Shuji Terayama (1936-1983) remains one of Japan's most intriguing modern writers. Playwright, novelist, scriptwriter, critic, essayist, poet and filmmaker, he was also a spokesman for his times. When the glorious ferment of the 1960s is recalled, it is Terayama who is remembered.
As J. L. Anderson has written, Terayama's main characters are children in revolt and their main target is the Japanese family. Sometimes he used real children, as in his 1969 "Emperor Tomato Ketchup," which was based on an earlier and explicitly titled radio play, "Adult Hunting."
Sometimes the targeted family is expanded to include the actors, as in the pathological family in "La Marie-Vison," or the audience itself in "Heretics," where the cast destroys the stage set and, if possible, the theater. Amid the ruins the actors harangue the spectators until the last one has left.
Members of the audience were also locked up, kept in darkened spaces, and sometimes mauled about. In one Tokyo production an actress was thrown off the stage with such force that a spectator's nose was broken.
Usually, however, the audience was more inconvenienced than violated. In the 1975 "Knock," all the "acts" occurred simultaneously over a two-day period in 33 locations in the Koenji area of Suginami ward. The spectator was given a map and expected to be there.
At other times the audience became the play itself. For the drama entitled "Everyone Gathered," 50 people, picked at random, were sent "official" letters telling them to come to a certain locale at a certain time to collect an unspecified lost item of some apparent value. The locale turned out to be an office with no one in it except the invitees who found themselves actors in a drama consisting of whatever they had to say about their predicament.
One of the more spectacular of the Terayama dramas was held in a public bathhouse (in the male side) with an unwitting audience. The event later was billed as "an attempt to transfigure time, sending actors as alien objects into a public bath on the casual continuum of everyday life." The actors paid, undressed, and then at precise moments loudly delivered any of 67 possible lines of nonsensical or obscene dialogue. They had the freedom to choose among the speeches, but not to improvise. The other bathers could make of it what they wanted.
Structure in Terayama's theatrical world was completely the director's -- and on several levels. His earlier works, those for which he is most remembered, are based on his own early life. There is the monstrous mother, the missing father, the androgynous young girl, the other man, usually bald.
Their decor is the detritus of prewar Japan: Taisho-period prints, old Japanese flags, the Victor dog, school uniforms, faded photos, ball gowns and a sword or two. A lost time, as misremembered by someone too young to remember any of it, but a comment nonetheless on how we live now.
Later, Terayama moved closer to the political climate of his time, as in his confrontations with both the authorities and his audience, as well as such strange encounters as his "debate" with Yukio Mishima.
Yet, as Carol Sorgenfrei makes clear in this fine study of Terayama and his times, he was not about to join any of the causes that illuminated his times. He was as anti-left as he was anti-right. Rather, it was the climate of the 1960s with its brave questioning of all values, that he sought to reflect.
Thus it is only natural that he ended up as spokesman for the zeitgeist of his times. He is still so regarded in Japan and it is this, argues Sorgenfrei, that makes him the cult figure that he is, and that keeps his memory and his legacy alive.
To be sure, no member of the audience is now attacked at a Terayama revival, but the attack against the family and the institutions that prop it up goes on. He still, says Sorgenfrei, insists that danger exists in imposing a stable identity of supposed "normality," and he still questions the reality of social constructions.
All of those unanswered questions first asked in the '60s are iterated in the plays and films of Terayama. Rebellion is really a search for knowledge. Freedom is for the taking. Children of Japan, arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains.
Supporting a thorough study of Terayama and his work, Sorgenfrei also offers full translations of such plays as "The Hunchback of Aomori," and "Heretics," was well as Don Kenny's translation of the New York version of "La Marie-Vison." There are also translated excerpts from Terayama's major work on dramaturgy, "The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea."
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