by Ian Buruma
5
OKUNI, IN THE meantime, was getting a lot of attention with his Existential Theater. Like the old riverside beggars who started the Kabuki, he traveled all over the country with his troupe, pitching the yellow tent wherever he could get a permit, and sometimes even where he couldn’t: in empty car parks, disused railway yards, temple grounds, riverbanks, old cemeteries, abandoned aerodromes, and most famously, at the Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku. That is where he had put up his tent when we filmed him and his actors in a movie about youth rebellion, entitled One Night in Shinjuku.
Okuni and I had patched up our differences long before then, of course. In fact, even before One Night in Shinjuku, he had acted in one of Ban-chan’s pink films, for which I had written the script. Ban-chan encouraged all his assistants to write scripts. I had written several already, all of which I showed to him, none of which he even acknowledged with a word of praise or criticism. Things could be worse. Sometimes he showed his contempt for a scriptwriter’s work by tearing the manuscript up in front of his eyes. On one occasion he took a fresh script into the toilet and used it to wipe his ass. But not this time. Finally I had written something that met with his approval. “Not bad,” he declared, “let’s do it.” That’s what he was like, Ban-chan. He never hung about. Decisions were made on the spot. I guess that’s how he was able to crank out two pink movies a month for so many years.
Anyhow, I was delirious, and at the same time filled with dread: would it really be good enough? Wouldn’t this show me up? Wet Desire, the title of my film, was about a bourgeois young woman, about to go through with an arranged marriage to a respectable young banker. The opening scene is of the two families, dressed in formal kimonos, meeting at a restaurant to exchange gifts. The ceremony is filmed in a stylized way, in a long panning shot, to illustrate the manners of the Japanese bourgeoisie: unsmiling patriarchs exchanging formulaic pleasantries, wives on the lookout for the smallest lapse in decorum, and the young couple staring ahead without showing any emotion, still as Noh masks.
Cut to the bride (played by Kujo Junko) visiting her dentist. While she is pinned down in the leather chair, the dentist slips a hypodermic into her mouth, and then a drill. Cut to a shot of her eyes closing, imagining all the things the dentist could do to her, while his drill dissolves into a giant dildo probing her in every orifice; and not only the dentist, for as her fantasies become more lurid, she imagines being raped by a gang of construction workers, and being used by a black GI who sticks a gun in her mouth, and being suspended in ropes in a roomful of yakuza, who spin her round and round and round, laughing at her helplessness. The dentist was acted brilliantly by Okuni.
It was a pink movie in form, of course, but also an attempt to strip away the hypocrisy of Japanese society. My model was Jean-Luc Godard. The point was to show how bondage is the only way for Japanese to find liberation. But it is not true liberation, for it exists only in the mind. It would take a revolution for Japanese to throw off their chains and act on their desires. And revolutions, as Chairman Mao said, are not dinner parties. Japanese simply weren’t ready for it. They still aren’t. Nor was I, if truth be told. But if praxis was still a way off, at least I was edging toward an understanding of the problem.
For One Night in Shinjuku we took a more documentary approach, mixed with fantasy sequences. We interviewed people, some famous, some not. Dr. Horikiri Tsuneo, who wrote a bestseller about sexual life in contemporary Japan, spoke about the main reason for male impotence (to do with the extraordinary size of our prostate glands apparently, unique to the Japanese race). A former student leader, and current chairman of a large trading company, Suzuki Muneo, talked about the defeat of 1960. And we spent a week with Okuni’s troupe in Shinjuku. Some of the actors were kids from the provinces, looking for a Tokyo home. But the leading figure in the Existential Theater group, apart from Okuni himself, was Yo Kee Hee, his half-Taiwanese wife. She was a typical Chinese woman of fierce temperament, who once broke an empty saké bottle over her husband’s head when she suspected him (quite rightly) of fooling around with a young actress. Things changed after that. Girls still turned up for auditions, but Yo always found fault with them. So the main female roles were shared between Yo and Nagasaki Shiro, who dressed in women’s kimonos, and spoke like a woman, but was in fact a very tough guy, who once smashed the nose of an obnoxious boxer who was giving Okuni trouble in a Shinjuku bar. (We were all a little afraid of Nagasaki.) The handsome young male roles usually went to an actor named Shina Tora.
The play we recorded on film, The Ri Koran Story: Asakusa Version, was one of Okuni’s best, and certainly most successful. In typical Okuni fashion, he had taken ingredients from the life of the legendary wartime movie star Ri Koran, cooked them together with his childhood memories of Asakusa, and peppered them with references to old movies, current comic book heroes, and old Japanese myths. In a nutshell (as if Okuni’s dreamlike stories could ever fit into a nutshell), the play is about Ri losing her memory when she returns to Japan after the war. Wandering through Asakusa, trying to find her old self, she has strange encounters along the way: the actor Hasegawa Kazuo (played by Okuni) appears as a character in a popular detective story; Captain Amakasu (Shina Tora), the notorious spy, makes a comeback as a rockabilly star; a well-known Asakusa stripper turns out to be none other than Kawashima Yoshiko, the Manchurian princess who worked for the Kempeitai, played by Nagasaki, of course. There is a stunning scene at the beginning of the second act where Amakasu appears as a puppetmaster, holding the other characters by a bunch of strings. But the puppets slowly come alive at the end of the act, running out of the master’s control. Amakasu turns out to have been a ghost all along.
We filmed the whole play, but ended up using just the final scene, where Ri discovers that she and Kawashima are actually the same person. As the ghost of Kawashima fades into the background through a neat trick of lighting, Ri stands alone on the Asakusa stage, stripping her clothes, layer after layer, like peeling an onion, without ever revealing her naked self. The audience went wild, shouting Yo’s name, tossing gifts onto the stage.
Every performance would be followed by a drinking session inside the tent, with actors and friends. Okuni and Ban-chan did most of the talking, while the actors poured their drinks from large bottles of cold saké. Ban-chan talked politics. Okuni argued with him. “My revolution,” he said, “is here inside this tent. This is where I create my situations.” Ban-chan insisted that more was needed. He didn’t want to isolate the action inside a tent, or, for that matter, on the movie screen. “We must create new situations,” he said, “in the streets, in the parks, on the beaches, and turn the whole world into a stage.”
There was an American there too, a tall, dark-haired guy, Vanovensan. For a Yank, he was all right. Like most foreigners, he spoke Japanese like a woman. I had seen him before, at movie openings and the like. Vanoven-san was a crazy foreigner who liked everything about Japan, and knew more about our country than we did. He was also a homo. This didn’t bother me. I don’t think I was his type, anyway. He showed a flicker of interest once, but when I tried to talk to him about Sartre, his eyes glazed over. From then on, he never paid much attention to me.
The subject of Ri Koran came up, the real one as well as the one imagined by Okuni. Nagasaki did a hilarious puppet theater routine, imitating the jerky movements while doing the falsetto woman’s voice. “Good,” said Ban-chan, who was already halfway through a bottle of whiskey, “very good, but who were the real puppeteers? It was surely Amakasu and his gang of Japanese Fascists.” Okuni, dragging thoughtfully on his usual Seven Stars cigarette, suggested that, on the contrary, Amakasu’s power was an optical illusion. Ri herself was pulling the strings of the men around her. “She was an artist,” he said. “Her power was her imagination. Art is the ultimate power.” Ban-chan shook his head. “That, my friend is the illusion. You forget about the politics. Ri Koran, Hasegawa, they were just pawns in a much larger game which they barely understood. The re
al source of Fascist power was the Emperor System.” He paused, then suddenly turned to me: “Misawa, what do you think?”
I dreaded this more than anything. I felt I was being compelled to make a speech, or take my clothes off, or dance in public. But Banchan wouldn’t let me off the hook: “I want to hear what Misawa thinks. Let’s hear what Misawa thinks.” By way of encouragement, he poured some saké into my glass. My face was dripping with perspiration. I stammered that maybe no one was in charge. Maybe that was the “Emperor System.” “Hmmm,” went Ban-chan, “interesting,” and turned away.
At which point Vanoven joined the discussion with a short lecture on Japanese politics. “Japanese politics,” he said, in his feminine Japanese, “is a system of irresponsibility. In the middle is the Emperor, pushed this way and that, like a portable shrine, by a group of anonymous men. Since none of them guides the shrine personally, no one is responsible. Ri Koran was a typical portable shrine, pushed around by invisible hands . . .”
“Hmm,” said Ban-chan, “a portable shrine, very interesting.” To which Okuni, eyes twinkling with enthusiasm, added that Vanoven knew so much more about us Japanese than we did ourselves. Vanoven looked pleased at this, and began to tell us about his friendship with the real Ri Koran. “It was still during the war,” he began, before being interrupted.
“You’re all wrong,” said an emaciated old man with bad teeth and a receding chin, wearing a dark blue kimono. He was a regular guest at Okuni’s post-performance parties. Professor Sekizawa Chu was a distinguished scholar of French literature. He had translated several works by the Marquis de Sade. The remarkable thing about him was that in all the sixty-six years of his life, he had never once been to France. I’m not sure he even spoke French, although it was rumored that he could speak eighteenth-century French quite fluently. I don’t mean to suggest that he was a dry old stick. On the contrary, Chusensei was actually a remarkably jolly fellow who could drink with the best of us, and when in his cups would sometimes get to his feet to do a country dance, pulling grotesque peasant faces.
“You’re all wrong,” he said. “I was born and bred in Harbin, and though I’ve never met Miss Ri Koran, I know one or two things about her. On the surface it may have seemed that we Japanese pulled the strings in Manchuria, and most of us were naive enough to think so. Not surprising, really, when you think of the way the Kanto Army strutted around for all the world as though they owned the place. But in fact, behind the scenes, it was the Jews who held the strings. They had the money and the connections. Did you know that Abraham Kaufman, head of the Jewish community in Harbin, knew Victor Sas-soon, who owned half of Shanghai in the 1930s and had close relations with President Roosevelt? Sassoon, Kaufman, Roosevelt—all Jews, looking after their own people’s interests. Can you blame them? The Russians knew this. The Chinese knew it. The Europeans all knew it. Only we Japanese didn’t know it, because we’re a gullible island people, too innocent in the ways of the wider world to realize that we’re a nation of puppets ourselves.”
There was a moment’s silence, as we let Chu-sensei’s words sink in. Ban-chan nodded, and Nagasaki made an appropriate sound to register his surprise. We looked at Vanoven. Surely he would have a view on this. He peered into his glass, and said nothing. Okuni laughed, took a swig from his glass of saké, asked one of the actors to hand him his guitar, and began to sing a song from a popular yakuza movie. We all joined in, clapping our hands. Shina Tora was asked to sing an old student song, and Nagasaki crooned a chanson by Edith Piaf. Ban-chan began a song from the 1960 anti-treaty demonstrations, and then one of his favorites, “Song of the Japanese Red Army.” As he sang, in his booming voice, of the martyrdom of fallen comrades in the struggle for justice and freedom, I suddenly felt his loneliness. Always surrounded by people, Ban-chan seemed terribly alone in this world. Perhaps that is why he was so eager to change it.
6
WHEN I RECALL those sunlit days now from my dark Lebanese prison cell, I am both touched by the confused, anxious, stammering person I was back then, and a little embarrassed. Perhaps most people feel that way about their former selves, sloughed off along the way like snakeskins. It is sometimes claimed that one remembers the good times and forgets the rest. I don’t know about other people, but I think with painful vividness of all my missteps, my shameful gaffes, the maladroit remarks, the unintended hurts inflicted, the shallowness of my views on the world. Then, of course, I didn’t really know the world as well as I thought I did. I just knew a tiny sliver of it, my hometown in the north country, the pink movie industry, Okuni’s tent. In the bright neon lights of Tokyo, I felt small and insignificant. Who would notice the difference if I suddenly died?
I was floundering like a blind man, spending all my time in the cinema, when I wasn’t working on movies with Ban-chan. My favorite place was the National Film Center in Kyobashi. I sat through festivals of Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Kurosawa. I sat through all the films starring Jean Gabin. It was as though I were living a hundred different lives in the dark, only to go home feeling like a man who was still in search of his own life. I saw revivals of wartime movies, movies about heroic Japanese mothers, samurai movies by Uchida Tomu, Hollywood movies of the 1930s, French movies by Duvivier and Clouzot, and even one or two wartime films with Ri Koran. My memory of them is hazy. One was called China Nights, I believe, and another was about a native girl in Taiwan who falls in love with a native man who joins the Imperial Japanese Army.
The real Ri Koran, who was actually called Yamaguchi Yoshiko, never came to see Okuni’s play that bore her name. I don’t think anyone really expected her to. The world of underground theater wasn’t exactly hers. She was supposedly married to a diplomat, and had retired from the movie industry years ago. For all we knew, she was living abroad at some foreign posting. Someone mentioned Burma. Once in a while, her name would come up in some nostalgic article in a weekly magazine about the good old days in Manchuria, usually illustrated by a still from an old movie. People still knew who she was, but her star had faded to a distant glimmer. What little I knew about her didn’t exactly endear her to me, anyway. She had, after all, been a collaborator with Japanese fascism, a propagandist for our war in Asia. And quite frankly, the nostalgia among certain Japanese for those days made me sick.
The idea that I might actually meet her in the flesh one day would never have occurred to me even in my dreams. And yet that is precisely what happened. This had nothing to do with Okuni’s play, or indeed One Night in Shinjuku. The film wasn’t a major commercial success, but it achieved a certain cult status. Ban-chan established his reputation as a political filmmaker and not just a director of interesting pornography. But this made it harder for him to get new projects off the ground. The people with cash didn’t like political filmmakers. Nor did they always like his pink stuff, but at least it made more money. So we went through a bit of a trough, and all of us had to cast around for other jobs to tide us over. I decided to try my luck in television.
A new documentary show was about to start up on one of the independent television channels, called What a Weird World, not the most promising of titles, I must admit. All I knew was that most of it would be shot in foreign countries. I wanted to travel, so I applied for the job. The interview process was long and unnecessarily complicated, or so it seemed to me after the world of pink movies, where everything was done at maximum speed. First I had to meet an assistant to someone’s assistant in a coffeeshop. Then I found myself in a haze of smoke with a number of men in suits, only one of whom asked me questions, while the others took notes. A week later, I was finally summoned by the producer, a sleek man in a blazer, with a mustache that made him look vaguely like that British actor, David Niven. He smelled of aftershave lotion and cigarettes, which he chain-smoked. His office was small and without a trace of character. A few gilt-framed diplomas—or perhaps they were prizes for television shows—were tacked to the wall. A female doll in a kimono stared out blankly from a glass case. On the desk was a
gold pen—another prize, perhaps?—lodged into a stand of magnificent ugliness, with a rim of gold babies holding up flower baskets.
“Congratulations,” he said, “you’re on board. We’ll put you in the scriptwriting department.” I expressed my gratitude, while hoping that he would take my stammer as a sign of enthusiasm. “You know President John F. Kennedy?” he asked, as he lit a fresh cigarette with his half-finished one. I replied that I’d heard of him, of course. “Remember what he said about America? Well, we like to apply the same thing to our outfit. Do that, and you’ll be fine.” I waited for a further explanation. Noticing my bewilderment, he laughed and told me what President Kennedy had said, or almost said: “It’s not what the company can do for you, it’s what you can do for the company.” This didn’t sound much to my liking, but I nodded, as though it were a matter of course. “And by the way, can you drink?”
The next thing I knew, we were sitting in a bar, somewhere on the sixth or seventh floor of a building near the Azabu subway station. A young woman in a velvet evening gown was playing cocktail music on a piano in a narrow room that was empty apart from us. Since it was only four o’clock in the afternoon, this was hardly surprising. David Niven proudly had his personal bottle of whiskey taken from the cabinet above the bar and he fully expected me to share its contents. “Johnnie Walker Black,” he insisted. “Always go for the Black.”
When I probed him on the exact nature of the program, what it would be about, who would front it, and what my role as a writer would entail, he became oddly evasive. “You’ll soon find out,” he said, as the Mama-san behind the bar picked up the bottle with a practiced hand to refill our glasses. As dusk began to fall outside, one or two more men in dark suits came through the door. I judged from their nods that they were Niven’s colleagues. Without glancing at me, they asked him who I was. After I was introduced as the new writer, they acknowledged my presence and slunk off to the other end of the bar.