In his theoretical reconsideration of Camus’ La Peste, Terayama dramatizes the
danger of the encounter through his citation of the dead rat in the novel’s
opening scene.46 The protagonist first discovers the dead animal on the landing
of his apartment building and unthinkingly kicks it out of the way, only then
turning back to notice the strangeness of encountering a rat in such a place. This
sequence of events—the sudden appearance of the rat; the physical contact
of the kick that precedes reflection, and only afterward the realization of its
strangeness—represents a primary model for Terayama’s theatrical practice.
The double-take (“What? Wait—what was that? A rat?”) defines the reversed
temporality of the encounter. By the time one has “arrived” at it or realized what
has happened, the encounter has already taken place. Like Watsuji’s “self,” constituted and reflected back, post hoc, after its “meeting” with the world, the
encounter is a moment of realization that comes always after the fact, when
it is too late to escape its results. By the time one realizes it, the transformation
has already begun.
Citing the concierge’s thoughts from La Peste (he misquotes as them as
Rieux’s, thereby perhaps accidentally blurring the boundaries of characters’
thoughts), Terayama describes the rat as something brought in “from the outside,” as a joke or mischief (itazura). Always eliciting the powers of the joke,
mischief, and scandal to disrupt, and thus make apparent, unspoken norms of
the everyday, Terayama reads the rat scene as a metaphor for the encounter
brought about by theater:
This thing “brought in from the outside” is the first touch of the play. This “one dead
rat” becomes the beginning of a contagion that moves toward another reality, a [fabricated] world condition (in the novel, it shows the ‘death’ that exists within everyday life).
At times, the single dead rat signifies language, and at other times it is a figure for action,
gesture, or acting. The role of the actor who plots a fictional world can be compared to
the thing that brings, from the outside, a single dead rat to the “town that seemed peaceful at
first glance.” The technique of the actor is concerned precisely with [or, is afflicted by]
touch’s power of adhesion, the power to generate a connection. (64–65)
Figuring the act of theater as a first touch, a first opening up to a different
world, Terayama aligns the movement of theater with the contagion of the rat.
A theatrical encounter should afford not merely the kind of recognition one
experiences when one finds out about things in the newspaper, or hears of
them on television, through that separation from the “problems of the
other”—the kind of process that consolidates the separateness of the self that
he describes earlier in the text. Instead, theater should bring on something
deeply unexpected, disturbing, something as powerful as a “touch.” Theater
should invade the boundaries of the subject. The actor’s technique is concerned, or is itself infected by, this “touch’s power of adhesion.” Does it stick?
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The encounter for Terayama must entail a corporeal intervention, like a disease, or like the “adhesion” of physical touch. The affliction affects not just
the audience, but the actors as well. The contact moves both audience and
actors toward another reality, one that might at first seem false or a mere fabrication, but that in the end could transform the distinction between what is
false and true, between fabrication and the ordinary, banal, or natural. Thus
Terayama evokes a tension between “touch” and “contagion,” between affective connection and defamiliarization, so that what at first seems empathetic,
a connection, immediately links to what is radically unhinging.
What would play the role of the “dead rat,” to mediate or become the conduit of its “contagious” touch in theater? Terayama proposes that the touch
could arrive through language or gesture, through action or acting. The actor
becomes the agent or carrier who brings in (mochikomu) the rat’s touch. This
actor’s art for Terayama is emphatically not an art of mimesis, representation, or
replication; rather, these less “adhesive” acting techniques are described in terms
of replication and reproduction—saigen, reproduction; fukusei saiseisan, replicate
and reproduce; mohō, imitate or copy—that Terayama rejects as a “mere display
or exhibition on the stage” (65).47
Among those “mimetic reproductions,” Terayama includes the traditional
plays he had compared to watching the activities of caged animals in the zoo.
Alluding to the audience’s self-defensive reactions, Terayama cites art critic
Tōno Yoshiaki’s metaphor of the cage in “Gendai kanshūron” (On the Contemporary Audience, 1969): “It is because of the audience’s cunning selfdefensive instinct that a new art, which aims to provoke an internal collapse
within the audience, has gained more and more recognition under the rubric of
fashion. It has thus had its fangs removed, and has been thrown into the cage of
history” (35).48 For Tōno, the cage represents recognition, and art, even radical
art, can lose its “fangs” by its fashionable acceptance into the institutions of art.
“The ‘encounter’ [deai] will not be complete until either the play that was
‘thrown into the cage of history’ is taken out of that cage, or the audience
members have been dragged inside,” Terayama writes (35). Like the Mono-ha
artists—and in many ways parallel to those historical avant-garde artists who
aimed in other ways for the “sublation of art into life”—Terayama focuses on
theater’s intervention into “everyday reality,” into the world including and extending beyond the work, like Lee’s “resonant space.” Rather than “representation,” reproduction, or mimesis, he adamantly advocates what he might call
the “direct encounter”: the contagion, the touch.
Rejecting mimesis, Terayama relies on a rhetoric of contagious, sympathetic
magic. This magic, this touch, this “dead rat” is the deai. It goes outside of the
everyday, the ordinary, the safe, and brings in something “from the outside.”
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Terayama takes his central conception of magic from the fourth chapter of Sir
James George Fraser’s The Golden Bough, with its distinction between imitative
magic and contiguous magic. Imitative magic, operating by the “law of similarity,” involves making a copy of something, and then doing an act to the copy
which is intended to affect the original. In the alternative category of sympathetic magic, through the “Law of Contagion / Contact,” “things which have
once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed” (64). Even after physical
contact has ended, there is still (if intermittently) the possibility of an effective
connection. Terayama imagines the work of the actor as analogous to that of
the shaman or medium, who mediates this particular contact that works beyond reason and understanding.
One would imagine that this anti-rational theatrical mode would be far distant from Brecht’s notion of estrangement (Verfremdung). A German critic from
Der Spiegel interviewed Terayama, asking about his understanding of Brechtian
theater in relation to his own. Terayama drew his understanding of Brecht’s
theater in that interview, and in his theoretical writings more generally, primarily
from Benjamin’s highly idiosyncratic version of it in his 1939 essay on Brecht,
“What is Epic Theater?”49 Terayama’s odd temporality of event and perception,
memory and reality, and his paradoxical idea of the encounter, are revealed
clearly in his discussions of his own dramaturgy as he opposes it to that of
Brecht. Terayama traces a contradictory understanding of Brecht’s use of the
interruption, gestus, reproducibility, and citation. Tracing those concepts via Benjamin in some depth will help us to explore how postwar theatrical ideas both
derive from and reject such Brechtian paradigms.50
In “What is Epic Theater?” (first version), Benjamin describes the gesture
( gestus) as analogous to a still shot in the movement of a film:
This strict, frame-like, enclosed nature of each moment of an attitude which, after all, is
as a whole in a state of living flux, is one of the basic dialectical characteristics of the
gesture. This leads to an important conclusion: the more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we obtain. Hence, the interrupting of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theater.51
Benjamin continues later in the essay with a different but parallel metaphor:
“ ‘To make gestures quotable’ is the actor’s most important achievement; he
must be able to space his gestures as the compositor produces spaced type.”52
A central underlying model for theater in Benjamin’s essay is written language: he maps the space of the page here onto the time of the play.53 Another
secondary but also important model is film, which he at times conflates with and
other times contrasts with photography. Like the photograph, or the frozen
moment of the film frame, the gestus or Brechtian gesture takes something that
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is a part of a movement and, dialectically, makes it hold still, “frame-like,” and
makes it susceptible to iteration, citation, or replication. This will lead Benjamin
later in the essay to his famous image of “dialectics at a standstill,” which he
describes as the “damming of the stream of real life, the moment when its flow
comes to a standstill, makes itself felt as reflux: this reflux is astonishment.”54
Like the moment of the encounter’s double-take in Terayama, Benjamin’s reflux
shows the flow of life not only standing still but also flowing backward, breaking the linearity of time and allowing for turning back, loops, and pauses. The
movement of Benjamin’s language emphasizes the possibility of making new
constellations in time as well as in space. At the end of the essay, this dialectical
movement between time and space becomes explicit in a vivid metaphor: “Epic
theater makes life spurt up high from the bed of time and, for an instant, hover
iridescent in empty space. Then it puts it back to bed.”55 This moment, this
instant of hovering outside of time—in empty space—suspends the flow of
“life” and thus reveals it, in a way that pure flux would not. Epic theater’s
interruptions in the action, its creation of frame-like, quotable gestures, allows
it to “represent conditions” in a dialectical way that generates “astonishment.”
The idiosyncratic textuality of Benjamin’s version of Brecht, then, both fascinates Terayama and “alienates / estranges” him from Brecht’s epic theater.
Terayama comments:
In Brecht’s epic theater, experience is not transmitted as experience. Experience is first
translated into knowledge. Then it is processed for reproducibility to the point that the
audience can quote its gestures. Speed falls, movement becomes full of gaps. This is
because it requires that [quoting Benjamin] “the actor open space between gestures, just
as the typesetter can open space between the letters of spaced type.” It presupposes
that the audience, receiving such acting as knowledge, will reproduce it [fukugen] as an
experience that can be quoted once again within [into] everyday reality. (40)
This stillness and space causes Terayama deep suspicion. (Terayama, quoting
the translated essay, uses the term jikan, which puns on the term for time, but refers to the spacing between characters [ ji ] in typeset text.) The idea that “speed
falls” and “movement is full of gaps,” along with the premise of iterability or
citationality would take the emphasis off some primary values of Terayama’s
theatrical system: connection, corporeality, and, indeed, speed / instantaneity.56
Terayama argues, perhaps wrongly, that epic theater places too much reliance
on the intellect, presupposing an “understanding” of content and a “translation”
into “knowledge” or realization. He does not see the affective power of “astonishment” also operating in Benjamin’s reading of Brecht. By contrast, he figures
the theatrical encounter as almost an abduction (“dragging the audience into
the cage”) or a more playful and yet violent relation to the other (“a tour of
hell”). Terayama believes that epic theater takes the emphasis off the experience
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of “connection” (i.e., encounter) so fundamental to his dramaturgy. By contrast,
“the interruption is the opportunity for Verfremdung” (40).
Terayama expounds at length on his objections to Brecht’s idea of the didactic, with particular emphasis on the question of memory. “Brecht’s theater
must be reconstructed in memory or it won’t be complete,” he writes, continuing to reject any centrality of mimesis, reproduction, or copying (40–41). In the
“quotable gesture,” as he understands it, the audience would receive a “model”
from the actor and then mime it back as a citation into everyday life. “The audience is nothing but a student being educated, so the reality of the play is limitlessly separated from the audience” (41). For Terayama, this separation from
the audience, through Verfremdung and the interruption, seems diametrically
opposed to his ideal of direct encounter.
If indeed the “quotability” of the gesture is a key element in Benjamin’s
elaboration of Brecht, as Terayama rightly argues, Terayama nonetheless at this
moment underestimates the complexity of the act of citation and the metaphysics of interruption, decontextualization, and mimesis in Benjamin’s work
as well as in his own. Even while iterability involves displacement, it is also a
reinsertion into a new context—the new illumination or flash that can bring
the cited element into “survival,” that can create new connections and new
possibilities for it. For Benjamin, for example, remembrance has nothing to
do with empty mimicry or even mechanical reiteration. Instead, it has a redemptive power oddly similar to what Terayama attributes to his own idea of
the “encounter.” The flashing up of the past in the present, the possibility of
reinscribing or turning the course of the past after it is over, has a temporal
structure finally resonant with Terayama’s theatrical encounter or double-take.
Benjamin describes Brecht as having rejected Aristotelian catharsis and empathic identification. Brecht proposes a specific term, “relaxed interest,” for
the nature of the audience’s relation to the play. Indeed there is a didactic
function: theater is on a “public platform / dais.” Terayama objects: “We had
succeeded in throwing out of the theater the ‘dais’ that reeked of the educational” (39). Terayama quotes the following passage from Benjamin’s essay:
The point at issue . . . concerns the filling in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence
heightens the sublime in a drama, whose resonance heightens the intoxication of opera,
this abyss which, of all the elements of the stage, most indelibly bears the traces of its
sacral origins, has lost its function. The stage is still elevated, but it no longer rises from
an immeasurable depth; it has become a public platform. Upon this platform the theater now has to install itself.57
Terayama, on the other hand, enamored with the “sacral function” of theater,
attempts (with Artaud) to reconnect to its shamanic and ritual origins. He re-
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jects beginning with a stark delineation of the “abyss” that “separates the dead
from the living.” If anything, he aims rather for an “encounter” precisely between the living and dead. Whereas Benjamin points out the gradual reduction
in the abyss-like separation between stage and audience seats, Terayama objects that by his era, there was no longer anything like such an “abyss.” Instead,
he traces his theatrical lineage through the low and bawdy stage of his youth
in Northern Japan: misemono [side shows], traveling troupes, circus, and strip
shows, where the actors worked already “at the same level” as the audience.
In the “apprenticeship” in misemono, he claims, that distinction or “abyss” had
already been destroyed from the start (39).
Terayama, when contrasting his work with Brecht’s (that is, Benjamin’s
version of Brecht), focuses on the corporeality of the realizations sparked by
theater. Rather than using the mind (or knowledge) to make the body move,
theater should involve a movement that begins in the body and only then,
afterward, influences thinking (“using the body to move the head,” 40). By
framing his work in contrast to Brecht’s, Terayama comes to emphasize the
ungraspable speed, the continual disappearance or vanishing that characterizes
the theatrical encounter, the asymptotically ungraspable moment of the “herenow,” which is always already over. The play is the staging of an irreducible
encounter that Terayama nonetheless describes with a very Benjaminian image:
the idea of never quite catching up with reality. This quick and slippery, rapidly
agile (subayai ) quality is central to theater and to the encounter.
The double-take, the moment of turning, or the sudden (too late) realization
that the strange has entered—these movements evoke the structure of traumatic
repetition, trauma’s inherent belatedness such that it is fully experienced only
after (and by definition precisely not at) the moment it occurs.58 On the one
hand, as we have seen, Terayama focuses on the present and emphasizes a metaphysics of presence: the encounter is ephemeral, momentary, quick. He quotes
(this time favorably) Brecht’s A Man’s a Man where one character sings: “Do not
remember things for longer than they last” (40). As part of this present-centered
universe of the encounter, he objects to repetition: “In the encounter, repetition
does not work. In theater, [the encounter] is as fast as the way reality overtakes
memory” (43). In his rejection of reiteration, it is always memory that is at stake.
Memory threatens the “self-presence” of the encounter. If reality is constantly
moving forward, so that memory can never catch it, it is also true that “reality
overtakes memory”—almost as if it were “reality” that were coming up from
behind a memory that pre-existed it. Thus, he implies an imperfect linearity,
where the relationship of memory and reality in time becomes ambiguous, in
an asymptotic and speedy “catching up.” The encounter is immediate and mediated; paradoxically structured, it happens both by arrangement and by chance.
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The quickness of the encounter Terayama describes is almost fluid, slippery,
like Benjamin’s image of the “stream of life” with its instantaneous, nearly
imperceptible moment of hovering. Contradictions between presence and repetition (reflux, double-take) approximate Benjamin’s version of Brecht more
than Terayama would acknowledge. Both contain contradictions between iterability and momentariness, between belatedness and immediacy, that lend each
theoretical structure internal tension and draw the two theories closer together.
In “What is Epic Theater?” Benjamin seems to praise Brecht for “filling in
the pit,” in his description of the theatrical abyss—which causes a silence that
heightens sublimity, resonance that heightens intoxication, so that the stage
used to “rise from an immeasurable depth.” Yet Benjamin also reveals how
he views intoxication and the dreamlike state as profoundly evocative and
potentially redemptive. When Terayama cites this passage, encouraging the
intoxication that would draw the audience into the play, he is approaching
the premises of some of Benjamin’s images. When he describes the encounter
as analogous to a traumatic rupture, he is perhaps unwittingly echoing the
theories of rupture and belatedness in creativity that Benjamin elaborates most
clearly with the figure of Baudelaire. Both, coming from such different places,
ultimately point to the difficulties of immediacy and distance, and the mingling, complex movements of space and time.
Crime Without a Scene
Terayama writes of the intoxication of the quick, sudden entrance of the encounter before one can rationally grasp what has occurred, and he emphasizes
that the encounter moves beyond the boundaries that would separate the audience from the performance. In his model of theater, there is a lasting, strong,
shocking effect that extends beyond the limits of the play’s space and time.
What are the implications of this utopian (or at times dystopian) understanding
of an intervention in the social world?
Terayama acknowledges that the structures of discursive thought make it
difficult to open the limits of intelligibility to changes in the social. Even a
forceful or powerful disruption can be quickly co-opted within the categories
of the known. One striking illustration of this dilemma, in his late writings,
comes not from the world of theater but from the world of crime. In the essay
“Hanzai ni okeru ‘kankyaku’ no kenkyū,” Terayama describes two contrasting
experiences of criminal events. As his first example, he takes up the Osaka
Mitsubishi Bank hold-up of 1979 by Umekawa Akiyoshi, famous in part for
the number of households that watched it on television:
Continuously watching the shuttered bank and the police surrounding it on my television
screen, before I knew it I had come to believe that I was an existence on the outside /
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exterior to the opposition between Umekawa and the “father = law” [law of the father].
I felt as if I were [or, one might say I was] in a safe position, “enjoying” the drama of
the hostage imprisonment of the hunting gun murder / robbery as if I were watching
Columbo. And that process, which made the criminal Umekawa’s actions into “gestures,”
and me into a tourist, eventually removed any contagion [from the incident].59
Contagion is the key term in this theory of encounter, a modality for the encounter to operate and be visible only post hoc. Writing of “gestures” in quotation marks, Terayama takes another jab at Brecht, drawing on the Freudian
paradigm from Totem and Taboo, in which the “drama” of Umekawa’s crime can
be seen as part of a primal drama of the rebellion against the law of the father.
Terayama points out how the process of consuming / watching the crime on
television removes him from his own sense of implication in this crime. While
in fact we are all fundamentally involved in the relationship with the law that
Umekawa’s crime challenges, the space of safety created by this mode of viewing would cover such implications. For Terayama, the world of television, as a
world of separation between spectator and actor, in which the spectator comes
to feel located at a safe distance from the drama, makes the Umekawa televised
crime insidious, as the site of a failed encounter, or a failure to encounter.60
The fact of the drama’s having a specific and psychologized “hero” (Umekawa), Terayama argues, makes the structure of this drama center around the
personal desires of Umekawa, his “catharsis.” Terayama compares this episode
to the Asama Sansō incident (discussed in Chapter 1), suggesting that the five
United Red Army members were positioned as “outsiders” to the law, and the
key role of the spectator was to follow the drama on television. For the later
crime as for the earlier one, Terayama claims that Umekawa’s “modern [kindaiteki ] dramaturgy” aims toward “invading collective life through forbidden
acts, toward putting himself outside of collective life.” Here he uses a cinematic
example, citing the “fetishism of the cut ear” in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120
giornate di Sodoma (Salò or 120 Days of Sodom, 1975) as an example of such forbidden acts; Umekawa himself is reported to have asked his victims repeatedly
in this incident if they knew about Pasolini’s Salò. Transgression of social norms
is not enough to create an encounter in Terayama’s sense, to shake the bounds
of the social. On the contrary, he implies that social norms depend on this kind
of transgressive hero or anti-hero, whom they can then surround and exclude.
Terayama writes rather cold-heartedly about these criminals, analyzing their
effect in society, and refusing to be drawn in by the “human interest” stories
presented on television. Although some of the things shown in Terayama’s
dramas have at times been called “pornographic,” here Terayama uses this term
to describe the mode of looking at the episodes of crime on television as they
are shown, for example, in the Mitsubishi Bank hold-up. Because Umekawa
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in the end was seen as “exceptional,” or “different” (here Terayama refers to
Marcel Mauss on the magician chased out of the village)61 the drama ended with
“the separation between him and the spectators getting stronger, rather than
drawing the audience in [makikomu]” (315–18).
By contrast, the process of drawing the audience in creates the possibility
of the “encounter,” the “connection.” As his work pushes against the modern
(kindaiteki ), against emotional identification and psychological interiority (so
also rejecting empathic connection of suture / identification), he defines his
place as part of the post-shingeki world and rejects the “psychological realism”
and interiority of shingeki. He then speculates on what would be a truly “contemporary” ( gendaiteki) crime: “In what crime could be a gendai theater, in which
stage and audience are made inseparable?”62 Criticizing Umekawa and Raskolnikov in one line, Terayama writes, “I cannot discover there the social relevance
of Artaud’s plays that infect like a plague. . . . That is, [the Umekawa incident on
television] is the kind of thing one ought to call a ‘safe form of danger’ ” (320).
By contrast with this safe type of danger, Terayama draws on the example of
the “poisoned cola” murder case, which began in January 1977. In that event,
seemingly unopened cola bottles laced with sodium cyanide were “left alone,”
simply “placed,” in various areas throughout Tokyo. When a high school student and a middle-aged man drank from two of the bottles, they died immediately.63 Later, on Valentine’s Day, 40 boxes of poisoned chocolate were left
in the Yaesu Underground Mall near Tokyo Station. In that second case, the
police were alerted and the boxes seized before anyone ate from them.
Although eventually the culprit was found, and subsequently the media speculated abundantly on psychological reasons for the crime, Terayama is most interested in the moment before a criminal has been found or has begun to “present” himself as a psychological interiority. He is fascinated with this crime in its
structure, as a “chance encounter,” and as a place where there is no personal relation between the murderer and the victim. Before the attribution of a motive,
there is no “hidden grudge,” no “desire for money,” no “love entanglement.” It is true,
as Marcel Duchamp writes, that “the one who dies is always the other,” but even the
system [hyōzoku] that keeps the order between that “other” and the “same” is overturned [taken away], and without its becoming clear “who” or “what” or “how,” suddenly, people start dying. Perhaps in this lies the “anti-modern” criminality of this incident—it is a dramaturgy that has life-force, so that it becomes a terrifying theater of
“audience participation” in the fundamental meaning of this term.
While at first it all seems peaceful and calm, the truth of the circumstance is that
there is no place that is safe. (322)
The absence of motive, for Terayama, means that causality itself disappears—
except for the most basic causality: drink poison and die. When he writes that
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“at first it all seems peaceful and calm,” Terayama is linking this criminal incident to Artaud’s theater, and also to his image of Camus’ rat, with its “terrifying theater of audience participation.” Just as in the encounter with the rat
something interrupts the order of the everyday to disrupt what would have
been the clear distinction of “self” and “other,” here also “the poison colas
scattered around the city, the poison chocolate, interrupt the reality of the
everyday, and make their demonstration by estranging [making different] that
[everyday] reality” (322). On the level of everyday consciousness or moral
point of view, the crime seems simply horrific, and pointless, but in Terayama’s view it has an added aspect in which it reveals the underlying “interruptedness” of subjectivity and of the everyday. This interruption has necessarily to do with death. Terayama quotes the famous epitaph from Duchamp’s
gravestone in Rouen that challenges the place of the speaking subject about
death: “D’ailleurs c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.”
This disruption of the systematicity of the everyday is a primal version of
the dramatic encounter, as uncomfortable as that idea might seem.64 A certain
anxiety and discomfort are central to the encounter—nowhere is one truly
safe. That anxiety is a fact, but is often forgotten, and these criminal moments
make one realize the foundational slipperiness and cruelty of the social. They
put one in touch with the contingent activation of the subject in relation to
others, and in some ways can be related to Kierkegaard’s “leap” of subjectivity,
or Laclau’s “distance,” from very different contexts, where the subject is not
defined by what it “is” but by an instability, a constitutive discontinuity. It
is not that someone must die in order to accomplish this aim. As with the
poisoned chocolates that no one consumed, it is the very possibility that the
encounter could take place, the opportunity itself, that is most powerful for
Terayama.
He describes this encounter and fundamental overturning of categories in
terms of art:
The victim is chosen by chance, so the dilemma of the tragic play cannot exist. And
to try to solve the riddle through modern regulations of cause and effect is absolutely
ridiculous.
Nonetheless, the stoppered bottle and the high school student do encounter one
another in front of the phone box—the suddenness, the unexpectedness of reaching
“death” through this encounter without even the identity of rules [hōsokuteki na dōitsusei ], like Lautreamont’s “meeting of the sewing machine and the umbrella on the operating table”—is even beautiful. (321–22)
Here, the crucial qualifier—the ultimate encounter—is figured in terms of the
suddenness and unexpectedness of death. This sudden encounter (again, always
with the death of the other) overturns the rules; it creates, for Terayama, a
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breaking of the terrain of the (known) possible, a breaking of the discursive
matrix of the social. The phone booth, the “scene” or locus of the encounter,
becomes important as the anonymous space of communication between absent
criminal and now absent student.65 Calling this encounter beautiful, comparing
it with a newly and eerily operating terrain of art, Terayama highlights the particularly “contemporary” quality of this crime.
At this point, Terayama deliberately recalls the opening moment in Foucault’s The Order of Things when Foucault cites Borges’ writings on the Chinese
Encyclopedia. In Borges, the bringing together of an otherwise impossible set
of categories (“things that look like flies from afar,” “things included in this
inventory,” “fantastic animals”) overturns the rules of classification in the encyclopedia that we take for granted, that undergird our sense of order in the
world. Similarly, the “poison cola” crime for Terayama—at least for as long
as a criminal was not found, and motives were not attributed—challenges the
boundaries of the categories “us” and “them,” or “same” and “other.” Rather
than being a “safe form of danger” that one can watch from one’s home television set, this breaking of categories makes it possible for the crime to invade
the world of the self. Terayama thus cites Foucault’s reading of Borges’ system
of classification as doing away with “the site, the mute ground upon which it
is possible for entities to be juxtaposed” (323).66 Terayama means to rock the
very stability of categories and of “place” itself, because nothing less is required for the true encounter to occur. The connection between audience and
performer, the place of theater’s liaison with everyday life, must come as a
radical “interruption in the everyday,” that disrupts and deeply shocks the very
site of “everydayness,” and shows how that shock has already been there,
within what is regularly glossed over as the smooth surface of the everyday.
The encounter must bring the “atopia,” the placelessness (as Foucault calls it),
or the impossible place, of Lautreamont’s and Borges’ world into a socially
mediated activation.
Crime, then, and its opposing figure of the law, are central terms for Terayama’s encounter. He associates the “contemporary” with anonymous, freefloating crime, of the type that makes no place truly safe. It can arrive all of
a sudden, Terayama reminds us, like the men in the opening of Franz Kafka’s
The Trial who come suddenly to arrest Josef K. As in Kafka, repetition is crucial, and Terayama describes the crime in relation to the possibility of its own
replication. Terayama recognizes with such anonymous crimes that there is
an inherent repetition effect: since one does not know who the perpetrator or
“performer” is, the crime is not an “expression” or “demonstration” of a particular subjectivity. “Expression” (hyōgen) is a key term here as in Lee U-fan’s
theories. There is an antipathy toward the idea of art (or crime) as an “expres-
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sion” of the subject—the expressivity from which one can retroactively posit
the authenticity of that artistic subject. Instead, authenticity is dislocated, or
located elsewhere. For the moment, the work has no “author” to whom a full
and intentional grasp of the work can be imaginatively attributed; perhaps in
this sense it has only the attribution itself, the “author-function” as described
by Foucault.67
Whereas in his discussion of Brecht, Terayama seemed to disdain the idea
of (intellectually grasped) iterability, in this case, like Benjamin, he focuses on
the interruption in everyday life, and also the factor of the repetition, as keys
to the contemporariness and power of the event:
When the event is told, it is already being replicated [reproduced], so even when it occurs “for the second time” on any street and is therefore being “performed” by someone, still nothing can be done about it [still it can’t be helped]. The novelty of this “poison cola incident” is that there are “no audience seats anywhere” and for that reason
there is “no stage anywhere.” (322)
At this moment Terayama comes closest to describing the “atopia” Foucault
described in the space of deterritorialization in Borges’ dictionary. There are
“no audience seats anywhere,” and “no stage anywhere.” The incident creates
a space of non-place for theater or for the encounter. It limns a space outside
the bounds of time, a place of no time, or at least no measurable time, in which it
is not clear where the event begins and when it ends. The “for the second time,”
the way in which at the moment it is discovered it has always already begun,
makes this encounter into a clear instance of the performative, reiterated, and
this structure gives it its power. The distinction between “performing” (enjiru)
the crime in the form of a quotation and committing the crime, the difference
between original and replication, do not hold; even the performed version is still
effective, and “cannot be helped.” The absence of perpetrator, motive, cause
and effect, or psychological rebellion (the criminal against society) means that
causal logic is suspended, and this suspension of comprehensibility is part of
what makes the crime “contagious.” It is a crime of contact, with intermittent
but potent effects beyond its own originary boundaries. It replicates itself for
no purpose.
In spite of his rejection of the “abyss” figure in Benjamin, Terayama’s
encounter creates an abyss.68 But this abyss brings with it the shock of unstoppable reiteration, of repetition and the destruction of classifications and
boundaries, including but not limited to the distinction between audience and
performer. In more than one sense, it is the scene of the destruction of the
subject. The abyss is a space of the beyond within the already here, figured
most frequently in Terayama’s work by the encounter with death (as in the
rat, and the crime scene). Obsessed with immediacy, Terayama’s vision of the
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encounter is nonetheless full of mediations, reiterations, interruptions; it enacts various kinds of distortions, slippages, divergences (zure) and leaps. The
encounter he strives for has a complex structure that sometimes escapes his
own leaping and allusive writing. Yet through his theoretical performance, and
his own “translations” of these ideas into theater works that no longer take for
granted either the body or the subject, he dramatically reveals the complexity
and limits of both the subject’s language and its performance.
The subject finds itself mired in “relationality,” so that inside and outside
distinctions do not hold, in a way that partially resembles the intersubjective
space posited by Watsuji. Environment comes within and within becomes environment. The mark, the act, or the intervention (as Lee wrote) is not the
expression of an individual subject, but reveals the world “as it is.” It creates
an opportunity for the “terrifying relation” between subject and object to be
revealed. Terayama’s encounter, like Lee’s, can also very much coincide with
the failure of encounter; but here, such a failure is the success, framed in the
“absence of place,” the atopia of theater that makes categories themselves fail.
Mono-ha artists, like Terayama, aim at the undermining of categories (subject /
object, time / space, inner / outer). They also seek out (and create) the encounter with something beyond control. Watsuji, Lee, and Terayama articulate particular visions of the “encounter” within a paradoxical temporality. Each sees
the encounter as crucial, yet each frames in different ways the intention of
encounter into the world. Each challenges the authority of the subjective will,
exploring the boundaries of the social through the breaking down of set categories and edges of the subject.
The touch or encounter is itself accessible to us, to theoretical analysis, only
through the indirections of a multilayered figurative language. Terayama’s collage of self-consciously theoretical citations “stages” its own encounter between the various works he cites, often without logically elaborating on his
interpretations of them. He incorporates anecdotes about performances he
saw in Frankfurt or Berlin, symposia he attended in New York or Paris, a
newspaper interview in Der Spiegel, and many fragmentary readings of his own
plays. As Yamaguchi Masao notes, Terayama brings together the vocabulary of
anthropology (Mauss, Fraser, Lévi-Strauss, later Foucault) with references to
the theatrical world (Brecht, Handke, Richard Schechner, Robert Wilson,). He
mixes these with frequent allusions to literature and literary criticism (Borges,
Kafka, Benjamin, Camus).69 Linked to the praxis of montage, this dramatic
layering of citations, with its spectacularization and juxtaposition, creates an
unresolved movement of one logic against another, or highlights the contradictory nature of projects and systems that would seem to be unintelligible to
one another.
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We could say, then, that a certain act of “encounter” is imminent in his
writing style itself. Yamaguchi observes, “One might even assert that a new
form of research could enter through Terayama’s theoretical writing.”70 This
form of research has as its central mode that of “taking things apart” (kaitai )—
taking apart his readers, taking apart disciplines. As a bricoleur, he cites from
all over and does not settle into any discrete space or zone. According to Yamaguchi, he cites “not out of necessity”; rather, his writing “grasps chance.”71 In
this iterability, in citationality and juxtapositions, the relevance of this theory for
theater becomes apparent, but also gestures beyond theater to help us think
through the workings of film, photography, and dance in the following chapters.
Terayama’s drama (in both his theater praxis and in his critical writings)
takes place, in part, through the staging of chance, and the assertion of the
will within chance. Terayama writes that the encounter “organizes the chance
element that exists within the group’s consciousness.”72 Chance reverses the
hierarchy and separation between outside and inside, and thus helps to show
the “outside within the inside” of the everyday. If at times, reading Terayama’s
citations can itself be like the experience of “stepping on a rat,” Camus’ La
peste (The Plague, 1947) is an apt text here, since a central question at the end
of the novel is whether or not one can return to “life as usual” after such
an exceptional experience. Terayama aims at a transformative rupture, one that
would not allow the unchanged or unquestioning return to “normal” life, one
that would evoke the figure of the sniper in the ending of Camus’ story.73 In
other words, he wants to see theater as something from which, once having
witnessed it, one can never truly return to the place one was before. Instead,
one becomes conscious of the contingent, hovering uncertainty of all places—
and of the subject itself. Perhaps one becomes like Betsuyaku’s scabies rash,
floating in the air until finding provisional places to settle, inhabit, infect.
The dramatic deai need not take place through theater alone. Terayama’s examples make some readers and critics understandably uneasy, because in their
attack on social norms they bring intense moral disorientation. Like Camus’
idea that the greatest existential act is an unmotivated murder—an idea also
dramatized and challenged in Betsuyaku’s Zō—Terayama’s ideas about the deai
can evoke a crime-centered, violently unmoored world. For example, he celebrates the encounter with the dead rats (which many interpret as signifying
fascism in Camus’ text) as harbingers of something new, intimations of freedom or revolution. What could Terayama be saying about power structures
by the work of glorifying the encounter with the dead rat? How does the vacillation of his work between glorifying and scrutinizing violence lead to a specific and striking vision of postwar Japanese theater, that opens a new mode
of exploration for a world wary of certainties?
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Terayama’s vision has a Janus-like face. In a way similar to other performers
of his time, he was interested in facing a dark underside of the body and of
culture in an effort to sidestep or circumvent the powerful holds of ideology and
power. Yet rather than attack current political structures or even demonize
power itself, Terayama celebrated a vision of revolution or engagement that
was also deeply critical of its own strategies and desires. Rather than sidestepping doubt, he delved into the heart of doubt and lingered there. In this
sense, I would argue, he does take his ambivalent part within the larger trend of
critical, dialectically engaged theater that rose with the swell of confusion and activist energy in the experimentalist milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, and that in
his case continued to delve into these issues as late as the 1980s.
Terayama celebrates the absence of limits on the encounter, so that what
he calls the “spectators’ seats” in the contemporary world (for example, watching titillating events on television, from the safety of one’s own home) would
no longer be possible. Referring to Duchamp and Foucault, Terayama idealizes
those things, like poison, that put a pause on the everyday, and reveal its inherent dangers and dislocations. He attacks what he sees as the didactic element or simplification in Brecht’s idea of crude thoughts. The vision tracked
here runs closer to Kafka’s idea of the sudden arrest, or the anti-categories in
Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia. This is a world without edges, without stable
mappings. The deai itself (between audience and actors, spectator and cinematic event, between subject and world) is an encounter between two terms,
neither of which is fixed or stable, and each of which can be changed irrevocably by the contact.
PART III
Imaginations of Return:
Film, Butō, Photography
SIX
X Marks the Spot:
Experimental Film Crossings
In his criticism of the kind of photographs used in the “Discover Japan”
campaign of the Japan National Railway ( JNR) in 1970, photographer Nakahira Takuma elaborates on the issue of furusato or home:
Indeed, we have no homeland [kokyō ] in any way. Unmistakably, the yearning for a
homeland, and the desire to return there is something that belongs to us. But when that
desire is inevitably frustrated and collapses, the desire to return home suddenly turns
around, and from there swiftly turns to face reality [ genjitsu], and transforms itself into a
latent force of revolution that does everything possible to destroy the present reality—
a mechanism which was pointed out by Marcuse.1
If this somewhat oblique reference is to the early, hopeful Marcuse, in which
desire can eventually rise up against capitalist structures to overturn them,2 it
is clear in this moment that Nakahira is pushing against the vision (associated
with the later Marcuse) of the turn of frustrated desire toward reactionary
directions or complacent co-optation, a vision represented here by the exoticizing and commercially complacent “Discover Japan” campaign. Nakahira
here acknowledges the desire, the veritable obsession with different forms of
“return” in the Japanese cultural landscape. However, with their perception of
this yearning, which intersects with debates on different kinds and impulses
of nostalgia, he and other artists attempt to acknowledge the impossibility of
fulfillment of such a longing which “is inevitably frustrated and collapses.” The
“turn” he describes is a swift turn toward “reality.” Without destroying the
yearning, it mobilizes the force of desire and the recognition of loss toward
a generative, imaginative project—in particular, a project of revolution, trans-
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X Marks the Spot
formation, activism that works to overturn and at times even to destroy the
present reality.
Although this observation is particularly trenchant and direct in Nakahira’s
critical writings, directed as it is at the photographic practices of “Discover
Japan” in relation to the much more challenging attempts by Nakahira and his
colleagues to reinvent the languages of photography (see the argument on Provoke in Chapter 8), it deftly summarizes a concern—the complex uses of imagined or imaginative return—central to the chapters in the last part of this book.
The “return” under discussion, each time “frustrated and collapsed,” turns itself
in a new and perhaps destructive direction: toward revolution, or toward an idea
of “freedom,” or toward a reconceptualization or grasping of a new vision of
“reality” in artistic practice.
The first chapter of this section, on experimental film, traces some more
unexpected representations of the A-bomb, in its status as “originary event” of
the postwar. Although in international reception, much of postwar Japanese art
is read reductively through the lens of post-atomic trauma, many experimental
works mobilize images of the mushroom cloud and bomb testing in ways that
destabilize its status and meaning in these postwar narratives. At times the bomb
comes to seem a “sign” or “signpost” in these films that marks the movement of
experimentality itself—that “destruction of the present reality” that Nakahira
named as an important activist force stemming from the acknowledged impossibility of return. This chapter explores the network of signs of return and its
foreclosures in three films, two from 1960 and one from later in the same decade. Two of these films mobilize the bomb image in a dense network of footage
that ultimately challenges the “origin stories” of postwar experimental arts and
speaks to a much more complex mode of practice of experimental activism.
The following chapters of this section examine a similar range of issues and
challenges as they play out within the discourses of return and origin in Hijikata Tatsumi’s butō and butō writings, and in the photographic experiments of
the Provoke photographers in the late 1960s to early 1970s. In all three of these
broadly differing media spaces, artists grapple with the issue of a “yearning for
homeland” that Nakahira named, combined with the creative mobilization of
Nakahira’s prescription of that yearning’s frustration and collapse.
Jazz Film Workshop: Navel and A-Bomb
Post-shingeki theater and experimental works as a whole veer away from explicit or direct representations of the bomb and its aftermath, choosing to take
this subject into more abstract and metaphorical forms. Whereas some early
plays of Betsuyaku involve the bomb or the war on the level of subject matter,
many other experimental works show how the visualization of the bomb cre-
X Marks the Spot
131
ates, in the end, works that both are and are not “about” it. If their content
may draw on the bomb by using images with a clear referentiality and history,
like the cameramen atop the Japan Films building in Ango’s essay, these works
also interrupt themselves in the midst of the citation of an event with extreme
physical and political consequences, and from this suspension, they create a
layer of self-awareness. They focus on the process of looking, framing, editing,
and reiterating that are crucial to the film medium itself.
Yet the spectacularization and abstraction of the bomb image comes to be
centrally associated with the very idea and process of postwar artistic experimentality, leading to frequent fetishization of the bomb image as the key to
the meaning of experimental arts of all kinds in postwar Japan. The films of
this chapter aim to work against this kind of fetishization; when they use it, they
interrogate the bomb image as already congealed “trope” or ideological given,
and work to dislodge the congealed meanings of these images from their frozen or conceptually overdetermined forms.
The use of the bomb footage within the experimental corresponds with a reframing of the “landscapes of the everyday” as an alternative mode of cinematic
critique: visions of the body against the landscape, the marking of Xs, writing
on bodies open themselves against modern or free jazz soundtracks. The films
foreshadow key questions about the “returns” as well as the “destruction” that
Nakahira described. Their use of footage challenges assumptions about referentiality and “origination” in both explicit and more fable-like or phantasmatic
modes, even while we can also read these films’ focus on landscape from within
the works’ own context of high-growth capitalism, their questioning of strategies of bodily movement as well as, through jazz’s improvising “action,” the
conventions of film and congealed social and conceptual relationships.
Those interested in landscape theory (fūkeiron) espoused a view that has sometimes been characterized as “anti-theatrical” or “anti-spectacular,” in which
“empty landscapes” of the everyday function visually and politically in place
of the dramatization of narrative events and emotion.3 This version of the antitheatrical or anti-spectacular—which arises in the late 1960s, well after the first
films explored in this chapter—aligns temporally as well as politically with the
superseding of shingeki: the anti- or post-shingeki desire to question narrative
assumptions, verisimilitude, authenticity, and cathartic action and plot, while
nonetheless foregrounding “the encounter” variously defined.4 The stories that
are told or not told in post-shingeki works, their experimental strategies of montage, fragmentation, and juxtaposition, can be read in a deep relationship with
the contemporaneous movements taking place in the world of experimental
cinema.
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X Marks the Spot
On an biographical level, there are numerous overlaps and personal connections between individuals involved in post-shingeki theater, dance, and cinema:
Jōnouchi Motoharu’s link to Hi Red Center and Hijikata Tatsumi; Ōshima Nagisa’s engagement with Kara Jūrō’s troupe; Hosoe Eikoh’s close link to Hijikata;
Moriyama Daidō’s photographic engagement with Tenjō sajiki; among many
others. Spaces like Tenjō sajiki, Shinjuku Bunka Center, and Teshigahara’s Sōgetsu Art Center became key spaces for the intersection and deliberate combination of artistic productivity in multiple media. As such, it is useful to consider
the arts of this period in terms of “scenes” or “waves” rather than to isolate
the works by medium, and it is important to consider the interlocking networks
of collaborators on so many projects. The two works considered next, part of
the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu ( Jazz Film Workshop), a single event that took place
on October 21 and 22, 1960 at the Yūrakuchō Video Hall, could be considered
representative of such collaborative, cross-fertilizing trends. We might better
understand experimental cinema, butō dance, and photography if we examine
the intersection of these spaces, modes, and media, with their distinct and complex approaches to movement, spontaneity, temporality and landscape.
Hosoe Eikoh’s Heso to genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb, 1960) and Tanikawa
Shuntarō and Takemitsu Tōru’s Batsu (“X,” 1960) are two short films that have
been canonized or preserved in very different contexts—so much so that when
I first saw them, I did not realize that they were originally part of a single collaborative film series and event. Hosoe’s work is one of the classic films of butō,
often presented in conjunction with other records of butō movement, including Hijikata’s Hōsōtan (Smallpox, 1972), Iimura Tadashi’s Bara-iro dansu (RoseColored Dance, 1965), or the fragments remaining of Hijikata’s Nikutai no hanran (Revolt of the Flesh, 1968). Tanikawa and Takemitsu’s Batsu, on the other
hand, is almost completely forgotten, and in the rare instances of its presentation, it is seen as a minor episode in the history of Japanese experimental film.
These last two remaining films of a five-film series (originally slated to be seven
short films) were part of the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu.5 Another series of events
involving some of the same collaborators, Etosetora to jazu no kai (Etcetera and
Jazz Event), formerly named Modan jazu no kai (Modern Jazz Event), had been
instigated by Takemitsu Tōru and was a crucial precedent for bringing together
jazz and experimental film as well as other artistic media. Panned by Matsumoto
Toshio as “anti-human” and little appreciated by the others who wrote about it
at the time, the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu might nonetheless be seen as an important
turning point in the history of experimental film in Japan.
Before fully entering a closer exploration of this event in Japanese experimental film, however, it is worth pausing for several moments to explore a
work of American experimental film from just two years earlier in which bomb
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footage features prominently as a precedent, and for contrast and comparison
to the works of the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu. Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE (1958)
reiterates and recontextualizes images of destruction one after another, and the
bomb footage takes a central place. A MOVIE partakes neither of the “casualness” of Betsuyaku’s scabies rash, wafting on the wind looking for a place to
inhabit—although there is a certain “absence of affect” in the continual barrage of disaster images—nor of the strategically passionate engagement that
the invalid envisions for himself in his own spectacularization of his corporeal
after-effects, his display and narration of his keloid scar, and the events of the
bombing. Conner makes the repetition of disasters and crashes in their multifarious forms the explicit subject of his film, yet seemingly without a “message,” without the aim for the cathexis that the invalid sought in the little girl’s
touch. The disasters come on so fast that there is no place to “enter,” to center
and identify, no eyes to look into; instead, viewers are thrust into a reflection
on the very replication itself, and thus into a consideration of cinema as medium of such reiterations. Like the invalid’s reference to “that town,” cinema
itself holds a continual indexical reference to the places and times these disasters were shot, but the film lightens this hold, opening and distancing them
beyond the point of referential reliability.
Interrogating the relationship between cinema and cultural event, A MOVIE
uses found footage of plane crashes, car crashes, capsizing boats, and parachute
fires. It refuses to “cohere” or create continuity, except perhaps by the presence
of the unbroken soundtrack of Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic tone poem Pini
di Roma (Pines of Rome, 1924).6 When the film does seem to invoke continuity
editing, it does so to lay bare the cinematic structures—cross-cuts, point-ofview shots, eyeline matches—that allow viewers to perceive linearity in something that is clearly an assemblage of disparate found parts. As one vehicle after
another capsizes, crashes, and overturns, these images are interrupted by others,
including obtrusive titles, which remind viewers they are watching “a movie.”
Conner’s work thus reflects on and, one might argue, critically / analytically performs, the ways sensationalism turns the image of disaster into a cinematic and
visual trope, part and parcel of what it means to see A MOVIE.
The mushroom cloud, by this time the paradigmatic image of postwar “disaster,” appears as a climax in one of the most famous sequences. The sequence
begins with a military officer peeking through a submarine periscope, then cuts
to a scantily clad pin-up woman looking seductively at the camera, implying
through editing that this was what the man saw through his peephole. The
man appears again, then his hand, and then a torpedo shooting from his submarine—as if this shooting were provoked by what he had seen. Next, the
bomb flies through the water. Finally, a mushroom cloud bursts and rises,
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shown from several angles. The film follows with multiple images of surfers,
of boat accidents, or capsizing vessels—“as if” the bomb had caused the waves
that now reach the shore.
Writing about this sequence, critics often focus on the allusion to the construction of continuity in classical cinema and how that illusion itself comes
“under fire” in this and other experimental works, including the Japanese experimental filmmakers of the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu. If the bomb itself becomes
a “spectacle,” or even the paradigmatic spectacle of disaster, Conner turns a
mirror on the gaze’s reconstruction of a story, the narrative line created through
cinema’s montage and juxtapositions. Since so many other moments in the film
refuse to make narrative or (at times) even thematic “sense” in this way, this sequence stands out more as an exception than as a rule; it makes the viewer aware
of the kinds of “sense-making” (or nonsense-making) procedures and practices
that surround the use of the bomb as trope—the way that trope, as a turn or
a substitution, has been twisted, and appropriated for various purposes, even,
as in experimental film, for the very critique of narrative sense-making itself.
Only at the end does the work begin to reflect in a different tone on its own
insurmountable belatedness with respect to “the event.” As if to foreshadow
Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck” (1973), the film examines the
intensities of reopening the ruin to see what remains. With the dramatic climax
of Respighi’s score, a diver plunges into a shipwreck, ever deeper, touching and
orienting himself through its metallic skeleton. The wreck can become a figure
for the evacuation of signification, as in the wreck of the dreamlike concluding
chapter of Coetzee’s Foe: “But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it
comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where
bodies are their own signs.”7 Conner’s film mostly refrains from showing the
wreckage, the bodies, that remain after the disaster, or the scars and the aftereffects of the moment of destruction. Yet after the diver’s dip into this object of
the wreck, the afterward of the disaster, the camera shoots us back up toward
the splayed sun’s rays cracked open at the surface of the sea, moving perhaps
(cinematic convention would tell us) toward an image of hope, return, or redemptive rise—or is it a traumatic rise?—while having thoroughly dissolved the
reliability of the modes through which such a movement of redemption would
be conveyed.8
Practices of experimental cinema read the bomb image as a perpetual fascination and repetition that recurs but fails to resolve. Such works hold an underlying provocation as they allude to the paradoxically prolific, productive stream
of meanings and contexts that the event and its representations generate. To
whom does the bomb belong? Who has a right to its memories and images?
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In the face of the aging survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who had
committed their lives to commemorating that loss individually and in numerous institutions and to fighting nuclear proliferation, how can one speak of
the bomb as a visual trope?9 One consideration is precisely what happens for
the next generations, or those who came after, for whom the images cannot
escape the shaping of genre and narrative form (if they could even for those
with “direct” experience, when it comes time to convey these meanings), yet
who retain a link, an unseverable yet in some sense ghostly relationship with
these images. For so many of the next generations, the distance and mediation
of the memories and the pull of the images as images came to challenge the
“substantiality” of experience itself. As one of Coetzee’s characters says of
another: “[She] is a ghost, a substantial ghost, if such beings exist, who haunts
me for reasons I cannot understand, and brings other ghosts in tow.”10 The
image of the bomb in the experimental films discussed in this chapter, like
that of the ghost, causes a doubling; it remains as an image, employed at times
in seemingly nonchalant experimental or improvisational play, but also sustains
itself (and even evidences itself simultaneously, for these very reasons) as a
generative haunting.
The question of the epistemological relationship between experience and
representation also constitutes a key component of the avant-garde dance
movement of butō. Roughly contemporaneous with the shōgekijō movement,
Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo’s butō formed an early and central part of
the postwar experimental performance world, and from the start was concerned
with breaking and transcending conventions of perception, movement, and
knowledge of experience. Going beyond Ango and the nikutai bungaku writers,
who also explored the body and flesh as a space for reading the subject’s
complicity with ideology and national identification, butō brought the body to
a praxis that aimed to shatter language and thought itself.11
Theater, dance, film, and photography pursue an obsession with both the
production and the foreclosure of myths of origin. In Hosoe’s film, this manifests itself as climbing into and crossing out navels. Jean Baudrillard writes:
“When the real is no longer what it used to be . . . there is a proliferation of
myths of origin.”12 The destabilization of the sense of the real by its reproductions, simulations, and replications leads to a prolific productivity around
sites of origination. As in Conner’s films, at times experimental works extract
the bomb image from the context of its coherent meaning, such that one interpretation leads toward a reading as an absent or inaccessible origin point
for the loss of a coherent meaning of the “real.”
Hosoe Eikoh’s film Heso to genbaku is one of the prolific photographer Hosoe’s only film works—he also participated in Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad
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as director of two sections—but as a work of his youth it includes several artists
who came later to be seen as key to postwar experimental arts.13 It includes
footage of dancers Hijikata Tatsumi, co-founder of the butō movement, and
Ohno Yoshito (son of Ohno Kazuo) along with four fisherman and nine children from Ōhara village in Chiba prefecture. It juxtaposes playful and jaunty
modern jazz by Maeda Norio (performed by Watanabe Sadao and others),
originally improvised along with the first screening of the film; the recorded
version then became the soundtrack of the film, along with a poem by Yamamoto Tarō that the poet composed after seeing the rushes. This juxtaposition
of poetry, jazz, and film began with Etosetora to jazu no kai, Takiguchi Shūzō’s
idea of “poetry as an act [that refutes all acts]” was followed by artists who saw
in jazz improvisation a parallel “act” that could be used to mobilize the intensity
and effectiveness of cinematic events as well.14 Heso to genbaku juxtaposes images
of dancers’ bodies, objects, and animals by the sea, along with footage of a
column of smoke and, like Conner’s films, footage of a nuclear bomb explosion. These images were accompanied by the improvised jazz, as well as sounds
of the sea, explosive gunshots, and the voice of Mizushima Hitoshi reading
Yamamoto Tarō’s poem.
In alignment with some of butō’s explorations, the film combines playfulness with an exploration of primal terror and the corporeal movements of death
under the sign of the experimental. One of the longest sequences at the center
of the film shows a chicken without a head flapping its wings on the shore. The
camera lingers on its flailing body, its wiggling neck, until it settles upside-down
at the edge of the surf, legs in the air, moving only with the rhythm of the waves;
this footage is cross-cut with the movements of a male dancer, face covered
with a mask, whose arms move jerkily in the air, and who scratches marks on the
dark coloring of his own bare chest. The opening scene had shown arms reaching for an apple on a sand dune, and a hand reaching for an elbow that it could
not quite grasp across the dune. This scene is read by Hosoe in his retrospective
scenario as related to the origins of the earth (the apple linked to Adam and Eve,
sexuality and life, original sin), yet the film itself hovers between the possibility
of such attributed meanings and the exploration of what might lie beyond such
a metaphorical allusion.15 In another key scene, the young boys, after dancing
in circles in the sand, lie in a pile. At first the film shows us only their naked
feet, like the piles of bodies familiar from catastrophe footage; but the hand
of one boy throws sand onto his belly, and the camera rises to their blatantly
living, breathing, squirming forms. Thus, the footage of the bomb that is the
climax or closing of the film both supplements and fails to supply a referent
or a center of gravity for all of these images, visual enactments and explorations
of the juxtaposition of life and death, generation and destruction.
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The film traces the fascination with life and its origins through a proliferation of myths of origin. The poetic voice-over compares the sea (la mer) with
the mother (la mère). Near the opening, a man’s finger (belonging to Hijikata)
seems to try to climb inside his own navel. It dances around, fingers coming
together to a point, and the frame shows only the naked torso and the wiggling
hand. Later, in a parallel scene from the second half, a child’s navel is marked
with an X as if foreclosing another vision of a moment of origin. As in Conner’s A MOVIE, as well as, with differing effects, in Kurosawa’s Rashōmon and
Ōshima’s Seishun zankoku monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth, 1960) at one point
the camera turns directly into the sun, sun as origin, canceling all vision. What
is visually perceptible as the difference, Heso to genbaku seems to ask, between
the mushroom cloud and the innocent white cloud in the sky that the film
showed us earlier? What is the difference—or more trenchantly, the relationship—between the image of A-bomb smoke and black industrial smoke, rising
and billowing from a train like an ink wash into the sky? The film closes, just
after the shot of the A-bomb, with the enigmatic shot of an apple at the line
of the tide. The fresh, clean apple sits on the shore; life comes up out of the
sea. But the sound of the sea is what replaces, or drowns out, the strange explosive sound of the bomb. Not the bomb image but the apple ends the film,
along with that sound of the waves—and the spectator hears again that selfestranged or displaced diegetic sound. The apple image thus overturns any
closure or grasp of what preceded it in the image of the bomb.
The closing shot of the apple returns the viewer back to earliest moments
of the film, when the apple sat poised on the summit of a small dune, and
then was grasped in a hand in the center of the screen. The apple, in its metonymic relation to life and origins (with Hosoe’s retrospective confirmation) reminds us again of the film’s title.16 Is there a relation between a navel and an
A-bomb? When the man rises out of the ocean and pulls the string, a displaced
umbilical cord, from the child’s belly, the cord is loosed from its connection
with the child. The camera shows us the boy’s crossed-out belly—a cancelled
origin.
The boy begins to cry, raising his hands to cover his eyes, and at this moment
the bomb footage appears. As in A MOVIE, the temporality of the splicedtogether shots cannot fail to suggest a continuity. Did the monster-man from
the sea detonate the bomb from the child’s navel? Did he pull the trigger that
made it explode? Is the bomb image constitutively necessary to the visual language of experimental film, to detonate the bounds of visual meaning? In the
end, it is the more defamiliarized images of the apple and the child’s belly button that rewrite or overwrite the given meanings of the bomb’s image. The film
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Fig. 11a–b Stills from Hosoe Eikoh, Heso to genbaku. Above, the camera shows the boy’s
crossed out belly; below, hands reach toward the apple on the shore.
shows the fission and fusion of the sun and of the bomb, the cruelty of a killing,
and the playful corporeal intimacy of a man carrying a goat, or four men dancing
primally on the sand as one other dancer wraps them in a rope.17 The apple, like
the bomb in Kajii Motojirō’s Remon (Lemon, 1925), detonates in the eye of the
spectator, in the hand of the dancer, placing itself out of place (on a dune).18 The
film foregrounds the uncomfortable similarity between the images of the bomb
and of the sea, their white waves rushing, the substitution of their sounds.
Experimental film, still haunted by this footage, reframes images of the
bomb to highlight the complexities of memory and visual repetition. It allows
the image of the bomb to reframe film’s own paradigms, to become a metonym
or a gateway to the improvisational rupture of codes that is one of the key
concerns of experimental works. The ethics of that project can make some want
to tie the footage back into another kind of use: to explain it with facts, to
contain it in an activist project or in a restorative reconstruction, to condemn
it as mere formalism. Matsumoto’s own critique at the time emphasizes this
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reading. Yet one must note that already in 1960—at the moment of apparent
failure of one round of the student and protest movements, but a decade before the disillusion with the subjectivist anti-state mass protest became more
thoroughly widespread—the film pushes hard and playfully against closures
and containments of the image, challenging the viewer to confront the ways
in which “the image” irradiates, pervades, refuses to be contained. The desires
and yearnings for a (foreclosed) origin persist—or the proliferating discourses
and myths of origins—as a central site for the continual return and encounter
of this film, just as parallel desires for originary encounters animate the antinarrative plays of shōgekijō and post-shingeki. The film leaves the viewer in a place
of tension, perhaps unsatisfied, between the seemingly indexical referentiality of
the bomb footage and its refusal to represent, to be representative.
In Betsuyaku’s Zō, the witnessing and spectacularization of the bomb’s aftermath on the invalid’s body brought the workings of meaning and reference
into question, and opened a new terrain of post-shingeki theatrical exploration.
These contemporaneous works give the viewer the impression of having seen
something significant—like a scar—whose resonance, under the sign of the experimental, echoes on the landscape, on the earth, demanding attention, suggesting an aim and a focus for experimentality as a working through of a promise or debt of memory and understanding. But in the end, the one collaborative
event of the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu is its only production; though the explorations of butō carry it forward, and all its collaborators continue with their highly
acclaimed careers in the arts, the Jikkenshitsu jūnu in itself does not open a
way for continued exploration. Indeed, it seems to close at the very moment
of its opening—except, that is, for the opening that Tanikawa and Takemitsu’s
film about foreclosures and crossings, Batsu, might provide.
Jazz Film Workshop: X
In his later, fantastical book of photographs Kamaitachi (Weasel-Sickle, 1969),
Hosoe photographed Hijikata in Tōhoku, the broad area in northern Japan
where both he and Hosoe (as well as Terayama and Ohno) were born. In that
collection, Hijikata leaps like an elf around fields seen from a high angle extreme long shot. He peeks over the shoulders of grandmothers seeming to
overhear their chatter, or perches like a bird high on a country fence against
the empty sky. At times, he appears frozen in the midst of a leap that highlights
the quirky temporality of the photograph.19 Hosoe’s photography and films
thus hover at the edge of performance genres, clearly stretching beyond their
status as a performance document, though they are frequently also the sole existing records of particular performances. Hosoe and his collaborators constructed works specifically for the camera, works such as Otoko to onna (Man
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and Woman, 1960) with Hijikata, Tamano Kōichi, and other dancers, and Barakei (Ordeal by Roses, 1961–62), with its manipulated montages of Mishima in
shadows, in various spaces in his house, or doubled in the same frame, in a loincloth, with members of Hijikata’s troupe, or posed on the body of a woman.20
As part of the Jikkenshitsu jūnu, for the event of the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu,
poet Tanikawa Shuntarō worked with the musician and composer Takemitsu
Tōru on the sixteen-minute, 16 mm film Batsu. Takemitsu had been an active
member of Jikken kōbō, the experimental workshop in the late 1950s that included theater performances, painting, and plastic arts, as well as music. He
participated in works related to the Sōgetsu Art Center, including composing
music for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film Hozē Tōresu ( Jose Torres, 1959), and just a
short while before the making of Batsu he composed the piece “Quiet Design”
to be played with Italian designer Bruno Munari’s colored-light film Proiezioni dirette (Direct Projections) as part of the Etosetora to jazu no kai (February 1960).
He was a key figure in the Sōgetsu Contemporary Series and Sōgetsu Music Inn.
He later became known as one of the most important twentieth-century classical
composers, composing 93 film scores, including the works of Ōshima Nagisa,
Shinoda Masahiro, Teshigahara Hiroshi, and Kurosawa Akira. Tanikawa Shuntarō is a famous and prolific poet known especially for his light, lyrical poetic
works; he had also collaborated on the Etosetora to jazu no kai earlier that year,
and also went on to collaborate with Terayama Shūji on the series of personal
Video Letters (discussed in Chapter 4). Other collaborators on Batsu included jazz
pianist Yagi Masao, whose (likely improvised) score is no longer present on
the currently surviving, silent print of the film, and the actor of the part of the
man, Yamamoto Naozumi, also known mainly as a composer and conductor,
credited with musical work on the 48 Otoko wa tsurai yo “Tora-san” films. In
Batsu, he appears as an actor. The “girl” named in the titles is played by Murata
Kyōko. All of the male figures, like many central artists of the avant-gardes of
the 1960s, eventually became well-known in the mainstream of Japanese arts in
the following decades.
The idea of experimental work, as Michel Chaouli has argued, originates in
eighteenth-century paradigms of chemistry, a science that starts in media res
without a grounding axiom and without a pre-given end.21 Batsu and other experimental works of this time refuse both purely allegorical-historical interpretations and detached formal analyses, instead asking viewers to consider how
the recombination of elements can provoke a more improvisatory reading / viewing experience. Batsu creates a high degree of freedom that makes it
possible to read the film in disparate terms: like Heso to genbaku, in terms of the
liminal space between performance art and cinematic experimentality; in relation to spectatorial agency, the possessive / curatorial power of the mark and
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gaze; or the opening of the desiring, generous, unconcealing look in the place
of absent origin. The film can be read politically, formally, or hover poised between the two; it can be serious and ironic at once. This is perhaps the advantage of the opening created by a blank, crossing-out gesture that holds so central a place in the film, as it held in Heso to genbaku as well; the X that can also
be a negation of all these possibilities, a rejection of the continuous attempt to
set a meaning through the language of allegory.
One place to begin to construct the reading that this work demands is in
the act of looking itself, the paradigms of spectatorship within the film. Performance-bound arts, including the performance-based film works discussed
here, raise the question of what kind of an “act” constitutes art. Is it the act
of making, or the resulting object, that then becomes the work? In this regard,
we might think of movements in the visual arts from the 1950s Gutai and
other “event-based” forms through the 1970s Mono-ha; but a more proximate
space to consider these questions is in the works shown at the Sōgetsu Art
Center and Terayama’s Tenjō sajiki. Admiring the “action” potential of improvised jazz, Jikkenshitsu jūnu aimed to bring to 16 mm cinema the power
of the “act.” In Batsu, the man draws Xs in the cityscape—for example, on the
window of Matsuzakaya Department Store, in a kind of “happening” or performance art within the film—and he is attacked by a passing group of thugs
who are themselves engaged in a particular kind of outraged, active spectatorship. The film thus could be read as performing an allegory of spectatorship as
an act of resistance or combat.
This reading hovers in oscillation with another: the outraged passers-by, in
contrast to the other more apathetic spectators who interrupt our view of the
event, could also be seen as indoctrinated and violent protectors of ideological
stability and property, spectators as punishing enforcers of a repressive state
apparatus. David Desser, for example, has written of the trope in 1960s cinema
of the thugs or gang members as symbolic stand-ins within a critique of conformist, hierarchical imperatives on the part of filmmakers of that period.22
Yet while the thugs here—pulling our protagonist out of the urban Ginza space
in their gangster car to an isolated field where they can beat him up—nearly
annihilate the man as an artist, a performer, a maker of Xs, knocking him out
cold on the ground, in another sense they themselves have moved from the
status of enraged spectators to a new place of unwitting artist. They have made
the sprawled out / knocked out man into an X on the ground, in a sense continuing his work. The camera shows the X of his body upside down in a bird’seye view. The landscape becomes the canvas and he becomes the X marking it,
a cartographic point on the diagram of the landscape, for the eyes of the viewer
and the eyes of the camera.
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Fig. 12 Man upside down, Batsu. Courtesy of Image Forum, by permission of Tanikawa
Shuntarō and the estate of Takemitsu Tōru.
This “narrative” moment—man marks Xs, thugs beat him—stands out,
nonetheless, as a rare instance of such continuity or teleology in the film, a
clear cause and effect with a climax. The mini-narrative gives the action a consequence: it lifts the needle of abstraction for a moment on this otherwise
prolifically unmotivated intervention in the landscape (the making of Xs) that
the character, and the film, have been repeating playfully and in almost musical
variations for several minutes. (The sense of this act as experimental music is
reinforced by the actor’s status as a composer, by the rhythm of the editing, and
by the almost certain inclusion of improvised modern jazz with the original
screening.) The film shows street scenes where other characters watch the man
mark the Xs. He marks them on the covers of Agatha Christie novels in a
bookstore; a shopkeeper chases him after he marks Xs on fruit, and he walks
off munching one of the crossed-out fruits. At another moment, children watch
as he draws Xs on the window of a café, one after the other, over the plastic
display drinks and foods. What becomes clear is that at many moments the
viewer (and the camera) play this spectator’s role as the ones who watch as
he marks his Xs and inscribes his acts of signification on the landscape. He
marks, and intervenes, in the power map or “micro-physics of power” of the
everyday. What kind of act does this marking then become in relation to the
act of seeing, and to the act of cinematic shooting that guides the viewer’s eye
to Xs on roads, on vehicles, on walls, on poles, and on the ground? What does
it mean to watch the “unmarked” landscape, and then to watch the act of
performance of a mark being made?
The film starts with a scene of sunrise. In the opening sequence, the man
walks up a road toward the camera. Interspersed with brief shots of industrial
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Fig. 13 The man looks into the camera, Batsu. Courtesy of Image Forum, by permission
of Tanikawa Shuntarō and the estate of Takemitsu Tōru.
Fig. 14 The man draws Xs on the woman’s back, Batsu. Courtesy of Image Forum, by
permission of Tanikawa Shuntarō and the estate of Takemitsu Tōru.
objects (an airplane, a smokestack), blurred swish pans and the blank sky, he
walks up an empty road, very small in the distance. The lines of perspective
form another kind of X across the frame, with the vanishing point near the
center. Next, as he comes close to the camera (so that only his knees are visible),
the film cuts on the movement of his walking to watch him from behind as
he bends to do something, to touch the earth—he is marking Xs on the road.
The camera moves back along the path he has taken, with its line of Xs, and
then follows him forward again. Next the shot traces his Xs up an electric pole;
the camera climbs up to find the man at the top, continuing to make the rising
and falling line of Xs.
An artist marks a landscape, and the film calls the viewer’s attention to its
overdetermined gendering, and simultaneously literalizes one possible trope of
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female body as landscape, male artist as marker of the surface of the land. In
another sequence, after he has accosted a woman in the street to write Xs on
the back of her dress, the man no longer writes on the land but marks his X
on the naked body of the same woman lying on the “blank” ground with him
while caressing her (the scene is marked by the jump cut from her clothed to
naked to clothed again). The excess of this performance raises this gendered
trope to a self-conscious citation. The performance reassigns the ambiguity of
the X, the possible allegorical readings. Is the marking of the X an act of selfreflection on artistic gendering? Is it an act of colonization, as suggested by
the cross-cut in another scene to the rising sun flag, with the film poised as
a critique of that? Is it a critique of the legacy of the Occupation, as a crosscut to a military plane and the base-like atmosphere of some of the landscapes
might suggest? Is it an allusion to the “marking” of rapid industrialization on
the environment (shots of smoke columns, trucks) and the move toward postindustrial landscapes (networks of transport)? Or could it, in another sense,
be a manifesto and celebration of artistic freedom, with the subplot of the
attack of the spectator ending in an affirmation of artistic expression as the
knocked-out artist dreams his art even in his unconscious state and in the end
rises again, weakly, to go on?
All of these explanations, while suggested in the film, still narrow the valences of its simultaneously allegorical and anti-allegorical structures of meaning. Ultimately, Batsu persistently returns to the act of looking in its relationship to all of these possibilities. The scene with the woman calls attention to
the look: it is the only shot in which the man gazes into the camera directly.
The camera often lingers on Xs in the landscape: architectural structures,
cross-beams, fences. After having watched the man create Xs in the world,
the eyes of the viewer become the ultimate agent in perceiving or not perceiving these overdetermined shots. Humorous and playful, not at all subtle,
these shots show the generic similarities created by one’s own perception, the
marking powers of one’s eyes. They highlight spectatorial vulnerability, or one’s
susceptibility to the pleasures and powers of film’s performance. What or who,
then, performs the act of X-ing? Is it the character, the camera, or the eye of
the viewer who performs the crossing “shot”? Is it a targeting, playfully alluding
to the documentary ethos of “film as weapon”? On what level does the film’s
performance occur? And further, what happens to the landscape as a space, a
canvas, a medium or venue of action and non-action alike?
This set of questions raised by the film leads to another inquiry, equally relevant to other works of postwar performance: where does one locate meaning
in the making of an experimental work, and where do the boundaries of the
experimental lie? What exactly is being “experimented”? More specifically, what
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is the boundary of the experimental in relation to narrative? The opposition
between narrative and avant-garde, commercial and experimental, becomes less
rigid in this context than critical writings usually describe.23 The micro-narrative
of the gang of thugs or the brief sex scene with the woman remain parallel
stories, brief intertextual allusions to the subgenres of sex and violence films
so popular in this era, just as Terayama alludes to popular children’s works or
detective fiction. In Batsu, however, the generic allusion is finally overwhelmed
by the powerful repetition, the act of crossing (X-ing) in itself.
Batsu thus reduces narrative to its lowest common denominator, its algebraic variable—the making of a mark. Could this X, as the persistent signifier
or the repeated, obsessive act of signification (the letter that always arrives at
its destination), be playing on theoretical understandings of the indexicality of
film: the X-marked target of the filmed object, filming the X itself, highlighting
the question of the document or the proof in evidence? X, like the primitive
signature of an absent proper name, authenticates the cinematic “real” while
playfully bringing it into doubt. Would this X, proleptically opening questions
of psychoanalytic film criticism, stand in for the substitutability of the act of
looking at things, ever-similar yet ever-new? One might recall here Kaja Silverman’s argument in World Spectators about the desire for the Kantian / Lacanian
“das Ding,” always absent but always manifesting itself through the desire of
the look, in a repetitive appearance that opens the world, or the landscape, to
its own revelation in a new form.
In this sense, Batsu’s questioning of originariness, of origin-place, also intersects with the persistent quest for origins in the rhetorical self-descriptions
of postwar theatrical performers. As a mode of artistic practice, this quest for
origins heads in several directions at once: on the one hand, it seems to hold
out hope for a “return”; on the other, its complex representational strategies
call attention to that return’s impossibility. The mode of interaction with the
landscape translates the origin-quest into a visual register, turning visuality back
upon itself, and questioning the transitivity of the subject’s own acts. It becomes
an encounter in which the relationship between the subject and the landscape
returns to transform both sides. At the same time, it decenters the centered
frame of cinema in the subject and viewer, and moves toward a decentering of
subjectivity and instead a prolific indexicality (this, and this, and this; here, and
here, and here) of the landscape.
In more explicitly political terms, the landscape functions in a wide range
of national-cultural origin stories. In Terayama Shūji’s later film Tomato kechappu
kōtei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup, 1971), for example, an X marks the eroticviolence of the children’s military flag. The children function as a miniature
army with an emperor child, and march around with a flag marked by an X in
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contrast to the sun symbol’s (absent) maru (circle; O as the opposite of X). Batsu
was filmed soon after the height of the Anpo struggles of 1960, yet in contrast to Terayama’s film, which mocks, satirizes, and erotically reinscribes the
remainders of the fascist collectivity, in Batsu the collective is vividly absent.
Much of Batsu instead shows a solitary performance in a ruined landscape, witnessed by the camera. Could this film, like Dominic Angerame’s film Anaconda
Targets (2004) about military combat in Afghanistan, be mimicking the targeting
of bombs from above, the visualized Xs that created the film’s ashcan environment of rubble and empty roads that lead nowhere? Instead, the handmade,
chalked, nontechnological inscription marks a personal gesture rather than a
panoptic view.
The repetition of the crossing out / erasing gesture remains abstract even in
its concreteness, and it refuses to have its repetition amass any additional meanings beyond “again, again, again.” Sometimes the mark with white on white
leaves no trace but the cinematic document of the gesture. At other times,
the man makes the mark using a rock, a tile, a piece of the landscape itself.
The closing moments of the film return to the sun in the sky from which it
began, although this time the sun seems to be setting. The beaten man rises to
make the X as a pure silhouetted gesture against the sky, leaving no mark at
all beyond the cinematic shadow and movement of his body.
Against the setting sun, the man flings his body from one side to the other.
Exhausted, beaten down, just risen from the land of dreams, he moves his hand
across the sky, across the sun, in an imaginary drawing of an X through that
other imaginary origin point. His body, seen from behind, lit by the sun in
front of him as he stumbles forward, appears purely as shadow. With each X,
a here and now gains its mark; in this sense, it refuses both the narrative and
the symbolic interpretation. The X tries to become an extra-discursive gesture,
refusing to be reincorporated. However, by inscribing it as a “representative”
experimental work, we rehistoricize Batsu within a certain bounded, particularized discursive terrain. This writes it back into the history of its making and
the larger oeuvre of its makers: Tanikawa’s playful and accessible lyrics, Takemitsu’s high theoretical concrete music and his humorous and expansive film
scores. In other words, with auteur, with genre, it becomes a much more manageable text.
Theorizations of performative temporality, with their vacillation between
ephemerality and repetition, allow this film to resonate anew. Theories of loss
and generative melancholia, as they stand in relation to the cinematic time of
shooting, editing, and screening, let the film resonate in yet another way again.
The sound in this film is another site of loss of something that was once “live”
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Fig. 15 The man “crosses out” the sky, Batsu.
Courtesy of Image Forum, by permission of Tanikawa Shuntarō and the estate of Takemitsu Tōru.
jazz. It has disappeared, or rather, become silence, shown only in the movement
of the lips of the man who seems to whistle as he walks, the rhythmic movement
of his hands writing the Xs, conducting, marking what could almost be a musical
score on the blank canvas of the world. The temporality of continuity and discontinuity created by cinematic editing, the moment of shooting, the framing
and click of the shutter from frame to frame—all of these create their own
temporal paradoxes that are taken on by the spectator’s vision, which then links
them together, through the suture that at once identifies them and identifies
with them. Could each X be like its own film frame, asking the viewer’s memory
to join them together into a story, to create new continuities and discontinuities?
Would this understanding of narrative and interpretation offer an alternative
practice to the oversimplified historicizing gesture within it might be so easy to
reinscribe the film?
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One act of Batsu is to question documentary indexicality and the status of
narrative at once; it shows the making of meaning by the eye, and the moment
of narrative’s vanishing or disruption. It shows a body, as it appears on the
two dimensional surface of film, and foreshadows the body’s disappearance.
The final X gesture has its own status as a piece of dance, and also seems a
desperate effort against the fading of the light. The setting sun, low against the
empty sky, is all that makes this final gesture visible, makes the body able to
appear at all, as a black mark moving its X on the screen. Putting paradigms of
cinematic and performative temporality against one another—in a sense, crossing them like a X—the viewer may arrive at an altered version of experimental
analysis, an improvisatory dance or recombination of methods at the intersection of media. In that sense, one may also postulate an end to one part of the
signifying movement of this disciplinary field, landscape, or terrain of reading.
One crucial transformation or intersection that takes place in the analysis of
photographic and cinematic landscapes in this book is that, as Benjamin writes
in his Trauerspiel study, “chronological movement is grasped and analysed in
a spatial image.”24 The spatializing of the temporal transforms the relation to
origins, in a way that can perhaps be called melancholic; it is a relation to the
historical and to historical representation as a site of loss, and a continual tracing
and performative elaboration around an absence. Chapter 2 read Terayama’s
Kegawa no Mari in terms of paradigms of truth and falsehood, reality and artifice,
in order to note the ways they blurred and broke down. Here, however, the site
of loss (including the loss of those “binary groundings”) comes to attract passionate action, a form of engagement in a performance that is both spatial and
temporal, repetitive, ephemeral and material at once. It is a movement within
a kind of traumatic structure, where the belated reiterations, however compulsive, also initiate a new movement, and an ever-shifting engagement. In that
sense, it is both a reference to an impossible origin / past and also an openness
to prolific possibilities, an openness to the contingent and multiple valences of
development and change.
Film Movement and Experimental Documentary: Jōnouchi Motoharu
In a more directly “activist” mode, Jōnouchi Motoharu was a filmmaker who
mobilized the cinematic medium—as document, as event, as collective movement—both to “destroy the present reality” in Nakahira’s sense and to evoke
a crucial turn toward conceptual and sensorial “agitation.” Jōnouchi’s experimental documentaries from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s deeply implicate
and interrogate the medium of photography as well, because of his frequent
method of in-camera editing in which a shot consists of just a few frames at a
time, koma-dori / koma-otoshi (terms usually used to designate stop-motion ani-
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mation or time-lapse photography). 25 Jōnouchi uses frequent blurring of shots
in terms of focus and movement, bringing to mind the are-bure-boke methods
(are, rough; bure, blurred, possibly from camera movement; boke, out of focus)
for which Provoke became famous and struggled not to have reified into a “style”
(see Chapter 8). In Jōnouchi’s experimental films, however, the experience of
blur and disorientation is compounded and ontologically altered by the medium
itself, in which the blurred shots fly by at a rate that is only barely absorbable
by the eye; and the works were often screened in the context of intermedia or
multimedia events, adding further complexity to the layers of what it would
be possible to see. Thus, the blur has a very different fundamental status and
kinesthetic velocity from that of a photography journal like Provoke, in which the
photo can be held in one’s hands and studied over an extended period of time.
Although the rarely screened works of Jōnouchi deserve a full and careful
analysis, I focus in this section on the experimental language of one of his key
films, his engaging and radical Gebarutopia yokokuhen (Gewaltopia Trailer, 1969),
which also contains footage of a mushroom cloud as a central visual element.
Yet in order to open the questions of documentary and his reworking of film’s
place among experimental artistic practices, it is useful to begin with a consideration of his earlier short film Sherutā puran (Shelter Plan, 1964), of an event
by the art group Hi Red Center. Gebarutopia yokokuhen is part of a series of experimental works Jōnouchi made under the main title Gewaltopia, including
Nichidai hakusan-dōri (Nichidai Hakusan Street, 1968), Nichidai taishū dankō
(Mass Collective Bargaining at Nihon University, 1968), and Shinjuku sutēshon
(Shinjuku Station, 1974).
Jōnouchi’s interventions in experimental cinema began in 1957 at Nihon
University when he co-founded Nichidai eiken (Nihon University Film Study
Group), one of the first cinema clubs to focus on not only the viewing but
also the production of experimental films in Japan. It inspired many other such
clubs to follow. He was a student in the art department there at the time, and
the group began to make experimental documentaries in a collective mode,
most notably Document 6.15 which was a controversial intermedia event held
at the memorial service of Kanba Michiko, one year after she was killed in
the 1960 anti-Anpo demonstrations.26 Filmmaker Adachi Masao also emerged
from Nichidai eiken, and along with Jōnouchi collaborated in the VAN eiga
kagaku kenkyūjo (VAN Institute for Cinematic Science) that some of the same
members founded upon graduation, with a communal living situation and active
collaborations from artists from many other media. Jōnouchi was involved with
artists from the action-art group Neo-Dada, and he also was found participating in such diverse but related activities as serving as assistant director to
Teshigahara Hiroshi in the film Otoshiana in 1962 (adapted from Abe Kōbō’s
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novel), and performing in Hijikata Tatsumi’s butō performance Bara-iro dansu in
1965.27 As one among such intermedia collaborations, Jōnouchi’s Sherutā puran
is a “document” about an event that itself questions subject-object documentation and imaging relationships.
The Hi Red Center group (Akasegawa Genpei, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and
Takamatsu Jirō, along with Izumi Tatsu and others) rented a room in the Imperial Hotel, in which they worked to create an individual shelter for nuclear
fallout in the aftermath of war. The event featured, among many well-known
artists, Adachi Masao and Yoko Ono—ironically having the width of her wavy
long hair measured as part of a weighing, measuring, photographing and documenting of the bodies of the participants. Jōnouchi’s film shows the “shelter
plan” in a way that both tempts us and yet refuses to allow us to consume it
as a “straight” document of the “event.” The first impulse of a viewer today
may be to label and identify all the participants—a veritable who’s who of the
experimental action arts scene of the era—to date and measure and understand
exactly what was going on: Yoko Ono signing a contract and lying on a bed
to be traced; a still shot of Nakanishi in one of his clothespin performances,
perhaps from the earlier Yomiuri Independent exhibitions; the name card of
the Hi Red Center group and the Imperial Hotel contract / rental form; cans of
what looks like food, but without their usual labels; a man taking a bath. When
did all this happen? What is the chronology, the flow of events? In fact, which
are photos and which are “live” events being filmed?
The film itself mostly refuses to satisfy this desire for retroactive stability,
reification, or even visual and vertical orientation. The film shows bottoms and
tops, naked backs and heads, heads to toes. It goes from naked bottoms as a
kind of crosshairs to views of blinking “live action” participants in front of
those photographed backs, themselves being measured and weighed. The “liveness” and the “documentation” vacillate against one another, and the act of
tracing the materiality of a body and framing it comes to the foreground as
one after another of the participants lie on the bed, and then after we see the
traces of some of their outlines left behind, and a new participant lies down on
this trace. Nonetheless, this film does become the “document” that remains of
the event.
Influenced by the radical documentary practices and theories of filmmakers
like Matsumoto Toshio, Jōnouchi and his colleagues engage in a radical questioning of materiality, cinematic practice, landscape, and politics. This becomes
all the more apparent in his later Gewaltopia series, but for now it is worth
stopping for a moment to mention the screening practices that were part and
parcel of these films’ distribution. Sherutā puran, for example, was ultimately
incorporated into the work called “VAN Document,” screened continuously
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over three days in Ginza’s Lunami Gallery (during an event called “Lunami Film
Gallery,” February 1967), where Jōnouchi did various things on each of the
three days to interrupt and perform around the screening, including reading a
poem; flashing a flashlight; shouting at the projector; facing his naked back in
front of the screen and having it partially project onto his body; whipping and
provoking the screen; and otherwise disturbing the premises in various ways.28
Similarly, Jōnouchi’s other films are often today seen (when they can be seen
at all) silent or with a fixed soundtrack, but the original screenings would have
included live music—for example, Kosugi Takehisa of Group Ongaku, credited
as a collaborator at times—and the films would be edited or retitled for individual screenings. Like the works of Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu and related earlier intermedia events at the Sōgetsu Art Center, Jōnouchi’s screenings incorporated
live music, poetry, and other spontaneous or improvised elements. Yet these
disruptions and variations, given Jōnouchi’s interest in both documentary and
protest movements, have a strongly and explicitly political intent. Hirasawa Gō
attributes this choice to the “pursuit of cinematic revolution” and in particular
the effort to “negat[e] the idea of film being complete, repeatable, and consumable” within capitalist economic structures.29 Jōnouchi himself spoke about
the desire to retain the “fluidity” of his films, so that “today and tomorrow will
be different, and I myself don’t know how it will be on a given day.”30 In what
might at first seem a contradictory interpretation, Hirasawa has also written that
Jōnouchi and his collaborators “rejected the theatrics of spectacle, instead establishing a radical materialism of spaces in both structure and methodology.”31
Yet, in the end, these interpretations do not exclude one another. The “theatrics of spectacle” would be another way of naming a distant, objectifying
gaze upon a spectacle in which one is not implicated, and it is clear, in works like
the Gewaltopia series, that though these works at times document or film /
photograph moments of protest, they refuse to allow for easy consumption
of these events as spectacle or stable image-object, and alternate with lengthy
sequences of shots of the trash-filled, “empty” urban landscapes in which there
is no “event” of note taking place.
Provoke photographers turned their cameras on the spaces of the urban landscape to capture these “fragments of reality” that “already existing words (and
concepts) cannot grasp,” as they put it in their manifesto, so that “the nonexchangeable, non-commutative materiality [of images]—the reality that is cut
out by means of the camera—can at times incite or touch off or detonate [shokuhatsu] the world of words and concepts . . . in order to create new thought.”
Jōnouchi and his colleagues, at a parallel moment in the late 1960s, worked with
a similar effort on the part of images—an effort to detonate or activate new
thought and new practices, implying a direct political intervention through their
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work with the dissemination or movement of film—work that they called “film
activism” (eiga undō, using the same term for movement as the student protestors, while in fact documenting student demonstrations). Ironically, Sherutā
puran was then also appropriated and shown as a document in Akasegawa’s trial
following the “1,000-yen note incident,” which, as many have argued, functioned to tame the anti-art activities of the time into the rubric of “art,” as a
defense strategy on a very different level of discourse.32
Let us return to an episode in the Gewaltopia series: namely, the film Gebarutopia yokokuhen (Gewaltopia Trailer). What is Gewaltopia? The German word
gewalt (violence or force) gained currency around the time of the student movements as a counter-term to the Japanese bōryoku (violence). For example, the
sticks carried by students during the demonstrations were known as geba-bō
(Gewalt-sticks), with the idea that they were to be a force to be distinguished
from the more cruel, repressive violence on the part of riot police acting on
behalf of the state apparatus.33 In the late 1960s, Nihon University became a
site in which the public empathized with the student protestors in the case of
embezzlement by the university’s president Furuta Jūjirō. A massive confrontation in which the president spoke to the activists took place in a former sumō
auditorium with many thousands of students in attendance, and this forms
one of the subjects of the film Nichidai taishū dankō, the same footage appearing
again in abbreviated form in the latter half of Gebarutopia yokokuhen. Gewaltopia
thus means violence or anti-repressive force, combined, perhaps, with utopia.
Or topia could be “place” itself, given the immense emphasis on locatedness,
on place, on sites: footage of the rooftops, the buildings, the back alleys, the
dumpsters—seemingly “nothing happening” places taking up as much space
and time in the films as the exciting, if impossibly fragmented, footage of the
student demonstrations.
What, then, happens in Gebarutopia yokokuhen? The word yokoku can be translated as trailer but also “advance notice, preliminary announcement, telling in
advance what is coming.” This sense of foretelling is elaborated in more verbal
detail in the soundtrack poem Jōnouchi reads in his film Shinjuku sutēshon:
Without an aim, this is it.
Gewaltopia announces in advance: we will descend to the underground.
A ruin leads to a ruin, graves stand, blackened, phallic heads, boiling over.
The underground, the ghost world’s lightless light. . .
Beginning to walk, yes, you, it’s pressure.
This poem, which retroactively illuminates or animates the idea of Gewaltopia
through its passionate verbal performance, shows an emphasis on a future that
is also associated with an already past, a ruin leading to a ruin. This could
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Fig. 16 Jōnouchi Motoharu, opening of Gebarutopia yokoku. By permission of the estate
of Jōnouchi Motoharu.
connect to the paradox of documentation that is at the center of “film activism,”
and of so many of Jōnouchi’s projects, and could perhaps represent a kind of
manifesto of what he was attempting to struggle with as a whole: both a provocation toward a future that would contain a certain activist violence, and a
recognition of the potentially “ghostly” structures of the photographic and cinematic document’s relation to the object. Jōnouchi’s dark, sometimes nearly illegible shots, often of night scenes or enclosed spherical spaces, could perhaps
be linked to these “graves,” this “ghostly world.” This “underground filled with
lightless light” sounds very much like a cinema, and the “underground” Jōnouchi agitates for may be an allegory of cinema—or perhaps cinema becomes
an allegory for, and space for the practice of, other kinds of underground action.
Yet these graves standing black, showing off their “phallic heads” and “boiling
over,” form a kind of masculine orgasmic imagery of overflowing pressure, congruent with the masculinist emphasis of much of 1960s and early 1970s experimental cinema, and in alignment with poetic images that go back to the
futurists. This imagery nonetheless corporealizes a vision of descending underground (chika e oriru) that is both the portent of a future of some kind and is itself
the moment (kore da; “this is it!”). This agitation then is itself the process that is
the “it,” if not the aim.
Moving back to Gebarutopia yokokuhen, the film starts with the camera lingering over calligraphic, poetic statements or phrases, written on the surfaces
of bodies—the eyelid, the back of the neck, the bottom of the foot, the navel.
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Images of student protestors, agitated crowds, and telltale “empty landscape”
or urban landscape shots are shown in the koma-dori (shooting frame by frame)
style, or two or three frames or several seconds at a time followed by a skip
to a nearby (sometimes) but slightly off shot, difficult to grasp. Interspersed or
at times superimposed on these rapid-fire shots in double exposure are striking
scenes from classic silent cinema: most memorably, a thrice-repeated moment
from Nosferatu, moments from Wolf Man, King Kong, and a brontosaurus breaking London’s Tower Bridge from the silent film The Lost World (1925). Why (and
how) does Jōnouchi combine these images?
Hirano mentions financial concerns as the key reasons for Jōnouchi’s spare
use of film footage documenting student protest events that extended over long
periods, and others have convincingly recognized the impact of Jonas Mekas’
style and the films of Stan Brackhage, introduced to Japan a few years earlier.
Yet it is clear, as Nishimura also argues, that this fragmented “style” becomes
a fundamental method and structure for so many of Jōnouchi’s films, along
with the reframing and reediting of existing footage from his own films or older
films. (The description of Gebarutopia yokokuhen as a “trailer” here may serve as a
marker for this fragmented juxtaposition of discontinuous sequences.) Existing
films function as an “archive” or object that is as susceptible to being reframed
as a document as any outside event or happening. The Lost World, for example,
compressed into selected frames over about 20 seconds of Gebarutopia yokokuhen, at times comes to be superimposed on other frames from the same film, or
on footage of the student protests. Scenes of crowds in a panic from The Lost
World appear in double exposure and are at times cross-cut with some of the
chaotic student protest crowd scenes, with the ironic implication that the demonstrations might be like the alien monster wreaking havoc on the structure of
urban life. What does this “wink” toward the cinematic trope of the panicking
crowd do to the implicit “participant-observer” position into which the camera
otherwise places the viewer?
Although the film screening is made into an event, and the film itself can be
changed from one screening to the next, the filmmaker’s own oeuvre and film
history as object are opened up, interrupted, and reconstituted. The materiality
of the shooting process—the filmmaker’s finger on the trigger—interrupts the
viewer’s act of seeing, while the materiality of surfaces becomes the key subject
matter: the body, language itself, skin, and the uncanniness of seeing language
written on body parts, beginning with the Dali-esque title inscribed on an opening and closing eyelid. The sound track, as it is currently preserved, contains a
female primal voice, a scream / squeal / yowl, tracing an indecipherable edge of
(Germanic) language, as if the edge of visual decipherability should be doubled
by a difficulty of hearing, a painful edge of sound at the margins of the event or
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promise of language. The words traced on the body—”labyrinth of violence”
(bōryoku meikyū), or “Aaah, cruel!” (aa, muzan)—come into and out of legibility,
and reinforce these evocations of pain, violence, and eruption.
Like Hosoe Eikoh’s Heso to genbaku, Gebarutopia yokokuhen has as one of its
central archival images the footage of a nuclear test, a mushroom cloud. What
work does the mushroom cloud do here, and how does it differ from that
in Hosoe’s film that also, like Gebarutopia yokokuhen, contains a good bit of
close-up footage of a navel, emphasizes writing on skin, and in parallel with
Jōnouchi’s undermining of the subject-object relation in documentary, emphasizes another kind of originariness under erasure? Here, the words “spring
departing” (haru ga saru) written on the skin combine with Jōnouchi’s persistent
questioning of modes of documentation of other kinds of events, even as he
reframes the viewer’s spectatorial relationship with these turning points in history. It is highly striking and particular that Jōnouchi’s films contain a relationship with so much “direct” footage of the protest demonstrations. The
latter half of Gebarutopia yokokuhen is largely taken up with these images, though
often seen in wide angle, or from a very high angle, or through a circular iris as
if to keep the viewer aware of the “peephole” through which these events are
viewed. His use of protest footage could imply a direct political alignment with
the student movements on the one hand, but in no simple way—the film continually interrupts the viewer’s vision and grasp of what is seen. It refuses to
allow the suture of identification, would not permit the jauntily pleasing modern jazz of Heso to genbaku, nor, in the end, allow anything like the gorgeous
light that bathes Hijikata’s interrogation of improvised corporeality. Reading
Gebarutopia yokokuhen against Hosoe’s film shows how Jōnouchi’s use of the
body takes tropes like those created by Heso to genbaku as one more document /
moment to be reframed and reincorporated, with a difference, into its own
activist project. Once again, later in the film, the briefest compressed footage
of the mushroom cloud is superimposed on the marching, protesting students,
between the words written on different parts of a foot, “the human world /
is it hell? / it is hell / only hell,” with each of the lines separated by a few
moments of film. Tropes of destruction (reminiscent of those in Conner’s A
MOVIE), some of them from The Lost World, intersperse with further fragmented shots of the student movements and other found footage. Near the
close of the film, a brief shot of Hitler also appears with his hands on his hips,
followed by the word “spring” inscribed on the skin near a hairy nipple. The
poetic moments about spring come to indicate pure irony, or perhaps sheer
disorientation in relation to the continuous disruption of sight, the ghostly
mediations framed by Gebarutopia yokokuhen, Jōnouchi’s violence and agitation
on the viewer’s eyes.
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Jōnouchi’s cinematic practice reflects on and intervenes in ideological, social, and cinematic events of its time. Gebarutopia yokokuhen in particular makes
a strong historical weave with and against the works of the Jikkenshitsu jūnu
and Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu orchestrated by Terayama and his diverse range of
collaborators. Though Jōnouchi biographically crosses Hosoe’s path through
their mutual link to Hijikata, the political and documentary intentionality of
Jōnouchi’s work inflects his use of experimental modes in divergent directions.
On a formal level, there are some notable resonances between these works:
the bomb closes Hosoe’s film, but opens Jōnouchi’s Gebarutopia yokokuhen,
detonating in the eye as the woman’s voice screeches against the ear. Both juxtapose images of intense seriousness or terror with differently playful and defamiliarizing structures. Each of these cinematic moments, in different ways,
has as its intention to make film into an “act,” a “movement” or “event,” and
at the same time to challenge the coded representationality of the bomb’s (and
other events’) originariness by placing them and decentering them into highly
unexpected referential networks. The continual crossing acts of Batsu mark a
potential foreclosure that triangulates against the crossed out navel in Hosoe’s
work and the interventionist seriousness and exuberantly destructive superimpositions of Jōnouchi’s footage, his interruptions of the viewer’s ability to see
his document. Like Jōnouchi’s more extremely disorienting work, Batsu has a
complex relationship with the “object” and the performative act of marking.
Gebarutopia yokokuhen mixes in its own lightness and irony with activism, its
ghostly silent film footage and falling buildings and cinematic monsters stirred
in along with its intensely empty, trashy urban landscapes where the protests
will have, might have, should have taken place.
The footage of Jōnouchi’s films “agitate” and at times pain the eyes, just
as his actions provide a form of agitation within the realm of film spectatorship. The buzzy electronic music, the “noise” that interrupts auditory pleasure,
escalates / rises in the ears. With its poetry of cruelty, figures of a paper cutout couple in a window and a parallel couple that stand absently next to a
mailbox; a urinating man seen from behind; sunbathing prone figures from
his earlier film Pū pū (1959); the closely examined black-linted navel—Jōnouchi
provides (parades) a cinema of contrasts and stark juxtapositions to “escalate
the agitation.”34 If we read this navel and this A-bomb against the crossmarks
of Batsu and Hosoe’s work, we see a progressive challenge to the relation between film and its documented object, between film and cultural event, engaged
explicitly via experimental modes of cinematic practice. But in their challenge
to the images of “return,” here via their upending of any direct (documentary)
relation to the cinematic or represented event, these works can be seen to continue a trajectory begun in the contemporaneous theatrical works discussed ear-
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lier. The desire to “see and grasp” is continually frustrated, through numerous
representational disturbances, and in its place, another kind of artistic direction
or trajectory may come into being. Or rather, if the desire is foreclosed and
ultimately collapses, at a certain point, as Nakahira pointed out, it may “turn
toward destruction”: and thus the promised artistic trajectory at times closes
out without further immediate sequel, in spite of Jikkenshitsu jūnu’s idealistic
call to restore to 16 mm cinema and the cinematic art its “rightful claim,” to
take it outside the “minor mode.” The moments of intimacy and temporary
community that can nonetheless be formed within such efforts form the subject
of the following chapter, with the nexus of artistic relationships around Hijikata
Tatsumi’s butō dance and writings.
SEVEN
On Homecoming:
Hijikata’s Writings and Butō
Who was Takiguchi Shūzō? . . .
This crazy beautiful face of the blue sky, who was it?
—Hijikata Tatsumi
Critics of Japanese culture often claim that the avant-garde movements in Japan
reached full realization only in the experimental arts of the late 1950s to the
1970s. Indeed, as I have argued, the avant-garde arts exploded in a new and
powerful way in the postwar period, and this “second wave” of the avant-garde
had a deep impact on contemporary Japan. In the context of the student uprisings and antiwar protests, or in the bars and night clubs of the Shinjuku and
Shibuya districts of Tokyo, students formed communal theatrical collectives and
new trends flourished in experimental dance and performance. Young artists
and students lurked in cafés listening to jazz, subsisting on coffee and whiskey.
They read Merleau-Ponty and Marx, Sartre and Sade, folklorists Origuchi Shinobu and Yanagita Kunio, along with radically violent comic books. Many who
experienced the “60s” in Japan look back on the radical countercultural experiments of those years with nostalgia and regret for the direction Japanese culture
has taken since.
Yet critics who extol the wonders of that period tend to dismiss or ignore
the earlier avant-garde writers and artists of the 1920s and 1930s, whose work
is still much less widely circulated both within and outside of Japan. It is nearly
impossible to grasp the aims and methods of the postwar artists without taking
into account their profound, complex, and paradoxical relationship with the
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early surrealists, these “historical avant-gardes.” Working in an increasingly militarized and imperialist Japan, prewar writers had struggled to explore a terrain
of rupture within language, the body, and subjectivity. Postwar artists, many of
whom had close personal ties to the writers of the “first wave,” worked within
and reconfigured these paradigms of the “avant-garde,” even while they worked
to undermine the process of artistic inheritance or the construction of tradition.
What kind of “imagined return” and departure is created by the relationship
between the postwar experimental artists and the avant-gardes of the 1920s and
1930s? And how does the theoretical and critical terrain covered by those earlier
artists shape the relationship of these later artists to their own “imagined returns”? The “frustrated and collapsed” yearnings for “home” and “origins” are
clearly not the unique preoccupation of the postwar period, but are shaped by
the versions and articulations of these preoccupations that preceded them.
Although the milieu of 1960s Japan differed strikingly from that which fostered the prewar experimental movements, Japanese surrealism and the avantgarde dance form of butō hold distinct tendencies in common. Butō, earlier called
ankoku butō (dance of darkness), developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s
in Japan through the work of Ohno Kazuo and Hijikata Tatsumi. Often messy
and wild, improvisational and idiosyncratic, butō has come to be recognized by
specific visual cues, such as the dancers’ intricate, unpredictable movements,
extreme facial expressions, and use of white body paint on exposed flesh. Yet
butō cannot be defined in terms of a consistent “style,” and most butō practitioners fiercely resist any crystallization of their work into a distinct set of
methods and techniques. While butō and surrealism both encompass multiple
goals and contradictory methods, they share an anti-conceptual search for a
terrifying limit-moment, a breakdown of symbolic systems—the moment of
approach to actuality and the body, which they conceive in paradoxical and
unexpected ways. Both movements, in alignment also with the photographers
of Provoke discussed in the next chapter, aspire to effect a radical decentering of
conventional systems of thought and consciousness, a rupture of existing symbolic frameworks. By varying means, they work to reach a space of “(sur)reality”
or “actuality” beyond socially defined boundaries of understanding.
One might simply claim that butō follows the surrealist quest, begun in the
poetic and plastic arts, into the realm of the body and the flesh (and the breakdown of the body, the refusal of the body). Yet such a clear division would be
reductive: the surrealists already took a deep interest in the expressivity of the
body. Through his writings and spoken improvisations, works of language and
text, butō movement co-founder Hijikata Tatsumi worked out the concept of
the body that became the center of his dance. One might consider his writings,
of equal importance to his dances, as works of butō in themselves.
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In his essay for the program of Hijikata Tatsumi’s second “Dance Experience” performance of October 1960,1 the longtime surrealist poet and art critic
Takiguchi Shūzō wrote:
Again I must use this well-worn word: avant-garde.
Be that as it may, many people must have remarked that the meaning of this word
has been changing bit by bit. The orders of modern art are becoming classical, displayed on the shelf of ready-made goods; it has begun to be proved that nothing new
can be born of an avant-garde art that tries to take these [older forms] as its model. We
may be searching for a new space for art’s occurrence, different from the one that has
existed up to now. Yet the carelessly used fixed concepts of art are themselves already
a problem, a big problem.2
Takiguchi draws a separation between the historical avant-gardes and the work
of the collaborators in this new series of events also presented as zen’ei (avantgarde). Takiguchi’s activities as a surrealist and theorist in the 1920s and 1930s
participated in this prewar “modern art,” yet he calls upon young artists to
evade that model and invent something entirely new.
To say that the early butō of Hijikata simply follows surrealism is problematic for the reasons Takiguchi outlines. Butō could not transparently follow the
surrealist model without betraying its own ends: to reject all “-isms,” refute
all acts, and then to act within this refutation. (One notes, however, that the
terms of the “act,” followed both by the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu and by Hijikata,
were articulated most influentially by Takiguchi himself in his 1930s surrealist
writings.) If one were to imagine butō as in any sense a return to surrealism,
it would be perhaps a return by moving away rather than by approach. If there
are similarities between butō and surrealism, if butō effected any kind of “return” to surrealism or seemed “at home” in surrealist ideas, it could accomplish this only by refusing surrealism and all known precedents and forms of
creation. Paradoxically, in the end, this achievement or attempt has much in
common with surrealism.
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, a close associate and “patron” of Hijikata, was known as
a post-surrealist fiction writer, critic, and translator of the Marquis de Sade. In
the program of Hijikata’s 650 Experience no kai event described above, Shibusawa describes the primal encounter of the artist with society:
The artist must bind himself firmly in the ropes of asceticism and scepticism, but it is
also crucial to know that there will come an unavoidable moment when the ropes
suddenly break. Whether we call that instant terrorism or scandal is up to the general
public to decide according to its caprice.
Whether the artist destroys through the pleasure of creation, or creates through the
nihilism of destruction, there is probably no other space or time in which the artist
engages in so vivid a negotiation with society.3
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Imagining the structure of this scandal in terms of a fictional garden he writes:
The avant-garde artist exists in the “imaginary garden” of Babylon. This is a fictional
space and time in which, from the start, the police have no right to intervene. Yet here
for the first time society receives the scandalous and severe uppercut of the solitary
artist, and because society enjoys the pleasure of a bloody nose and being knocked
down, there is perhaps no climate for art more real than this one.
The most idealistic way for the artist to participate in actuality is probably this terrorism, this scandal. All reality other than this is a swollen, tepid, spineless reality, and
certainly such things should be banished from the climate of art to the greatest possible
extent.
The problem is not how to bring the social or historical into art; the eternal problem
for art is rather that by its very terrorism, or in other words its function of negation, art
itself becomes a part of history.4
Shibusawa reiterates the necessity that art continuously challenge social convention, giving society “the pleasure of bloody noses and being knocked out,”
like the upside-down artist in the sequence from Batsu sprawled on the grass
in an X. By his ironic use of the term “general public” or “society” (sekensama),
he maintains the position of the artist as the enemy of accepted social mores,
a position that the early Japanese avant-gardes also strongly endorsed. The attainment of actuality is predicated on scandal or terrorism, rejecting the “swollen, tepid, spineless” thing that passes for reality in the social world. Takiguchi
had written in 1931: “Reality—if my lips are not burned by the word, is it not
rather a miracle?”5 The aim for an “encounter” with some form of actuality—
that brings with it a certain terror, a danger—is shared by the surrealists and
enters the vocabulary of Hijikata’s early butō, in part through his relation with
Shibusawa.
While he associated closely with important artists of the early Japanese
avant-garde, Hijikata deeply distrusted events like contemporary “happenings”
and realistic psychological theater (shingeki). Both of these he saw as having
been vulgarized, falsified in their relation to what they claim to accomplish.
Like butō, they call upon the body for their art, but Hijikata considered that
they “put the flesh to use” for its “explosive power”; he found this very idea of
“usefulness” suspect. Instead of the terms of “happenings,” Hijikata invented
his own vocabulary of the experience (he used the English word as well as the
Japanese), ceremonial, and revolt. With the “650 Experience,” he emphasized
the fact that each of the 650 spectators in the Dai-ichi Seimei Hall would have
his or her own unique encounter with the work.
Takiguchi wrote the following notes for Hijikata’s “Dance Experience” performance in September 1961:
When Hijikata Tatsumi speaks of ceremonial or experience I suddenly remember the
guiding words of a twentieth-century artist: “The eye exists in its savage state.” But
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where, you may ask, are the butō dancer’s eyes affixed? That is precisely the core of the
matter. In any case, I will be glad to be guided into this secret afternoon ceremony of
the hermaphrodite, never before seen. I will no doubt experience a terrifying comedy,
filling all the empty spaces in this flesh. Dance has just begun. Now . . . here in Japan.6
The kind of immediacy proclaimed in Hijikata’s ceremonial experience reminds
Takiguchi of André Breton’s phrase: “L’oeil existe à l’état sauvage.”7 Whereas
Breton explored the relation between visuality and representation, Takiguchi
overturns Breton’s language toward Hijikata’s exploration of the flesh: “Where
are the butō dancer’s eyes affixed?” Takiguchi had been guided by Breton’s idea
of the savage visual territory, one which nonetheless also contains representation. The secret afternoon ceremony of the hermaphrodite leads toward a
new reading of this line, one which highlights the physical eyes as parts of the
dancer’s body. This new, strange ceremony affects the spectator’s body as well,
“filling all the empty spaces in this flesh.” This joyous entry allows the ceremony
to affect the spectator in the most intimate ways—to the point that it might,
in the end, reaffix his eyes within his head as well.
Writing of his relationship to Takiguchi, Hijikata claims that the visions Takiguchi revealed, and in fact the presence of Takiguchi himself, are “in the air”
in postwar Japan and are implicit in the work of many later artists, including
butō dancers.8 Citing Takiguchi’s critical / poetic essay “Shi to jitsuzai” (Poetry
and Actuality, 1931), Hijikata comments on his idea of the poetic act, a conception that shapes Hijikata’s dance and his understanding of the movements
of the body:
It is true that an act lets out its first cry of birth at precisely the moment when it refutes
[all] acts. But because of this, at the moment of action people tend to forget the origins
of their expressions. What we usually call expression is, in fact, the name of that which
has forgotten its origins. Expression is something that is secreted of itself, not something that appeared as a pattern for some purpose (like the illustration on a sliding door
in relation to that door). Then again, there are times when acts pierce us suddenly before we have a moment to catch our breath. At that moment, like that pierced emptiness, we ever so vividly—our own dancing girl comes into existence.9
Hijikata calls upon the necessity of remembering “origins,” and he condemns
“what we call expression,” which is “in fact the name of that which has forgotten its origins.” Like the act itself, however, origins emerge from the moment
of their own impossibility. Moreover, expression is a kind of secretion, and this
becomes a key metaphor in Hijikata’s language and in his dance. If one examines
Hijikata’s writing closely, one discovers that the origin (or origins, since it can
be singular or plural) does not preexist the act, but is secreted (expressed, created) by the act itself. The origin, like “home,” is not located in a lost past, but
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rather becomes something that emerges at a moment of creativity, generativity—the origins are born, like the artistic act is born. Secretion is a particularly
corporeal creation, produced from a body but without intention or will, an
intransitive production, as much a giving over (spilling over) of the self into
the exterior as it is any kind of product or form. This informe [formless] secretion that appears “of itself,” or is secreted of itself, challenges the intuitive /
conventional idea of origins.
Hijikata condemns the moment of erasure, of forgetting, where the point
of contact between an act and its refusal, between a person and her acts is lost.
Butō becomes the effort to confront the moment when that terror or awe is
still vivid, before its covering over; that is, when the birth cry of the act can
still be heard. That cry comes from a place of paradox that consists of an act
and its negation at once. The idea of origin then takes on a much more complex
valence than simply “the place or point from which something comes.” The
term Hijikata uses, kigen, implies a genesis, a beginning, a traceability. Expression (here hyōjō, not hyōgen), like the expression on a face, comes figuratively to
encompass all kinds of creative acts, but also, like Watsuji’s idea of existence,
encompasses a liminal place between interior and exterior, between internalization of something from the outside and externalization / exteriorization of
something from within.
Hijikata’s “origins,” and the lilting language with which he describes them,
lose almost all connection to common sense: the idea of origins that would
exist in a discrete past, whether relevant or not, forgotten or reconstructed,
from which the present would be imagined to emerge in a linear temporal
schema. Nor is originariness here a cover story for an eschatological imagining;
instead, it is relentlessly focused on process, a process that occurs for the most
part outside of will. Like the floating scabies rash of Betsuyaku, or like the improvisational double-take quality of Terayama’s encounter, this kind of expression defies control, including ideological control (though after the fact it
can be subject to punishments / framings / reappropriations), and it depends,
like daraku, upon corporeality for its emergence. While drawing on surrealist
thought, the expression of butō is aimed at the edges or just outside of intelligibility, like Hijikata’s language itself.
By way of contrast to the idea of origin as secretion, Hijikata describes the
violent, quick motion of expression when “acts pierce us suddenly before we
have a moment to catch our breath,” when we are violently rushed upon by
our own acts. This image—having something in common with a notion of
the psyche or the body that functions beyond or prior to conscious control or
“decision”—undermines a conventional relation of subject to artistic expression. Expression pierces us before we are ready for it. Acts come upon us and
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become the act-ors, we become the emptiness that is acted upon; then, for Hijikata, something is born that is neither ourselves nor the result of our acts, but
a new birth of another subject, a “dancing girl.” Hijikata writes of the moment
of birth of the act: “The cry of that moment must have returned to its place of
return.” The cry presupposes a place to which it can return, like a home; the cry,
however, also creates that “return-place” (kaeru tokoro). While this limit moment
of the place of return at once presumed and produced remains inaccessible, the
unheimlich return becomes the birth of a dance.
The return-place that is also a limit echoes the conception of automatic
writing as immediacy, a limit point of immediacy prior to or below the intervention of aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical concerns. Just as automatic writing envisioned an access to “presence” that would also provide a direct link to
the unconscious—itself another kind of unknowable origin—Hijikata’s image
of art-making both depends upon and refutes the idea of origin, and with it,
the idea of form. Form itself, for Hijikata, becomes a stabilization, a conceptual
freezing, of what otherwise emerges without end. Form is a shape or aim, an
end of expression that retroactively constructs a beginning, middle, and end
and holds them in that order. Here, instead, the transitivity of the maker and
the made are overturned.
Hijikata thus posits that the made world—the line, the expression, the object
of a grasp—turns around to grasp or make legible the subjectivity of the grabber, line-drawer, expresser qua object. What would normally be seen as the exterior world, the object of making and grabbing, comes to be the origin or agent
of the act, and “re-makes” the actor or subject in return. While suggesting
deconstruction’s debunking of the myths of origin, then, Hijikata’s vision also
clears the way for a kind of contradictory intersubjectivity or intimacy deeply
embedded in the very perception or retroactive construction of both origin and
agent of an act. The seemingly essentialist moments in Hijikata’s work, and in
the writings of many postwar artists, could be taken more generously in the
light of this strange reciprocity of origination. The dancing or drawing hand, no
longer seen as an object or tool, comes to be for Hijikata the most authoritative
speaker on this process.
Mishima Yukio first introduced Hijikata to Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. In 1965, at
the suggestion of designer Yokoo Tadanori, Hijikata gave his Bara-iro dansu a
subtitle in French dedicating it to Shibusawa: “À la maison de M. Çivesawa.” In
the essay “Yami no naka no denryū” (Electric Current in the Dark, 1970), Hijikata reimagines his first meeting with Shibusawa and contemplates the writer’s
contributions to his career and thought. Like the line that returns at the moment
of its birth, he figures his meeting with Shibusawa as a strange homecoming to a
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place he had never been before. This encounter shows one of the ways Hijikata
imagines returns: the nest of Shibusawa contains not a weight or burden of
memory or the past, but a lightness, ease, and encouragement. Although it is
an “empty” nest, Hijikata’s own void can settle within it. Like the movement
of the line, it is a strangely familiar return that resembles a fresh beginning.
The essay begins with a description of a man (perhaps Hijikata) being banished from his hometown: “When he fell from the roof, he had an insulator
in his mouth. When I think of the palm of the hand of that man who was banished from his hometown for that reason alone, gripping that cloth package,
I suddenly become scorched pitch black.”10 Hijikata links this image to that
of an electricity or intense energy. The man’s mouth holds a kind of insulator
( gaishi), a protective cover that retains current in the interior.11 Recalling this
event after the fact, the narrator is no longer protected and becomes burned
black. In remembering the event he experiences the burn for the first time.
Left out in the cold, gripping only a cloth filled with a mysterious and continuously transforming object, Hijikata finds his way to his new nest:
When I think of what on earth the heavy angular breakable thing inside the cloth could
be, I think I may go mad. I will probably never tell what it was. Not because I don’t
want to talk about it, but because it gives me no time for that, since it is in such a state
of continuously being discovered. I did not have the ability to line up, as if to crack the
egg of nothingness, these things that grasp each other in a terrifying hostility. That was
the cause of a harsh, bitter cold. In the midst of this mutual grappling, before I knew
what was happening I was swarmed by ants, and I was discovered on the concrete floor
of the Shibusawa family’s entry hall. I had forgotten how it felt to be welcomed [handled]; the person who lifted me became my nest. (YN, 285; emphasis mine)
The journey leaves him, in a bitter chill and covered by ants, on the floor of
Shibusawa’s house. The object he carries with him from the place of his origins, from his hometown, he cannot describe: there is too much yet to be discovered. His package is angular and breakable, and threatens to drive him to
madness. While unspeakable, the package suggests the site from which he has
emerged, and which he has abandoned; he carries his “origin” with him. To
speak of it would be to “crack the egg of nothingness.” Compared to its hostility, Shibusawa’s house is a return to a kinder form of the unknown.
The image of a homecoming that is also a continual discovery of limits has
a structural similarity to the image of the line that is in continual emergence,
never reaching or settling on a “form.” If doing and being done to, grasping
and being grasped, come to intertwine in an indistinguishable and mutually constitutive process, what happens to the assumed transitivity of engagement? If
one normally thinks of activism, as a part of engaged and “authentic” action,
as in some way transitive—the subject does something, works to change some-
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thing, acts on something—here the notion of action twists on itself and returns
within itself. As in Betsuyaku’s plays, where characters search for something,
anything, to do, the action here is provoked, interrogated, and then rewritten as
a process of “mutual grappling.” This mutual grappling, this “grasping of each
other” that Hijikata describes as having a “terrifying hostility,” becomes a model
for a radical vision of engagement as well as intersubjective encounter that he
elaborates. He continually proposes a kind of engagement that encompasses the
unknown without mastering it.
At the same time, this process creates a space where acts of generosity are
possible, as in the gesture of Shibusawa’s “lifting” Hijikata from the threshold.
While clearly an imaginary moment, it is also a powerful image of kindness and
gentleness within a world where otherwise terrors seem almost boundless. To
Hijikata’s eyes, Shibusawa is the “last of the literati,” and as such provides him
with an intellectual and artistic compass, a guiding spirit. He writes:
I cannot even begin to compare this last literary man who does not lose his innocent
[detached] laugh, even when looking at the feet of a baby twisted in unhappiness, with
the Japanese in front of their televisions who skip over reality in a short circuit of the
structure of the world. [Even to think of such a comparison] makes me want to cry.
Finally, the dark kingdom is coming. (YN, 286–87)
For Hijikata, as it was for Terayama, the image of watching television stands
in for a detachment from reality. In the face of the “Japanese before their television screens,” in the face of the banalities of a postwar humanism that covers
over sights too uncomfortable to see, Shibusawa “does not lose his innocent
[detached] laugh, even when looking at the feet of a baby twisted in unhappiness.” Shibusawa’s look here is neither a look of empathy nor of sadistic
pleasure, both of which have centrally to do with the affect of the seeing subject; but, for Hijikata, it is a direct look, with open eyes. It may have something in common with the vacillations of blindness and vision in Mōjin shokan,
in that it approaches a “real” that is (nearly) impossible to access, and involves
a kind of sight that transcends the everyday sight of the eyes. Shibusawa, translator of Sade, can grasp in a deep sense the existent pain of reality; this commonality, this ability, is in itself a source of hope, even as it comes with recognition of the loss of the type of visionary literary mentor that he embodies
(“this last literary man”). When we think of Shibusawa today, idiosyncratic
collector of objects and toys, writer and translator of an irredeemably quirky
sensibility, we can imagine both the fascination and the relief Hijikata would
feel in his presence. Even while the terrors of Being might be inescapable,
the existence of another subject who can look clearly, in the strongest sense,
who can share the vision of this world of complexity and paradox, is a great
help.
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For Hijikata, the fact that Shibusawa can maintain his laughter in the face of
this pain bespeaks not an elision of reality, nor a sadistic pleasure in another’s
pain, but a more trustworthy and deeper understanding of pain, a more complete ability to absorb and receive its impact. In Hijikata’s imaginary retelling,
Shibusawa seems to appreciate the dance of the twisted feet and within it the
beauty of the child’s life itself. The passage also makes Hijikata into a child of
sorts, wanting to cry. Hijikata earlier told this story of his own childhood: after
a day left alone in the fields in a basket, he could no longer move his legs, and
his feet were twisted in pain under his body like inanimate objects.12 The child’s
feet resemble the apocryphal feet of the child Hijikata, abandoned in the fields,
crying out without being heard. Shibusawa, in this vision, gives the memorychild of Hijikata the comfort of being seen, of a detached yet present / visionary
witness to this moment from which Hijikata’s ideas of dance emerged, when
the body’s sensation and movement go beyond the controlled / regulated movements of the everyday.
Shibusawa’s presence for Hijikata also eases pain by approaching it with a
certain lightness: “Beating testicles on an anvil, and giving the name of a youthful maiden to each drop of blood flying off, the dancers of ankoku butō could
achieve an expression of sacrifice that was not too heavily painful thanks to his
[Shibusawa’s] encouragement”(YN, 286). One thinks here of the many painful
moments in Heso to genbaku, the film in which Hijikata danced, in which the pain
of tortured movements (scratching of the belly, contorted hands reaching up
into the sky) are juxtaposed with the light, jaunty, almost humorous music of
jazz. The jazz itself in that film can be a source of aesthetic layering and interpretative confusion in relation to the A-bomb that opens the film in the title and
closes the film in its image. One also might think of the most violent moment in
the film, when after the chicken has been decapitated, its body writhes on the
seashore, and the camera focuses on the contorted and subtle movements of
the dead chicken’s feet in the air. Although this may be a more raw and early expression of what Hijikata was aiming for—the movements of the chicken’s feet
in death as by definition outside of the “controlled” and “conceptualized” languages of conscious, intentional movement—animal movements continue to
have a central place in Hijikata’s conceptualization of dance, as does the dialectic
of pain and kindness.13 While it might have been possible for the dance of darkness to focus on a heavy suffering, in this essay Shibusawa’s broad knowledge
and guidance, and his kind gaze, counter the weight of (and make possible) the
dancers’ sacrifice. He reveals the pleasures of walking the boundary of between
terror and creativity. For Hijikata, it is not that Shibusawa fills an emptiness,
but rather that his void supplements Hijikata’s own. “When I touch the wholeness of the void that is Shibusawa, my own void gains flesh” (YN, 286). Hijikata
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saw Shibusawa as his “great patron.” He writes, “Indulged flight heads toward
the hometown of the flesh that is not the product of the mind. That, in my
case, was precisely toward Shibusawa’s house” (YN, 286). This image seems
to describe Hijikata’s path, and the path of his dance, as a kind of flight. Indulged, perhaps by Shibusawa himself, this path moves toward a return to flesh
(and a “hometown of the flesh,” a radical and surprising conceptualization of
the hometown that foregrounds its corporeality over its conceptual / verbal /
imaginative status), a hometown that is not a product of mind or intention,
nor something created as “product” or commodity. Shibusawa, too, understood
the limits of the flesh, and explored the body as a practice of language that
escapes its place as a “product of the mind.” The hometown of this body, then,
the originary space of the flesh, is in fact here then renamed as “Shibusawa’s
house,” a personal landmark on the map of Hijikata’s dance.
Yet, at the same time, the movement of Bara-iro dansu is not only “to” but
also “from” Shibusawa’s house. A perfect homecoming, however authentic in
the face of reality’s terrors, however complex and contradictory, cannot permanently stabilize or eliminate these difficulties. Almost immediately, Hijikata
must leave. Along with the movement of return, there is also a movement of
challenging, reinscribing, and ultimately moving away from his “great patron,”
from this hometown or space of imaginative origin. Dance critic and scholar
Gōda Nario recalls biographically that Bara-iro dansu in fact marked a moment
of ending, or at least of major change, in the intellectual and artistic collaboration between Hijikata and Shibusawa. From this point on, Shibusawa was
more of a friend than a mentor to Hijikata; according to Gōda, Hijikata was
deliberately distancing himself from Shibusawa’s influence. So the element of
departure, of moving away from Shibusawa, takes on an added resonance; the
moment of realization of (and writing of / expressing) this comfort coincides
with a moment of its loss. It is a requiem as well as an homage and a deliberate
farewell.14 In Bara-iro dansu, Hijikata maps a line of flight toward an unknown
realm, a new way of movement (an unexpected use of the feet) that he learned
on the way to—and from—Shibusawa’s house.
A second mentorship in Hijikata’s imaginary world, a crucial connection to
earlier artistic moments that he relies on, is to be found in the life and work of
Antonin Artaud. Artaud, who was briefly affiliated with the surrealist movement
from 1924 to 1926, is both inspiration and impossible / inaccessible standard
for Hijikata. As Hijikata describes it in the brief prose piece entitled “Arutō
no surippa” (Artaud’s Slipper, 1971; translated in full below), any revolution
that artists may attempt is destined to fall short, by comparison with Artaud’s
extreme example:
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Happily, we already know that we were made to live and die in fear of the collapse of
thought. Thanks to whom do we grip this collapse, and by whose hand is it denied
that the appearance of this collapse is an absolute reality? Our lives are grasped [sustained] again and again by a species of mind that turns tolerantly toward death. He
[Artaud] desired theater, or flesh—that derangement which has come to be regarded as
the polar opposite of thought—under a new name, to sustain the unique, unrepeatable
action his physiological scream required. Any calamities or explosive occurrences are
indicted as watered-down revolution before the man who said “and unfortunately, I am
alive.” Yet, beyond that, he needed to grasp the particles of absolute collapse, and inquire about them of uncrowned flesh. The appearance of life is told as the immaculate
miscarriage that it is by the matrimony of trembling matter with the metaphysics of a
dim era, wandering about inside the particles where the fetus foams; that appearance of
life is also a blinding sight from the time when principle, in its infancy, floated and sank
in the sea of life. As thought for whose sake is the horizon line of his full capabilities,
the foremost point of pain, being drawn in the earnest desire for life? Artaud cut open
that foremost point, that horizon line, and risked the thought of flesh in a new trial.
At that moment, he clearly observed the hole that corrodes thought being restored to
its original state as flesh, a cave of dread. We learned from him the strictly condensed
meaning of the thing called tenderness held in reserve, and the revival of the pitiable
brain was pointed out to us from an infinite distance. We must think anew about that
last monologue—was it, in fact, the perfection thought—made by the slipper Artaud
held in his mouth at the moment just before his death.15
Part of what makes Artaud’s example radical for Hijikata is the fact that he does
not cling too closely to life, that he has a strange intimacy with death.16 He is
willing to risk his very life, his flesh, for the sake of an inquiry into the collapse
of thought. Artaud, “cuts open that foremost point [of pain], that horizon line,”
and “wagers the thought of flesh in a new trial” (AS, 258).
Hijikata writes: “Happily, we already know that we are made to live and die
in fear of the collapse of thought. . . . By whose hand is it denied that the appearance of this collapse is an absolute reality?” (AS, 258). Hijikata accuses society of denying the truth, revealed by Artaud, that thought’s collapse is an absolute reality, the only reality that can sustain us. As writers and performers,
Artaud and Hijikata share a conception of the intimate relation between thought
and flesh. They press words to their limits, toward the breakdown of transmissible meaning. “The hole that corrodes thought,” writes Hijikata in reference
to Artaud, is “restored to its original state as flesh, a cave of dread” (AS, 258).
Like Shibusawa’s void that lends flesh to Hijikata’s emptiness, here one hole,
the cave of flesh, supplements and restores another, the hole in thought. Dissolving thought returns it to its originary state of rawness, fragmentation, and
terror. According to Hijikata, when Artaud cut open the horizon line at the
extreme point of pain, he was able to observe thought’s erosion and return to
flesh. Turning inside-out the material of thought in his writings and in his ideas
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of theater, but in a way that took him outside the useful teleologies of “application to an object,” Artaud inspired Hijikata with fundamental conceptions
for his dance. Like the cry of birth of the dancing girl that returns to its unknown “place of return,” thought’s abyss retreats to its primary state as gap,
aperture, or absence within the flesh. Yet the collapse of thought leads to the
realization of affect, of tenderness.
Exploring Artaud’s views of matter and language, Hijikata describes the
magical emergence of life from the meeting of the material and the metaphysical
worlds. For Artaud, metaphysics is not an abstract philosophical concept but
a magical poetry that transcends the stench of human flesh, and that scatters
meaning and utility. Artaud wrote in “La métaphysique et la mise-en-scène”:
To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it
does not ordinarily express: to make use of it in a new, exceptional, and unaccustomed
fashion; to reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock; to divide and distribute
it actively in space; to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner restoring
their power to shatter as well as really to manifest something; to turn against language
and its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, against its trapped-beast
origins; and finally, to consider language as the form of Incantation.17
Language, through intonation and sonority more than meaning, is only one
means of instigating such a poetic metaphysics in the theater: gestures, attitudes, sets, and music can also effect it—“all the ways they can have of making
contact with time and with movement” (69; 46). The act of creation or incantation in language moves toward a shattering that manifests what is otherwise unrepresentable. Language creates the exceptional, the anti-utilitarian, the
magical. And yet language also has a link to flesh at its origins, according to
Artaud, in its “alimentary sources”: it can return upon its collapse to that place
of flesh, that “cave of dread.”
When Hijikata describes what occurs in Artaud’s thought, he revives the
terms of metaphysics:
The appearance of life is told as the immaculate miscarriage that it is by the matrimony
of trembling matter with the metaphysics of a dim era, that wanders about inside of
the particles where the fetus foams; that appearance of life is also a blinding scene from
the time when principle, in its infancy, floated and sank in the sea of life. (AS, 258)
The bubbling, primordial “sea of life,” where principle (thought) is still in its
infancy, contains a metaphysics wandering inside particles “where the fetus
foams.” Metaphysics, in this image, is a fecund birth in matter. But the intertwining of thought and flesh is a miscarriage—it leads to a life that is, in the end,
stillborn. The entry to enlightenment via metaphysics is a “blinding scene,” a
dangerous light that burns visibility (a scene) toward vision’s erasure, and burns
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the flesh toward pain. In Hijikata’s view, Artaud seeks out a place of terror, a
blinding encounter in his theater that provokes a limit-experience. Hijikata also
aspires to enter this space in his dance.
Hijikata hints that Artaud’s openness toward death makes a contribution
to our lives. Thanks to Artaud, we do know and grasp something, if only the
fact that we live (and die) in fear of the collapse of thought. His exploration
of cruelty contains within it a certain generosity, a kindness. For Hijikata, Artaud’s pain is also a giving, a giving over, which enters our lives and sustains
us in the direction of life. Artaud desired to maintain, and to renew through
theater—synonym for flesh and for derangement—a unique event that occurs
in the flash of an instant. He remains far from us, and the tenderness he holds
is not accessible; nonetheless he gave us the possibility of moving toward a
revival, even at risk of the flesh.
The slipper ( pantoufle) Artaud held at the moment of his death became the
final word of his performance, and to Hijikata it may have been the ultimate realization of thought. At the same time, it is the pure attainment of
incompletion and requires us, continually, to think again, to supplement and
reflect. Artaud’s achievement becomes a question; yet, in the very question
his absurd slipper posed, he salvages thought for Hijikata. Although it is not
a question of dancing per se, Artaud’s gesture, here reframed by Hijikata, is
also speech, a silent monologue to which Hijikata continues to listen, moving
toward a new creation. Like Hijikata’s image of “holding the insulator in
his mouth” as he falls from the roof, here Artaud grips the slipper between
his lips: it enters his language, and becomes part of the poetic metaphysics
he evoked in the space outside of logic. This final gesture treads the border
between speech and bodily movement, stepping toward impossibility at the
threshold of death.
Both Hijikata and Artaud aimed to become the “master of ceremonies”
at a sacred ritual form of theater. They worked toward the extreme edge of
gesture and movement, in order to evoke something more primal than meaning, something intimately linked to pain. Both struggled to realize their poetry,
which was also a metaphysics of the flesh and of theater, in the physical world.
The poet Yoshioka Minoru, in his homage to Hijikata, compared the dancer’s
final gesture on his deathbed to that of Artaud:
Hijikata once wrote, “in the end, what kind of last monologue was the slipper Artaud
held in his mouth at the moment before his death?” In a scene that is certainly a match
for this one, Gōda Nario describes the figure of Hijikata Tatsumi on the verge of death:
“From within his clouded consciousness, this gesture: he brought the fingers of both
hands together, rolled the space between them onto his chest like a paper balloon, and
gently placed it under his cheek.”18
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Fig. 17 Hijikata Tatsumi holding a fish between his lips during the final curtain, Nikutai
no hanran. Image by Nakamura Hiroshi, courtesy of Keio University Art Center Hijikata
Tatsumi Archive.
To mark the link with Artaud, the abbreviated, filmed documentary of Hijikata’s performance Nikutai no hanran was afterward overlaid with a recording
of Artaud’s radio broadcast, “Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu.”19
As Hijikata takes his bows and receives piles of roses at his feet, he grasps
not a slipper but the flesh of a large, floppy fish in his mouth. In the sound
version of the film, Artaud’s voice speaks: “What was your purpose, M. Artaud,
in this radio broadcast? . . . To denounce a certain number of officially authorized and acknowledged social filthinesses.”20 The screams and drums of
the radio broadcast (“on ne sait jamais,” or “one never knows,” screams the
voice at the edge of incomprehensibility) are superimposed on the image of
Hijikata’s body being lifted, as if crucified, on ropes over the audience. “First,
this emission [broadcast] of infantile sperm given voluntarily by children with
a view to that artificial insemination of fetuses and that will see the light in a
century or more,” intones Artaud,21 while the flesh of Hijikata is reflected and
fragmented in mirrored panels suspended on strings. Hijikata’s butō, fiercely
excavating a primal space of thought and the cry of the flesh, comes in some
ways as a realization of the legacy of Artaud’s metaphysics of theater.
Around Hijikata and other postwar artists, we see gathering a certain commonality of understanding, even through an engagement with pain and impossibility.
A kind of community of mutual encouragement emerges. At times laced with
cruelty, and with distancings as well as approaches, it nonetheless forms an in-
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telligible language of tenderness, a tissue of citations and intimacies, collaborations and links, that holds a certain relief in the face of such an otherwise
disoriented and disorienting worldview. It initiates its practitioners into a set
of secrets and a matrix of philosophical possibilities not grounded in belief but
in practices and gestures, as in the holding of a strange object between the lips.
These odd movements suggest how an oblique representation of the relation between language and flesh becomes one of the central concerns of postwar performance. Hijikata explores this relationship in his largest and most
ambitious written work, Yameru maihime (Dancing Girl in Pain). A novel-length
book written in playful, leaping prose, Yameru maihime is an oeuvre of poetic and
imaginative autobiography mingled with dreamlike reflection. Hijikata wrote its
fourteen chapters over the course of six years and began to serialize them in
1977. The work tells the story of a grown man and a child who become and
remember one another, mingle as one, and at times separate. It is one of the
major pieces he created after stepping down from the stage in 1973 to devote
himself to directing the dance of others and to writing, although in his own view
he considered these activities a continuation of his dance. “It is absolutely never
made clear what is happening, or who is there,” writes Uno Kuniichi of the
experience of reading this work. He continues:
A stern-featured man of almost fifty, who was the priest of the avant-garde, gives over
every word, thought, and sensation to a single child within him. Perhaps the fact that
events and characters never become clear is because he is trying intently to record excessive quantities and speeds and phases of the “world that leaps” inside this child. . . .
Hijikata taught us that such a thing is possible in words.22
Shattering the representation of lucid and consistent events and characters, Hijikata’s words trace a line of narrative that transcends any attempt to depict
a fixed shape or form. Instead, his words become an experiment or practice
of mingling thought and matter, language and flesh. The narrator’s body dissolves into his surroundings and is continuously transformed, as in the following passage:
But I was carried along in the flow of the colors flowing around me, and the character
of things and the interior of memory did not become my close companions. . . . I became like the pale heroic [samurai] Kurama Tengu under the high heavens, an existence
that no one would understand, and I moved with great care, hemmed in by the air
around me. The kind of body about which one feels certain (yes, this is I) was being
taken away from me. My thoughts, like moving pictures—where among material phenomena were they trying to insert themselves?—were bathed in a waterfall of light
mixed with dust falling from a hole in the roof. This heroic ghost-horseman under
the waterfall of dust stopped doing anything but sucking up the seeds of fingernails,
and I started to resemble the seed of a fingernail.23
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“Carried along in the flow of colors flowing around [him],” the boy narrator
of Hijikata’s story does not clarify the distinction between himself and the surroundings, nor articulate the meanings of things. Like Hijikata’s body in dance,
he is in continual transformation, dyed in the colors of the world. Dream and
reality blend, and the phenomena of the material world mingle with phantoms
and reflected images. Air surrounds the narrator (he is “hemmed in by the air
around [him]”) as his body transforms gradually into the Zorro-like figure of
Kurama Tengu.
Kurama Tengu becomes an existence that no one understands, and melts,
like a film image, into the air and dust around him. He learns to move, carefully,
while unsure of the boundaries of his own body. Fragmented like the moving
picture out of which the goblin emerges, the narrator’s thought tries to insert
itself into material phenomena. Thought bathes in a light mingled with dust
coming through a small hole in the roof, like dust in the light of a projector
that blocks and materializes the phantom film image. The boy himself, transformed or reincarnated—an introverted ghostly hero—starts to suck up the
“seeds of fingernails,” and thus comes to resemble what he sucks on. The
character for fingernails, tsume 爪 differs from melon, uri 瓜 by two strokes;
through Hijikata’s play on resemblances in the writing as well, the seeds belong
not to a melon but to the boy’s own body.24
In Hijikata’s thought, all things come to resemble what they touch, what
they suck, or what they secrete. In Yameru maihime, he performs a textual dance
of reflections of the body, so that, as Uno describes it: “They are words, it is
Japanese from one end to the other, but an event that cannot be encapsulated
as meaning is endlessly drawn up, and only the nameless and infinite bits of
information that were folded within one body are salvaged. . . . The work
becomes at once a poem in praise of butō and an elegy.”25 As an elegy, it encapsulates the perspective of a postscript by Hijikata, who had “given up”
the corporeal act of performing his own dances. In the work, fragments of
dust, thought, and flesh move and gather, but remain outside of the possibility
of full comprehension. Salvaged as fragments and making an “event,” real or
imagined, they refuse containment, like the boy’s dissolving, illusory body.
Thus, Hijikata’s words teach that dance is not simply a matter of performing on stage, but that it takes place in every realm of the imagination, and especially in the breaking rhythms of language. His continuously transforming
images, borrowed from and speaking to—returning to and departing from—
other artists like Takiguchi, Shibusawa, and Artaud, remake these earlier voices
in the form of a scent, a memory trace, or a gesture. In the new experimental
works that he wrote and directed, he constructed a space where language and
the body emerge not as two positive elements, but as two forms of a void,
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each one pierced by the other. In the realization of their interlocking, Hijikata
discovered his own path, the space in which he could think himself anew.
Looking closely at his unusual language, we can argue that Hijikata’s ideas
of the child, of the past, and the natural body on the border between life and
death “cut open the horizon line” (as he claimed for Artaud) and fragment
themselves from the start. The violent, strange, and sinewy twisting that Hijikata
performs in Japanese prose forces a reconceptualization of often-romanticized
ideas of countryside and native place, even as he evokes these images and stages
a longing for them. In critical writings on butō as well as other forms of Japanese postwar performance, the question of “Japaneseness” often appears in
a form strongly infused with essentialist rhetoric. The language of the “Japanese
body,” like the language of furusato (hometown), seems to start with this particular yearning to ground or stabilize a link between particular art practices
and a “Japanese” formation of subjectivity, corporeality, or culture. Reifying
the “home” is a dangerous path to tread (as is reifying or stabilizing “exile” or
nomadism or homelessness as an idealized state of flux as well). At its most
reductive, and easiest to sell, the rhetoric of the Japanese body simply falls into
the closures and clarities that make it very difficult to distinguish from orientalizing nihonjinron—or, to put it another way, it reinforces that already deep tread.
In its binarizing mirror, these performances as presented for export come to
be categorized and fixed in these limiting gestures or frames.
Given Hijikata’s interrelated use of the body and language, one can no
longer take concepts such as childhood, or the past, origins, or hometown at
face value. His work rediscovers terror in the primal scene that has been forgotten or repressed, the origins that he claims secrete us, and are secreted by
us.26 What butō artists sometimes refer to as the “Japanese body,” as metaphor
and leap, signifies a limit that opposes the naturalizing essentialism and orientalism of butō reified, fixed, and shut down as “ever so Japanese.” Instead,
Hijikata takes us through a paradox of the body folded in two, exposed, and
discovering the difficulty of a strange walk that is no longer either Japanese or
not Japanese. Instead, it heads outward in flight, turning in the direction of
Shibusawa’s house or some other (ever deferred and destabilizing) home.
Some might still argue that, by the very fact of calling insistently upon the
“Japanese body”—for example, in the ganimata [bow-legged farmer figure] in
Hijikata’s Tōhoku kabuki—butō’s rhetoric brings with it an inevitable series of
associations. Yet, while he cites particular “types,” Hijikata (as is clear from
the passages in his playful, essayistic prose examined thus far) rearticulates them
in the form of a dance, and thus in a far less deterministic framework. The body
that Hijikata describes continually evacuates itself in the odd relation he enacts
between thought and flesh. If its walk moves strangely, with difficulty, it finds
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its direction only through vacillations and hesitations; the home it seeks (toward
which it heads rather than at which it necessarily arrives) remains deferred and
temporally askew. In Hijikata’s language, the body dances around the idea of
home, and flexibly reinvents its strategic essentialisms, rather than claiming to
have located home itself. As leap and metaphor, it traces a line around the
edges of an irretrievable loss and at its best marks a limit and the terrain of
a foreclosure; it thus opposes, rather than supports, the naturalizing and essentializing tendencies of a butō fixed in its place of “origin.” In that sense, it
is a continual “returning,” or imagination of returning, rather than a completed
return. It should mark a holding—as, for Benjamin, language “holds open”—
rather than a shutting down.
In dialogue with his surrealist elders, and also with the child that he remained in eternal double-exposure (the young boy in the fields or the dancing
girl), Hijikata brings together a multilayered figure: a man and a child, walking
side by side, leaning toward a future and looking toward a return. Hijikata extends his gaze back to an “origin” that does not yet exist; he pushes forward
toward an unknown possibility has already begun to be opened (or that may
already be over, like Zoom’s multiple future deaths in Terayama’s Hyakunen no
kodoku), in many layers of the dance of flesh and thought. Like a cloth package
carried from a distance, his self-estranged body folds into other bodies, constantly changing before one is able to grasp its contents. Then, suddenly, one
may forget the word “avant-garde,” and no longer know whether such acts of
creation are a matter of writing or being written, dancing or being danced.
Whereas this chapter focuses on some particular uses of the ideas of “home”
and “origin,” as they intermingle with conceptions of corporeality and thought
in key moments of Hijikata’s writings, the themes of imaginative returns to
home or other imaginary sites of “origin” pervade postwar experimental arts.
Often, this home, hometown, or point of origin exists under erasure, like the
X that marks the belly-button of the child in Hosoe’s Heso to genbaku, or the
X (batsu) marked spontaneously throughout the urban landscapes of Tanikawa
and Takemitsu’s film. As a structuring metaphor, these origin points are both
temporal and spatial, and are mobilized for a broad range of uses and powers.
As we have seen, while the bomb at times functions as an “origin point” for the
temporal representation of the postwar, many works of postwar experimental
arts disturb rather than reinforce this origin myth. At times, by their irreverent
and playful reiterations, they destabilize its status as a unique and originating
moment. In Terayama’s Hyakunen no kodoku, it is the hole that instead of going
down into the ground, rises up toward the sky, that becomes the symbolic navel
of the village in the play, and the physical center of the five-stage performance.
There, this navel serves as a point of contact or ascent toward the world of the
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dead, however jokingly the dialogue may link it to the angels that fly in the
advertising logo of Morinaga chocolate. In that case, the temporal functions of
memory and language link to the spatial function of the village to make two
kinds of “origin” or “home,” the spatial and the temporal, blend and interlock.
While origination myths in folklore make claims to authenticity and originary
truth in one way, carrying with them their own visions of ghosts and terrors,27
the kind of home that is advocated and referred to by Hijikata and his associates focuses on terrors of another kind. Could there be both stabilizing and
destabilizing, intimate and estranging forms of darkness and abjection (or in
Maurice Blanchot’s words, “two kinds of night”)? Furthermore, and perhaps
most symptomatically and revealingly for postwar arts, how can one kind of
darkness be converted into the other?
In an interview with Shibusawa, Hijikata touches on this problem in an idiosyncratic way. He states that, by 1968, the “underground” arts movements had
“sold out”—having moved from an unstable and volatile state of relationship
with darkness to a stable and conventionalized one. In part, he is making reference to the co-optations in the lead-up to Expo ‘70 in Osaka, which drew
in numerous artists for large-scale works supported by corporate capitalism (an
event discussed further in the next chapter on the photographic journal Provoke,
founded in explicit opposition to the Osaka Expo or banpaku). Hijikata, speaking on a more conceptual / metaphorical plane, asserts: “The fact that the ‘underground’ has become completely vulgarized and conventionalized cannot be
blamed on outside circumstances, but is rather, I think, the fault of the people
participating in it.”28 He describes a search within the body, thus linking the kind
of darkness he affirms to a particularly corporeal delving:
They constantly set up a desert all around themselves and then complain that there is no
water. But before saying that, why not try drinking the water from a well inside your own
flesh? How about how about setting up a stepladder in your own bodies and descending
within? I think they should try plucking and eating the darkness of their own flesh. But
[instead] they all dissolve themselves further and further into the exterior world.29
The kind of delving within the flesh he describes could be a representative figure for the search for home and origin as well, a version of “imagined return.”
It is a kind of nourishment that in the end marks a fleshy, or a darker, internal
consumption, a realm that cannot be sustained without dissolving the boundaries of the subject, turning the subject inside-out. Although Hijikata at first
seems to uphold the distinction between exterior and interior, images like that
of “drinking the water from a well inside your own flesh” confound the edges
of the corporeal subject, to frame the encounter with an inside as if it were an
outside, a circularity of drinking one’s own secretions as a form of artistic expression. The particularly literary resonances in his formulation of this “turn”
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toward a “limit place” that is also “no place” allow for a distinct conceptualization of a moment of imaginative return. It is a turn toward construction
within a space of destruction, positing or aiming toward something that at the
very same moment comes under erasure.
Part of the goal of discussing this idea of return is to reframe and contemplate the prevalent use of essentialisms of Japaneseness and native place
in postwar experimental arts. Why would these artists, freed from (or extracting themselves so forcefully from) many generic constraints of narrative and
performative sense-making continue to resort to these seemingly overworked
terms and tropes of nation and hometown? The more sociologically inclined
might trace the need for a “Japan hook” to allow some of these works—
however resistant to consumption—to be “consumable” or marketable, legible
as a commodity on an international stage. Yet what is striking is that artists
such as Hijikata are continuously thematizing the very issues of consumption,
or even of eating, that the fleshly consumption and darkness frame the very
issue of experimental arts’ need for “light,” visibility, recognizability. Looking
closely at these theoretical writings and self-reflexive essays on artistic practice,
we can see their complex engagement with these issues—through textual as
well as corporeal practices—in which they grapple with and ultimately deviate
from the well-worn articulations of identity, nation, gender, and “home” as inflected through a more stable idea of origins. These experimental formulations
of origins, then, these complex concepts of “return” as a creative (and destructive) turn rather than as a goal, frame a subtle critique of the more superficial
modes of reception of postwar arts and more broadly, a critique of ideologies
of nihonjinron in their multifarious social forms, along with a recognition of the
desires (for intimacy, collectivity, home) that sustain them.
In the next chapter, focusing on photography from 1968 to the early
1970s, we find that the notions of origins and imaginative return come to be
inflected in complex ways through that medium’s own version of the issues
of “presence”—via indexicality—and reiteration. In particular, the “language”
of photography’s relationship to reality ( genjitsu) is a central preoccupation of
the widely influential journal Provoke and its contributors. The following chapter
moves from the originating moment of the “Provoke era” in photography to
the later work of Provoke contributor Moriyama Daidō in his “return” to the
ur-furusato of literature and landscape, his Tōno monogatari (Tales of Tōno), an exhibition at Nikon Salon in 1974 that was published in 1976 as a book. Though
photography changes the terms of the debates around encounter and return,
Provoke-era photographers and theorists write critically about language in its
limits and relation to photography in ways that resonate strongly with Hijikata’s
explorations of language and flesh. The “point of origin” that is Tōno articulates
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a turning of the subject on himself, a piercing of the artist by the act and a rewriting of the ontology of artistic expression. And thus, the X marking the spot
on the landscape takes on a new resonance with issues of photographic mediation and the kind of “editing” or cutting out of fragments of reality that photography performs.
Provoke is a collaborative venture and cooperative attempt both to gather
a special kind of “document” (shiryō) and transform (provoke) the terms upon
which documentation and vision take place. There we see the work of the intersubjective, the dialogue, intimacies depicted and performed in a new way.
The three volumes of Provoke, produced on thin paper with grainy, graphically
blunt photos and brief essays, might look like the scantest of “documentation”
to go on, yet their very form questions a fetishization of the photographic object as commercial / consumable, while explicitly thematizing the urban landscape’s rapid and disorienting transformations.
EIGHT
The Provoke Era:
New Languages of Japanese Photography
This chapter considers key moments in the writings and visual works of the
“golden age” of Japanese photography that has come to be known in critical
writings as the Provoke era. The broader pre-history of this era of photography
encompasses the work of the VIVO group of 1959–61 (including Kawada
Kikuji, Hosoe Eikoh, Narahara Ikkō, Satō Akira, Tanno Akira, and Tōmatsu
Shōmei) as well as journals that concurrently published photography and related essays, such as Gendai no me and Asahi Camera. Yet the range of works and
ideas drawn in and cited explicitly by Provoke alone amount to a large, complex
and shifting discursive terrain, and this chapter opens only a fraction of its
central elements. Provoke came to be known as a key turning point in the early
careers of these young photographers and in postwar Japanese photography
as a whole. Following a discussion of Provoke itself, we move on to look at a
work from the early 1970s by one of the Provoke photographers, Tōno monogatari
by Moriyama Daidō, in order to explore more explicitly the issues of imagined
return and the relationship to “reality” implicit in the works of this time.
Provoke was a seemingly flimsy dōjinshi (coterie magazine) founded in 1968
as a collaborative venture, with photography and writings by photographer
Nakahira Takuma, photographer and critic Taki Kōji, poet and critic Okada
Takahiko, photographer Takanashi Yutaka, and joined in the second issue by
Moriyama Daidō. The magazine folded in 1969 after releasing only three issues.
The following year, a retrospective collection called Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai
o sutero (First Let’s Abolish the World of Apparent Certainty, 1970; hereafter
Mazu tashikarashisa) was published, containing some new writings and interviews as well as pieces the members had published concurrently in journals
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such as Dezain, Doramukan, Hon no techō, and Gendaishi techō.1 The Provoke magazine itself is a rather light and cheap-looking little object that deliberately contests the values both of journalistic photography as document and art photography as aesthetic work.2 It eschews “prettiness,” “beauty,” and commercial
value. Though the individual artists are situated within a network of journals
and ventures that also partake in this very world of commercial exchange, they
reflect on and push against the constraints that this situation constructs for
their work. The journal includes frequent references to and send-ups of the
fashion industry and fashion photography, including most pointedly a citation
of William Klein’s film Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo (1966). It is clear that its aim is
also to challenge the idea of the work of photographic art (on the art market)
as a “valued” subjective expression of the artist.
Provoke has become known for its are-bure-boke works (are, rough; bure, blurred,
because of camera movement; boke, out of focus; as discussed in Chapter 6).
In fact, the proportion of works that fit that description is only a (hefty) fraction.
It also includes many works taken at twilight or at night; many empty or rundown landscapes and messy objects of urban material culture; photos of models
in strange spaces or on runways; and reproductions of other photos. It is somewhat “cinematic” in that each set of works is meant to be seen as a series,
with its own rhythm and structure. The magazine is striking for its use of the
published page in a creative compositional style: often the photos run to the
edge of the page on one side and not on the other, or run across the fold with
something crucial hiding in the center; or more than one photo is juxtaposed
at an unexpected place on the page. This style of composition is at times linked
to the work of Alexey Brodovich of Harper’s Bazaar, who also used asymmetric
and interesting borders and compositions. The photographs, meant to be “consumed” or viewed on the page of a journal rather than as prints in an exhibition,
become increasingly explicit in their graphic emphasis as subsequent issues of
Provoke were issued, so that parts of Provoke 3 look more like prints or (blurry)
silkscreens than photographs, and work with material that is itself already
printed: for example, V-8 juice cans in a store, green bean cans, 7-Up bottles or
Dash and other laundry detergent boxes lined up one after another (Moriyama).
By this last volume, which is printed on rougher and thicker paper than the
others, the issue of commodification of art becomes highly explicit; but from
the start, Provoke raises the issue of photographic reproducibility, and it questions the relation between language, materiality, ideology, and photography.3
This chapter will open a consideration of the four main volumes of Provoke,
the three journals and the retrospective book, in their multiplicity and internal
contrast or contradictions—for one cannot say that Provoke was really unified
as a “movement” per se—while keeping in mind the web of concurrent pub-
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lications of the participating critics and photographers directly invoked by them.
At times the photographers lift or reuse negatives, recropping, flipping, or reexposing a shot, or reframing it in a different order or context from Provoke
to their other works, such as in Nakahira’s Kitaru beki kotoba no tame ni (1970) or
Moriyama’s Shashin yo sayōnara (1972, which he referred to as “my own personal
Provoke”).4 Moriyama discusses this kind of reproduction of the same photographs in different contexts: a few years before Provoke, he was publishing a
series of photographs in photo journals that were viewed by editors or critics
as shomin geinō mono (folk art series) or dochaku mono (indigenous or native series).
“What they called by these names received the 1967 New Photographers’
Award from the Japan Photo Critics’ Association [Nihon shashin hihyōka kyōkai],” says Moriyama in a published interview.
I was not very satisfied with the reason for my winning the award. I wasn’t particularly interested in “common people” [shomin] or old towns [shitamachi] or “indigenous” [dochakuteki] things. Of course, superficially, such things were lined up one after another [in
the result], but that wasn’t [my point] at all. There is a sense in which I wanted to state
that clearly, and so I made the new collection [Nippon gekijō shashinchō, 1968].5
Moriyama’s emphasis on Japan as a theatrical or performative space rather than
on national essence or site of “authenticity” directly contradicts the reception of
this work as “folk art” or native display. Many of the photos here are of actors,
and particularly center on figures from Terayama Shūji’s Tenjō sajiki troupe,
though often shown not on stage but in the streets or in interiors. Nakahira
replies in the same interview: “I had already seen most of the photographs individually, but when they were collected like this, it appeared as if the individual
meanings of each one were blown away, blown off [fukitonde shimatta yō ni].”6
This image of “blowing off” of meaning from the photographs prefigures
the critical writings on Provoke; photographer Miyamoto Ryūji, for example, an
art college student when Provoke was published, recalls: “I first became clearly
conscious of photography as expression at the time when I witnessed the activities of Provoke. . . . Every photograph was inexplicable in words, and words
tore off and flew away from the surfaces of the photographs.”7 This “blowing
off” of meanings, this relation (or non-relation) to language is a crucial element
of these photographs’ appeal. For Nakahira, even familiar subjects and people
in this work of Moriyama’s come to be seen as unfamiliar, in a new way: Nippon
gekijō shashinchō is precisely not the recreation of furusato or a sense of the folk
or the indigenous, but rather, an interrogation of seeing and photography itself,
along with an interrogation of the works’ own relation to language.
Beyond reproduction, or even re-collection, in Mazu tashikarashisa (otherwise known as Provoke 4) the members take these concepts—the idea of “tearing off and blowing away meaning,” and the questioning of artistic subjectivity
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and scales of value—to an extreme. In his March 1970 essay on Provoke, Nakahira wrote of the desire to reach the “degree zero” of language (with Roland
Barthes). In Mazu tashikarashisa, Nakahira, Moriyama, and Taki allude to a certain kind of degree zero of photography, photography’s anonymity, the complete leveling of values they aimed for in Provoke.8 Asking whether it even
matters who presses the shutter, Nakahira and Moriyama allude to a copyright
suit still underway in 1970 over a work Moriyama had published,9 and assert
that the fundamental concept or intention of the work, whether it was finally
achieved in Provoke or not, was a “denial of originality.”10
With the idea of the “anonymity of the real” (a visual turn perhaps on the
French philosophical terms of the “il y a”),11 there is an attempt to get to the
bottom of the act of seeing, which vacillates between the subjective and that
which belongs to no subject. Moriyama states, “I suddenly grasp and put out
[ patto tsukande soto ni dasu] that thing which is most real [riaru] to me. After that
has ended, it no longer matters at all who took the photograph; it’s that kind
of an act.”12 Again, the terms of the “act” appear: the action of photography
becomes a momentary grasp of that which is “most real,” and yet, through that
moment that seems to pass through the subject, something beyond or outside
of individual subjectivity is attained. While Nakahira describes his own practice
as a more closed relationship between himself and the “world” as object, he
sees Moriyama’s practice as one that engages the potentiality of being seen by
another.
Isn’t it true that this problem could be called the systematization of seeing and being
seen? I can’t state it well, but . . . If I were to explain a bit more, your seeing is the
foundation. For example, you saw the special edition newspaper about Kennedy’s assassination blowing in the wind, and if you had taken a picture of it, that would have
been a completion of your act of seeing. “This precisely is the world,” would have been
what you had expressed if you had made it into a photograph. However, instead, it
sinks deep inside you, with yourself standing there included—and that there might have
been someone (else) looking [possibly at you]—and you try to put that out there to the
world as well. Not just yourself seeing, but the premonition that you yourself might be
seen. At that moment, various gazes move around you and come in and are tangled.
And you systematize the whole [aggregation] of these relations of seeing and being seen
that envelop you, and what one could call the “one who systematizes these gazes” becomes that which would replace the photographer.13
Rather than making a statement about the world from the photographer’s point
of view, and thus affirming the subjective and creative stance of the artist, here
the photographer’s role is supplanted. Nakahira sympathetically calls it Moriyama’s “systematizing the whole [aggregation] of these tangled gazes, these relations of seeing and being seen that envelop you.”14 As a positioned reading
that allows for the gaze of others beyond the photographer, and one that also
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encompasses a political / historical event without being able to fix its meaning,
this description by Nakahira of Moriyama’s photographic practice raises key
issues of the relation between images and meaning with which Provoke photographers were struggling in their work of this era.
Fragments of the “Real” and Photography’s Leap
What is the place of language in Provoke? The first issue opens with the following
statement: “Images in themselves are not thought” (eizō wa sore jitai to shite wa
shisō de wa nai). The cover of Provoke holds the subtitle: shisō no tame no chōhatsuteki shiryō (a provocative reference material for [philosophical] thought).15 In
the September 30, 1968 issue of Nihon dokusho shinbun, Nakahira had written that
he opposed the idea that images are a language in themselves, as in the phrase
eizō gengo (image language). “Rather, images haunt / stalk / follow language like
shadows, line [or underpin] language with their materiality, and at times amplify
language.”16 This interest in the materiality of images is echoed in the Provoke
manifesto, signed jointly by Taki, Nakahira, Takanashi, and (under a slash)
Okada Takahiko, and cited here in full:
Images in themselves are not thought. They cannot have the completeness of concepts,
nor are they signs that can be exchanged [commutatively], like words. However, their
non-exchangeable, non-commutative materiality—the reality [ genjitsu] that is cut out
by means of the camera—is on the underside of the world of words, and therefore at
times they can incite [shokuhatsu; touch off, detonate] the world of words and concepts.
At that time, words transcend the versions of themselves that have become fixed concepts; in other words they transform into new thought.
In this present time when words have lost their material basis [busshitsu-teki kiban] or
in other words their reality [riaritī] and are doing nothing but floating / dancing in space,
what we photographers can do is to continue to capture or grasp with our own eyes
the fragments of reality [ genjitsu no danpen] that already existing words cannot possibly
catch, and we must actively present [submit or exhibit, almost as evidence] a certain
number of documents [shiryō] in relation to [in opposition to] words, and in relation
to concepts. It is with this kind of meaning that we, and Provoke, with a certain amount
of embarrassment, add the subtitle “Provocative documents for the sake of thought.”
Notable here is what goes beyond Nakahira’s earlier comment: not only
can “image language” not exist independent of verbal language, but there is a
close relation established between genjitsu—the substantiality of the fragments
captured with the eyes, “cut out” by means of the camera—and the process
of photography, which can then be used to ground, to provoke, to detonate
established concepts, meanings, and ideas locked in the abstraction of language.
The “cut out” image is a key point in terms of the photographic techniques of
recropping and reprinting, and in some way frames a contradiction as well. It is
not the “originality” or “indexicality” of the work of photography that is em-
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phasized, because it could just as well be a recropping, a photo of a photo, or a
reversed negative—nonetheless the eyes “gain a hold” of things—an interest in
“actuality” not in the documentary sense but in some more asymptotically liminal sense, an “encounter,” detonation, or provocation that breaks existing concepts but that also emphasizes a lack of mediation: the eyes themselves “grasp”
reality and then “present” it (the camera’s cut) as a certain kind of evidence.
Nakahira writes, in his response to criticism of his later photographic work,
that in Provoke, by working with monochromes, he had wanted to preserve—
to “cling indecisively” to—the sense of the touch of the hands in the darkroom. The emphasis on night and twilight, on extreme grainy textures, and on
shaken, blurred pictures were “the means to obscure the border between the
object and myself” and also the surreptitious re-entry of the human via the
photographer’s affect. The “evidence” here may be just as much the evident
materiality of the photo itself, in its graphic presence, and the physical process
of its making, as that of the object photographed.17
In the manifesto, then, concepts have “completeness” or totality (zentaisei),
but reality has fragments. Moving on to Taki Kōji’s memorandum at the end
of Provoke 1, there is a further exploration of the collapse of thought (chi 知;
reason, in Hegel’s terms), and there, totality or zentaisei takes on a much more
positive meaning than it had in the manifesto. Taki’s highly philosophical
meditations are a clear attack on the artists who participated in Expo ‘70—
thus placing Provoke squarely in the hanpaku (anti-Expo) camp. In that dense
and philosophical five-part essay, Taki passes through discussions of Italian
architect Ettore Sottsass’ reflection on the Vietnam war, a sustained consideration of the way bourgeois academic “thought” or knowledge (chishiki) becomes a utilitarian and separated sphere, and argues that the goal of art and
intellectual life should be a broader grasp of culture and human life. Resonant
with Sartre’s 1966 lectures in Japan about the role of the engaged intellectual,
Taki’s writing attempts to parse the particularities of Provoke’s political engagement, its aim at and beyond the political by interrogating the subtle relationship between “reality, consciousness, and images.” Thus he is able to talk
about the “tie-up between industry and the university,” and the importation
of U.S. army capital on the one hand, and go on in section 2 to mobilize the
terms of Hegelian dialectics and Hegel’s ideas of nothingness, existence, becoming, and overcoming (Aufheben). He writes of the virtuality and yet concreteness of Allan D’Arcangelo’s pop art images, and critiques Tange Kenzō’s
participation in Expo ‘70.18
One of the rare instances in the essay when Taki describes the Provoke project directly is the following: “When we say Provoke, it does not mean a political
provocation. Politics is clearly among the areas our images can provoke. But
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our provocation aims, beyond and beneath politics, at the sphere of negation
[hitei-teki na ryōiki]. Or we even think that our provocation is possible in such
ways that we ourselves become something utterly negative.” Taki sees the political as part of a deeper and wider task of taking “intellect” (chi) to account.
All this, then, is part of the frame for the shisō (thought) that is brought into
relation with the photographs in the opening of Provoke, though with rare exceptions, his essay does not mention the work of Provoke directly. Instead, he
writes: “When we think that the consciousness that becomes nothingness—
the consciousness that analyzes the self and leaves nothing behind—perhaps
has nothing to do with the structure of the world that exists beyond us, as
our negativity or overcoming, outside of us, we have begun to understand the
‘rationalization’ of human existence that I spoke of before.” The concept of
chi (intellect, knowledge, reason) in Taki’s essay is thus defined as a totalizing
project, an effort toward something that is ultimately beyond the full grasp of
human intellect. Totalizing here takes on this positive meaning, a philosophical
resonance that is a politicized relation to the fact that it is impossible to grasp
via consciousness all aspects of the world including ourselves—that there is
something that both language and consciousness cannot grasp. The “project”
(tōki) that Taki describes (implicitly encompassing Provoke) involves the word
chi, defining it as a “leap,” and as an “attempt to decide how to exist ‘toward’
something, and toward what, within the theorization of what we cannot see”
(‘mienai’ mono no rironka no naka ni, ‘nani ni mukatte’ mizukara o sonzai saseru ka o
kimeyō to suru koto).19 This project, he says, can “save or rehabilitate one concrete person”; he contrasts it to the “wreck of Rimbaud” on the project of
“overcoming nothingness.” To extend this idea for a moment, then, we can
infer that the philosophical grounding of the are-bure-boke has to do with this
“theorization of what we cannot see,” as well as a practice of inquiry into
seeing and the materiality of the photograph. This “theorization of what we
cannot see” is for Taki a decision about a mode of existence or Being in a
philosophical sense, the high stakes of which involve “saving one concrete
human being.” This is a subtle place, where the exteriority of the world, the
parts of the world that consciousness by definition cannot grasp, define the
parameters of a “negativity” that can allow for an opening or leap: “But our
politics aims, beyond or beneath politics, at the sphere of negation.” And in
some way, the kinds of photographic techniques practiced in Provoke thus become an aim to “detonate thought” and move beyond the fixed spheres of
language by attempting, through an emphasis on materiality, to “grasp” that
sphere of negativity beyond consciousness—like Moriyama’s work on the interlocking and tangled gazes—and by combining an emphasis on the material
“traces of the hands” with the sphere of what cannot be seen.
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In Provoke 1, each section by a different photographer opens with the text
of a poem or paragraph of prose, thus perhaps instantiating the movement
between language and photography the manifesto described. Taki opens the
series, alternating between the philosophical register (“existence” [sonzai and
jitsuzon]) and more concrete political visions. Under the title “1968 Summer I,”
he writes:
Even in America there was no large Black riot. In San’ya, it happened only in June,
and then the summer flowed on quietly. However, everywhere there was disquiet [fuon,
turbulence, restlessness]. In the coal mines, where it seemed as if there were hardly
seasons, as if time itself had stopped flowing, existence [sonzai] disclosed its fullness and
its absence. In the universities, even during summer vacation, the students held their
ground on the barricades. In those places one found an existence [jitsuzon] like dark
blood. In the cities, too, strikes occurred in alleyways [roji] that no one would normally
pay attention to, and workers and gangs scuffled and brawled back and forth. The wind
begins to blow. It jolts our spirit, compels a painful awakening.
Along with the implication of continued political engagement, such as the continued strikes and students remaining on the barricades, and the implication
that an awakening of the spirit is taking place, one finds a strong contrast between the era’s “quiet” and its turbulences, the summer season and the political actions. “Existence” discloses its fullness and absence, with the figure of
the “dark blood.” Visually, the images of miners, students, laborers that follow
complement the themes implied by Taki’s text, but are difficult to read as
events: do they represent quiet within turbulence, rest or threatening disorder?
Decentered on the page, the first photo in stark contrast shows the white of
a helmet and a collar, but its center is all blackness. In a second, a face split
across the fold holds open a mouth and we see the tongue, perhaps in a shout
or a cry, and most of all the subject’s distinct white hat. Students and laborers
in moments of leisure or smoking highlight the strange contrast of action and
inaction that is part of “strike time,” this somehow sleepy summer foreshadowing of Taki’s envisioned “painful awakening.” In one of the central photos,
a laborer-subject is fully on display but deeply blurred, with only the apparatus
of the factory or industrial structures around him in focus. The closing photo
shows a figure whose face and gaze are in deep shadow, with only the furrowed brow and nose visible in this close-up shot.
How are these photos to show the relation of language to materiality? Their
“fragments of reality,” in the mode of “evidence,” can be read against the language of the manifesto, the memorandum, the opening paragraph, but they
also push against it, refuse to be fully captioned or to satisfy the gaze of the
viewer and the need to understand the “meaning” of this evidence, these “documents” cut out from “reality.” If “existence” itself is notoriously difficult to
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capture in a photograph, these photos, and the combination created by the
strongly contrasting work of Nakanishi and Nakahira in this same volume,
frame an effort to document, to criticize, to provoke, but also to skirt the
edges of that which cannot be seen. The effort of Provoke itself is not “systematic” or fully reasoned, framing a promise but also trying to grasp that
which “human consciousness,” or even vision, cannot take in. Takanashi’s text
describes his act of “framing out” an empty Coca-Cola bottle and an electric
wire from his calendar shots, two months’ work, with a sun made by a flash
to resemble another season. As the most commercially established of the participating photographers, Takanashi here reflects on his photographic work
within this world of artifice. He then shows the viewers a range of worlds,
from a fashion runway to an “empty” seaside, from a roadside sign of a festival
celebrating Emperor Meiji’s temporary abode to a series of billboards flashing
across a moving landscape. A hip urban couple walks in the middle of the
street, holding a doll between them across the magazine’s fold. Nakanishi’s
photos vacillate between the spontaneous and the staged, adding their visual
range and gentle gray tones to Provoke’s efforts to “level” photographic value,
and showing the more porous boundaries between the commercial world and
visual tropes and the “reality” captured by the camera—showing how the
commercial world in some ways is already inscribed in that “reality,” that
landscape, so that the effort of Provoke becomes not merely to overcome the
“commercial” (as artifice, illusion) in favor of the “real,” but to interrogate the
deep relationship between the two.
Nakahira’s poetic text in the third section speaks of summer “dribbling
down slowly like a thick curtain” and finally stopping moving altogether. For
consciousness to transcend its current (static) state it may well take many
centuries: “No need to hurry. Nothing to do but tolerate it, clasp it to my
breast like a nesting embryo.” Here, too, appears the dialectic of movement
and stasis, a strong contrast with the kinds of calls to action one might imagine
for a politically “engaged” project. In questioning photography itself, with that
medium’s inherent possibility of creating motion in stasis, stasis in motion,
Nakahira figures the congealed state of consciousness in the odd verbal image
of a congested amaranth plant (ukketsu shita hageitō); yet an eventual movement
seems to be implied in the “nesting embryo,” a sign of a (slower) hope. Nakahira’s images of foreshortened trolley lines and buses, his photographs’ interest in infrastructure—night trucks and vehicles imply the possibility of movement—are nonetheless mostly captured in a static state, parked and unmoving.
Does a grainy high-angle image of two young women on the beach, cropped
at the foreheads and knees, represent some hope of change, a certain beauty,
or rather more unfocused stasis and pressure of that summer “stuck fast to
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the ground”? The works of Provoke presented here aim at the level of consciousness that would be required to “unstick” that congealed summer: the
slow-moving, long haul, the “leap” beyond the known, the restlessness underlying quiet.
Reading the images of Provoke alongside its language in this network of philosophical reflections, one gains a hold on the crucial place of the “fragment of
reality” and the movement created by the juxtaposition of these images. How
can one photograph “existence” ( jitsuzon), these photographers seem to ask—
the existence that one read about in the works of Sartre, or read through Taki’s
crucial dialectic of totality and fragmentation, in the interlocking worlds of
design, photography, and political discourse? How can the attack on bourgeois
ideology, as represented in the opposition to Expo ’70 and in the attack on the
Japan Advertising Artists Club ( JAAC; Nihon senden bijutsukai, or Nissenbi),20
come into dialogue with the Hegelian “Moment”? What does it mean, via
photographic “fragments” and reiterations, to “grasp the opportunity [Moment,
keiki] in the direction of totality, wholeness [zentaisei]”? There is a tendency
to read the photographs too simply—for what they show, for their stylistic
characteristics and affinities with American photography—that causes one to
miss the complex of issues raised when one crosses “what one cannot see”
with “what one cannot say.” 21 Yet it is this very gap, this very leap Provoke takes
that both opens the way for later photography, and at the same time makes
it hard for the journal to do anything so teleological as “achieve or accomplish
its stated intentions.”
In fact, later, Nakahira and others would despair of the incapacity of Provoke
to realize the aims it had set for itself. Taki would both lament and celebrate
the lack of unity that may have complicated the achievement of these aims.
Nakahira and Moriyama at different points would write of the need to start
again from the beginning. Still, Provoke formed a pivot point in postwar Japanese
photography as a whole.22 Nakahira lamented that the “rough and out-of-focus
images” became a “decoration,” a fashion or style, that lost the power of its
original stakes, the Godardian “reality as a wager” that is transformed by the fact
that one was witnessing it. All of the participants continued to declare the need
for further experiment while repeatedly describing such experiments as a matter
of process or mindset, and challenging their fashionable reception in the art
market or their reification into a fixed style. By returning to the “messy” philosophical and photographic deliberations of Provoke itself, one begins to gain
a sense of the complex and multifaceted interrogation these artists pursued into
the language of photography, and to see the web of fraught, mutually provocative relationships between critics and photographers, and between “thought”
and images there.
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Landscape, Replication, Erasure: Tōno monogatari
In 1972, prominent postwar photographer Moriyama Daidō took this black
and white photograph of Nagano cherry blossoms in full bloom. He held the
camera at a diagonal so that the image of the blossoms lurches off-kilter, like
the dilapidated wooden houses and shack in the background. The photograph
thus cites one of the most frequently essentialized of visual moments, the
cherry blossoms in full bloom—overblown symbol of Japanese aesthetics, of
Japanese cultural uniqueness—and turns it into a site of the uncanny reproduction of reproduction itself. Seen too many times, relentlessly reproduced
in the history of Japanese art and commercial tourist photography, the fetishized beauty of rural Japan in the scene of sakura viewing turns into a darker,
more ghostly, more terrifying world. A resolutely unattractive child—reminiscent of the photographs of Diane Arbus—seems to stumble forward on this
lurching landscape, his arms out to the side awkwardly. A bottle litters the
ground, making the beauty of the cherry petals into perhaps yet another form
of litter, white dirt against the dark earth.
Having worked as an assistant to Hosoe in the closing months of the VIVO
group, Moriyama later broke out on his own. He became noted for his grainy,
documentary-style photographs of dirty city streets, accidents, flashy advertising
posters, and the greased faces of transvestites in the Shinjuku demimonde. With
unromantic and unflinching clarity, he also photographed conventional-looking
couples crossing the streets of newly built suburban “bed-towns.” He mingled
with Terayama’s troupe, photographing them extensively in what was to become Nippon gekijō shashinchō, discussed above. Moriyama had thus earned his
place in the photographic world through his incisive critique of postwar urban
life in Japan. Why did he then turn, in the early 1970s, to what might almost
look like a utopian nativism in the exploration of rural Japan? Why, in those
years following his cherry blossom photos in Nagano, did he create the series
of cinematic stills, some displayed with their “Kodak Safety Film” contact sheet
leader still visible, at the fetishized ur-site of nativism, Tōno itself? Many critics
received his series, Tōno monogatari (1974, Nikon Salon), as a conservative effort
on his part—in alignment with the reading as so-called dochaku mono of some of
his earlier work—but out of kilter with the radical provocations of his photographs of the urban landscape.
By titling his work Tōno monogatari, after Yanagita’s much celebrated series
of fragmentary tales, Moriyama addresses questions surrounding reality, documentary, fact, and essentialized Japan. Invoking the face of modernity already
present in Yanagita’s popular work, Moriyama gives these questions a further,
photographic twist.23 Yanagita’s tales and the discipline of ethnography, in part
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Fig. 18a–b Moriyama Daidō, Cherry blossoms, Nagano, 1972. By permission of the
artist.
via the work of Origuchi Shinobu, had gained a new popularity (a “boom” status)
in the early 1970s. As we have seen, Tōhoku, Tōno, and other rural areas in
northeastern Japan were sites of a projected longing that increasingly pervaded
intellectual and artistic circles as well as commercial campaigns in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.24 As we have seen, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Tōhoku kabuki, including
the series “Shiki no tame no nijūnana-ban” (27 Nights for Four Seasons) and
“Shizuka na ie” (Quiet House), as well as his unfinished series Tōhoku kabuki
keikaku (Tōhoku Kabuki Project), also invoked this “imaginary world” of Tōhoku, a world parallel to the artist’s memories of childhood, as a central inspirational site.25 Yet his Tōhoku holds a liminal status, between fantasy and
reality; he often said that “Tōhoku is everywhere.” Kurihara Nanako describes
Hijikata’s Tōhoku as a place where life and death exist side by side; in his work,
the presence of death brings the brilliance of life into strong relief.26
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Similarly, and in spite of the continual references to photography’s indexicality, Moriyama’s Tōno is a place as much fantastical as real. Indeed, it is only
strange that he chooses or feels the need to travel physically to the ‘real’ site
of Tōno in order to photograph it. In the essay accompanying the published
version of this photo exhibition, Moriyama claims that the Tōno he discovered
finally exceeded his expectations and made him feel as if he himself, or his
photographic practice, were inadequate to the site. Instead of failing to live up
to its over-invested image, and thus becoming the site of the disillusion (with
the place) on the part of the self-contained subject, Tōno for Moriyama instead
provoked an introspective shattering of the subject’s self-presence in the face of
the all-too-full and overdetermined originary “site.”27
“There is no furusato [hometown] that we can really go home to,” Moriyama
writes. Invoking the myth of furusato, which was growing rapidly as a commercial tourist venture at the time of his writing (as Nakahira also articulated
above) Moriyama reframes the image of the hometown as a kind of “desire for
desire itself, a love for love itself.” The furusato is thus the emblem of a desire
that persists without an object. Or to think of it from another angle, as he goes
on to describe, the very presence of an object like the site of Tōno reminds one
of the non-self-presence of the desiring subject.
Moriyama begins with the realm of the phantasmatic and the discursive,
what he calls the kodawari (node of obsession) of Tōno, which crosses the cultural with the personal. In shifting to the mode of travel, to the “actuality” of
a physical place, Moriyama finds the beauty and power of its farmlands, elderly
women, kimono and wooden houses, its rice fields and mountains and festivals
and even its farm trucks to be “just as in the cliché,” altogether too “right,”
as he comes face to face with this overdetermined place of presence. Like the
struggle with the overdetermined images of the mushroom cloud by experimental filmmakers, Moriyama struggles to confront these spaces already infused with the framing that has made it impossible to “see” them except within
these fetishized frameworks. As he writes: “After all, it had to be Tōno” ( yahari
Tōno).28 The irony of fate or destiny rings in the phrase: Moriyama discovers
that the intimacies of the subject, of his own personal and intricate myths, had
at their inner core, at the place of their most personal cathexes, something
as common and culturally overdrawn as this ur-site of Japanese premodernity
and cultural authenticity. Obedient to this demand, Moriyama photographs the
famous festival of shishi odori (dance of the deer), but alongside it, he photographs the crude drawings in the museum display about Tōno’s past, and the
worn posters for local Tōhoku song performances.
Tōhoku has entered a discursive space of eternal repetition, a mise en abîme
of its own continual reproduction and self-representation. This mise en abîme
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and the materiality of these reproductions take place not only on the level of
public myth. The public phantasm enters the presumed private space of Moriyama’s childhood memories. He recalls, as a child, loving maps, loving their
dots, lines, signs, and colors. He describes his childhood appreciation for the
wonders of the train schedule. “Ever since I was small, I already had a strong
yearning for the ‘not here, but somewhere else’ ” (144). In his casual, anecdotal
essay, Moriyama relates a vision of a childhood precisely not as a site of imagined fullness on which the present can project its longing, but rather as a site
that is itself already full of longing for “something else,” for “somewhere else.”
Like the years of the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of the present day,
childhood and Tōno have become sites of overdetermined idealization. Yet
even as Moriyama engages with conventional associations by talking about his
kodawari for / on Tōno, returning to childhood as the origin of this obsession,
in a complex and vacillating way, layer by layer, he takes this illusion apart.
As in Provoke, where the camera provides a means to disturb and instill restlessness into the otherwise “static” consciousness, the photographic apparatus
in Tōno monogatari is the instance and the catalyst for such a dismantling. Like
other artists who became famous for their work in the 1960s and 1970s, Moriyama cites the dominant Tōhoku tropes of his day. He describes his chance
encounter with Yanagita’s work. He evokes the nearby Iwate prefecture and its
associations with the poetry of Miyazawa Kenji. Like Terayama, who quotes
Miyazawa’s poem “Ame ni mo makezu” in Nuhikun and riffs on Miyazawa’s
Ginga tetsudō no yoru, Moriyama invokes the earlier author’s fairy tale images of
the idealized land Ihatov as part of the mediated world of images that layer his
vision. Such images structure the preformed fantasy of Tōno that had created
the early impetus for his travel, and for his Tōno monogatari project itself.
In alignment with Terayama’s idealization of presence, Moriyama at times
elaborates a narrative complicit with the key tropes of the idealized Tōno image.
Yet the camera seems to refuse to let him rest in that place of complicity.
It forces him (and the viewer) to struggle “against the grain” with the fantasies
and myths that he reshapes from the broader discursive field of culture. His
vivid metaphors reverse the order of events. Real places he has visited, he writes,
rather than entering his eyes from the exterior, seem to pass through his memory or spill out of his eyes as if the eyes were holes in a sieve. If the idea of Tōno
was always already the site of the “mixing of reality and imagining, of the factual
and the lyrical,” the presence of the camera creates a certain “unfreedom.”
Without the camera, he writes, perhaps he could have “gotten sticky with the
cloying sentimentality of how perfectly furusato it all was.” But with the camera
there, “no matter how wonderfully I wanted to make everything look in my
photos, or how much I wanted to stay with that sticky, too-sweet feeling, in
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the end this certain unfreedom / constraint got stronger and rivaled with my
image. The feeling and the reality were staring each other down” (146).
By envisioning the loss of sentimental investment, acting out the rivalry between the “actual” and the overwhelming mediation of the trope, Moriyama
leads toward a kind of dramatic rupture in the myth of Tōno. He reveals, in
his images of torn posters, and of pornographic images on the walls of the
“sacred” town, and even in the lumpy reality of the mountains themselves taken
in dark grays and black and whites, with their grainy textured surfaces, how
this world of Tōno is one more layer in the series of fantasies of national and
cultural origins. If his description of his travel experience in Tōno focuses on
the inadequacy of the subject and of the photographic practice in the face of
the “presence” of the place, in the photographs themselves one might say
that Tōno becomes a site where the emptiness of the fairy tale comes to light.
But more accurately, one might rather describe it as the site where the even
more powerful structures—of fantasy, ideology, and artistic image—confront
the everyday strangeness of an actual place. When Moriyama writes of his childhood days of map-gazing, he cites Camus’ dictum that “however much you
trace the map with your finger in the end the world does not appear” (145).
Moriyama’s world structures itself like Baudrillard’s simulacrum: when you go
to the site represented by the map, the place performs a disorienting Disneyland citation of itself. If Moriyama invokes the rhetoric of “actuality” versus
“lyricism,” his photographs engage in the work of revealing a simulacrum. At
the same time, the opposition between the “real” and the “fantasy” (simulacrum)
does not finally hold; the fantasy itself, embodied in the material presence of
the maps and train schedules, comes to bring to him a certain, other kind of
“reality” (riaritī, 145).
Yet, this simulacrum is not only that of Tōno but, by extension, Tokyo as
well. Through his meditations on the process of participating in (and critiquing)
the imaginary of Tōno, Moriyama shows how this seemingly discrete region is
also determined by the imaginary of the capital / cosmopolitan space. Moriyama
is frank about the circumstances that brought him to photographing Tōno. It
was not just the inner imperative but also the overt desire for a solo exhibition.
Before this, he writes, he had never before had a major exhibition devoted solely
to his own work (although there is mention elsewhere of one solo exhibition
in 1970). His mentor Hosoe opened the opportunity for him to do a solo show
at the Nikon Salon with which Hosoe was closely involved. This opportunity,
proposed (according to Moriyama’s description) in proper early 1970s fashion
over drinks on a late-night chance encounter, came at a moment when Moriyama was, he recounts, feeling deep frustration about the distance between
his desired outcomes for his creativity and their realization in his series entitled
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“Chijō” (Above Ground) in the Asahi Camera magazine. He writes that he had
been unable to take any photos at all for some time. If we are to believe his
self-description, how is it that Tōno provided the possibility of reopening for
a blocked artist? More crucially, what does this Tōno reveal about what had
made photography impossible before?
As the site of the face-off of image / phantasm / projection with the actuality
of a place, Tōno echoes the dilemma Moriyama voices for his photographic
work with Asahi—that earlier work he describes also as the site of a contrast
or showdown between phantasm and “actuality.” Perhaps phantasm becomes
actuality and actuality becomes imbued with fantasy; but by describing it as a
showdown, a face-off, or a stare-down, Moriyama emphasizes both the visuality
and the violence in this encounter. On the cover of Tōno monogatari, the published collection of photos from the exhibition, a grainy modernistic geometry
of the photo’s shutter or iris frames and distances the romantic beauty of a
landscape reflected in a foreshortened train window. When Moriyama describes
his experience of Tōno as living up perfectly to its legend, he says that he sensed
in that landscape a kind of yoyū (confidence, freedom of time and space, relaxed
temporality) of rural life.
Yet in the collection itself, alongside images that might evoke the “authenticities” of Tōno everyday life, or bring to mind such rural yoyū, there is the
eerie face of a woman on an advertising billboard ( gijutsu no mise; literally, “shop
of artifices”; an ad for a beauty shop) that reminds the viewer, as in Tokyo,
of the commodification of gender, and by extension the forms of beauty not
as nature or aura but as artifice. This process of unmooring images from their
naturalized and auratic contexts (an image of another image, framed starkly
within an empty street landscape whose zebra stripes create yet another layered frame) takes place also through Moriyama’s juxtapositions—indeed, the
juxtapositions and double-print structure of the series are some of the features
most noted by viewers and critics. Next to the crushed and gathered agricultural
product (possibly rice), a piece of nature that could be aestheticized as part
of the authentic farming culture of Tōno, Moriyama places a horror porn film
advertisement with its dates of availability proclaimed in simple handwritten letters: “From the 11th to the 13th, Secret Record of a Bizarre Sex Crime—Too
Cruel! Touch a woman’s body! Real Sex, Scandalous [imawashii] Confessions!”
The screaming woman with breasts exposed in the photographed poster is
shadowed and overwhelmed by a dark pair of eyes staring out at the viewer.
Another small-scale woman with paint splatters hiding her genitals flies above
in the poster’s abstract space. The image (or image of an image) is itself offkilter, recalling many of the popular culture and found image citations in Mori-
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Fig. 19a–b Beauty shop sign and poster on a wall, Tōno monogatari. By permission of the
artist.
yama’s Tokyo work, like his famous image of a poster of Brigitte Bardot leaning
on a motorcycle.29 Yet in this case, the ad is plastered against a beautiful wooden
wall from what could be one of Tōno’s perfect furusato buildings, a traditional
farmhouse. Placed in his collection opposite the roiling hay or rice grasses,
the poster draws the eye into its words and into its horrors—the odd kinds
of leisure acts that also “grow” in the soil of contemporary Tōno.
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Here Tōno is no longer “the Tibet of Japan,” as, Moriyama reminds us,
it was once called. The rice grasses themselves, next to the exposed and “confessing” female body that seems to be raped by a diagonally monstrous phallic
form, come to evoke pubic hair or some uncanny corporeality, a ghostly movement. Both images, in black and white and gray, and especially through the
denaturalized grays of the grasses, bring to mind nothing if not a certain fear,
a primal terror—which is itself, however, one must recall, part and parcel of
Tōno’s myth.
While Yanagita’s ghostly tales as narrated by disembodied mechanical voices
in the Tōno Museum attempted to elicit a tamed or contained terror, Moriyama’s photographs could be read as refusing such polite beauty, though they
also later can come to be seen as participating in the urban 1970s photographic
discourse of the grainy “real.” The grain seems to give all the more physical
and explicit meaning to the crime, the terrors, and voyeuristic pleasures of the
visitor to Tōno. Does the visitor to Tōno “rape the landscape and then confess”? Ivy has written of the “internal colonialism” of Tōno’s rhetoric: Tōno’s
authentic folkways as the site of origin of the ethnographic discipline parallel
the rise of colonial ethnographic activity in prewar Taiwan.30 Here, Moriyama
seems to kiss and tell. Is there something sinister in the very use of Tōno for
the furthering of his photographic ambitions?
“Is this good enough?” (kore de ii no ka), his essay asks (143). Repeatedly
Moriyama uses the term yabai [bad / embarrassing / distasteful] for his feeling
when visiting Tōno. Yabai refers not so much to the object—which retains its
adequacy and “presence” in his eyes, its feeling of emotional yoyū (leeway, spaciousness) in its daily life and its classic odayakasa (calm, quiet, pleasantness)—
but to the feeling it gave him about himself. “Hey, you, is this really good enough?”
(hontō ni omae kore de ii no kai?): he describes the feeling to himself as if to another, acknowledging the impossibility of the adequacy of his visit, his practice,
when encountering the place. There is something distasteful to himself, perhaps—but admittedly and self-reflexively so—in his attempt to capture this
image of Tōno, a place ever so always-already done and captured in spectacularizing images. Moriyama’s self-critique predicts and maps the forms of the criticism his work would receive. Photographing it, Moriyama suggests, comes out
of a space of paralysis, even of pain.
The children in his Tōno landscape are off-kilter, jumping in the air or
crouching to the ground, and they are alone. In fact, we find no sense here of
idealized communitarian life, of grandparents passing down “authentic Japanese” tales from long ago. Instead, the children are solitary, left behind, left
alone, smiling eerily in a dark, abandoned playground. One, with a jack-olantern’s elfin face, holds one foot raised in a pained look, appearing to ap-
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proach an edge of madness. A girl-child squats alone in the dried gray grass,
her face invisible. While there are images also of dancing and festivals, these
photographs of children stand out, their gray faces like the lined-up masks of
Tōno’s folklore, grimacing, the specter of commodification never far off. The
shop windows at night show the lonely figure of a mannequin beside suits, every
bit as “real” as the shadowed figures or the landscape’s trees; old fashioned
Seiko clocks flash out an aging modernity and yesterday’s high-tech under the
reflecting glare of neon. Even Moriyama’s cloud photos, Constable-like in their
framing of clouds alone in the sky, take on an eerie air in black and white, fading
into darkness below, connoting not only “sublime” skies, but also the denatured
nature of this series of reflections of Tōno.
The meanings of these Tōno photographs link to the rest of Moriyama’s
oeuvre, and to the postwar artistic milieu in which he took part: the mediations
of the urban grain, the specificities of a postwar politics of reflection. At times,
Moriyama cites the language of Tōno’s fūdo (climate or culture). This discourse,
as he is aware, can easily slip into romanticization, into a further reinforcement
of the myths of Japanese cultural authenticity that Provoke artists would otherwise seek to undermine. Yet when Moriyama employs these terms in his description, or in the images of the known festivals and masks, his emphasis on
the self-critical rhetoric of the commodity and his own reflection on the exploitative sensation of taking these photographs enacts a slippage. He thereby
introduces an alternate approach through the specific relationship between explicitly reproduced images and the now-denaturalized representations of nature
that nonetheless proclaim their indexicality in the physical site of Tōno.
Looking at Moriyama’s earlier Nippon gekijō shashinchō, one can already see
this emphasis on the performativity of the photograph: the forlorn performer
from the Tenjō sajiki troupe playing cards, the strips of the photographer’s
negatives hanging against the window in a tangle of wires and ropes, the crossdressing actor with the plastic of his artificial breast exposed.31 Moriyama’s Tōno
Monogatari weaves its own updated 1972 tale of what was imagined to be “the
place that time forgot.” Steeped in time, Moriyama’s Tōno emphasizes the
present and also reveals its awareness of the moment when the myth of Tōno
grew and exploded in the folklore boom of his era. Like the photographs of
Nippon gekijō shashinchō, this Tōno insists on pressing our awareness to the aspect
of performance, of theatricality, and also to the function of the frame. Through
this insistent exposure, the photographs invoke the specific and elusive affect of
their performative moment, revealing themselves in the truck’s puff of smoke,
in the posed beauty shop ad poster framed against an empty street, in the garish
zebra stripes of a crosswalk without cars or pedestrians. One might say they
“show off” for the viewer, reveal their crimes to us: a cabbage head grows ob-
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199
scene in scale opposite an empty pair of futons, perhaps anticipating the shot in
Hasegawa Kazuhiko’s film Seishun no satsujinsha (Murderous Youth, 1976) where
the decapitated head is replaced by a quick cut to a cabbage rolling.32
In this Tōno, in a way that might call to mind moments in Terayama’s Kegawa no Mari, nature can no longer be constructed easily even as a second
nature in relation to a simple or traditional culture. Moriyama evokes a hall of
mirrors where nature becomes a second and third and even fourth degree of
dizzying reflections and revised expectations. His rhetoric in the essay mimics
this continual return, this unanswerable question: did Tōno satisfy or not? Is
this exhibition adequate to itself? To the desire it provokes? The self-reflexivity
of the Tōno occasion forces the photographer to question; the most stable,
assured answers are citations from the already existing discursive matrix of
Tōno images. Yet “how rude,” writes Moriyama of this romanticization, “to
the real people of Tōno, with their real present problems and dilemmas.” The
need for a space in which to dream, a space of projection, butts up against the
tenuous project of a non-exploitative voyeurism in the space of an “other.”
The eyes on the poster gaze out at the photograph’s viewers; and the “Kodak
Safety Film” with its reassuringly artistic, self-reflexive sprockets offers only an
illusion of safety from this danger of voyeuristic consumption.
If there is any guarantee of safety, perhaps it is only in the very grayness of
the landscapes, the grainy quality of the photographs: their dotted dreariness
attempts, at least, to counter the hazards of “beauty,” the romance of furusato.
Unless, that is, the very terrors and eeriness, the very uncanny is itself the sign
of the successful myth of Tōno leaving its mark on even these photographs
that attempt to confront those myths. “Was it a ‘hana ichi monme’ [a children’s
game that involves advancing and retreating lines of children, evokes a potentially endless game of back and forth, perhaps like De Man’s tropic “whirligig”]
of looking for furusato? . . . Well, if you start thinking that, there’s no end to
it,” writes Moriyama.<CITATION?> At some point, necessity compels one
to look in another direction. The restlessness of the search is itself perhaps
the quality that reveals this project as a product of its very specific cultural and
artistic milieu.
Moriyama’s choices of object and this project as a whole thus still participate,
in a new way, in the leveling of values he had described for the Provoke project
with Nakahira: “To state things in an extreme way, everything before my eyes—
a cigarette or match, a television or film screen, a photo by someone else, a
photo taken by me—all have equivalent value. They are all reality [ genjitsu] for
me.”33 Yet this leveling of values also aims for another kind of destruction, a
destructive impulse toward photography that extends toward reality itself:
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Why is it that without going through the “self,” photography can’t realize itself as photography? I’ve had naïve but intense doubts about that. Sometime I want to take that
photography wrapped in brilliance and make it totally vulgar. When someone looks at
pornographic photos, it doesn’t matter at all who took the photograph. The person
looking is only interested in what is being shown, how they are doing it. For once, I
want to abase photography to that level, and then try to grasp what it is that remains
nonetheless.34
This mode, then, partakes of the aim to move toward an anonymity, that
“anonymous real” that is also a breaking of taboos, a pushing against market
values, while reflecting on an intensity of visual desire. It is also an expression
of the photographer’s frustration, a destructive desire to ruin photography itself.
Like Nakahira’s vision of the desire that, once frustrated, “swiftly turns to face
reality” and through that process, becomes a force of revolution, Moriyama’s
aspiration toward the pornographer’s anonymity and his question—what kind
of “reality” can be grasped after passage of through the photographer’s “self”
is suspended—reframes Taki’s urging toward the “leap” beyond “human consciousness,” the grasp of the thing, however fragmentary, that might incite, provoke, or detonate the world of words and concepts, to touch off the world of
“thought” in the direction of terrains unknown.
CONCLUSION
Counterfeit Coins/Phantasms
As promissory notes for the real—counterfeit ones—these signifiers become
phantasmatic occasions for a return, a return to that which must be foreclosed
in order for symbolization to occur, a return to a conjectured jouissance which
cannot be named or described within language precisely because language itself
is based on its foreclosure.
—Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter
Post-shingeki performance, at both its center and its margins, often offers
promissory notes for a return. Yet, rather than position itself in terms of a
direct or viable political signifier, at times it suggests the counterfeit: reflecting,
fascinated, on the existence of such “counterfeit coins.” It remains fascinated
by the failure of language that is the threatened consequence of the referent’s
recovery. In this sense, experimental theater and postwar artistic movements
might be read as structurally and metaphorically linked to the process of signification itself. They invite misreading: in the return to the real or concrete;
to nature; to the site of that phantasm known as the “Japanese body”; as part
of the politically loaded and historically laden term “Japan”; or those other odd
coins—the “Orient,” or more intimately, “home.” The locus of native Japanese tradition is as much a counterfeit coin for the 1960s, passed as a promissory note, as it is a containment of that which is tactically useful for the
functioning of specific negations: the refusal of a particular, encroaching version of the “West” (America, Europe); of a shingeki modern “realist” theater;
and of the artist-centered expressive “work.” Post-shingeki and experimental
works of the 1960s and 1970s offer a displacement into a multitude of signi-
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202
fiers that deliberately do not congeal, except perhaps momentarily, as the site
of a search for that which (still) cannot be accessed.
The idea of the primary prohibition is no accident here, nor is the search to
re-enter the navel, as in Hosoe’s film, the site of an irreparably severed connection with origins. This search is itself the flesh’s dance: the delving of the fingers,
the drawing out of the signifying line from the child’s belly. Terror (and perhaps
jazz’s jouissance?) arises in the moment of realization that the promissory note—
while still a subject of exchange, still holding or hinting at a certain use value in
political terms—is also, simultaneously, counterfeit. Nonetheless, one can play
at and reflect on the site of the loss of value; this is the moment when artists
of the 1960s and 1970s asked if, through that realization, the act of playing and
dwelling in the loss could itself become an opening to novel possibilities.
Butō appeals to a transcendent return and also, at other moments, acknowledges the impossibility of such a return. In this sense, the performance of butō
has the structure of a text, with its impossible invocation of and refusal of
the real. The invocation of essence or transcendence in the language of postwar Japanese performance should be understood in the context of the already
multiple, displaced structures for which, in different ways, theater and dance,
film and photography, can be read as paradigmatic figures. In film, such a displacement would arise in the phantasmatic structure of the montage’s promise
of a linking together, even while it brings a rupture that cannot be rejoined.
Turning again to the scene of reentering the navel in Hosoe’s film, in place
of Luis Buñuel’s split eye appears the cancelled, X’ed out navel. A marking
in writing, like the scratches on the chest, the X cancels out an origin point
or referentiality of the flesh, while at the same time yielding to our vision the
written, inscribed, black traces of this very cancellation. The denaturalization
of the images—the jazz, the black smoke, the black X inscribed in the flesh—
refuses nakedness, childhood, and light of the sun as images of idealized purity. (Light, hikari, is placed alongside the rhyming word for anger, ikari, in the
opening poem.)
Oh, that
is not the sound of the waves
It is the eternity [mukyūdo]
of the mother ocean [haha naru umi ]
What comes from
That hometown [native place] of life
Is not “rage” [ikari ]
But rather, children glistening with light [hikari ]
We were born
cannot return
We came
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into the light
shot out suddenly
to live
more violently [hageshiku] than anyone
Directly under the open sky
Standing naked
(In) the sun
The smallest
Child
As these words suggest, the child of Heso to genbaku is no Wordsworthian
child—or if it is, it is a child of echo and delay, of missed and unreturnable
time (belatedness / Nachträglichkeit )—“redoubled and redoubled.”1 The child
multiplies and the children’s flesh rises in piles. It is already too late to see
these children in piles and think of an innocent monument to an unmediated
origin or “native place of life.” The native place is already overdetermined—
monumentalized or targeted (with the X and with the tiny penis mirroring the
bump in the mountain) and eroticized. Jouissance comes as a site of longing, conjecture, and imagining—or as performance. The term genbaku (A-bomb) itself
presents an explosion of primary particles like the explosion of origins this film
enacts. By juxtaposing heso (navel) with genbaku (primary particle explosion, or
simply explosion in the original version), the title thus brings out the primal gen
of origins and submits it to critique.
Where else do we see such fantasies, such phantasms of a return? How
can we distinguish the intentional indication of an unproblematic site of return
(go here, turn this way; this way to the source of life) from the otherwise
generative and layered indicators of foreclosure, contradiction, and loss? How,
with enigmatic Xs marking our targets, can we tell if we are dealing with a
self-aware or an intentionally deceptive counterfeit? Moreover, if a promissory
note receives full credit in practice—as when marks of “Japaneseness” are read
as fulfillments of an Orientalist promise in the European love of butō—does it
matter, ultimately, that it is a phantasm?
When an X can mark a goal as well as a foreclosure, a sign as well as an
erasure, it creates fundamental difficulties in reading. The promissory notes for
origins or tradition reworked so carefully and with so much subtlety by postwar
artists still hold important currency today. “Rising from the ashes” discourses
of postwar rupture come to be used as a model for international exchanges,
promoting a return to and “preservation” (reinvention) of traditional values
within a reinforced binary against a monolithic “West.” This discursive move,
understandable in the context of globalization and American imperial intimidation, marks in this context how such “essences,” deeply critiqued at particular
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historical moments, still have real effects, and the “listening” to these critiques
and layers is not fully complete.2 When judo—a new martial art constructed
for the purpose of “preserving” traditions, or “returning” to traditions threatened with disappearance—was offered to Iraq, it became a model for a kind
of return that would promise a “non-Western” vision of power and strength:
forging an alliance based on that very strategic phantasm of preservation.3 It
becomes all the more striking then, from today’s perspective, to see Hijikata’s
adult dancer in Heso to genbaku moving at the margins of this cult of productivity
and virile masculine powers; Hosoe creates all too self-reflexive a version of
the A-bomb to be mobilized unproblematically for the purposes of discourses
of militarization and ever-forward movement. Here, instead, there is no enemy,
only the body’s idiosyncratic anti-productivities and destabilized movements,
still present and foregrounded in the form of a spectacle.
One might think in this context of Betsuyaku’s play, Ashi no aru shitai (A
Corpse with Feet, 1982) as it embodies some of the key problems facing postwar Japanese artists who grapple with questions of engagement, identity, authenticity, and failures of forward movement / temporality. This work comes
from the very end of the period under consideration in this book, and the historical situation of the early 1980s is quite different, with the opening of the
“bubble” period in the Japanese economy, so that the reading of the “technological sublime” that follows may well be important to link to these changes
in the meanings of technology and temporality in this new context. Yet Betsuyaku’s work shows certain continuities even in this changed milieu that can
bring us full circle in our exploration of the search for encounter, in the establishment of the space of the intersubjective.
The play features a central female character who is dragging a corpse behind her. Her way is barred by a barrier crossing.4 She meets a man coming
from a wedding, carrying a gift. There is a relentless belatedness to her situation: someone (her lover) is dead, and as it turns out, he had always already
been betraying her. There was no golden age of love, no idealism, no clarity
of cause and effect. The situation is simple, as in many of Betsuyaku’s works;
dragging a corpse, she must move forward, though her way is blocked.
It would be easy to read this as an allegory for the situation we have described in relation to the promissory note: the search for a means of effective
direct action, along with the structural realization that the way is foreclosed.
At this moment, when the prolific period of the 1960s and 1970s, with their
revolutionary hopes were fully over, at the moment when parts of experimental theater had entered the mainstream of media, and others had settled into
an almost comfortable marginality, surviving and questioning slowly in their
small (snail-like?) way—when the movements of these parts of the experimen-
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tal arts themselves might take on the emblem of the snail as totem, deliberately
moving outside the too-fast, too-inflated emergent bubble of speed and prolific overexpenditure—it appears at first that there can be neither progress nor
return. It is even the very movement of the woman toward the barrier crossing
that seems to provoke the event of its closure. The corpse, immobile, has feet,
as if to remind one of its potential or its past potential for motion. Yet as with
other works we have seen, the form of Betsuyaku’s dialogue allows for some
other kinds of opening. As a corporealization of a past she drags with her, the
corpse structures and conditions the interaction between her and the man.
MAN:
Is he alive?
What? [She notices the man] No, he’s not but. . .
WOMAN:
[. . .]
MAN:
But weren’t you just talking to him? [He draws closer]
There was a noise, so I thought maybe he had come back to life. . .
MAN: A noise?
WOMAN: The train. A train just passed. (8)
WOMAN:
The woman talks to the corpse, almost as if it were alive, or could come back
to life. The man comes to resemble or identify with the corpse, by a series of
unusual parallels:
MAN:
Oh, that noise. . . . [He stares down] Those are feet, aren’t they?
Yes . . . [suddenly] haven’t you ever seen feet before?
MAN: Hmm? Feet? Certainly I have. I see them every day, when I take off my socks.
Of course, that is, my own. . . . (8)
WOMAN:
The man’s perceptions of the corpse become tied to his self-perception. The
corpse, the immobile result of the afterward of action and life, resists forward
movement, yet grappling with that corpse becomes the mode of engagement
of the living. The characters expect that the barrier will rise at any moment,
that they will be able to move forward in a teleological trajectory. The play
dramatizes a forward-leaning motion within stagnation: the engaged awaiting
of an external circumstance that does not come. If they could make their way
forward, it is uncertain what would ensue; but this situation, this daunted stagnation, nonetheless forces an encounter, a strange intimacy, albeit of ever-growing
desperation.
Even as we read it in the mode of allegory, Betsuyaku’s own mode of writing
remains relentlessly quotidian and particular, avoiding (along with the characters) any rising or transcendence of language into the (meaningful) figurative,
the overarching metaphoric, the terrain of substitutions and displacements. The
woman expresses the desire to show the man parts of “her” corpse, to receive
the gesture of his witness, his gaze, his seeing of her situation. Perhaps this in
itself is the paradigmatic gesture of many moments in postwar theater: after a
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loss comes a movement of showing, of seeking witness and recognition of an
event in ruins, something no longer legible even as metaphor.
Through the unconscious parallels drawn between the man and the corpse,
through the implicit association caused by his seeing, little by little the man is
drawn into the story of the death—and with him, by implication, the audience
as well. The man (corpse) had died when he had confessed the existence of
another family, in addition to his relationship with the woman who now drags
his corpse in the street. Still, the exact cause of the man’s death remains uncertain. The woman denies responsibility for his death, just as she denies responsibility for the barrier’s immobility:
WOMAN:
But I didn’t do it. He fell before I pushed him. He hit this part of his head on
a corner of the kitchen table. It’s true . . . I pushed him, but only after he fell . . . So
there was no need to push him then . . . He was already falling himself . . . Or do you
think he fell because I pushed him?
MAN: No, after all, I don’t know. . . .
WOMAN: That’s not how it was. That is the one thing that is clear to me. (17)
The woman reviews the possibilities, lifting and destabilizing the event’s cause
and effect. Eventually, she arrives at the idea that in fact she was reaching over
to try to rescue the man when he fell, that his falling might be called suicide. The
listening man suggests that suicide on a kitchen table is rather unusual and perhaps one might more appropriately call it “accidental death.” The woman takes
this as his agreement that what occurred was, in fact, an accidental death. In
contrast to the man, who assumes there is an external “reality” of the event,
from the woman’s point of view (as for the viewers of the play) the progress
of this dialogue is itself constituting the facts of what has occurred. It remains
in flux until it gains a designation in the language and view of the stranger. Like
Kurotokage’s view that “all history is monogatari,” many of Betsuyaku’s plays
share awareness of this constituting force of language, of communal agreement.
Thus the woman little by little reveals to the man both the corporeal reality
of the body (the aftermath of the event) and explains in a dialogic process the
reasons for what happened. Was the fall inevitable? Was it an accident? Was it
someone’s fault, and if so, whose? At this point the stage directions prescribe:
“A train roars through. Of course [needless to say], the crossing barrier does
not rise.” (22) With this “of course,” even the crossing barrier’s repeated “response” to the human situation comes to take on an inevitability, or even
intentionality, which renders its arbitrariness uncertain. The barrier crossing
marks the possibility of forward motion, like the aims and goals of the 1960s
generation of activist artists. It marks the strong urge for a move forward—
the age rushes by—combined with (and this is what is marked also through the
1970s and many of the artists studied here) an intense stagnation, a repeated
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encounter with an impossibility, or even a resistance to forward motion and a
contrary appreciation of the slow deliberateness of this pause. Why did things
go the way they did? Why so much hope, so much promise, and yet so many
terrains where teleology itself broke down? The loss can hardly be acknowledged, yet there is a settling into recognition of the current state of things: “of
course” it does not rise. What can one do in the face of such a situation? How
can one understand the mode of responsibility, of ethically facing the current
circumstance?
In the next moment, thanks to the woman’s relentless questioning, the
woman and man discover that after all they are both heading toward the same
destination. The man is delivering the gift from the wedding he has just attended
to the other wife and child, the other family of the woman’s former lover. Simultaneously, she is on her way to deliver his body to this same family. In other
words, the man comes to recognize the corpse as that of his good friend (while
still refusing to look at it). Now that their two worlds are definitively connected,
the woman requests the man’s help in carrying her heavy load across the tracks.
At her suggestion they decide to try to cross under the barrier in spite of the
fact that it remains closed. Reluctantly the man helps, uncertain when a train
may arrive. When the warning bell in fact sounds, the woman hurriedly ducks
back outside the barrier (onto the stage) and shouts to the man (calling out anata,
the intimate form of “you,” the same words she had used to address the corpse
at the beginning of the play):
WOMAN:
It came! Anata! What’s going on? No, no, that’s no good! Move the corpse,
not there . . . ! This way . . . The feet! The feet I say! They’re caught. Get the feet out of
the way. . . . There! There. . . . No, not like that! Not that way. . . . What are you doing?
This way. I’m telling you, this way! You have to get the feet out of the way. Quick!
Hurry! . . . No, pull it this way, lift it up! This way, this way! Why, anata . . . this way. I
say it’s this way. . . . Over here. . . .
[The woman screams, and squats down. The train roars by. A single foot wearing a sock and shoe rolls
out of the crossing in front of the woman. She covers her ears, and remains squatting. The warning bell
and lights go out.]
WOMAN: [Standing up confusedly, and looking at the foot below her] Oh! This foot has a sock on
it. . . . It seems he hated being barefoot after all. . . .(41–42)
The woman’s warnings to the man make explicit the divide between “this way”
and that way, this realm and that. Her focus on the corpse’s feet and her cries
of “Anata!” link this moment to the play’s opening when she spoke to the corpse
in the terms she uses to address the man. The relationships come to substitute
for one another, in a full cycle of repetition. But her confused comment about
the isolated, severed foot remains ambiguous: it could refer to the stranger, who
had claimed not to mind being barefoot but whose severed foot seems to the
woman to show otherwise; or it could refer to the corpse whose socks she had
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removed. Although it seems to belong to the stranger, the woman has not quite
managed to make sense of the situation at the play’s close. Drawn in, the audience is no longer innocent; the viewers are left to interpret this interrupted event
just as the man was engaged to interpret and designate responsibility for his
friend’s death. The climactic events in Betsuyaku’s plays are neither precisely
apocalyptic, nor accidental; they are somehow significant, but not quite transcendent. Thus no one’s feet, by the end, are “on the ground,” and the ground
itself has become unstable; there remains a mutilating violence, an abundance
of non-functioning feet.
It is impossible to predict when the large force or event (perhaps like the
Godot of this work) will arrive. “Do you think the train is coming now?” asks
the woman near the close of the play, echoing the many waiting figures in
postwar theatrical works, waiting for and yet fearing the arrival of something
that escapes their control; the man replies, “I don’t think so. . . .” (41). The
crossing of the barrier becomes a temporal and spatial breach that is impossible
to suture, and suggests the kind of sundering of past and future, here and beyond, cause and effect, that is so central in many postwar experimental works.
The barrier, as the mechanism that regulates the intercourse between these two
worlds, presents itself as the representative of a larger order beyond their limited
situation. But the structure of the dramatic performance hints that the characters’ own complicit dialogue may itself contribute to the invention of the barrier
and its results, which nonetheless remain (still, or at the same time) beyond their
reach.
Although it is beyond the scope of this work to delve fully into the legacy
of the experimental works of the 1960s and 1970s in the decade of the bubble
years and beyond, it could be useful to look for a moment at the workings of
“technology as expectation” in one work of the bubble period. While some
questions and issues that are raised in this book seem to continue to be addressed by the work of the bubble / post-bubble period of the 1980s and 1990s,
even a brief glance will give a sense of what a different form these questions and
issues took in these later moments, as well as some of the changes in the no
longer underground, highly mediatized and commoditized theater networks of
that time. For one brief example, one might look at the hit play Asahi no yō na
yūhi o tsurete (Bringing an Evening Sun Like the Morning Sun, 1983) by Kōkami
Shōji and the group Daisan butai (Third Stage), which takes the question of
the “awaited event” into an explicitly parodic tone and register. In this work,
which has been reproduced by Kōkami’s group in multiple versions incorporating references to ever more sophisticated and updated technologies, we
recognize Estragon and Vladimir in the characters Esukawa and Urayama. Employees of a toy company, they continually rack their brains for an invention,
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trying to come up with an idea that will take off and become the new boom.
Kōkami thus moves the desire for success and invention, along with the Godot
theme, both of which were central for Betsuyaku’s work in very different ways,
into the corporate context for “bubble” Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, and
into the realm of mass media, while the play itself takes this theme out of the
fringe and into the (theatrical) mainstream.5 The group makes fun of all prior
forms of theater: in addition to parodying Waiting for Godot, the characters joke
about shingeki-byō (shingeki disease), musical-disease, and even shōgekijō-byō (small
theater / underground theater-disease). The toy company characters blatantly
copy and pun on media trends known to the audience, and it becomes clear
that—at this remove, where the shōgekijō movement and the kinds of works that
have been considered in this book are seen, from a distance, as just another set
of energetic but passé movements that are now over and almost pathological—
these characters have been trying, pathetically, to come up with a successful
boom or fad object for a long time. They argue with one another about whose
fault it is that they have not been able to come up with anything good. Although
the overall atmosphere is extremely light and “bubbly,” there is an underlying
fear that runs through this play as it progresses with less and less likelihood of
their finding the magical solution they await—that is, until the inevitable happy
ending.
Urayama and Esukawa ask the famous question once asked by the waiting Vladimir and Estragon: “What is to be done now?” but their question is
phrased in a kind of spirited idleness. It is idleness that comes out of a saturation of media in a late capitalist world, a hyper-media ennui and distraction,
rather than the vested sarigenasa of which Betsuyaku often speaks. The effort at
entertainment is desperate: the characters must continually invent something
new, and must not let themselves (or the audience) get bored. No longer trying, even in the face of obstacles, for “engagement” in the sense we have
seen or idealized “encounter,” there is instead a kind of evacuation of theatrical creativity itself that leads to its own kind of light play of language. After
a round of lively jokes and puns:
ESUKAWA:
Well?
Hmm?
ESUKAWA: Continue.
URAYAMA: It’s enough.
ESUKAWA: But, well, you know, we have to do something [nanika shinai to sa].
URAYAMA: Do you have anything?
ESUKAWA: Well, no. . . .
URAYAMA: I do.
ESUKAWA: Oh! (34)
URAYAMA:
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Suddenly, Urayama suggests that they play dodgeball, an old pleasure of his
youth. In the midst of the game, a boy arrives—we recall the boy messenger
from Waiting for Godot, who comes at the end of the day to announce that Godot
will not come today, but surely tomorrow. Urayama and Esukawa tease him
and don’t seem to care much for Godot. Instead, they ask if Miyoko is coming.
In a new, mocking twist, they also ask for proof that Godot is coming. The
boy shows them letters from Godot, in the last of which Godot says he is coming after all. Immediately Godot appears in the back of the audience and weaves
his way to the stage, bowing and saying, “Excuse me,” and “thank you, yes, I am
Godot.” He announces: “So sorry to keep you waiting!” (omatase shimashita)
when he finally arrives on stage (42). In this crazy scene, deeper existential
meaning is undercut, replaced, or painted over with shining surfaces, and anything worth waiting for seems transformed into a consumer fad for mass entertainment. This is the realm of a technology of surfaces, and a reflection
on these, that revise and resubmit the concept and necessity of meaning itself.
Kōkami’s plays thus carry the work of postwar theater into a different register,
thereby transforming its resonances.6
One would be reluctant to formulate an immediate link, or to articulate a linear
temporal trajectory from Betsuyaku’s work and other post-shingeki plays to the
diverse proliferation of contemporary performance groups. Yet Betsuyaku’s
plays suggest some larger questions key to the understanding of much of later
experimental performance. His work can be read in terms of an ironic technological aesthetic, replacing an older vision of an infinite or sublime power that
cannot be represented. Elaborating a mode of waiting and expecting that takes
into account the centrality of contingency, he begins to formulate or stage an
ethics of seeing, in which a discursive dialogic matrix becomes the only (unstable) ground. As such, here a prescient paranoia replaces nostalgia. Ashi no
aru shitai implicitly asks the question of human involvement and responsibility,
but without returning to unqualified “humanism”: the woman character twice
quotes an uncle who used to ask, “What, after all, is true kindness?” (20, 30)
By waiting with the woman and witnessing her situation, the man, in spite of
himself, becomes increasingly responsible for what he sees. The physical fragmentation of the corpse and his viewing of it part by part, as if it were a doll,
illustrate a larger sense of the fragmentary nature of seeing. One can only grasp
one’s situation bit by bit, without fullness, and one can only hope for continuity, imagining that the next “part” will rise above the level of the individual
fragment into some larger vision.
Yet when the characters’ limited view of their situation seems to converge
in the ending, and when the man’s vision of the woman’s situation seems to lead
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to “true” involvement, the result is calamity. Here, the fragmentation of the
bodies, and the temporal interruption or rupture, refuse to allow for legibility:
language and understanding collapse. The vision of the future that Betsuyaku
constructs, mediated by an unpredictable technological presence, contains and
engages the accidental, the unexpected. This future also reflects back paradoxically on a past no longer stable but ever in progress. (The signs of past
and future have been reopened here: the future is no longer pure flux; the past is
no longer stable but rather opens to development and change.) Betsuyaku’s view
challenges the possibility of a fully “sincere” or “truthful” seeing and engagement that would not be conditioned by its own areas of (often polite, quotidian)
blindness.
Postwar artistic works take this ungrounded and contingent performativity
outside the confines of the proscenium stage; as we have seen, they transport
the physicality of this fragmentation into a novel exploration of bodies and
sexuality as a mode of revolt, of the workings of normative discipline, and of
the possibilities and limits of protest. Betsuyaku already touches on the primary
affective intensities: the iraira (the constant irritation, impatience of the characters) in his plays; the guilt or sense of responsibility combined with the overwhelming desire to escape; the fear or paranoia; the empty hurry; and the continually vacillating doubt. Some of these elements continue to be central in the
work of later performers, artists, and filmmakers as well.
Interrogating concerns of subjectivity, technology, and memory, artists in
postwar Japan attempt to work through and transform the “stuck places” of
their own social worlds. Tsuno Kaitarō has written about the reinvention of
Godot in terms of a “multidimensionality,” whose purpose is:
to give expression to the recognition that, beside the time and space to which we have
become accustomed—where everything is deemed to be self-evident—there are any
number of other dimensions of time and space that we have either forgotten or are pretending to forget. And in the very midst of that multidimensionality, [those who wait]
metamorphose into the awaited. . . . By creating the conditions where ‘waiting for Godot’
and ‘being Godot’ can be the same thing, Vladimir and Estragon metamorphose into
‘Godot’ of their own accord.7
For Tsuno, a thoughtful theater critic who is also a participant in and proponent
of the more explicitly politically activist theaters such as Satoh Makoto’s Black
Tent and its legacies, and the journal Concerned Theatre Japan, such interruptions
of time and space become a means for an entry into agency, for the awaited
to be converted into the movement and agent of transformation. It seems that
engaged acts of transformation can take place even where perception is in
question, where the subject is not stable, where “truth” cannot be trusted. Even
when the complicity of subjects with the current structures is presupposed, in-
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terruption and multilayered time and space offer a possibility of an engagement that can exceed the subject’s own self-conscious knowledge, or that can
mobilize the powers of a non-reified “collective.” Or, perhaps more accurately,
it is precisely because these works reflect on the complicity of the subject that
they are able to offer a specifically unsafe, provocative vision for the mobilization of agency.
Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s Terayama and Hijikata tried to create a collective experience that might trick the mind in the dark into a certain physical
realization, an almost magical dramatic connection, many multimedia performances from later decades no longer expect or attempt such a possibility. Adopting many of the forms and stories drawn from these earlier experimental works,
they engage at a different level with the virtual world and draw such productions through citation into the “media mix.” These later works presuppose the
pervasive hyperreal shine of media culture, the luminous world of screens and
transparencies whose movements and sensibilities our bodies already absorb
and reflect.
Yet in the work of some contemporary performance groups can be seen the
reemergence of a certain haunting, frequently figured as a bright, blinding flash.8
One contemporary example that we might consider briefly for purposes of contrast is the subtly and paradoxically framed installation “World, Membrane, and
the Dismembered Body” (1997) by Mikami Seiko, another work in which concepts of “encounter” might be said to be turned on their heads.9 Mikami’s work
consists of a clean, white chair in a white anechoic chamber equipped with a
panic button. Participants enter one at a time for a four (to eight) minute experience of hearing, literally, the sound of their own heartbeats, regenerated
and enormously amplified through a computer program. The installation becomes like a work of “performance art” except that here, the spectator becomes
the performer; instead of a collectivity, it is an experience of utter solitude. In
spite of the fact that this piece involves hearing in utter darkness (recalling the
sensory limitations explored by Terayama in his work with darkness), the sound
in the anechoic chamber retains an odd whiteness of the void, disorienting and
detached from all the echoes and coincidences of the external environment. The
sounds of one’s own heartbeat and organs are almost painfully loud. Entering
the chamber (so dark that the insides of one’s eyelids produce their own whitening and colors), one holds the visual whiteness of the room in memory as
the computer begins to register and oscillate with the body’s amplified internal
sounds. A technological circuitry of wires and speakers and the all-important
panic button inscribe the possibility of claustrophobia, shock, and intolerability
in the structure of this virtual membrane, which disturbs the distinction between
observer and observed in a kind of short circuit of the senses.
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In an interview with the director Suzuki Tadashi, originator (with Betsuyaku
and others) of the Waseda Little Theater, Hijikata Tatsumi had asserted, in a
Proustian gesture: “What is certain to me is that your measure is properly taken
only when you get into bed, and when you wake it all falls apart, even the furniture. That’s why being in bed is reality and getting up from it is a dream.”10
Suzuki responded to Hijikata: “To a greater or lesser degree, all people experience the flow of time within themselves and hear the sounds within their
own bodies or know, in Mr. Hijikata’s words, the time spent in bed.” Hijikata
frames the problem more cryptically elsewhere, linking the intangible absence
of sound to the tangibility of the body and its violent changes: “I live my life
transforming something like a silent grasp that beats silence into a shinbone.”11
The physical body transforms itself endlessly into the objects of the world; even
the paradoxically intangible object (“the silent grip [grasp] that beats silence”)
becomes a part of a body, a shinbone, so that interior and exterior, body and
objects, no longer hold their separation.
In its technological extreme, from a period several decades after this conversation, when aspects of new media and technologies were already taken for
granted, Mikami’s installation is in many ways far removed from the “experience of the flow of time within oneself,” or the kind of “time spent in bed”
of which Hijikata and Suzuki Tadashi speak—although those also involve a
listening to one’s own heart, lungs, and organs. In Mikami’s contemporary installation, which is considered in this context for its points of departure as well
as its continuities, the body enters a mechanism monitoring itself; and the subject disappears in another sense or is disassembled, reduced to a membranemonitor of its own body as machine. In the perfectly controlled feedback loop
of this intense, echoless chamber, one comes to appreciate the memory and
echo of the dark shuffles, the soft warm fizzles and strange soul-cries of Terayama’s and Hijikata’s contingent darknesses and silences.
In the performances of other recent multimedia groups, bright lights and
flat, blank screens overtake the flickering, tenuous shadows, and supplant the
contingent, self-reflexive essentialisms of earlier experimental theater. Dumb
Type’s pH (1990–93), for one example, reorients the stage space into a flat horizontal plane below the audience, which is seated on scaffolds on either side.12
The performers lie prone while a large, bright beam encased in metal, a blinding
fluorescent light bar passes slowly, silently over them. It is the intense, painful
illumination of the copy machine, the slide of the scanner, or the penetrating
invisible intensity of the x-ray. Three women lie on the white background,
wearing only translucent slips and black high heels, with one arm raised and
flattened above their heads, as this light bar—along with ghostly computer projections and images of the dollar bill—passes over their bodies from one end
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of the flat stage to the other. The body is reduced to crawling, shuffling, and
flailing, tossing and turning in the face of these omnipotent, unwavering beams
of light. As in Mikami’s anechoic chamber, a darkness surrounds and frames
this hyper-brilliance, marking its perfectly crisp, clean edges. Here, as well, there
is no flickering of the match, no scent of smoke, no half-heard scuffling. There
is no chance for an “encounter,” let alone a collision, between audience and
performer. The lines are clean, clear, and stark. The distinctions are digitally binary: on and off, light and dark. One finds no seeping, no secreting, no gradual
change of dawn or twilight.
Yet the ghosts evoked in the brilliant flash of light, as in Mikami’s installlation, are themselves residues and after-effects of the body’s idiosyncrasies.
They are the remnants on the retina, after-images of red and blue provoked
by this technological assault on the frailties of the sensorium. Dumb Type thus
plays on and enacts, paradoxically, as did earlier Japanese futurists, an image
of the frailty and helplessness of the organic world in the face of the technological.13 In the performance OR (1997), another piece that the creators say
“reflect[s] on the zones between life and death,”14 the group evokes the surgical operations of technology on the body, flashing painfully bright lights at
the spectators, emphasizing the eye’s contingencies and susceptibilities. In pH,
the performers become perfectly stiff beams, like the bar of light, or they flip
and twist at speeds that accommodate and mimic this technology that already,
irreversibly, pervades the body. Dumb Type evokes a death starker and whiter
in its fluorescence than Terayama’s dirt hole rising toward the sky, Hijikata’s
Tōhoku memories, or Betsuyaku’s catastrophic arrival and loose feet. Here
death is a hard, flat world, a blank-faced irony of surfaces. pH reveals the ways
in which the scanner’s slow beam, its flat reiteration, invades and suffuses the
movements of the body in sleep, the repetitions of running, or the convulsions of sex. Dumb Type slows these silent movements down to a kind of live
stop-action photography. The performers play with the accelerations and decelerations of the body that blend with and reiterate those of the machine.
Dumb Type, as just one brief example drawn out from a later moment,
can find a strange, hypnotic, even ironic beauty in the severity of these very
technologies, these unavoidable mediations. Their work effects an almost
ghostly transformation, as the actors’ bare and blank faces under the screaming
light-bar evoke their own kind of impassive, post-modern masks. Such newer
forms of theater, at the edge of installation and technological invention, blend
the tactile and the theoretical to effect a rupture at the edge of darkness and
light, between the sensibilities of silence and sound. They move through the
dilemma or deadlock of sensory and rhetorical oppositions. No longer searching for lost origins or directly acknowledging loss, they remap in spatial /
215
technological paradoxes the apparent limits of the body and of the theatrical
world.
Yet such a work of remapping, I argue, began explicitly with and links back
to the experimental arts and expression of the 1960s and 1970s. The works of
theater, dance, film, video, and photography explored in this book take up the
challenge of such uncertainties of temporality and identity, performing with and
through them. The citational quality of these representations, like the quoting or
acting of a death scene that was or became Terayama’s real death, cannot be repressed. Here, already, it is no longer possible to pretend to originariness, to an
“authenticity” or presence not susceptible to such a layering and opening up: to
being “itself” while not simultaneously implicated in prior or subsequent repetitions, reiterations, copies, and mimicries. For all that, however, the artists discussed in this book continued to cite and reinscribe a vision of authenticity that
arises through the process of the “encounter,” as it is variously theorized, with
particular collisions allowing transformative events and generative moments to
occur. If the symbolic process of expression and intelligibility of expression depends, in some fundamental way, on the foreclosure of such a “direct” engagement, these artistic practices nonetheless continue to skirt its edges, to delve
into its philosophical conditions and underpinnings. They redefine the very idea
of communal connection and intimacy, in search of a mode of expression that
could outline a non-coercive intersubjective space, one that could move within
the skin of the “subject” without falsely stabilizing its bounds.
Reference Matter
Notes
Preface
1. The dance form butō is also commonly known in English as “butoh,” but I have
used the Library of Congress subject heading category as a guide to the recent shift
toward spelling it according to the modified Hepburn romanization system, also used
throughout this book, unless it is used in a previously published title.
2. Performance theorist Uchino Tadashi summarizes the debates around the continuities of shingeki, or “new theater,” which is usually defined in contrast to older forms
of traditional Japanese theater and displays strong Western influence from Chekhov,
Strindberg, and Ibsen, as well as Stanislavsky’s acting techniques. My use of the term
“post-shingeki” builds on David Goodman’s terminology to refer to the angura (underground) theater of the 1960s and 1970s. See Uchino, “Political Displacements”; for a
thorough and full description in English, see Goodman, “Satoh Makoto and the PostShingeki Movement in Japanese Contemporary Theatre,” 2–92. I say that my version
of “post-shingeki” is a variant on Goodman’s, because though he coined the term for
English-language scholarship, I spend more time focusing on Terayama Shūji here than
would make sense by Goodman’s definition. For more on Goodman’s view of Terayama’s marginal place in the “post-shingeki” or angura history, see the Introduction below,
and Goodman, “Japan’s Nostalgic Avant-Garde.” For a broader history of shingeki, see
among others Suwa and Sugai, eds., Gendai no engeki I. For a very succinct, cogent, and
vividly illustrated summary of the history of angura / post-shingeki, see the exhibition catalogue of the posters of this movement published in Goodman, Angura.
3. This observation was made by John Tain, “Seminar on Japanese Visual Culture,”
Getty Institute, Los Angeles, October 28, 2008.
4. Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 805–6.
5. Notable here were, for example, Noma Hiroshi’s responses to Sartre’s ideas, including his Sarutoru ron (Treatise on Sartre, 1968) and Takeuchi Yoshirō’s year-long debate with him about Sartre’s thought. For more information, see the informative works
of Simone Müller on Sartre’s reception in Japan, including “Le débat philosophique entre
Noma Hiroshi et Takeuchi Yoshirō”; “Faszination eines universalistischen Denkers”;
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Notes to Pages 00–00
and “Jean-Paul Sartres Konzeption von Freiheit und moralischer Verantwortung in der
japanischen Nachkriegsliteratur.”
6. From 1946, when Sartre’s La Nausée joined André Gide’s Interviews Imaginaires on
the top ten bestseller list, interest in Sartre’s and existentialist remained strong, especially
among artists and intellectuals. See Dower, Embracing Defeat, 190; for a discussion of this
history of reception, see also Slaymaker, “When Sartre was an Erotic Writer”; and Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Fiction, 128–29 and passim.
7. See Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 817, 813–16; and Sartre,
Qu’est-ce que la littérature, 65–66.
8. See Matsuoka Seigō, Sen ya sen satsu, no. 860 on Sartre’s 1962 “Question de Methode” (1962) for a description of this colloquial usage. Matsuoka’s piece was republished
in Matsuoka, Sen ya sen satsu, vol. 4, 910–11.
9. The ideas of engagement and commitment have a varied history in twentiethcentury literature; for example, in Latin American literature comprometido (committed)
would refer to leftist writers; in France engagé alludes to another contextually particular
form of political intention. One notable model of engagement in relation to theater is
Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed,” developed in the late 1960s to 1970s and still
being practiced worldwide in varying forms to this day. Although the forms of engagement studied in this book differ from this most direct form of theatrical “engagement”
with social issues, there are certainly areas of overlap between the thinking of Japanese
theater practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s and Boal’s work. For example, Boal’s methodology that turns the “spectator” into an “actor” resonates with the efforts of many
Japanese theater practitioners to break down the barrier between spectator and actor;
Boal’s “invisible theatre,” in which actors perform in public spaces without many of
those present realizing that their work is a play, though done for different reasons, nonetheless resonates with the experiments with performing in public space that many Japanese artists conducted (as well as with “happenings” and “guerilla theater” events taking
place in the United States and elsewhere). See Babbage, Augusto Boal, 21. Murobushi Kō,
for example, recounts early performances in which he would bring a barrel out to the
Ginza and perform in and around it during rush hour; other examples include Hijikata
Tatsumi’s street performances, works by Hi Red Center, and Terayama’s street theater.
10. See Reiko Tomii’s description of the effects of the fact that in this era, poststructuralist and gendai discourses had not yet fully taken hold; for example, Tomii, “Historicizing Contemporary Art,” 617–18.
11. In this sense, then, this study is part of a broader trend of challenging older models
of “Western theory applied to Asian literature and art works” by showing, first of all,
the ways in which this dichotomy does not hold and how such experimental works are
already theoretical and already in dialogue with so-called “Western” theory; and second,
that such experimental works, though necessarily viewing theoretical works dialectically
from a later point in time, draw theoretical inspiration from within the works themselves,
rather than from some “external” or higher ground.
Introduction
1. My account paraphrases her version of the story; for Kujō’s telling and wording,
see Kujō, Musshū Terayama Shūji, Chapter 1. Terayama, in fact, did die on this very day; his
221
date of birth, however, is somewhat disputed. For an analysis of the issue of legendgeneration that emerges around Terayama’s life and oeuvre, see the discussion below, as
well as Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts, which also contains some of the first published translations of his work. See also Ridgely, “The Poetics of Terayama Shūji.” Both of these
works on Terayama were released during the writing of this book, after many years during
which little scholarship was available in English on Terayama; when topics overlap, I note
page numbers in footnotes below. Ridgely’s work opens with a discussion of the conflicting birth date ascriptions. For a fuller listing of the troupe’s travels and chronology,
see Sugiyama, Terayama Shūji, 281–302.
2. Andrew Barshay writes: “In Japan, the ‘postwar’ era ended for the first time in
1956. . . . Other candidates for ‘the end’ include 1968 (Nakajima Makoto, in Sengo shisōshi
nyūmon points to the ‘lost Pax Americana’ in Vietnam and to the American debt crisis);
1972–73 (reversion of Okinawa plus oil crisis); 1989 (death of Hirohito and end of
Cold war); and (on the grounds that the war responsibility issue still tends to be evaded)
‘not yet’” (Barshay, “Postwar Social and Political Thought, 1945–90,” 316). Harry Harootunian warns of conservative uses of the term “postwar” in the 1990s that imply a fetishization of war and victimization, a “frozen temporality,” rather than, as intended
here, a multivalent history or series of micro-histories (Harootunian, “Japan’s Long
Postwar). For a subtle analysis (also cited by Barshay), see Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” 92–95 and passim. In the European context one thinks also of the “long postwar”
that Adorno references in his lectures on coming to terms with the past. Though I use the
term “postwar” here, I also work to contest the “rupture” narrative with evidence of continuities form the prewar to the postwar, both in politics / economics and in the spheres
of culture.
3. Although scholarship continues to delve into the full implications of the 1960 student protests, the usual story—as told, for example, by Takahashi Yasunari in its ramifications for postwar theater—is that “the progressive camp . . . regarded the prevention
of [the treaty’s] ratification as a supreme task in the cause of Japan’s true democratization
and organized a huge campaign mobilizing nearly 6 million people on 30 June. The
government won the battle, not, however, without the cancellation of President Eisenhower’s scheduled visit to Japan before and the resignation of Prime Minister Kishi immediately after ratification” (See Rolf and Gillespie, eds., Alternative Japanese Drama, 2).
In addition to providing an introduction to experimental drama, Rolf and Gillespie include translations of plays by important playwrights Betsuyaku Minoru, Shimizu Kunio,
Terayama Shūji and Kishida Rio, Kara Jūrō, and Satoh Makoto.
Recent views of the Anpo protest movements have complicated the clear “progressive vs. conservative” narrative. As Victor Koschmann writes, “Despite the revolutionary
rhetoric of its Communist and left-wing Socialist elements, the [1960 Anpo] movement
was basically conservative in that it sought ultimately to preserve ‘postwar democracy,’
protect the constitution, and prevent various forms of reactionary tampering with the
postwar democratic order. According to political scientist Takabatake Michitoshi, this
conservative orientation was responsible for much of the movement’s mass appeal.”
Koschmann also points out that the institutional and social base of participation made
the movement vulnerable to cooptation by the LDP afterward, and tended to make it
preserve traditional hierarchies, although it had also “marked the beginnings of action by
222
ordinary citizens who sometimes acted outside existing organizations”(“Intellectuals and
Politics,” 406–7).
4. See Havens, Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts.
5. Sasaki-Uemura, “Competing Publics,” 95. See also the thorough history of the protests in English, Packard, Protest in Tokyo and Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous.
6. He grew up with his mother near Misawa Air Base for part of his childhood, after
which he stayed with relatives while his mother worked at the U.S. military facility. His
father died in military service. As a high school student he had sent off a poem to the
Surrealist poetry journal VOU run by poet and dandy extraordinaire Kitasono Katsue.
If one travels today to the Terayama Shūji Memorial Museum in Misawa, one can still
see the postcard Kitasono wrote to him enthusiastically welcoming the teenage Terayama
into the magazine’s coterie, the “VOU club.” He had much early success as a poet and
writer, after which his artistic production exploded into a variety of media, including
radio drama, essays on horse racing and boxing, photographic post card art, and most
notably theater and film. This history and his early successes are documented in some detail in Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts and Ridgely, “The Poetics of Terayama Shūji.”
7. It might be noted that the appearance of a butterfly can signify death in Kabuki
theatrical convention, thus adding to the story another layer of theatrical mediation.
8. Tenjō sajiki adopted a five-part periodization of their work, which identifies the
fourth “street performances” period as dating from around 1973. Nokku (Knock), for
example, was performed in 33 locations in the Suginami ward of Tokyo in April 1975.
However, there is certainly also a “street performance” element to Iede no susume (Encouragement to Run Away from Home) and in the use of non-actors during the second
period (1969–70). See Chapter 2, note 31 for more detail on this periodization.
9. See Sugiyama, Terayama Shūji, 210–11.
10. See also Chapter 6, note 3 on landscape theory; one might consider the views in
landscape theory of acts of crime and “terror” as they were discussed contemporaneously
with many of the works analyzed in this book. For recent Japanese critical and literary
historical writings on the issue of terror in the United States, see Shimokōbe, Amerikan
teroru.
11. Uchino, Merodorama no gyakushū, 194. Translations throughout are mine unless
otherwise noted. Terayama himself alluded to Poe in his writings on the ambiguous delimitations of the borders between life and death.
12. Theatre Arts was founded in 1992 by Uchino along with other prominent theater
critics and theorists Ōzasa Yoshio, Senda Akihiko, Tanokura Minoru, Nishidō Kōjin,
Matsuoka Kazuko, and Ōtori Hidenaka (editor in chief ).
13. Sakaguchi Ango, “Darakuron.” Hereafter page numbers will be given in the text
and the common appellation “Ango” used to refer to the author. A fine translation by
Seiji Lippit can be found under the title “Discourse on Decadence.” See also Ian Smith’s
translation and related essay, “Sakaguchi Ango and the Morality of Decadence,” at
http://mcel.pacificu.edu/aspac/papers/scholars/smith/ (accessed 23 February 2010).
14. See Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence,” 79–80; also cited in Dorsey,
“Culture, Nationalism, and Sakaguchi Ango,” 377 and passim. See also Steen, “To Live
and to Fall,” 156–69, 211–27.
15. On “Darakuron,” see Karatani Kōjin, Sakaguchi Ango to Nakagami Kenji, 27.
223
16. Dorsey points out the continuities of discourses (of “Japan” as unifying ideology)
that in part enabled Japan’s miraculous reconstruction efforts’ success in the postwar
years. He cites the similarly irreverent example of the essay “Nihon bunka shikan” that
went uncensored in spite of its attacks on Japanese “authentic” cultural sites before the
war. Karatani too emphasizes the continuities between “Darakuron” and “Nihon bunka
shikan” as well as other earlier writings by Ango. See Dorsey, “Culture, Nationalism, and
Sakaguchi Ango,” 349–50 and passim; Karatani, Sakaguchi Ango to Nakagami Kenji, 66–67
and passim.
17. In contrast to Kobayashi Hideo’s assertion (which Ango cites) that politicians
have no originality / creativity, he asserts that a certain number of talented politicians use
their creativity to become the medium for the revelation or realization of this “creature’s
will” (“Darakuron,” 53).
18. Ian Smith, though only in a brief discussion, suggestively compares Ango’s description of daraku to Nietzsche’s positive nihilism, and to Deleuze’s deterritorialization
(“Sakaguchi Ango and the Morality of Decadence”). Robert Steen’s introduction in “To
Live and to Fall” suggests as similar line of reading. See also Kristeva, Powers of Horror, and
feminist criticisms of that influential work.
19. He describes several bombings. One occurred at night as he was hiding in an
air raid shelter; he dates it at April 4, 1945. The second occurred, according to Ango, just
after a bombing of the Ginza district of Tokyo. Ginza was bombed on four occasions in
1945: January 27, March 10, April 28, and May 25. Ango is referring to one of the latter
two dates.
20. The original reads: “soshite moshi wareware ga kangaeru koto o wasureru nara,
korehodo kiraku na soshite sōkan na misemono wa nai darō” (“Darakuron,” 59). He uses
the word misemono—a carnivalesque sideshow, an exhibition.
21. The original: “keredomo watashi wa kyodai na hakai o aishita” (“Darakuron,”
<PAGE?>). For more on the ambivalences inherent in Japanese futurism and a translation of the first Japanese futurist manifesto see Sas, “Subject, City, Machine.”
22. The original: “shiko no mitate to idetatsu ware wa—ōkimi no he ni koso shiname
kaerimi wa seji.” The first part of the quotation refers to Man’yōshū, 20: 4373; the second
to 18: 4094.
23. Japan Films was founded in 1940 under the name Nihon nyūsu eigasha and during
the war years was a propaganda film company. This studio made a famed series of films
with actress Ri Kōran.
24. There is an earlier moment when, with his brother in an air raid shelter, he had
watched “flares illuminate the sky above our heads bright as noon” (56).
25. Note the trenchant Marxist criticism of this emphasis on the “self,” such as that of
Matsumoto Kazuto; also cited in Steen, “To Live and to Fall,” 160–61.
26. For the reference to Kant, see “‘Nihon bunka shikan’ ron,” in Karatani, Sakaguchi
Ango to Nakagami Kenji, 17.
27. See “Daraku ni tsuite” (66–70), “‘Nihon bunka shikan’ ron” (18–26), and “Natsukashii Ango” (89) in Karatani, Sakaguchi Ango to Nakagami Kenji.
28. See Karatani’s reading of Ango’s “Bungaku no furusato,” in Sakaguchi Ango to
Nakagami Kenji, 19.
29. Sakaguchi Ango, Teihon Sakaguchi Ango zenshū, vol. 7, 238.
224
30. Sakaguchi Ango, “Bungaku no furusato,” cited in Karatani, Sakaguchi Ango to
Nakagami Kenji, 19.
31. David G. Goodman cogently summarizes the development of Japanese theater
from shingeki through the Youth Art Theater and these three centers of post-shingeki
(“Satoh Makoto and the Post-Shingeki Movement in Japanese Contemporary Theater,”
4–53). Other English-language introductions to postwar Japanese theater include The
Voyage of Contemporary Japanese Theater, a book of translations of theater critic Senda Akihiko’s illuminating reviews (1971–87) originally published in the Asahi shinbun. For translations of seven plays by important playwrights of the 1960s, see Japan Playwrights Association, Half a Century of Japanese Theater, vol. 6. See also Eckersall, Theorizing the Angura
Space, a highly relevant recent work that also delves into the histories of the protest movements of the 1960s.
32. Goodman, “Angura: Japan’s Nostalgic Avant-Garde,” 261–62; citing Senda, Nihon
no gendai engeki, 136.
33. In the constellations of artistic movements in this period, individuals at times
migrated from one group to another, started their own groups, or burned out, sometimes
gloriously. In this sense, it is more accurate to examine “scenes” or flows of individuals
among institutions and spaces and collaborations of artists in various media than to speak
of individual artists or isolated troupes. Terayama, for example, participated in the work
of the Sōgetsu Art Center, including Jazz eiga jikkenshitsu ( Jazz Film Workshop), discussed in Chapter 6, with Takemitsu Tōru, Hijikata Tatsumi, photographer Hosoe Eikoh, and many other key artists, poets, and musicians in the early 1960s. Kara Jūrō and
his players appeared in films by Ōshima Nagisa, such as Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a
Shinjuku Thief ); and butō dancers often appeared in both experimental and commercial
films, to take just a few small examples of this kind of intersection of media and artistic
collaborations. Many members of groups from the 1960s and 1970s later started their
own troupes.
34. Senda, Nihon no gendai engeki, 144, 151.
35. For alternative “launching points,” see, for example, Kara Jūrō’s later (1966) use
of an old bandshell as the setting for Koshimaki Osen bōkyaku hen (Petticoat Osen: A Tale
of Forgetfulness), noted in Goodman’s dissertation, 28.
Chapter One
1. Betsuyaku, Zō, 214–15; my translation. An excellent English translation can also be
found in Goodman, After Apocalypse, 193–248. I provide my own version here to give
readers a further, alternate sense of Betsuyaku’s language. Hereafter Japanese page numbers are noted in the text.
2. In an article on Zō in the Asahi shinbun evening edition, July 31, 1970, Betsuyaku
claimed not to know the man’s name, but to have seen him in a photograph. Events surrounding the 25th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reported in the daily edition on the same day (Asahi shinbun, July 31, 1970, 23). See the autobiography of Kikkawa
Kiyoshi, Genbaku ichigō to yobarete. According to Kikkawa, the term genbaku ichigō (A-bomb
victim number one) was coined by American journalists and military officers who came
to report on Hiroshima in 1947. A fuller citation of Betsuyaku’s description of his encountering his model can be found in Yamamoto Ken’ichi’s writings, where Betsuyaku is
225
quoted saying that this man was criticized for “selling the bomb” [hibaku o shōbai ni shiteiru] but that in the psychological impulse of that act of selling he sensed a real resistance
(“Engeki jūjiro,” 50–51). See also Lifton’s account of “A-Bomb victim number one” in
Death in Life, 231–37; and Goodman’s introduction to his translation of Zō, in After Apocalypse, 189, 323n7.
3. David Goodman uses the evocative phrase “the naked truth, no holds barred” to
translate sono mono zubari de yuku (After Apocalypse, 203).
4. See Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 63–64; citing Hoffman, The Mortal No, 140.
5. For examples of this see Lifton, Death in Life and Ibuse, Kuroi ame.
6. Spivak has stated this well-known dictum, among other times, in the lecture “Subaltern, Popular, Organic Intellectual,” May 3, 2004, at the University of California, Berkeley.
7. See the reading of Friday in Coetzee’s novel by Spivak, “Theory in the Margin.”
8. For example, Shiraishi Kayoko, the long-time star of Suzuki Tadashi’s troupe and
one of the greatest actresses of post-shingeki, was trained in shingeki. There are many other
links within the Suzuki / Satō / Kara triangle to shingeki actor training and history. See Nishidō, Shōgekijō wa shimetsu shita ka.
9. From Betsuyaku’s acceptance speech, published in Shingeki, March 1968; cited in
Senda, Gekiteki runessansu, 117–18.
10. As I have considered elsewhere in relation to surrealist aspirations toward immediacy, Maurice Blanchot writes: “In reality, where the most facile means were being proposed, there hid behind this facility an extreme demand, and behind this certitude . . .
was concealed the insecurity of the inaccessible” (The Space of Literature, 178); discussed in
Sas, Fault Lines, 111.
11. See Senda, Gekiteki runessansu, 107. Cultural critic Matsuura Hisaki has commented
on a radical shift around 1989 or 1990 in Japan, which he associated with the events of
the death of Hirohito and the collapse of the “bubble” economy, from a feeling of sarigenasa (casual nonchalance) to a moral atmosphere of namanamashisa (graphic rawness)
or okumen no nasa (shamelessness, brazenness). Personal communication, November 6,
1997.
12. Goodman, After Apocalypse, 191.
13. Benjamin, One-Way Street, 447–48; my emphasis.
14. One might even argue that such a strategy is “anti-fascist” in Foucault’s sense:
“not only historical fascism, . . . but the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday
behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates
and exploits us.” See Foucault’s preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiii.
15. The play can be found in Betsuyaku’s collection, Sūji de kakareta monogatari. Robert
T. Rolf’s fine translation, which I use here with minor modifications, can be found in
Rolf and Gillespie, eds., Alternative Japanese Drama, 54–75.
16. For a contemporaneous work that focuses on the Vietnam deserters and their relationship with Japanese supporters, see Teshigahara Hiroshi’s film, Samā sorujā (Summer
Soldiers, 1972).
17. Ōe, “Sengo sedai no imēji,” 8.
18. Betsuyaku, Shōgo no densetsu, 138; Rolf and Gillespie, eds., Alternative Japanese Drama,
68–69. Hereafter quotations from the play are cited in the text with page numbers for the
226
Japanese original followed by those for the English translation; an asterisk indicates that
I have modified the translation.
19. In terms of the questions of the relation between guilt / punishment and corporeality, one could draw a useful comparison / contrast with Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”
(1919). One might also note, in broad outline, the resonance of this choice with the move
from externalized modes of protest and engagement in the 1960s to the more internalized and sometimes sexualized modes of experimenting with politicality and refusal in
the 1970s.
20. The moment can be found in section 36 of the story. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,
Kappa / Aru ahō no isshō, 191.
21. On the relationship between Betsuyaku and Beckett, see Hori Mariko, Beketto
junrei, 259–62. The same book contains a compendium record of the performances of
Beckett’s work in Japan between 1960 and 2007 (“Beketto sakuhin jōen kiroku,” 370–89).
Hori also examines these playwrights together in “Ontological Fear and Anxiety in the
Theater of Beckett, Betsuyaku, and Pinter.”
22. In this last sentence, “I’ll [lit.] do you the favor of thinking that you really believe
it” (anata ga hontō ni sō shinjite irundatte, omotte ageru wa), the woman is stopping the endless
chain of debt in the form of a favor to the man, a gift—omotte ageru—she will think or
believe that he believes her as yet another form of giving.
Chapter Two
EPIGRAPHS.
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1. In specifically gendered terms, “By moving into the feminine position that Asia had
occupied, Japan easily assumed the role of victim. Hirohito played the role of the heroine
who first recognizes the didactic values of the slap. According to the foundational narrative, the United States rescued a longing for liberalism in Japan: though (s)he initially
resisted, (s)he eventually succumbed to America’s allure.” This description uses Ri Kōran’s role in Shina no yoru (China Night, 1940) as a key figure. (Igarashi also describes the
disturbing resurgence of the heroic narrative of self-sacrifice in the 1990s.) Igarashi, Bodies
of Memory, 37, 205.
2. Terayama, Gendai no seishunron and Iede no susume. Terayama’s work began as a series
of lectures given in 1962, and was first published in 1963 under the title Gendai no seishunron (On Contemporary Youth) at the suggestion of the editor, who was afraid that the
original title Iede no susume would be too inflammatory. Later it was changed back to the
original title. The foreword was deleted from the 1972 Kadokawa paperback version. See
also Noonan, “Creating a Counterpublic.”
3. In March 1969 the troupe opened a two-story theater / café space in the center of
the youth-culture neighborhood of Namikibashi, in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. The
first floor was the café, and the second held an office with dressing rooms and troupe
members’ rooms; the basement was a small black box theater with seating for about forty.
In July 1976, Tenjō sajiki moved to the Azabu Jūban area. Nagao, Kyokō jigoku Terayama
Shūji, 292, 332.
4. A revival production directed by J. A. Seazer, Terayama’s musical director and
composer, was produced in summer 1998 in a trendy black box theater in the Shimo-
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Kitazawa neighborhood of Tokyo. The popularity of the work had not flagged—it was
standing room only every night of the run.
5. At that time Miwa used the name Maruyama Akihiro. The original script has been
published in Terayama, Terayama Shūji gikyokushū, vol. 1, 38–77. Hereafter the corresponding script pages will be referenced in the text. A translation of the 1970 New York
version of the play has recently been published under the title “La Marie-Vison (Mink
Marie),” by Don Kenny, in Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts, 196–225. Sorgenfrei’s translation
of the original production can be found in Japan Playwrights Association, Half a Century of
Japanese Theater, vol. 6, 27–53, with an introduction by Ishii Tatsurō, 22–26. Sorgenfrei
mentions that the play can be seen as a reworking of Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad,
Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1960). My analysis is based on the
original Japanese version of the play. An excellent analysis of the differences between the
two versions can be found in Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts, 88–94. See also Sorgenfrei’s
discussion of the Christian imagery in the New York version (Unspeakable Acts, 127–33).
6. Miwa may be best known outside of Japan for the performance, with cameos by
Mishima Yukio, in the film Kurotokage (Black Lizard, 1968) directed by Fukasaku Kinji. A
video is also available of a later production of Kegawa no mari made just after Terayama’s
death, in 1983, at Parco gekijō in Shibuya, with Miwa as Mari.
7. See Mezur, Beautiful Boys / Outlaw Bodies and the earlier discussion of otokoyaku and
sexuality in Robertson, Takarazuka, where, however, she argues for the ultimate limitations on the effectiveness of this critique. One might also think of Zettsu Tomoyuki’s
work on popular music [kayōkyoku] of this period—a form in which Miwa was an active
participant. Zettsu argues that although popular music in its “sentimentality” appears to
perpetuate gender stereotypes, many crucial changes in gender expectations are clearly
revealed in and through the medium of popular music in the 1970s. See Zettsu, Dō nimo
tomaranai kayōkyoku.
8. Desser, Eros plus Massacre, 96.
9. Sorgenfrei centers her analysis of Terayama’s work on this mother-son relationship,
which she likens to the Ajase complex in Indian Buddhist mythology (via a reading of the
work of psychoanalyst Kosawa Heisaku).
10. Mishima, Kamen no kokuhaku, 66–67; Confessions of a Mask, 77–78.
11. Terayama was known to compare his own notoriety to that of Mishima, though
the analogous imagery here and common areas of concern in general (the photographic,
the workings of memory, violence) are elaborated to far differing ends in their respective
works.
12. In an earlier publication, Sorgenfrei reads this play, as she does with Nuhikun, as a
historical allegory, suggesting that Mari’s domineering attitude in relation to the boy can
be identified with America as occupying force, and mapping the boy onto “Japan,” being
groomed (as is the boy in this story) to be America’s whore. See Sorgenfrei, “Showdown
at the Culture Gap,” 117. A similar though further nuanced reading of the New York version of the play is reiterated briefly in Unspeakable Acts: “Japan, like Kin’ya, is being
groomed to be the whore of God. Terayama’s familiar theme of the helpless, feminine
Japan raped and sodomized by the decadent West is not fully abandoned, but the emphasis has changed. The victim is neither transformed into the victimizer . . . nor is he
helplessly manipulated by abstract forces such as heredity and society. . . . Instead, blame
is placed directly on the active agent of the rape: Marie, who is clearly identified as the
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feared, desired, despised, omnipotent mother, God, and the west—all embodied in the
myth of America” (130). The omnipotent, imperious oppressiveness in Mari’s godlike
control of the boy would lead toward a reading of it in some larger terms, yet it still
remains difficult to account for the subtly multiple layers of irony and masquerade in the
play within a purely historical / allegorical reading.
13. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 87.
14. Woman takes on here something of the fantasized projection role that, in a reverse move, the gendering of characters in yaoi manga take on: appropriating the spaces
of an “other’s” subjectivity for the sake of opening a space or “safe” distance for one’s
own fantasy, but often without taking into account the impact on “real” others. See Vincent, “A Japanese Electra and Her Queer Progeny,” for a discussion of these debates on
yaoi manga about homosexual male characters directed at a predominantly female audience.
15. For an example evoking the essentialist cultural imperative of maternity, see
Barthes, “Novels and Children.”
16. In the original version, Kin’ya first strangles the butterfly girl who is trying to
seduce / rape him; in the New York version, he allows her to kill him. Sorgenfrei insightfully analyzes the different versions of this scene as follows: “When he [kills the butterfly
girl], it at first seems that he has grasped his own agency and power to resist. However,
he is soon lost outside the house of fantasy. He must return to Marie as a docile painted
doll, totally manipulated by Marie, the mother / puppet master.” In the New York version as well, “Marie resurrects him; he cannot even choose his own death” (Unspeakable
Acts, 92).
17. One might note that two years before, Foucault published the immensely influential Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish), and Terayama’s interview with him seems to
date from about 1976, one year before this play’s production.
18. See Tenjō sajiki, “Nuhikun.” For an early descriptive essay on this version that
draws heavily on the former, see Myers, “Terayama’s Directions to Servants.” Sorgenfrei
cogently describes the differences between the Tokyo version and the later European and
New York revisions in Unspeakable Acts,140–43.
19. Seazer is credited as co-director of the performance as well as for the music.
Seazer, Terayama’s longtime collaborator, composed the music for most of the plays of
Tenjō sajiki as well as for Terayama’s films, including Sho o suteyo, machi ni deyō (1971),
Den’en ni shisu (1975), and Emperor Tomato Ketchup (plays include Lemming, Jashūmon, Shintokumaru, and Ahobune). His “avant acid rock” features prominently in almost all of Tenjō
sajiki’s work, combining rock instruments with ghostly synthesized sounds as well as
Japanese folk tunes and traditional instruments. Since 2002 he also has been well-known
for composing the music for the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena. He has his own theater
company, Engeki jikkenshitsu ban’yū inryoku [Theater Laboratory: Universal Gravity].
20. Swift advises a servant to “Write your own name and your sweet-heart’s with the
smoak of a candle on the roof of the kitchen, or the servants hall, to shew your learning.”
Terayama’s characters reiterate such strange commands: one character orders another to
write on the kitchen ceiling with smoke, without any other pretext or context within the
play itself. See Swift, Directions to Servants.
21. From Tenjō sajiki, “Nuhikun.” See Sorgenfrei’s analysis of this play and this scene
in Unspeakable Acts, 141. She describes how the European productions included mobile
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seating units transported around the mansion by hovercraft, so that audience members
could only see parts of the performance at any one time.
22. Sorgenfrei, as mentioned above, has read the master’s power in Terayama’s works
as representing the various dominating forces that have been significant in Japanese history: for example, as the power of the American Occupation forces and the dominance of
American cultural elements within Japanese life, or more distantly, the power of China.
She interprets the exploited and prostituted children in Terayama’s plays as representing
Japan more broadly; seeking an identity and independence of their own, they rebel against
or do violence to the powerful “other” by whom their identity is constituted and with
whom they have, in Terayama’s work, a consistently ambivalent love-hate relationship,
often read in sexual terms.
23. Perhaps what is implicit in his work, in this challenging of “grand narratives,”
could then be seen as a prototype of what Azuma Hiroki would later articulate differently
as a working within the otaku’s cultural and character “database”; see Azuma, Dōbutsuka
suru posuto-modān,47–54.
24. This moment in the play calls to mind Žižek’s description of the uses of money
and illusion. No matter how thoroughly one debunks or critiques the representational
and symbolic quality of money as an empty marker of value, as a contingent place-holder,
when one buys a quart of milk with a dollar, one is enacting or performing the monetary
system in a way that is finally supremely effective in reinforcing it. See Žižek, The Sublime
Object of Ideology, 31–33.
25. Judith Butler reads Foucault on the ways social norms are internalized: “Is the
norm first ‘outside,’ and does it then enter into a pre-given psychic space, understood as
an interior theater of some kind? Or does the internalization of the norm contribute to the
production of internality? Does the norm, having become psychic, involve not only the
interiorization of the norm, but the interiorization of the psyche? I argue that this process
of internalization fabricates the distinction between interior and exterior life” (The Psychic Life of
Power, 19; original emphasis). Here she describes another kind of production of an interior through a reversal that takes place through a trope of inversion. The internalization
of norms is an interiorization into a space, figured as a theater, that does not exist in itself
before this movement.
26. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; quoted in Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 55.
27. All citations from a privately circulated video version of performance (my translation). Terayama’s recording of the January 1978 version of the performance is currently
available on video from Uplink Company, Tokyo.
28. See for example the discussion in Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity; or, with a different
aim, the 2008 sound sculpture / installation by Ben Rubin at the Contemporary Jewish
Museum, San Francsico.
29. Though she did not make this connection, this scene (among others) was one of
those that caused Eileen Blumenthal, Village Voice critic of the La MaMa production, to
pan the performance as misogynist. In her article “Sade, but not Wise,” she calls the production “a get-your-rocks-off, sex-as-violence” show. “It is deeply misogynist, it glorifies
violence, and as far as I’m concerned, it is thoroughly unwelcome” (Village Voice, June 25,
1980, 77).
30. From Tenjō sajiki, “Nuhikun.” In this essay that introduces Tenjō sajiki’s work to
the American audience, Terayama divides the group’s work into a periodization that has
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been roughly followed by later scholars. The first period, 1967–68, includes Kegawa no
Mari; the second focuses on “theater-vérité” and using non-actors (1969–70); the third
begins their performances abroad (1970–72); the fourth includes theater in enclosed
spaces and theater in the streets; the fifth that includes Nuhikun tries to break the distinction between audience and performer, and includes the description cited above about
physical elements.
31. This is a reference to the children’s novel Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night of the Milky
Way Railroad) by Miyazawa Kenji.
32. This manifesto was published in English as Terayama, “Manifesto.” It is composed of fragments of the longer theoretical writings that appear in Terayama Shūji engeki
ronshū; this particular fragment comes from his “Gekijōron” (Theory of Theater), 133.
In the published English translation this passage reads: “A close scrutiny of the contrasting notions of inside and outside as exemplified by the two sides of a door should
enable us to clarify our conception of the theater as a space without contours” (86). The
“space without contours” or outline (rinkaku no nai kūkan) is here contrasted to the inside
and outside opposition that comes with the idea of a door. Here Terayama explicates
his theory of theater through a citation of the poet Pierre Albert-Birot, the famous lines
from the poem “Les amusements naturels”: “A la porte de la maison qui viendra frapper? / Une
porte ouverte on entre / Une porte fermée un antre / Le monde bat de l’autre côté de ma porte. [Who
comes knocking at the door of the house? / The door opens, someone enters / the door
shuts, a cave / the world beats on the other side of my door] (Albert-Birot, Les Amusements Naturels, 217). Most likely Terayama encountered these lines as quoted by Gaston
Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, an influential book in Japan at the time.
33. Terayama, “Gikyokuron” (Theory of the Script), 176–78. The trip here also implies a psychedelic trip. The published English translation from 1975 has been modified
here. Between the two segments of the passage, in the segment elided above, Terayama
passes through a metaphor for the text’s subtle and repetitive ‘journey’ in an image of
Vladimir and Estragon—that is, a journey without a destination, with complex and detailed chance encounters on the way.
34. In the actual spaces of his theatrical endeavors, Terayama found significant resistance to this idea in practice, as he describes in his critical writings on dramaturgy.
35. Terayama’s relationship to the political left, and the student movements, is often
critical and ambivalent. We can see this, for example, in his director’s note to the 1972
published version of one of his most controversial plays, Jashūmon (Heretics): “Since the
kurogo are an allegory for power, they must always behave like a military regiment. Ideally,
the kurogo should have trained for over a month in regimentalized ‘combat drills’ using
wooden staffs such as those used in military training by the rebels of the student movement.” Here, the kurogo are said to fall on the side of power; in the play, for example, they
have the role of manipulating the characters like puppets, and preventing the audience
from leaving the theater, though they also have other unexpected or fanciful roles. Their
appropriation of the apparatus of power is placed in alignment not only with military
regiment training, but also, more directly, in parallel with the student movements’ appropriation of that training. Thus, one might say, Terayama aligns the style or methods of
student rebels’ combat with his “allegory of power” (and thus, in a sense, might be
reflecting on them critically). On the other hand, he also appropriates this vocabulary of
militarist physicality for his own purposes—but with a more direct “citationality” ap-
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parent in his use of it. Citation from Jashūmon translated in Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts,
228.
Chapter Three
EPIGRAPH.
<>
1. Although one can no longer see these live performances as evoked by witnesses of
the time, video versions from 1973 and 1982 are available in the retrospective “Shigei:
Nihon buyō no sekai 1,” broadcast on Japan’s satellite television channel NHK-BS2,
January 1, 1990. The eye expression of Takehara there is reminiscent of the “spirit eyes”
that Ohno Kazuo asked students to aim for, for example, in his workshops in the 1980s;
though the trajectories of these two dance forms are otherwise highly distinct, there are
layers of overlap that could be interesting to trace. For the evocative accompanying poem
and a brief history of the dance, see Okada, ed., Nihon buyōkyoku shūsei, vol. 2, 151. Takehara began to perform “Yuki” in the 1930s; Ohno Kazuo also began his dance training
around that time.
2. Hijikata Tatsumi, “Nikutai no yami o mushiru,” 12. The interview, originally published in 1968, makes explicit reference to the upcoming Osaka Expo as an example of
what the true underground sensibility would oppose. See also discussion in Chapter 7.
3. See discussion in Phelan, Unmarked, 1–3; 6–11.
4. Terayama frequently thematized blindness in his work. His interest in the absence
of the visual might also be linked to his interest in the specific medium of radio. He had
the opportunity to write scenarios for NHK radio dramas starting in 1958–59, thanks to
Tanikawa Shuntarō. The differences between monaural and stereo, between radio and
television, as Ridgely points out, become thematized in the radio dramas, and in the end
led to Terayama’s writing specifically for an imaginary blind audience. See Ridgely, “The
Poetics of Terayama Shūji,” 63–79.
5. Mōjin shokan began as the second installation in a trilogy commissioned by Ritsaert
ten Cate of the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam, where it was performed in Japanese
without translation; the other two plays are Ahen sensō (Opium War, 1972) and Ekibyō
ryūkōki ( Journal of a Plague Year, 1975). For a discussion on the impact of this linguistic
choice in the troupe’s reflections on “internationalization,” see Ridgely, “The Poetics of
Terayama Shūji,” 98–114.
6. “Mōjin shokan: Shanhai-hen,” as published in Terayama Shūji gikyokushū, vol. 3, 164.
I cite from this edition throughout this analysis. Hereafter page numbers from the play
cited in the text.
7. Terayama, “Gekijōron,” 146. We should recall that Terayama had been exposed to
theatrical work at La MaMa with the production of Kegawa no Mari there, and had already
gained some notoriety in the New York theater scene with the publication of reviews and
The Drama Review’s analysis of his work.
8. For a reading of the correspondence with the Mickery about the breaking of the fire
codes in the theater that this would entail, see Ridgely, “The Poetics of Terayama Shūji,”
105.
9. This is Terayama’s own description of the initial stages of the play’s creation in
“Gekijōron,” 148–49.
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10. Doctor Garigari alludes to “Doctor Caligari” while (as a Japanese onomatopoeic
word) garigari signifies grating or scratching.
11. The Japanese detective fiction writer Edogawa Ranpo (whose name plays on
Edgar Allen Poe) published some of the works to which Terayama alludes in the magazine Shōnen kurabu (Boys’ Club). These works include Kaijin nijū mensō (The Mysterious
Man with Twenty Faces), Kurotokage (Black Lizard), and Shōnen tanteidan (Boys’ Detective
Club).
12. Young Kobayashi (Kobayashi shōnen) is a character in Edogawa Ranpo’s stories.
The name Kobayashi Hideo is homophonous with that of the famous literary critic, but
written with different characters for the given name. The “coolie” characters say that
Kobayashi remained in Shanghai after the other members of the boys’ detective club got
old and gave up looking for the mysterious man with twenty faces. He is old but still
single; and he is living with his overbearing mother (as is the case with many of Terayama’s characters). I call him “the boy,” following the script’s terms (shōnen) although it
seems he may already be old.
13. From Terayama’s own description in “Gekijōron,” 151.
14. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 187.
15. Silverman, World Spectators, 19; emphasis in original.
16. See Plato, Republic, Book 7, 537d, 1152; cited in Silverman, World Spectators, 6.
17. One might think in this context of Angelika Festa’s performances, such as Untitled
Dance (with fish and others) and the play of visibility and invisibility analyzed in Phelan, Unmarked, 152–63.
18. In one match-giving sequence, Terayama has the actors give the audience boxes
that contain precisely three matches. An actress sings a song that emphasizes the match
strike as a precise analogue to the finitude of human life: “Three matches, struck one at
a time, one to see the place where you were born, one to see what your face looks like
when you die, and—what is it we can see with the last one?” She suggests an afterlife or
haunting, in which the third match opens a space beyond a final ending.
19. This novel had been revived by the cult film Kurotokage (Black Lizard, 1968; directed by Fukasaku Kinji), starring the transvestite actor Miwa Akihiro, who had also
starred in Kegawa no Mari (see earlier discussion). The film featured a cameo appearance by
Mishima Yukio, who had written the stage adaptation of Ranpo’s novel.
20. The term “coolie” in Japanese (kūrī, 苦力) retains the Chinese reading of the
characters and evokes Asian / Chinese manual laborers during the colonial period. Yet
Terayama’s “coolies” have identities that are every bit as shifty as that of the other characters in the play, and their national identity is by no means certain. Dressed all in black,
in bowler (derby) hats and / or “Chinese overcoats,” with crutches and eye bandages, he
writes, “they look like special police (tokkō-in) of the [ Japanese] army, party agents, or
vagabonds who have just missed the Ship of Fools” (165).
21. One is reminded of a later work in another context: the aging of Kazik in David
Grossman’s See Under: Love: “Kazik died at 1827 hours, twenty-two hours and twenty-two
minutes after he was brought to the zoo as a newborn infant. He was sixty-five years old
at the time, according to his own chronological frame of reference, that he killed himself.
Unquestionably it is the fact that Kazik lived a full life in so short a span which justifies
and motivates this modest scientific project, inasmuch as it offers a unique opportunity
for a full encyclopedic transcription of one man’s life, from birth to death” (304).
233
22. For a useful summary of Allied Occupation policy in postwar Japan and the
ironies of individualism and democratic revolution “imposed from above,” as well as
alternative notions that question democratic assumptions about subjectivity, see Dower,
Embracing Defeat, 71–77, 236–41.
23. For a later experimental cinematic adaptation of this story, see Trinh T. Minh-ha
and Jean-Paul Bourdier’s 2004 film, Night Passage.
24. J. A. Seazer notes that, unlike the others listed in this excerpt from the script,
this name is not that of a cast member in the performance, so that even the “record” of
this performance is not necessarily reliable, but already fictionalized. Personal communication, July 11, 2010.
25. For an insightful reading of the dream of the burning child in Freud and Lacan,
see Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 99.
26. Lacan, “Tuché and Automaton,” 53; cited in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 105. See
Chapter 5, note 26, for a discussion of the Lacanian resonance of Terayama’s idea of the
encounter.
27. One recalls Benjamin’s famous statement in the fifth section of “Theses on the
Philosophy of History”: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (255).
28. Recent American scholarship in particular has been quick to point out the forgotten or repressed violences and complicities of the Pacific War, and has opened more
of the facts to historical discussion, noting debates about what may and may not be said.
Yoshikuni Igarashi outlines a history of the shifts in awareness of the Pacific War within
Japan: with the attenuation of the Cold War paradigm and images of the Vietnam war
after the early 1970s, images of the war resurfaced for examination, but the focus of
attention remained on Asian bodies, with a “dissociation of Japanese bodies from the
nation’s war memories.” In the 1980s, the atrocities of medical experimentation on Russian and Chinese subjects came to wide public attention, as did controversies around the
representation of the war in Japanese history textbooks. The Emperor Hirohito’s death
in 1989 “aptly announced an end of the postwar paradigm. With the disappearance of
Hirohito’s body [. . .] war memories returned to the Japanese media, both as nostalgia and
as critical reflection.” At that point the issue of comfort women also entered into wide
public controversy. Still, Igarashi argues that the emphasis on Asian bodies, rather than
Japanese, continues to contribute to a failure to work through the memories of the war.
The issue of individual and collective subjectivity here is crucial, and remains unresolved. Igarashi argues that it is impossible to work through the memories of the war
without there existing something like a collective (if non-totalizing) “Japanese identity,”
and he argues that the embrace of the “borderless world” of globalization is a move
complicit with (or that contributes to) the failure to confront the history of the war and its
representations. Yet this problem of subjectivity remains unfinished, and cannot be easily
or quickly resolved. One could argue for a defined or fixed historical collective (national)
notion of subjectivity, strategically, even temporarily for the purpose of working with
legal discourses as well as in order to create clarity for questions of responsibility and
accountability. How could a notion of ethics and responsibility still account accurately
for instabilities and fissures (blind spots) in the subject? Perhaps the answer lies in part
in sustaining a clear distinction between notions of “subject” and that of the individual,
person, or collective which though in some way constituted through a phantasmatic iden-
234
tification, nonetheless act (in real ways) in the world with real effects and impacts. Can
one be held accountable for a phantasm? Does it matter nonetheless, in other ways, to
question these structures of identification? I would answer yes, on both counts. The
questioning of these structures of identification allows a critical / analytical distance that
can open the way toward shifting them. See Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 203–4.
29. For an extended discussion of the issues of representation and representability in
the case of extreme historical traumas and crimes, see Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty. There she
carefully points out the pitfalls of the arguments that say that because the Holocaust was
an extreme or limit-event, it should be considered outside or beyond representation. Her
point is that such an argument finally reaches too constrained a limit, and she espouses
the argument that the Holocaust can and should be represented and that the problems
then inherent in such representation can be confronted in a move towards deeper understanding. This relates to my own argument about factuality and epistemological limits in
that the idea that a fact might not be “fully available” argues not for the possibility of its
denial or the movement of erasure / forgetting, but rather for a continuous process of
delving (be it framed in terms of light or darkness)—which includes acts of representation, aesthetic “reading,” writing and performance, that can open up the layers to deeper
awareness and fuller understanding (including the places where understanding is closed
off, or the limits of knowing). Some of the experiments Terayama makes with collectivity
and non-individual experience of pain and dreams speak to these limits and openings as
well.
30. See Introduction for a fuller elaboration of such accusations.
Chapter Four
1. Terayama, “Haiyūron” (On the Actor), 65.
2. See Nishidō Kōjin, Shōgekijō wa shimetsu shita ka. For additional readings that focus
on institutional and financial structures as they influenced the development of postwar
Japanese arts more broadly, see Havens, Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan, and also his
more recent book Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts.
3. The “small theater” (shōgekijō) has a crucial prewar history, with Osanai Kaoru’s
founding the Tsukiji shōgekijō in 1924 with participation by Senda Koreya and others,
as a key forum for the development of shingeki. The shōgekijō undō (“small theater movement”) today, however, refers to “post-shingeki,” the postwar manifestation of the angura
(underground) theater movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
4. Terayama, “Haiyūron,” 65.
5. Terayama, Hyakunen no kodoku, 52. Hereafter page numbers appear in text. These
references come from a published script based on (but not identical to) the video release
of the recording of this play, from performances of July 2–7, 1981, performed at Tōkyō
kokusai mihon-ichi kyōkai Stage B. That script usefully maps the five stages on a grid
by what was happening in each time frame, and shows which dialogues and scenes occur
simultaneously.
6. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 446.
7. The story also exposes assumptions of gender: the identity of the child’s father
remains unknown, and both men die in the mother’s labor.
8. Rugg, Picturing Ourselves, 82.
235
9. Ibid., 85.
10. In Hyakunen no kodoku, Terayama reinterprets and borrows in complex ways from
García Márquez’s novel. Certain facts are recognizable: Ursula and José Arcadia, the
founding family of Macondo, are also cousins whose fear of having children with pig tails
prevents them from consummating their marriage; later, the ghost of a murdered villager
haunts them into migrating. Terayama shares García Márquez’s preoccupation with technology and the writing of names. Yet Terayama puts a new emphasis on the language of
photography, and his use of García Márquez’s work further highlights questions of translation and relocation in a performative textual ungrounding.
11. In another context, the story of Kakesu’s arrival might bring to mind the story
of Susan and her uncanny and evocative haunting by a mysterious “daughter” in J. M.
Coetzee’s Foe.
12. He brings a bag full of warm hair, and continues to bring many items throughout
the following scenes in strange containers: a small doll in a big bag, false teeth in a large
box, a billiards set, a cage with a dead rat inside, and other items, until the young women
begin to take a sexual interest in the delivery man himself and invite him in.
13. Sony developed the first portable video camera in 1964, but the earliest video
art in Japan dates from about 1969, and only in the 1970s did video come to be used
as a stand-alone artistic medium. See Andō Kōhei, Oh! My Mother (1969, 16 mm film
and video), Iimura Takahiko’s Blinking (1970, black and white video), and Matsumoto
Toshio’s Metastasis: Shinchintaisha (1971, 16 mm film and video) for early examples. Glenn
Phillips writes of Japanese video art of the 1970s and especially early 1980s that artists
“engaged in a careful dissection of the formal and poetic complexities allowed by editing”
(“Radical Communication”). Both Video Letters and, in other ways, Hyakunen no kodoku
can be thought structurally in relation to this larger trend of the exploration of video
editing. Tanikawa and Terayama’s friendship and collaborations date from well before
the earliest days of video, where they were working together in the intersection of 16 mm
film, poetry, and jazz, as detailed below in Chapter 6.
14. Video Letters, vol. 4, 0:10:35–0:12:20. Hereafter video references are cited in the
text. The collected Video Letters were released at one point on DVD by Art Days (2003).
A text transcript and brief essays in Japanese and German were earlier published as
Terayama and Tanikawa, Videobrief: Dialogtext. The work received acclaim at various film
festivals. I follow the Humboldt publication’s practice in numbering each video letter by
volume (1–16).
15. The homoerotic overtones of this intimacy in connection with Terayama are usually unspoken, but given the tense closeness and almost secrecy of the tone of the voices,
one could certainly open such a discussion (in parallel to, in another kind of interpretation, the explicit references to / comparisons of relationships with “girls”). Vol. 5 opens
with a shot distorted in an upside-down mirror lens where Terayama says “good morning” and a naked young man (Morisaki Henrik, assistant director, designer, sound manager and occasional actor from Terayama’s troupe) emerges to look in the camera with
him. The young man stands brushing his teeth before a poster of Terayama’s play Lemming, before Terayama begins his morning routine.
16. This image occurs in several other places in Terayama’s oeuvre, and thus could
be seen also as a reflection on the past of his own work (as well as a continuation of the
citationality that is a key part of his creative process). For example, it appears in the 1975
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collection Terayama, Inugami-ke no hitobito, 35, and in the 1974 film Den’en ni shisu, also
noted by Ridgely, “The Poetics of Terayama Shūji,” 24n21.
17. In this segment, the discussion of “semblance” (like Benjamin’s Schein) leads into a
questioning of the camera’s function, and the trembling of Tanikawa’s hand as a “proof”
of life. Here, too, the dogs stand in for that which does not question either meaning or
meaninglessness (vol. 9, 0:32:00–0:33:21).
18. Miyamoto, who became a key figure in the Japanese Communist Party, was imprisoned for twelve years during the war. The essay on Akutagawa, “Haiboku no bungaku” (The Literature of Defeat), won first prize in an essay contest in the journal Kaizō,
with the second prize going to Kobayashi Hideo’s “Samazama naru ishō.” See Miyamoto,
“Haiboku no bungaku,” 3–32.
19. Such claims have a long history, but more recently, Mexican video artist Ximena
Cuevas speaks specifically of the medium of video in terms of “intimacy”; she claims that
the notion of “intimacy” made her want to start her work by taking extensive footage of
the inside of her closet—although she also frequently plays on television and popular
culture representations (“Ximena Cuevas and the Laboratory of Life”). In terms of
broader trends in Japanese cinema, one might also point out that this period in the early
1980s marked a move toward many explorations of the personal, in ways inspired by
Hara Kazuo’s earlier films such as Extreme Private Eros but often criticized (by Hara as
well) for showing insufficient resistance in their mode of exploring that “personal.”
20. There is a special space created here for exploration of the terms of “engagement”
from within the apparently “irrelevant,” from within that without enforceable power, in
opposition to the relentlessly productive quest for the most relevant and powerful. Such
an interest might call to mind the concept and aims of the “left alone” or the skew (zure)
of the encounter in Mono-ha arts—precisely focused on the unenforced and unenforceable, the excess that flows outside of the public venues like the court room. See Chapter 5
for a discussion of skew and Mono-ha. One might also link it, from a different perspective, to the excesses of the rising economic “bubble” period of the mid- to late 1980s.
Chapter Five
2. Terayama had seen the play during a visit to Berlin. See Handke, Kaspar and Other
Plays, ix–32; and Terayama, “Kankyakuron,” 35.
3. Letter to Weisengrund-Adorno, Paris, May 31, 1935, in Benjamin, Walter Benjamin
and Theodor Adorno, 88. He credits his reading and translation of Aragon with the beginning of the generation of the Arcades project.
4. For recent analysis on a related thematic of encounter under the term fureai, see
Sakai, “Jōdō no seijigaku.” The history of subjectivity (shutaisei ) in Japan and how it
should be viewed remains a subject of extensive debate in many fields. Takeuchi Yoshirō,
whom J. Victor Koschmann also cites, argues that using post-structuralist theory to challenge the concept of unified subjectivity along with European critics—the use of Deleuze,
Foucault, Derrida in a Japanese context—does not make sense because the project of
creating a solid and unassailable subject, or even notion of the subject, had not been completed in Japanese modernity. For him and other writers in alignment with him (he cites
precedents in 1950s Japanese intellectuals following Max Weber), it makes more sense
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to attempt to complete the process of modernization by, if anything, buttressing and
working to build a more solid sense of the subject. One should, in other words, aim to
build rather than to assail the solidity of the subject. Similar arguments were made about
the appropriation of surrealist critiques of logocentrism in the context of Japan, whose
accession to this notion of logocentrism was considered incomplete and very recent. At
the same time, traditional Japanese culture and language were being employed by European avant-garde artists as a mode of inspiration for challenging logocentric modes of
thought. See Takeuchi, “Posutomodan ni okeru chi no kansei.” Takeuchi also criticizes
the rehabilitation of the Kyoto school under the sign of the post-modern for reasons discussed later in this study.
5. J. Victor Koschmann draws on this insight in his excellent analysis of postwar
Japanese subjectivity Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan. Here Laclau uses the term
“structure” in a way particular to his philosophical project, in a sense that could be a productive site for further exploration.
6. One might trace a fuller history of this mode of thinking about the subject, which
views the subject as constituted through a struggle with an other (that might be itself ).
Such a history would include earlier thinkers such as Hegel (in Phenomenology of Spirit) as
well as Kierkegaard, and more recently Foucault, Laclau, Mouffe, Butler, and others.
Kyoto school thought deserves inclusion in such a genealogy of such concepts of a ‘dislocated’ subject, and part of this book’s project is to trace more deeply the relationships
between this strand within philosophical thought and the theoretical issues raised by
postwar experimental arts, both by the critical and attentive reading of particular works
and of theoretical writings of the artists themselves. The artists do not refer directly to
Watsuji: his work on subjectivity, with its emphasis on encounters and relationality,
stands in a useful relationship to open the questions later artists raise using terms like the
deai and shutai (subject) or jiko (self ).
7. Watsuji Tetsurō, “Zeeren Kierukegōru,” 403 and passim for the description of
Kierkegaard’s thought in these terms; 513, 547, 555–58, 581, 631 and passim for the opposition to Hegel. (This is a 1946 revision / clarification of an original essay written in 1915.
In 1915, Watsuji is highly identified with Kierkegaard’s ethical thought and less interested
in the theological aspects, but by 1946, according to his own preface, he has come to recognize more clearly the distances between Kierkegaard’s visions and his own.) For the
subject as “leap,” see, for example, Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments.
8. Ibid., 558, existential thought (the German originals as cited by Watsuji with his
translations, though gensonzai is also sometimes translated as Dasein); existential subjectivity, see for example 559. We can see, here and in Watsuji’s “Nīche kenkyū” (Study of
Nietzsche, 1913), some early precedents for existentialist thought in Japan well before the
arrival of Sartre, as Kaneko Takezō also explains in his afterward to the volume (690).
Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard had been subjects of research in Japan since the 1890s
(Meiji 30s), but according to Kaneko, Watsuji is the first to achieve a fully realized work
on their ideas.
9. Ibid., 574, 575.
10. Ibid., “Zeeren Kierukegōru,” 581. For Watsuji, there is a precondition for Kierkegaard’s leap, something that pre-exists or conditions the ground “within the self” but at
the same time is only a possibility, not yet realized until the “moment of leap.”
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11. Watsuji describes the temporality in Kierkegaard’s thought: “Existence is within
‘time’ and is in the process of being generated (seisei = Wesen) subjectively [. . .] Human
beings live forward and comprehend backward. Subjective existence moves constantly forward
as life manifested directly before one’s eyes, eternally present, but what is caught in the
net of thought comes to congeal in an orderly line between past and future” (562, emphasis in original).
12. Thus Watsuji here proposes a version of subjectivity as part of a matrix that preexists the subject. When we think of postwar versions of subjectivity, or even recent critical versions like Laclau and Mouffe’s Marxist-inflected ideas of the structure, it is
important to understand the idea of a subterfuge where the process of entering culture is
disguised (or at least perceived) as a process of self-expression, where there is a temporal
and causal reversal in the process of the self-activated self-anticipated subject. It is a
moment where one would think one sees “engagement” or agency, where one in fact also
sees an “encounter” that is simultaneously an accession to culture at the very moment
of acting.
13. Those critical of Watsuji’s theories (like Tosaka Jun, a Marxist arrested by the
thought police during the war who died in prison in 1945) argued that Watsuji’s ideas
of relationality (aidagara) and in-betweenness of the subject came to be seen as fixed or
natural, in an unquestioned causality of the environment or climate. See Harootunian,
Overcome by Modernity, 270. Tosaka called Fūdo the “most sophisticated [haikara] form of
Nipponism,” for how he claimed it overemphasized the uniqueness of Japan. See Yuasa,
Watsuji Tetsurō, 124–26. Yet other scholars of the Kyoto school much more explicitly
justified the Pacific War, most notably Kōsaka Masaaki, with their “philosophy of world
history” (sekai-shi no tetsugaku). Yamada Kō argues that the scholars of the New (post-war)
Kyoto School such as Ueyama Shunpei, Umesao Tadao, and Umehara Takeshi use a
rough reading of Fūdo and Watsuji’s thought to justify a “new Nipponism.” Yamada,
Watsuji Tetsurō ron, 176.
14. For example, drawing primarily from Watsuji’s mentor Nishida, Arisaka wonders
how the very same works, and sometimes the very same passages within them, can be
used to support such diametrically opposed assessments; she explores how the texts open
themselves to such seemingly incompatible political appropriations. The aspect of Watsuji’s thought that implies an unchanging “essential” climate contradicts the premise of
the contingency of culture, and the otherwise radical ideas of the subject in relation with
which he begins his study. In the early part of Fūdo, Watsuji gives history a primary place
in the contingent construction of fūdo: “there is no history that exists without fūdo and no
fūdo without history” (Watsuji, Fūdo, 13). Hereafter page numbers cited in text above. At
other places in his work he rejects or denies such contingency, arguing for a fundamental
stability of the cultural. See Harootunian’s discussion of Watsuji in Overcome by Modernity,
260, 262. “Recalling Kuki’s powerful argument linking contingence to exceptionalism,
Watsuji declared that the circumstances of folk uniqueness were not ‘contingent, trifling
things,’ but rather the most fundamental rules governing human existence” (260).
15. Benjamin points out that Marx too envisioned this relationship as a complex series
of mediations, but the particularity of the workings of these mediations is open to debate.
See “Bejamin’s Marxisms,” Chapter 2 of Cohen, Profane Illumination.
16. Konvolut K2, 5 in Benjamin, The Arcades Project,392; cited in Cohen, Profane Illumination, 28.
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17. Watsuji uses the term wareware to encompass the “we,” though a deeper exploration of the inclusions and exclusions implied by this first person plural is warranted. For
the moment, I follow his argument in referring to an unspecified “we” and note when the
“we” becomes more specific. In some sense, still, his is a universalizing “we.”
18. Watsuji, “Zeeren Kierukegōru,” 562. First the subject experiences a certain unnamed sensation; next, the subject discovers and in a certain sense draws into visiblity /
perceptibility “something like the feeling of ‘cold’” (samuke to iu gotoki mono). Watsuji does
not simply call it “cold” (as if it had an independent and prior existence); rather, he keeps
cold in quotation marks surrounded by the phrase “something like” (to iu gotoki mono),
attempting to capture, if ever so briefly, a moment of prelinguistic vagueness, before the
concept of cold (and by extension knowledge of its source) would come to be fixed in an
attribution. Of course, this is not an approach that is intended to supplant all scientific
reason or political causality—nor is it meant to muddy the historical or political understanding, but rather, to try to evoke the instances of the relational subject that Watsuji and
others worked to describe.
19. Here again the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the term “we” remains in question (see above).
20. Silverman, World Spectators draws on Hegel in making a parallel argument, emphasizing the act of seeing as an ethical act.
21. Such a statement might remind one of the moment when Franz Fanon, advocating an intensive self-scrutiny in so different a context of colonial subjugation, writes:
“To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of
this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight
of a civilization” (Black Skin, White Masks, 18). Fanon, with his own Hegelian intertext,
activates the insight that “a man who has a language consequently possesses the world
expressed and implied by that language,” bringing it to bear on the situation of the Antillean who speaks, who assumes, and is assumed by French language and culture. Though
Fanon’s work comes from a colonial context that is not fully translatable here, it is one
site where contemporary critical theory has come to recognize the most explicit vision
of “putting on” or assumption of culture, as something not “natural” but that involves
a particular kind of linguistically mediated process. While Watsuji’s vision of cultural
assumption does not foreground language as strongly as Fanon’s, there is nonetheless
both a linguistic and culturally / historically mediated aspect to Watsuji’s “putting on,”
at least for the moment, resonant with Fanon’s, that Watsuji finally extends in a more
universalizing direction as a fundamental aspect of his theory of subjectivization.
22. This blind spot in the theoretical apparatus—what, then, counts as human?—
allows for the subjugation of Asian countries to be understood, by some of his readers,
as just one more “expression” of the Japanese spirit. Non-Japanese subjects come to be
permissibly treated as objects in a sense: suru tame no mono—for a purpose.
23. Chōetsu can be translated as “overcoming” or “transcendence.” The choice of
translation depends in part on how much one emphasizes the universalizing tendency of
Watsuji’s ideas, and how much one wants to stress his understanding of the importance
of contingent particularity, as I emphasize it here.
24. It is hegemony’s continually moving network of relations that I compare here to
Watsuji’s relationality moving outward toward the future. That one can make this comparison at all once again evokes the multivalent and contradictory possibilities in Wa-
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tsuji’s thought. If hegemony is a concept used to frame the modes of dominance of an
alliance of certain social groups, which exerts “total social control” over other groups,
at the same time it describes a mode of continuing change, where, as Stuart Hall argues,
“‘Hegemony . . . is not universal and ‘given’ to the continuing rule of a particular class.
It has to be won, reproduced, sustained. Hegemony is, as Gramsci said, a ‘moving equilibrium’ containing relations of forces favourable or unfavourable to this or that tendency’” (cited in Hebdige, Subculture, 16).
25. Benjamin describes the scene after arriving late to class: “No-one seemed to know
me, or even to see me. Just as the devil takes the shadow of Peter Schlemihl, the teacher
had taken my name at the beginning of the hour. I could no longer get my turn on the
list” (“Tardy Arrival,” in Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, 354). See also the temporality of Terayama’s always-too-late encounter, described later in this chapter.
26. In Lacan’s discussion of the dream and waking in psychoanalysis, he points to the
orientation of psychoanalysis toward the “kernel of the real.” He describes in psychoanalysis “an essential encounter—an appointment to which we are always called with a
real that eludes us.” Lacan translates the tuché as the encounter with the real; and “this real
brings with it the subject, almost by force.” In his idea of encounter, to be discussed as
the third “site” of encounter below, Terayama draws on a similar principle, the question
of the subject being brought by force to the encounter. Perhaps a resonant model for the
efficacy of the theatrical encounter can be found in the transference relationship as well.
Terayama’s interest in the organization of chance in theater can be compared to Lacan’s
interest in this occurrence that happens “as if by chance.” Thus, Lacan writes of “the real
as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the
missed encounter” (“Tuché and Automaton,” 53–55).
27. Lee, Deai o motomete: atarashii geijutsu no hajimari ni; reprinted with changes and
additions by the author as Lee, Deai o motomete: gendai bijutsu no shigen. In an interview with
Wakabayashi Naoki, Lee writes of the disjunction in time between his recognition internationally (such as in the journal Art International) in the early years, and the recognition he
received only later from Japanese critics. He claims that he began to write in part because
he was not receiving understanding and recognition from art critics within Japan. Other
artists now frequently included under the Mono-ha rubric include Sekine Nobuo, Suga
Kishio, Yoshida Katsurō, Koshimizu Susumu, Enokura Kōji, Takayama Noboru, and
Narita Katsuhiko.
<28. Cited and translated in Tatehata, “Mono-ha and Japan’s Crisis of the Modern,”
226, from “Sonzai to mu o koete: Sekine Nobuo ron,” Mizue ( June 1969); reprinted in
Lee, Deai o motomete: gendai bijutsu no shigen.>
29. Some critics interpret the focus on the “thing” as an expression of ambivalence
toward the materials of industrial society. Mono-ha works often juxtapose natural materials (dirt, stone, wood) with industrial materials (steel, glass).
30. See Suga, “‘Hōchi’ to iu jōkyō,” 145.
31. Suga, “Jōtai o koete Aru,” 29. In his excellent introductory article on Mono-ha,
Tatehata Akira points out a crucial distinction in emphasis between the theorizations of
Lee and Suga. Suga’s emphasis on “leaving alone” ultimately closes off the possibility of
a relationship or emphasizes an absence of connection, while Lee highlights relationality:
“Whereas Lee dislocates things to initiate an unprecedented relationship that strips away
their names, Suga leaves them alone so as to apprehend directly their ‘nameless state.’”
241
Tatehata continues: “While Lee’s ‘dislocation’ in search of an encounter with the ‘worldas-it-is’ is relational (i.e., accepting of mutual interactivity between things), Suga’s ‘ultimate “being”’ no longer permits any relationships.” Yet in the end, both Lee’s “dislocated” relationship and Suga’s silent left-alone things do explore a dislocated or missed
or cut-off place for relationality. See Tatehata, “Mono-ha and Japan’s Crisis of the Modern,” 234. Article reprinted from the catalogue of the exhibition “Mono-ha: School of
Things,” organized by Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, May 26–July 22, 2001.
I refer here also to Tatehata, “Gutai group and Mono-ha,” lecture given on February 6,
2003.
32. Lee, Deai o motomete: gendai bijutsu no shigen, 57. The original article was published
as “Deai o motomete,” (Bijutsu techō, February 1970). Hereafter page numbers from the
reprint edition and the translation are cited in the text. Translated in Tatehata, “Mono-ha
and Japan’s Crisis of the Modern,” 231.
33. Would the object’s breath then come into the life of the subject? One might recall
what Gayatri Spivak writes, for feminist criticism from a very different context, about an
act that she terms the “simultaneous other focus”: “How am I naming her? How does
she name me?” (cited in Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 103).
34. Tatehata points out that the name “Mono-ha” was not yet coined at the time this
article was published, and the joining together of the group took place after Lee created a
“theoretical backbone” for the movement through these writings. Tatehata, “Mono-ha
and Japan’s Crisis of the Modern,” 229–30.
35. Working from within a framework of European philosophical discourse (as was
Watsuji), Lee may associate this ‘as it is’ with Kant’s thing-in-itself, and Heidegger’s critique thereof, while at other moments he calls on Chuang Tzu to explicate these ideas.
36. Catalogue essay from Tokyo Gallery Exhibition, 1999. The paintings were called
Correspondance.
37. For a thoughtful work on Gutai artists in relation to issues of subjectivity, see
Kunimoto, “Portraits of the Sun.”
<38. “Sonzai to mu o koete: Sekine Nobuo ron,” Mizue ( June 1969): 52; reprinted in
Lee, Deai o motomete: gendai bijutsu no shigen; cited in Tatehata, “Mono-ha and Japan’s Crisis
of the Modern,” 226.>
39. Terayama, “Haiyūron,” 65. Hereafter citations from “Haiyūron” and “Kankyakuron” appear in the text. For more extended translations of Terayama’s writings on theater,
including some parts included here, see “Excerpts from The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea:
My Theater,” in Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts, 274, 285–86, and 263–311 passim. See also
Terayama, Meiro to shikai, reprinted as part of the above collection of Terayama’s dramatic
theories. See Introduction on Terayama’s ambivalent inclusion in this “post-shingeki ”
realm.
40. “L’Enfer c’est les Autres” (Sartre, “Huis Clos,” 128).
42. Ibid., 66–67. Terayama describes himself, at least, as speaking these words to his
actors as a way of making them understand the proper stance of the actor.
43. Goodman, The Return of the Gods, 18.
44. Gerald Figal writes that “late-century ‘booms’ in Yanagita-gaku, nihonjin-ron and
native-place-ism, yōkai, and most recently, Minakata [Kumagusu] studies offer, perhaps,
symptoms of a renewed crisis in Japanese national-cultural identity which summon mys-
242
teries and mystifications that triangulate with the fushigi-ron that formed around the century’s beginning” (Civilization and Monsters, 198).
45. Goodman, The Return of the Gods, 23.
46. Terayama, “Haiyūron,” 64–65. Hereafter citations from “Haiyūron” and “Kankyakuron” appear in the text, and sources from Benjamin’s essays appear in the notes.
47. This reaction does not take into account the more subtle uses of mimetic language
and understandings of mimesis that come up in other parts of his work. For a contextualization of the anti-mimetic bias and the challenges to it in contemporary and feminist
theater practices, see Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis.
48. From Tōno, “Gendai kanshūron,” 69.
49. A Japanese translation of the epic theater essay was published in Ishiguro, ed.,
Burehito / Varutā Benyamin chosakushū, vol. 9.
50. On the history of Brecht’s reception in Japan, see Uchino, “Political Displacements,” which was recently included as a chapter in Uchino, Crucible Bodies. See also
Nakajima, “Burehito to Terayama Shūji.”
51. Benjamin, Versuche über Brecht; cited from Anna Bostock’s translation Understanding
Brecht, 3; emphasis mine. Those interested in traditional Japanese theater might think of
kata in reference to this description of interruption and raised, presentational gesture.
Terayama does not mention this, though many practitioners in his time did draw on
kabuki and other earlier forms (notably Kara Jūrō and Suzuki Tadashi) to challenge
shingeki convention and draw out spectacularity / spectacularization. This raises complex
cultural issues in relation to the expectations of different national and international audiences—for example, see Ridgely, “The Poetics of Terayama Shūji” for a discussion of
the ways Terayama’s troupe responded to the need for international legibility. See also
Tomii, “Historicizing Contemporary Art” for a discussion of gendai-period arts more
broadly in the drive for international acceptance. At different points, the need for “product differentiation,” as one might call it, in the European arts market would cause Japanese troupes to emphasize what would be recognized as “native” or “traditional” Japanese cultural elements; at other times, they were working within and reframing paradigms
of European theatrical innovation of their time (as with Terayama).
52. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 11.
53. Later in the essay he explicitly compares theater with film and radio—both of
which he sees as interrupted and interruptable media.
55. Ibid.
56. A further inquiry would compare their two varying versions of “experience”: for
Benjamin, the distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, and for Terayama, the centrality
of the bodily experience (taiken) of the encounter.
58. This reading of Freud is explained most succinctly in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience.
59. Terayama, “Hanzai ni okeru ‘kankyaku’ no kenkyū,” 315. Page numbers from this
essay hereafter cited in the text.
60. Other theories of television might argue that we are all also implicated in a certain
way in Columbo as well, that it is precisely the charged ideological issues implied by fiction
that give them a powerful draw, even if the conflicts are magically resolved in the end.
243
61. Mauss writes about the modes of exorcism of illness and unwanted elements in
A General Theory of Magic (1902–1903).
62. One might think of Adachi Masao et al’s Ryakushō renzoku shasatsuma (AKA: Serial
Killer, 1969) from the earlier development of landscape theory and how that film had also
attempted to evade precisely such psychologization of the criminal.
63. Numerous similar crimes have occurred since that time, such as the indiscriminate
poisoning of the curry at a local town festival in 1998.
64. In another context one might analyze the analogous real crimes that have proliferated in recent years, with the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attack in 1995 as an extreme
example. The uncomfortable similarity between this mode of thinking of crime and that
of some socially prominent criminal cases of more recent times reveals the deliberate violence of this idea of the encounter that is, in some ways, indifferent to its moral or ethical
resonances. Terayama is interested, precisely, in a performative exploitation of some of
the anxiety this issue raises, and I can envision the objection to it in those terms. There
is an expressive, performative extravagance in this celebration or idealization of a situation of danger (that could be discussed in terms of Terayama’s own resistance to ideas of
artistic expressivity as being about an artistic subject, even while he does participate so
actively in the making of his own artistic legend). From another angle, however, one can
see that Terayama is interested in understanding / analyzing the less obvious violences
that sustain the structures and exclusions of the moral / social order, and from this point
of view can understand focusing an analysis on the “system that keeps the order between
the ‘other’ and the ‘same’” (322) in such extreme moments as these crime cases.
65. In another context, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura refers precisely to the phone booth,
neither fully public nor fully private, as a paradigmatic space in the changing notions of
the public sphere in postwar Japan (“Competing Publics,” 79).
66. Terayama had interviewed Foucault in 1976, and the resulting (strange) dialogue
was published in Japanese in the magazine Jōkyō (April 1976), and reprinted in Terayama,
Terayama Shūji taidanshū, 27–40. I am here following Terayama’s notion of television’s
“safety”—he himself performed provocative dialogical experiments with video (as discussed in Chapter 4).
67. Such a concept also resonates strongly with Akasegawa Genpei’s idea of the Tomason (Thomasson) from around the same period.
68. As we saw above, though he advocated for a certain sacral function of theater,
Terayama had rejected the figure of the “abyss” in Benjamin as an outdated vision of
theater, just as Benjamin had argued that theater had already become a public platform
(rather than something separated from the audience by an abyss). Whereas Benjamin
argues for the creative use of this public platform, for its recognition and self-reflection
through epic theater, Terayama in general rejects the idea of the public platform as a form
of didacticism.
69. Miura Masashi further points out a set of links to phenomenology in Terayama’s
work, through the problem of the relation of the subject to the world. See Miura, “Engeki
to genshōgaku to iu shiten” (first published in 1983). Miura writes: “One would probably
not be mistaken to think of Terayama Shūji’s theater as deeply linked to phenomenology.
Or more accurately, one might say that the methodology of phenomenology is itself extremely theatrical. The point of view that treats the world as a stage is one of the things
that conspicuously links the Umwelt theory of [ Jakob Joahnn Baron von] Uexküll, the
244
life-world theory of Husserl, the impulsion / becoming of the cosmos in [Max] Scheler,
and Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world. Or rather, one might do better to think of it this
way: through the extreme violence / severity of the question ‘who am I,’ Terayama Shūji
achieved a phenomenological point of view, and through that point of view, by necessity,
he arrived at theater” (215).
70. Yamaguchi, “Terayama Shūji,” 330.
71. Ibid.
72. Terayama Shūji, “Haiyūron,” 65.
73. See the reading of this text in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 170.
Chapter Six
1. Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 284.
2. Wendy Brown considers that, though this argument could be hard to recognize as
Marcusian, it may draw on Marcuse’s critique of the ‘reality principle’ in Eros and Civilization. “In that text, Marcuse insists that Freud's formulation of the inherent and necessary
sacrifice of desire to civilization was a description of capitalism rather than of human existence as such. When this sacrifice is no longer necessary, when capitalism has radically
reduced the necessary labor needed to reproduce our existence, desire can rise up against
it.” The later Marcuse would be represented in works like One Dimensional Man. Personal
communication, May 6, 2009.
3. In place of the “film-as-weapon” ideal of political documentary, they propose an
alternative political critique involving a decentering of subjectivity and of the spectator
as that around which narrative space and time would be structured. They move toward a
more fragmented and conceptual mode of analysis of the workings of power in the social
and architectural landscape. Filmmakers interested in landscape theory include Adachi
Masao, Jōnouchi Motoharu, and Ōshima Nagisa in Tōkyō sensō sengo hiwa (The Man Who
Left His Will on Film, 1970) and theorist Matsuda Masao, among others. The topic of
landscape theory has been the subject of percolating interest in recent years, including the
founding of a study group in Tokyo that includes scholars including Hirasawa Gō. For a
fine recent analysis in English of two films in their relation to landscape theory, see Furuhata, “Returning to Actuality,” 348.
4. One could imagine a whole reading of Ōshima’s Tōkyō sensō sengo hiwa as a film
about the “encounter” and “non-encounter” with the imaginary filmmaker and landscape of Tokyo “he” filmed.
5. I am indebted to Nishimura Tomohiro’s fine article, “‘Etosetora to jazu no kai’
to ‘Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu’” for introducing me to the histories of these events. The former
rockabilly singer Yamana Yoshizō was involved as a sponsor, as well as Kanamori Kaoru
and Terayama as organizers. Ishihara Shintarō’s reluctant film Yoru ga kuru (Evening
Comes, which he abandoned but was edited and completed by his cinematographer)
was screened in the series. The other films were IRON by Okamoto Yoshihiko and
Terayama’s Neko gaku: anata mo neko ga suki desuka (Catology: Do You Love Cats Too?)
(Nishimura, “‘Etosetora to jazu no kai,’” 40). Excellent references on Sōgetsu Art Center
are held in the archives of Keiō University Art Center and also within the Sōgetsu Art
Center itself. Full details for Sōgetsu at this time are available in “Sōgetsu āto sentā no
kiroku” kankō iinkai, ed., Kagayake 60 nendai. Other key events taking place at Sōgetsu
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around this time include the famous Sōgetsu Music Inn as well as “Sannin no animeeshon” (Three Person Animation Event), that led to an annual art animation festival
held there, which played a key role in the construction of the genre of anime as it is
known today.
6. One might hesitate to bring up Pini. di. Roma, however, under the sign of “coherence.” The piece uses a compositional practice in part analogous to that of Conner,
picking up or alluding to pieces of folksongs and medieval chant. The piece is also an apt
choice for Conner’s critique of Hollywood since the piece is said to have inspired many
early Hollywood composers. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson include an extensive discussion of A MOVIE as a key example of experimental film and what they
term “associational form” in Film Art, 138–44.
7. Coetzee, Foe, 157.
8. In contrast to this focus on the prolific spectacularization of the bomb as a trope,
Conner’s later film Crossroads (1976) experiments explicitly with the paradoxical beauty
and the complex temporality of bomb footage, and the contradictions inherent in the
act of looking. Because the film consists solely of found footage shot at high speed but
played at normal speed, it appears as extreme slow motion. By 1976, this image had been
shown on film so many times; indeed, A MOVIE (1958) already seemed to be reflecting
on that problem. Yet due to the slowness of movement and repetition of the “same
event,” one could argue that the viewer is made to really see it in a deeper sense for the
first time. The stress and damage done to the film by the situation of its filming—the
radiation, the heat—lets the film itself stand in as a surface of flesh appearing, and deteriorating, before the viewers’ eyes.
9. Part of this chapter was originally given as a talk at the conference “Hiroshima / Nagasaki 2005: Memories and Visions,” Tufts University, April 21, 2005, a conference that invited survivors—most of them avid anti-nuclear activists—to hear and
respond to academic presentations on bomb representation and history. In this context,
speaking of a “visual trope” in reference to this experience felt awkward and even impolite.
10. Coetzee, Foe, 132.
11. On the philosophical underpinnings of butō, see Chapter 7, as well as the epilogue
to Sas, Fault Lines.
12. Baudrillard, Simulations, 12.
13. Earlier known as Heso to A-Bomb, as on the poster for the event, the film came to
be known most commonly in Japanese as Heso to genbaku with the English title Navel and
A-Bomb. Both this and Tanikawa / Takemitsu’s Batsu were listed there as “experimental
films on modern jazz themes.”
14. Nishimura explains that the use of jazz was inspired by the previous year’s screenings, such as Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958), which
included the music of Miles Davis, and the experimental animation of Norman McLaren,
such as “Short and Suite” (1959). The screenings in Etosetera to jazu no kai juxtaposed
experimental animated films with “live action” films and form a clear precedent for the
events of the Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu and the collaborations of Jikkenshitsu jūnu (Laboratory Jeune). In a manifesto signed by Yamana Yoshizō, Kanamori Kaoru, and Terayama, the group writes: “We feel ourselves struck by the many aspects of ‘art as an act’
that jazz possesses. Taking that concept as our primary axis, we would like to destroy the
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minor atmosphere of 16 mm film, which has been nothing more than an accumulation
of static images, and to restore the decadent [daraku] film art to its rightful power” (“Jūnu
arui wa wakasa to iu koto,” cited in Nishimura, “‘Etosetora to jazu no kai,’” 43).
15. The first, darker half of the film centering on the dying chicken in the surf juxtaposes strongly to the more jaunty, gentler footage in the latter half, footage of small
naked boys frolicking and dancing in the sand. Thus the film can be read as a story of
“death and rebirth,” and the tenor of the music seems largely to confirm such a reading;
still, the film’s latter half also has its dark side, and both halves sustain an odd balance
between playfulness and its fearful underside.
16. See Hosoe’s allegorical reading / retrospective scenario of the film, “Heso to genbaku gaiyō,” in Hosoe Eikō no shashin, 215.
17. The dying body is a key image in early butō, related to the search for the kind of
movement, like the chicken’s legs in death that, because of the absence of connection to
the brain, could be envisioned as outside of conceptual and conscious control and limits.
Perhaps this extreme view can related to the interest in the dying cat’s body after it is
thrown from a rooftop in Terayama’s lost or suppressed film Neko gaku from the same
event, and it may be related to Matsumoto’s 1960 condemnation of the film series as a
whole as “anti-human” (writing in the journal Kiroku eiga): “In relation to this objectification of anti-human sentiment, there is nothing more here than the cheapest of patterns
that anyone could immediately have thought of” (“Zankoku o mitsumeru me”; cited in
Nishimura, “‘Etosetora to jazu no kai’ to ‘Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu,’” 43).
18. For the full evocative story and image, see Kajii, Remon. “How interesting it would
be if I were the mysterious villain who had come to place the terrifying bomb that glistened golden on the shelf at Maruzen [bookstore], and in ten minutes’ time Maruzen
would explode, with the shelf of Art at the center of the explosion?” (12). Even within
the image of detonating Art, Kajii’s thrill centers on an allusion to an image mediated
through one kind of art—he sees himself through a popular culture or cinematic image of
the “mysterious villain.”
19. Hijikata returned numerous times to his birthplace in Akita prefecture with Hosoe
Eikoh for this project, beginning in 1965. The three-year collaboration resulted in the
publication of Kamaitachi.
20. One approach to butō that is opened by this work but remains for fuller study:
in what ways is butō itself as much imbricated in the paradigms of film and photography as
in dance?
21. Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry, 11.
22. Desser writes of Ōshima Nagisa’s Taiyō no hakaba (Burial of the Sun, 1960), for
example: “The gang is ubiquitous, a clear metaphor for the Japanese social structure
which virtually precludes individualism (the most frequently noted, even clichéd, image
of Japan held by the West). . . . In Oshima’s film, the youth gang is compared to the militarist band (gang), thus making it clear that the gang is a microcosm of the nation-state. . . .
The motif of the gang, apparent in these early films by Ōshima, and recurrent in films
by Shinoda and Imamura Shōhei, finds a more commercial reappearance in a popular
formula which appeared shortly after the New Wave: the yakuza film. . . . What separates
Ōshima from the yakuza genre is that while Ōshima politicizes the context of his films,
the yakuza film ritualizes it” (Eros Plus Massacre, 52).
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23. The categorization of the experimental in cinema studies has often been structured around the opposition between narrative and non-narrative film, and the opposition between independent / non-commercial and studio-based / commercial / popular
cinema. Yet neither of these oppositions holds fully for the case of Japanese experimental
film, which has ties to studios and includes narrative, feature-length work. For a discussion of these issues in an analysis of Matsumoto Toshio’s narrative feature-length experimental film Bara no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969), see Hall, “Unwilling Subjects.”
24. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 92. For a provocative reading of this
intersection of the spatial and the temporal in Benjamin, see Butler, “Afterword.”
25. I would like to thank Hirasawa Gō and Jonathan M. Hall for introducing me to the
specific cinematic world of Jōnouchi.
26. Matsuda Masao, film critic and landscape theorist, defended “Document 6.15”
under a pseudonym in Nihon dokusho shinbun against attacks that it was inappropriate to
the occasion. See Nishimura, “Nichidai eiken to VAN eiga kagaku kenkyūjo.”
27. He also made a film entitled “Hijikata Tatsumi” of Hijikata in the process of
directing, in 1967.
28. Lunami Film Gallery No. 2, March 1967, cited in Nishimura, “Nichidai eiken to
VAN eiga kagaku kenkyūjo,” 36. “The first day, a torchlight hanging around his neck,
he read a poem out loud and from time to time he would vehemently point to the projector and shout ‘Film Cut! Film Cut!’ The second day he and a partner, naked, backs to
the audience, moved in the front of the room from side to side over and over again. The
screen with the film overlapped the body, or film projected onto the body overlapping
the screen. . . . The third day, he repeatedly hit the screen with the kind of attitude of
whipping someone spineless. . . .”
29. Program for “Cinema and Situations, Japanese Experimental Film Night: Film
Works of Motoharu Jonouchi and Yoshihiro Kato (Zero Dimension),” page 2; event
held at Tonic, New York City, November 21, 2004.
30. Lunami Film Gallery No. 2, March 1967; cited in Nishimura, “Nichidai eiken to
VAN eiga kagaku kenkyūjo,” 37.
31. Program for “Cinema Movement on Tour” (November 2–30, 2007), curated and
annotated by Hirasawa Gō, translated by Phil Kaffen.
32. Nishimura Tomohiro, “Nichidai eiken to VAN eiga kagaku kenkyūjo,” 32; for
more on the significance of the trial, see Tomii, “State v. (Anti-)Art,” and Marotti, “Simulacra and Subversion in the Everyday.”
33. For a discussion of this issue, see Marotti, “Japan 1968,” 131. This distinction
finds a source (for 1960s Japanese artists as well) in Walter Benjamin, who distinguishes a
rotten, pernicious form of (law-sustaining) violence from a more saving, messianic and
transformative violence (“Critique of Violence,” 249, 252). The German term can mean
both violence and power.
34. “Agitation” and “action-escalation” are part of a repeated refrain in his Shinjuku
sutēshon film’s soundtrack poem. Yet the descent that he imagines also includes a certain
kind of blankness; it evades the traps of the “movement-image,” the classical buildup and
catharsis that would be part of the usual plot structures, and substitutes what one might
call “time-images,” such as these blank stares and “empty” landscape shots. It is important to consider how this obsession with “action” and “agitation” are taken to such an
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extreme point and at the same time, there is a strange slowness or emptiness, a “void”
that is produced simultaneously with these intensities.
Chapter Seven
EPIGRAPH. Hijikata Tatsumi, “Sen ga sen ni nitekuru toki” (1974) in Hijikata, Hijikata Tatsumi zenshū (hereafter abbreviated as HTZ), vol. 1, 266.
1. It is notable that among the participants in this 650 Experience no kai event “Rokunin no abangyarudo” (Six People of the Avant-Garde), there is strong overlap with the
participants in Jazu eiga jikkenshitsu: Kanamori Kaoru, signer of the Jikkenshitsu jūnu
manifesto; Terayama Shūji; Miho Keitarō, composer and co-organizer of the Etosetora
to jazu no kai events; along with photographer Tomatsu Shōmei, whose work becomes
relevant in the next chapter.
2. Takiguchi, “Tachiainin no kotoba,” 73–74.
3. Shibusawa, “Zen’ei to sukyandaru,” 356.
4. Ibid., 357.
5. Takiguchi, “Shi to jitsuzai,” 1–5.
6. Takiguchi, “Hijikata Tatsumi ga gishiki to ii, taiken to iu toki,” 101.
7. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 1. In his own translation of this passage, Takiguchi puns on the word, which means savage, uncivilized, state of nature; but literally the
characters mean unopened, so in his translation it is as if he implies, “The eyes exist only
when they are closed.” In his 1969 preface to Hijikata and Hosoe Eikoh’s Kamaitachi,
photographs of Hijikata in his native Tōhoku region in northern Japan, Takiguchi again
draws on Breton’s famous phrase to describe Hijikata’s movements. Takiguchi, “Shinkū
no su e,” 306.
8. “It is not that I usually live my life thinking about Takiguchi. He is, rather like air;
up until now, there was no need to consider what meaning he might have. On the contrary, by not searching for meaning one is more likely to discover, as if by accident, what
one is searching for. This is the manner in which I have breathed Takiguchi” (“Sen ga sen
ni nitekuru toki,” in HTZ, vol. 1, 263).
9. “Sen ga sen ni nitekuru toki,” HTZ, vol. 1, 264. This “act that refutes all acts” is a
reference to Takiguchi’s “Shi to jitsuzai.” See Sas, Fault Lines, 118.
10. “Yami no naka no denryū,” HTZ, vol. 1; hereafter cited as YN in the text.
11. Collections of ceramic or glass insulators form a striking landmark in the poetics
of Japan’s rural landscape. The “insulator” has a place, for example, in the imaginative
landscapes of poet Miyazawa Kenji, whose work is so important to many postwar artists.
In “Fuyu to ginga sutēshon” (Winter and the Milky Way Station, 1923) he writes: “Aah,
this convenient Milky Way Railroad in winter / Conducted [directed] by Josef Pasternack / creeps through such heavy ice / (red insulator on the electric pole and forest of
pine)” (Miyazawa Kenji zenshū, vol. 2, 234–36). Or, in “Gurando denchū” (Grand Electric
Pole, 1922) he describes: “The sparrows that gather on the hundred insulators / of Hanamaki’s grand electric poles . . . Quickly the sparrows return / to the one hundred insulators of Hanamaki’s big three-forked road” (Miyazawa Kenji zenshū, vol. 2, 113–114).
12. “Nikutai no yami o mushiru,” HTZ, vol. 2, 13–14. See also “Kazedaruma,” HTZ,
vol. 2. 120–21.
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13. See “World of Birds and Beasts” in Waguri Yukio’s Butō kaden DVD-ROM. In his
butō notation there, Waguri, disciple of Hijikata, outlines and demonstrates the techniques
of butō movement as categorized by the animal or bird that inspired them, from his recollections and notes on his study with Hijikata. See also the recent useful categorization
and analysis of Hijikata’s notational system (butō-fu) and names of body movements in
Morishita, Hijikata Tatsumi butō-fu no butō.
14. Gōda Nario, personal interview, August 26, 2002.
15. “Arutō no surippa,” HTZ, vol. 1, 258–59. Hereafter cited as AS in text.
16. Artaud wrote to Jacques Rivière: “In me this want of application to an object, a
characteristic of all literature, is a want of application to life. Speaking for myself, I can
honestly say that I am not in the world” (Artaud, L’Ombilic des limbes, 39–40). By contrast
the version of a required and indoctrinated “willingness to risk one’s life” seen frequently
in militarist ideology was one that existed for the sake of buttressing, rather than destroying or collapsing, ideological structures (such as nation and empire). In Hijikata’s
view, even “revolution” appears “watered down” in the face of the intensity of Artaud’s
example. Instead, Artaud’s slipper rises to become a continual invitation to contestatory
reflection.
17. Artaud, “La métaphysique et la mise-en-scène,” 69; The Theater and its Double, 46.
Cited in text with pagination of French edition, then of English translation.
18. Yoshioka, Hijikata Tatsumi shō, 234.
19. Although some work of Artaud had been introduced earlier, interest in Japan
blossomed with the publication of The Theater and its Double in Japanese in 1965 (Engeki to
sono keijijōgaku, translated by Andō Shin’ya, who had also translated and put on a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1960). See Aslan, “Du Butō Masculin au Féminin,”
62. Hijikata became interested in Artaud through the work of poet and critic Uno Kuniichi, and later producers of the film chose to mark this association by overlaying it with
the recording of Artaud’s radio production. Nakamura Hiroshi, Hijikata Tatsumi: Nikutai
no hanran butai dokyumento (Hijikata Tatsumi: Revolt of the Flesh stage documentary, 1968;
silent film, recorded at Nihon Seinenkan Hall). The 1987 sonorization thus raises new
issues of memorialization of Hijikata (who had died in 1986) as one considers the process of reading and visualizing his work, constructing (or reifying) his legacy and myth
through films such as this one.
20. Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (from the “Conclusion,” unpaginated);
translation modified.
21. Artaud’s images of the broadcast as a form of linguistic gamete emission resonate
with Hijikata’s images of fecundity: “the particles where the fetus foams.”
22. Uno, “Ayashii karada,” 99–100, 103.
23. Yameru maihime, HTZ, vol. 1, 69. An English translation of this work by Kobata
Kazue is said to be in progress, under the provisional title “Ailing Dancer.” The story
of Kurama Tengu is that of a long-nosed goblin from Mount Kurama (in Kyoto) in the
fifteenth-century Japanese folk legend. This Kurama Tengu also appears in a nō play,
where he teaches swordplay to the young Minamoto no Yoshitsune (Ushiwakamaru).
In the late Edo period, a samurai hero who tried to help the emperor was also known
as Kurama Tengu, taking his name from the folk goblin. The writer Osaragi Jirō is best
known for his popular historical novels featuring this samurai as their hero. The samurai
figure here could also refer to the hit 1928 silent film Kurama Tengu, directed by Yama-
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guchi Teppei, starring Arashi Kanjūrō in the popularized version of the tale. At around
the same time, the parallel heroic horseman figure of Zorro became well-known in Japan
through the 1920 silent film with Douglas Fairbanks, The Mask of Zorro.
24. In Jihishinchō ga basabasa to hone no hane o hirogetekuru (Bird of Mercy Comes Fluttering Open its Bone Wings), Hijikata vividly evokes the sounds of slurping watermelon
as a key memory from childhood.
25. Uno, “Ayashii karada,” 103.
26. This vision of origin, to my eye, links to earlier theorizations of limit-horizons
such as actuality in surrealism (for which we have here traced a direct link for Hijikata),
as well as theorizations of das Ding and the encounter (tuché) in Lacan.
27. Yanagita Kunio, known as a founder of the discipline of ethnography in Japan,
wrote about folk tales, local traditions, and dialects in a form that made claims to authenticity as a documentation of local cultural facts and traditions. Marilyn Ivy’s Discourses of the Vanishing explores the literariness and mediated status of his writings and the
stakes in their claims to factuality. The next chapter will discuss a postwar photographic
re-envisioning (by Moriyama Daidō) of Yanagita’s Tōno monogatari (Tales of Tōno).
28. “Nikutai no yami o mushiru,” HTZ, vol. 2, 11.
29. Ibid.
Chapter Eight
1. Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero, also sometimes translated as “First, Throw out
Verisimilitude,” had the subtitle shashin to gengo no shisō (Thought on Photography and
Language) and included a new participant, Amano Michie. See also the overlap in membership with the journal Eiga hihyō, 1970–73.
2. It is perhaps ironic, though also much appreciated, that in 2001, Edition 7L published a reprint of (most of ) Provoke, edited by Christoph Schifferli, with several other
volumes, in a beautiful box that sells for about $2,000. It includes Moriyama and Nakahira’s Shashin yo sayōnara (Bye Bye Photography), Nakahira’s Kitaru beki kotoba no tame ni
(For a Language to Come), and Araki Nobuyoshi’s Senchimentaru na tabi (Sentimental
Journey), though Araki was not technically part of the Provoke circle. The original Provoke
itself has become a yet more treasured collector’s item, shown in art galleries and museums, as in the collection shown at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York in 2008.
3. William Klein, who had visited Japan in 1961 and was already well-known, is often
cited as a key influence in the use of blurred photos of movement, but critics also elucidate the differences in effect between the movement-blurring in Klein’s photos and
those in Provoke. See for example in Nakahira’s interview with Arai Haruhiko in Hirasawa,
Andāguraundo firumu ākaibusu, 76–77. See also Nakahira’s essay on William Klein in Kitarubeki kotoba no tame ni, 172–75. As a side note, Japan at the time was known for the quality
printing of photographic books, such that in 1967–68, for example, Andy Warhol had his
Index Book manufactured in Japan. The use of reproductions of reproductions (printed /
newspaper ones, as well as televisual images or filmic images) is a central part of Moriyama’s photographic technique and process, one that he continued to explore for many
years.
4. Cited in Yasumi, “Journey to the Limits of Photography.”
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5. Amano et al., Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero, 148. This interview was first published in the April 1969 issue of Dezain journal under the title “Shashin to iu kotoba o
nakuse!” (Get Rid of the Word “Photography”!), a few months before the August release
of Provoke 3.
6. Amano et al., Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero, 148.
7. Kyōto zōkei geijutsu daigaku, ed., Gendai shashin no riaritii; cited by Yasumi Akihito
in the afterword to Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 301–2. (This collection of Nakahira’s “Image Theory” essays from 1967–72 was originally published in 1973).
8. In his introduction to Mazu tashikarashisa, “What can photography do: In lieu of
Introduction,” Taki writes of the mechanical aspect of photography, which shows a
reality independent of the photographer’s consciousness: he describes the “dialectics of
anonymity and expressivity, the eternal theme for a photographer” (13). Moriyama and
Nakahira discuss the anonymity of photography here as well.
9. This suit again calls to mind Akasegawa Genpei’s 1,000-yen note incident and its
emphasis on the “anonymity” and challenging of values that then came to be dealt with
on the level of this highly performative legal proceeding.
10. Still, this denial must be effected from within a recognition of the commercial
context in which they are embedded: “When you speak of the denial of originality, if one
is going to carry it out via already established journalistic media, one cannot avoid a certain kind of contradiction,” writes Moriyama. “In terms of the denial of originality, I have
a feeling that I’ve only gone halfway, and haven’t been able to complete it . . . it’s something to do gradually, bit by bit” (Amano et al., Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero, 144).
11. For useful discussions of the “il y a,” see the works of Maurice Blanchot as well as
Emmanuel Levinas.
12. Amano et al., Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero, 150. Some of the descriptions
that lead up to this statement also verge on the more recent discourses of the otaku, where
the virtual or in this case the “printed woman”—for it is still here the woman drawn as
object of the gaze—is said to seem more riaru (vivid) from the point of view of the otaku
than the living woman. In Provoke 2, “Eros,” Moriyama includes the female model in
occasionally pressing the shutter, but he also says that it doesn’t matter who releases the
shutter. We see a vacillation between ideas of interiority (what is felt as most “real” in the
photographer’s subjective viewpoint) and exteriority (where after it has been grasped, it
no longer matters about the interiority). The result is “put out” (soto ni dasu) and becomes
in some way an “anonymous real,” external to the subject—without solving some of the
gendered biases that remain problematic in the experimental practices of this period, as
well as in claims for the radical potential of otaku today.
14. Ibid.
15. Nakahira later wrote that he had insisted on the emphasis on language, and had
even wanted the subtitle to be rewritten as shisō to shite no gengo—language as thought—
to preserve both the political and philosophical resonances of the term shisō. Though this
would doubtless have been too cumbersome a title, it captures something of the meaning
explained further in this opening statement.
16. Cited in Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 140.
17. Introductory essay to Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 23–24. Kuronuma Kōichi makes a similar point about the centrality of the photographer’s body: that more than
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the content or information, the photo relies on “the form (gaze) that is born out
of the mediation / intervention [kaizai ] of the photographer’s body” (“Shashinka e no
ajitēshon,” 109).
18. Taki, “Oboegaki 1,” 64, 67–68. Taki went on, after the Provoke era, to become a
prominent architectural critic.
19. Taki, “Oboegaki 1,” 65.
20. Nissenbi (1951–70) was a national organization for graphic designers that held
annual exhibitions of graphic art. Taki attacks the mode of “anti-war” aesthetic in posters
from the Nissenbi exhibition. He demands that there be a deeper praxis than that represented by merely employing the word “anti-war” and painting posters under that title.
“If one were to try to grasp the world and oneself in totality, one would realize how
empty the word anti-war is. I am not saying that one must not paint anti-war posters.
But to endure that emptiness and write the word ‘anti-war,’ one must actualize communication—the reality of graphic design—as one’s own praxis.” (“Oboegaki 1,” 66).
21. What comes to stand in for the “real” here—light and shadow, capitalist infrastructure, women’s and men’s faces and bodies? How can these objects fail to accrue
additional semiotic bulk from their own histories of representation?
22. See Taki, “Henshū kōki,” and Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, especially his
March 1970 essay on Provoke, “Shashin wa kotoba o chōhatsu shieta ka” (Was Photography able to Provoke language?), 140–44; for a later reflection, see Kuronuma,
“Shashinka e no ajitēshon,” 108–9. For a useful summary in English, see Parr and Badger,
eds., The Photobook, in particular vol. 1, 267–71, and the full section entitled “Provocative
Materials For Thought: The Postwar Japanese Photobook.” See also Tomii, “Tokyo /
1967–1973.”
23. Yangita was allegedly told the tales by the Tōno tale-bearer Sasaki Kizen. Ivy’s
Discourses of the Vanishing elaborates the issues at stake in Yanagita’s 1910 work, describing
the impact of his fantasy and literary construction of Tōno on the discipline of ethnography and on the contemporary (1970s) tourist development of the “real” Tōno in collusion with that fantasy.
24. They also have the status as a locus of “origin” and childhood, and sometimes a
place of imagined or real returns, because artists such as Terayama, Ohno Kazuo, Hijikata, and Hosoe were born and grew up in Tōhoku.
25. According to Morishita Takashi of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive at Keiō University, Hijikata first coined the term “Tōhoku kabuki” in his interviews with newspapers
and magazines in 1972. Kurihara Nanako points out that Hijikata “ended up making Tōhoku into an imagined place beyond space and time. While, however, he used the
‘nativism’ popular in early 1970s Japan, he did so in an extremely radical way. He was undoubtedly a shrewd entrepreneur and a superb artist at the same time” (Kurihara, “Hijikata Tatsumi,” 21). In this special issue of The Drama Review, Kurihara broke new ground
by publishing some of the first English translations of a selection of Hijikata’s writings.
26. Kurihara, “Hijikata Tatsumi,” 21. Hijikata describes the idea of the simultaneous
presence of life and death also in “Inner Material”: “The radiant vitality of athletes at a
sports ground intimately exists side by side with death. Legs extended for the sake of
being chosen as well as for all-out vitality may be registered as new springs in order to run
rampant in the dance of death” (41). Ohno Kazuo frequently referenced the paradoxical
simultaneity of life and death in his lectures and writings. For the political complexity of
253
the essentialist uses of Tōhoku, and for an invaluable discussion of the continuities and
thought in Hijikata’s work from the 1960s and 1970s, see Kuniyoshi, “Repenser la danse
des ténèbres,” 133. For a discussion of the way nativisms and nationalist discourses resurface in “uneasy coexistence” alongside the discourses of postwar subjectivity after
1952, see Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan.
27. After the exhibition, the series was published as Moriyama, Tōno monogatari. It
was re-released by Kōbunsha in 2007. On the occasion of the new edition, Moriyama reiterated in an interview his sense that this work was like an “air pocket” in a period otherwise marked by struggle and self-reflection; and that the photographing of Tōno was
marked by continual self-questioning and doubt (“Shashin de yume o miru,” 1–2).
28. Moriyama, Tōno monogatari, 143. Further citations (paginated in the text) refer to
this essay, “Naze Tōno nanoka” (Why Tōno?) in Moriyama, Tōno monogatari, 140–72.
29. “Brigitte Bardot Poster, Aoyama” is an image of the cropped 1967 release promotional poster for Bardot’s hit single record, “Harley Davidson” (record released 1968).
Only the overlap of another poster at the left edge and the title reveal the layering of
reproductions here.
30. See Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 119–20.
31. Moriyama, Nippon gekijō shashinchō.
32. In this cult film, one of two films Hasegawa made, a young man kills his father
in the house; the mother screams and a head of cabbage comes rolling out of her shopping bag.
34. Ibid., 146.
Conclusion
EPIGRAPH. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 209, from a discussion of Zizek’s notion of the real,
in “Arguing with the Real.”
1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 122. Cathy Caruth reads the Wordworthian child
partly against the grain, pointing to the “redoubled and redoubled” echoes as a place of
traumatic belatedness and mediation against Wordsworth’s apparently unmediated ideal.
Caruth and Hartman, “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman.”
2. See de Boer, “US-Japan Global Partnership: An Introduction,” Japan-America
Student Conference, Stanford University, July 27, 2005. See also de Boer, “Japan and the
Occupation-Reconstruction of Iraq,” accessed March 17, 2010. In terms of the “rising
from the ashes” narrative, the televised drama Oshin exemplifies this trend. Oshin, identified with Japan, is the most widely known representation of Japanese culture in both Iran
and Iraq. Originally aired in 1983–84 on NHK, Oshin was disseminated on Iraq Media
Network (IMN) starting in October 2003. It tells the story of a poor girl born in the Meiji
era who, through many sufferings, ends as the successful owner of a supermarket franchise. Yoshikuni Igarashi outlines the history of a pro-Arab stance of the Japanese government as stemming from worries about losing the oil that underlay the Japanese industrial structure, beginning with the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 (Bodies of Memory,
201–3).
3. Judo was established in 1882 by Kanō Jigorō. Sociologist Inoue Shun argues that
the martial art started as “wakon yōsai-type culture” ( Japanese spirit combined with West-
254
ern learning), but in the 1930s started to remove or hide its yōsai (Western learning)
part and leaned heavily in the direction of wakon ( Japanese spirit / traditionalism). After
the war, the occupation forces banned judo until 1950, when it rehabilitated itself as a
democratized “sport” (Inoue, Budō no tanjō, 188).
4. The play was written for the company Katatsumuri no kai (Snail Theater Company),
which consists of the director Murai Shimako, the actress Kusunoki Yūko (who is Betsuyaku’s wife), a technical crew (including Endō Yukio, the designer), and a rotating cast
of other actors and collaborators. Katatsumuri no kai is a company devoted solely to
staging Betsuyaku’s plays, although each of its members also participates in other theatrical activities. Betsuyaku had written plays for this company yearly since 1978, and continued to do so until 1995. The play was first performed in Shibuya’s Jean-Jean theater
( Jan-jan gekijō), a well-known and central fringe theater in the basement of a church. The
lead role, as many of the lead roles in Betsuyaku’s plays for Katatsumuri, was performed
by Kusunoki. The play has been translated into English and produced in Great Britain
by Masako Yuasa and her Leeds Workshop Theater. The text of her translation along
with an introduction can be found in Yuasa, “A Corpse with Feet by Betsuyaku Minoru.”
My own modified translation from Betsuyaku, “Ashi no aru shitai,” appears in the text
with page numbers from the original.
5. The play began in 1981, with new versions in 1983, 1985, 1987, 1991, and 1997. Citations hereafter noted above, from Kōkami, Asahi no yō na yūhi o tsurete.
6. Kōkami is one among many young playwrights/directors who extend postwar
experimental interrogations of modes of engagement into and beyond the bubble period.
Among this generation there is continuity, but also a highly transformed context and
mode of inquiry. Many directors and playwrights could be included in an extended consideration, though they are beyond the scope of this study. These would include, among
others, Kawamura Takeshi and the group Daisan erotica, which has (among many other
works) adapted the work of Richard Foreman and Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine;
Tsuka Kōhei, on questions of power, gender, and Korean identity; Noda Hideki’s punfilled spectacles, and in a very different mode that links back to the world of shingeki
and opens it in a new way, Hirata Oriza’s “quiet theater.” Many 1960s and 1970s theater
practitioners who worked with the directors covered in this book continue to produce
works, including many women. Kujō Kyōko (Terayama Eiko), for example, directs the
company Jinriki hikōkisha; J. A. Seazer directs the group Banyū inryoku. Ashikawa Yōko,
student of Hijikata, continues a prolific practice of rigorous butō performance and teaching. Until her death in 2003, Motofuji Akiko (Hijikata’s wife) continued to dance and
teach international workshops. The new generation of butō practitioners has arisen since
the start of the movement, and Ohno Kazuo continued until his early hundreds to dance
from his wheelchair (I last saw him perform in 2002, and he died at 103 in 2010). From
a later period, one thinks of wonderful companies like Pappa tarahumara, and young
all-women’s performance companies like Mezurashii kinoko and Yubiwa hotel, making
innovative work and coming into recognition in the new millennium. Directors and playwrights whose work began in the 1960s and 1970s continue to evolve: Suzuki Tadashi,
Kara Jūrō, Satoh Makoto, Ninagawa Yukio, and Betsuyaku himself continue to produce
new and important works. One can think of many more—each working both within
and outside of arts institutions, inventing their own practices of collaboration and performance within a fragmented structure of meaning. Further exploration of the relation
255
of these modes of corporeal performance to film, photography and other arts remains
to be done, as does the work of tracing fully the legacies of performance from 1960
and 1970s in their many proliferations in the 1980s and beyond. One work that does a
significant job of mapping these generations and legacies in the theatrical realm is Uchino
Tadashi’s deeply invested Crucible Bodies.
7. Tsuno, Mon no mukō no gekijō, 114; cited and discussed in Goodman, Japanese Drama
and Culture in the 1960s, 351.
8. This vision can be discussed in relation to the post-nuclear explosions of a whole
genre of animated film, with their post-apocalyptic crimes and hyper-brilliant space adventures, where ghostly spirit children traverse the atmosphere; see, for example Ōtomo
Katsuhiro’s Akira.
9. This installation was shown at the NTT InterCommunication Center, a contemporary center and museum in Tokyo devoted to media arts. The darkness is eventually interrupted by a computer-generated visual pattern echoing the sonic landscape.
10. Hijikata and Suzuki, “Ketsujo to shite no gengo”; translated as “Fragments of
Glass,” 67.
11. “Inu no jōmyaku ni shitto suru koto kara,” HTZ, vol. 1, 174. 58–59.
12. Dumb Type was founded in 1984 in Kyoto (in contrast to the mostly Tokyobased works discussed in this book). The leader, Furuhashi Teiji, died in 1995 at age 35
of AIDS complications, but the group has continued to produce new work. One might
note, in relation to the essentialisms of Japaneseness cited by earlier artists, Dumb Type’s
emphasis on the absence of language (which in fact echoes Hijikata’s suspicions of language, but is also well-poised for international reception); most of Dumb Type’s performances use language minimally and they describe their work, frequently developed
in Europe, as “global, it’s not limited to something that’s Japanese.” Cited in Hood and
Gendrich, “Memories of the Future’,” 7.
13. See Sas, “Subject, City, Machine.”
14. Dumb Type, “Installation OR,” 85.
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Index
<Index>
2
Index
Harvard East Asian Monographs
(*out-of-print)
*1.
*2.
3.
*4.
Liang Fang-chung, The Single-Whip Method of Taxation in China
Harold C. Hinton, The Grain Tribute System of China, 1845–1911
Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Kaiping Mines, 1877–1912
Chao Kuo-chün, Agrarian Policies of Mainland China: A Documentary Study,
1949–1956
*5. Edgar Snow, Random Notes on Red China, 1936–1945
*6. Edwin George Beal, Jr., The Origin of Likin, 1835–1864
7. Chao Kuo-chün, Economic Planning and Organization in Mainland China: A
Documentary Study, 1949–1957
*8. John K. Fairbank, Ching Documents: An Introductory Syllabus
*9. Helen Yin and Yi-chang Yin, Economic Statistics of Mainland China, 1949–1957
10. Wolfgang Franke, The Reform and Abolition of the Traditional Chinese Examination
System
11. Albert Feuerwerker and S. Cheng, Chinese Communist Studies of Modern Chinese
History
12. C. John Stanley, Late Ching Finance: Hu Kuang-yung as an Innovator
13. S. M. Meng, The Tsungli Yamen: Its Organization and Functions
*14. Ssu-yü Teng, Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion
15. Chun-Jo Liu, Controversies in Modern Chinese Intellectual History: An Analytic
Bibliography of Periodical Articles, Mainly of the May Fourth and Post-May Fourth Era
*16. Edward J. M. Rhoads, The Chinese Red Army, 1927–1963: An Annotated
Bibliography
*17. Andrew J. Nathan, A History of the China International Famine Relief Commission
*18. Frank H. H. King (ed.) and Prescott Clarke, A Research Guide to China-Coast
Newspapers, 1822–1911
*19. Ellis Joffe, Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer
Corps, 1949–1964
*20. Toshio G. Tsukahira, Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan: The Sankin Kōtai System
*21. Kwang-Ching Liu, ed., American Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars
*22. George Moseley, A Sino-Soviet Cultural Frontier: The Ili Kazakh Autonomous Chou
23. Carl F. Nathan, Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910–1931
*24. Adrian Arthur Bennett, John Fryer: The Introduction of Western Science and Technology
into Nineteenth-Century China
*25. Donald J. Friedman, The Road from Isolation: The Campaign of the American
Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, 1938–1941
*26. Edward LeFevour, Western Enterprise in Late Ching China: A Selective Survey of
Jardine, Matheson and Company’s Operations, 1842–1895
27. Charles Neuhauser, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity
Organization, 1957–1967
*28. Kungtu C. Sun, assisted by Ralph W. Huenemann, The Economic Development of
Manchuria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
*29. Shahid Javed Burki, A Study of Chinese Communes, 1965
30. John Carter Vincent, The Extraterritorial System in China: Final Phase
31. Madeleine Chi, China Diplomacy, 1914–1918
*32. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half
Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860
*33. James Pusey, Wu Han: Attacking the Present Through the Past
*34. Ying-wan Cheng, Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, 1860–1896
35. Tuvia Blumenthal, Saving in Postwar Japan
36. Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis
37. Stephen C. Lockwood, Augustine Heard and Company, 1858–1862
38. Robert R. Campbell, James Duncan Campbell: A Memoir by His Son
39. Jerome Alan Cohen, ed., The Dynamics of China’s Foreign Relations
40. V. V. Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 1925–1927, trans.
Steven L. Levine
41. Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan During the Closing Years of the Tokugawa
Regime
42. Ezra Vogel, Margie Sargent, Vivienne B. Shue, Thomas Jay Mathews, and
Deborah S. Davis, The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces
43. Sidney A. Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, 1895–1905
*44. Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement.: A Symposium
*45. Ching Young Choe, The Rule of the Taewŏngun, 1864–1873: Restoration in Yi Korea
46. W. P. J. Hall, A Bibliographical Guide to Japanese Research on the Chinese Economy,
1958–1970
47. Jack J. Gerson, Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations, 1854–1864
48. Paul Richard Bohr, Famine and the Missionary: Timothy Richard as Relief
Administrator and Advocate of National Reform
49. Endymion Wilkinson, The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide
50. Britten Dean, China and Great Britain: The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations,
1860–1864
51. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847–1880
52. Yeh-chien Wang, An Estimate of the Land-Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908
53. Richard M. Pfeffer, Understanding Business Contracts in China, 1949–1963
*54. Han-sheng Chuan and Richard Kraus, Mid-Ching Rice Markets and Trade: An
Essay in Price History
55. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution
56. Liang-lin Hsiao, China’s Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864–1949
*57. Lee-hsia Hsu Ting, Government Control of the Press in Modern China, 1900–1949
*58. Edward W. Wagner, The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea
*59. Joungwon A. Kim, Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945–1972
60. Noriko Kamachi, John K. Fairbank, and Chūzō Ichiko, Japanese Studies of Modern
China Since 1953: A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Supplementary Volume for 1953–1969
61. Donald A. Gibbs and Yun-chen Li, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of
Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942
62. Robert H. Silin, Leadership and Values: The Organization of Large-Scale Taiwanese
Enterprises
63. David Pong, A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at the
Public Record Office of London
*64. Fred W. Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yü and His Geography of 1848
*65. William A. Brown and Urgrunge Onon, translators and annotators, History of the
Mongolian People’s Republic
66. Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals
*67. Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero
*68. William J. Tyler, tr., The Psychological World of Natsume Sōseki, by Doi Takeo
69. Eric Widmer, The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking During the Eighteenth
Century
*70. Charlton M. Lewis, Prologue to the Chinese Revolution: The Transformation of Ideas and
Institutions in Hunan Province, 1891–1907
71. Preston Torbert, The Ching Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its
Organization and Principal Functions, 1662–1796
72. Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, eds., Reform in Nineteenth-Century China
73. Jon Sigurdson, Rural Industrialism in China
74. Kang Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China
75. Valentin Rabe, The Home Base of American China Missions, 1880–1920
*76. Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Profit: Sino-Siamese Trade, 1652–1853
77. Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty
78. Meishi Tsai, Contemporary Chinese Novels and Short Stories, 1949–1974: An
Annotated Bibliography
*79. Wellington K. K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins and Modern Enterprise in Late
Ching China
80. Endymion Wilkinson, Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China: Case Studies from
Shandong by Jing Su and Luo Lun
*81. Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power
in the Early Republic
*82. George A. Hayden, Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama: Three Judge
Pao Plays
*83. Sang-Chul Suh, Growth and Structural Changes in the Korean Economy, 1910–1940
84. J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience,
1878–1954
85. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in
Medieval Japan
86. Kwang Suk Kim and Michael Roemer, Growth and Structural Transformation
87. Anne O. Krueger, The Developmental Role of the Foreign Sector and Aid
*88. Edwin S. Mills and Byung-Nak Song, Urbanization and Urban Problems
89. Sung Hwan Ban, Pal Yong Moon, and Dwight H. Perkins, Rural Development
*90. Noel F. McGinn, Donald R. Snodgrass, Yung Bong Kim, Shin-Bok Kim, and
Quee-Young Kim, Education and Development in Korea
*91. Leroy P. Jones and II SaKong, Government, Business, and Entrepreneurship in
Economic Development: The Korean Case
92. Edward S. Mason, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim, David C. Cole, Mahn
Je Kim et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea
93. Robert Repetto, Tai Hwan Kwon, Son-Ung Kim, Dae Young Kim, John
E. Sloboda, and Peter J. Donaldson, Economic Development, Population Policy, and
Demographic Transition in the Republic of Korea
94. Parks M. Coble, Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government,
1927–1937
95. Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model
96. Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and
Communication
97. Lillian M. Li, China’s Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842–1937
98. R. David Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China
*99. Kenneth Alan Grossberg, Japan’s Renaissance: The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu
100. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin
101. Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Chen Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi
102. Thomas A. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taishō Japan: The Creativity of the Ego
103. Jonathan K. Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Jih-ch’ang in
Restoration Kiangsu, 1867–1870
104. James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915
105. Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in
the Kawasaki Region
106. David C. Cole and Yung Chul Park, Financial Development in Korea, 1945–1978
107. Roy Bahl, Chuk Kyo Kim, and Chong Kee Park, Public Finances During the Korean
Modernization Process
108. William D. Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K, 1870–1914: Business Strategy in the
Japanese Shipping Industry
109. Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of
Railroads in China, 1876–1937
*110. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of
Change in Late Imperial China
111. Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yüan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World
112. Luke S. K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days:. Personalities, Politics, and Ideas
of 1898
*113. John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi,
1666–1687
114.
*115.
116.
117.
Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934)
Jeffrey C. Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978–1981
C. Andrew Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu
Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry,
1853–1955
*118. Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the “Ta Hsueh”: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the
Confucian Canon
119. Christine Guth Kanda, Shinzō: Hachiman Imagery and Its Development
*120. Robert Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court
121. Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectual and Folk Literature,
1918–1937
*122. Michael A. Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry: Technology and
Management at Nissan and Toyota
123. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and
the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times
124. Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin
125. Katherine F. Bruner, John K. Fairbank, and Richard T. Smith, Entering China’s
Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854–1863
126. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern
Japan: The “New Theses” of 1825
127. Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai Eijirō
(1891–1944)
128. Ellen Widmer, The Margins of Utopia: “Shui-hu hou-chuan” and the Literature of
Ming Loyalism
129. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late
Chien-lung Era
130. Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850
131. Susan Chan Egan, A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893–1980)
132. James T. C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early
Twelfth Century
*133. Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late
Ching China
134. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of
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136. Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890–1920
137. Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichū
138. Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki, Rakugo: The Popular Narrative Art of Japan
139. Joshua A. Fogel, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit
140. Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study
of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
*141. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan
142. William D. Wray, ed., Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan’s Prewar
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*143. T’ung-tsu Ch’ü, Local Government in China Under the Ching
144. Marie Anchordoguy, Computers, Inc.: Japan’s Challenge to IBM
145. Barbara Molony, Technology and Investment: The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry
146. Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi
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148. Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China,
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149. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic
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152. Gail Lee Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946
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154. Mark Mason, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese
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155. Richard J. Smith, John K. Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner, Robert Hart and
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156. George J. Tanabe, Jr., Myōe the Dreamkeeper: Fantasy and Knowledge in Kamakura
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161. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform,
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162. William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: History of Tuberculosis in Japan
163. Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early
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164. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary Genre and
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165. James C. Baxter, The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture
166. Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the SeibuSaison Enterprises in Twentieth-Century Japan
167. Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction
168. Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan
169. Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution
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171. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in TwelfthCentury Japan
172. Charles Shirō Inouye, The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Kyōka
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173. Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland
174. Deborah J. Milly, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need in
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175. See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy Toward China, 1918–1931: A Comparative
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176. Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese
177. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War,
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178. John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue
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179. Edward Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gōnō
180. Atsuko Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern
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181. Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda
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182. JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late
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183. John W. Chaffee, Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China
184. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea
185. Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo
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186. Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937
187. Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology,
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188. Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan
189. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity
*190. James Z. Lee, The Political Economy of a Frontier: Southwest China, 1250–1850
191. Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization
192. Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama,
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193. William C. Kirby, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, and David A. Pietz, eds.,
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194. Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in
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195. Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien
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196. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932
197. Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered
Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction
198. Curtis J. Milhaupt, J. Mark Ramseyer, and Michael K. Young, eds. and comps.,
Japanese Law in Context: Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics
199. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations,
1937–1952
200. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, Culture and Power in the
Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600
201. Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and
Kamakura Japan
202. Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China
203. Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds., Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China
Diplomacy, 1954–1973
204. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott
205. David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography
206. Christine Yano, Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song
207. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldřich Král, with Graham Sanders, eds.,
The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project
208. Robert N. Huey, The Making of ‘Shinkokinshū’
209. Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467–1680: Resilience and Renewal
210. Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China
211. Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy,
1945–1995
212. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China
213. Aviad E. Raz, Emotions at Work: Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture in
Japan and America
214. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political
and Cultural Change in Late Qing China
215. Kevin O’Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo
216. Ezra F. Vogel, ed., The Golden Age of the U.S.-China-Japan Triangle,
1972–1989
217. Thomas A. Wilson, ed., On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the
Formation of the Cult of Confucius
218. Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in
Twentieth-Century Taiwan
219. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansionism in
Asia, 1883–1945
220. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the
Seventeenth Century
221. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in
Chinese History
222. Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative
223. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and
Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930
224. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation
225. Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song
Poetry
226. Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s
News Media, 1872–1912
227. Joyce A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade
and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s
228. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on
the Analects
229. Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional
Enterprises in Modern China
230. Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and
Pictures, 1683–1895
231. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China
232. Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art
233. Elizabeth Remick, Building Local States: China During the Republican and PostMao Eras
234. Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
235. D. Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape
of Premodern Japan
236. Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850
237. Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890
238. Gail Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Public Spheres,
Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950: Essays in Honor of Albert Craig
239. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture
240. Stephen Dodd, Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern
Japanese Literature
241. David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the
Chinese Interior, 1729–1850
242. Hosea Hirata, Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern
Japanese Literature
243. Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea
244. Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China
245. Mark McNally, Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of
Japanese Nativism
246. Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureaucratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950–1985
247. Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the
National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan
248. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late
Imperial China
249. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, eds., Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation:
From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond
250. Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, eds., Trauma and Transcendence in
Early Qing Literature
251. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History
252. Hiroshi Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic
Production in Contemporary Japan
253. Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
254. William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of U.S.-China
Relations: An International History
255. Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano Chōei, Takahashi Keisaku, and
Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan
256. Jonathan W. Best, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an
annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi
257. Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945–
1992: National Security, Party Politics, and International Status
258. Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late
Imperial Beijing
259. Zwia Lipkin, “Useless to the State”: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in
Nationalist Nanjing, 1927–1937
260. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in
the 1920s
261. Stephen Owen, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry
262. Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China
263. Anna M. Shields, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the
Huajian ji 花間集 (Collection from Among the Flowers)
264. Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860)
265. Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in
Southeastern China
266. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late Northern
Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics
267. Sophie Volpp, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China
268. Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in NineteenthCentury China
269. Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in NineteenthCentury Guangzhou
270. Lin Man-houng, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856
271. Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song
Dynasty China
272. Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China,
960–1279
273. Helen Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in
1740s China
274. Sabina Knight, The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
275. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in
the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō
276. Paul Rouzer, A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese
277. Jonathan Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and
the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan
278. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005
279. Adam L. Kern, Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi
of Edo Japan
280. Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and
Republican Periods
281. Eugene Y. Park, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late
Chosŏn Korea, 1600–1894
282. Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity,
and the Danka System
283. Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in
Modern China
284. Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of
Urban Clerics
285. Peter Nickerson, Taoism, Bureaucracy, and Popular Religion in Early Medieval China
286. Charo B. D’Etcheverry, Love After The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the
Shining Prince
287. Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring & the Construction of
Qing Rule, 1680–1785
288. Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith: Ikkō Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan
289. Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service
Examinations in Imperial China (1127 –1279)
290. Eve Zimmerman, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste
Fiction
291. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in
Southeastern China, 1912–1940
292. Richard J. Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo,
Japan’s Keynes
293. John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–
1700
294. Tomoko Shiroyama, China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World
Economy, 1929–1937
295. Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosŏn Korea,
1850–1910
296. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in
Japanese Literary Modernism
297. Barbara Ambros, Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The Ōyama Cult and Regional Religion in
Early Modern Japan
298. Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and
the United States
299. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of
World War II
300. Linda Isako Angst, In a Dark Time: Memory, Community, and Gendered Nationalism
in Postwar Okinawa
301. David M. Robinson, ed., Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–
1644)
302. Calvin Chen, Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China’s Rural
Enterprises
303. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the Koryŏ
Dynasty (918–1392)
304. Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late
Imperial Chinese Literature
305. Chang Woei Ong, Men of Letters Within the Passes: Guanzhong Literati in Chinese
History, 907–1911
306. Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception
(427–1900)
307. Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History
308. Carlos Rojas, The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity
309. Kelly H. Chong, Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of
Patriarchy in South Korea
310. Rachel DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar
Japan
311. Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late
Imperial China
312. Jay Dautcher, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community
in Xinjiang China
313. Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy
in Republican Shanghai
314. Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of
Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000
315. David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North
China
316. James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak
(Nanyue 南嶽) in Medieval China
317. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan
318. James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan
319. Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe
Kōbō
320. Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing
321. Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated
Unions in Postwar Japan
322. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity
323. Lucien Bianco, Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution
324. Cathryn H. Clayton, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness
325. Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and
Modern China
326. Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1750–1868
327. Robert Ashmore, The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World of
Tao Qian (365–427)
328. Mark A. Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early
Twentieth Century Japan
329. Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement,
and Imagined Return

Preface - Comparative Literature - University of California, Berkeley

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