by Ian Buruma
The department store was one of the biggest and smartest in Osaka, the kind of store where the customer would be greeted in the morning by a straight row of uniformed women standing by the door, bowing and smiling and lisping words of welcome. The elevator girls, heavily made up and lipsticked, dressed in red and cream skirt-suits, shiny white shoes, and red caps with a little black feather, were perfectly drilled. They bowed as one entered the elevator, pointed up or down with their white-gloved right hands at precisely the right angles, and announced the specialties of each floor in well-trained falsetto voices. They were human dolls, as artificial as the puppets in the Bunraku theater for which Osaka is famous. There was not one gesture or sound in their elevator performance that had not been honed to the highest perfection. I wanted to get on film exactly how this was done.
I could have chosen any of Japan’s large department stores. All of them had elevator girls, dressed in the distinct uniforms of their company. The reason I picked the one in Osaka is that I had seen a photograph of a bowing machine. Someone at this store had invented a contraption that could train a woman to make a bow at precisely forty-five degrees. The machine looked a bit like a large scale, but it had a breastplate. As the person pressed against the steel plate, a moving arrow marked the degree of the bow. It could also be set for fifteen degrees, an appropriate angle for a more casual encounter, or thirty degrees, the proper angle applied to customers leaving the store.
We got to film the use of the machine, as well as the training sessions, where the falsetto voices announcing the fourth floor for women’s wear and children’s toys, or the tenth for pottery, household items, and art galleries, were practiced. Since the movie was shot over a period of several months, we could follow the training of one girl, named Yamada Hiroko, from start to finish. She would go through a remarkable transformation, not just from the start of her training to the moment she picked up her elevator girl license at the public ceremony at the end, but one that was repeated every day.
Hiroko would arrive in the morning, wearing jeans, chatting happily to her friends, giggling and chewing gum. She was an animated young woman who liked to laugh. But as soon as practice began, her face would be drained of all expression and become mask-like. Her voice would rise, and her bodily movements become as stylized as those of a Noh dancer.
At first, I must confess, I watched this spectacle with the sniggering attitude of a typical Westerner, reaching for the clichéd image of Japanese as human robots. But Hiroko was very far from being a robot. Hers was a performance, and she took pride in it. I asked her in front of the camera why she had decided to become an elevator girl. She cocked her head and thought for a while, and then answered in one word: akogare. It is a word people use for something they yearn for, or dream about, as in akogare no Paris, Paris of our dreams. Young fans use precisely that word when they talk about the all-female Takarazuka theater.
The aesthetic of the human doll is of course the opposite of Kara Juro’s idea of “the privilege of the flesh.” The frenzy of his actors’ bodily movements is a deliberate rebellion against the controlled beauty of the living bonsai that is part of the Japanese tradition. But his physical revolt, the dancing and fighting and face pulling and spitting and screaming onstage, is in fact just as much part of a Japanese tradition. It is the tradition of early Kabuki, the riverside beggars, the riotous Shinto festivals, the student demos in Shinjuku, and “the revolt of the body” in Hijikata’s dance. Both traditions are stylized. They are two sides of the same aesthetic coin.
In 1978, a year after I translated Mask of a Virgin, Kara suddenly called me. He had something to tell me. I should come over right away. As I walked into the studio above Kara and Ri’s house, some of the actors were smiling at me, as though they knew something I didn’t. We sat down in a circle, as Kara explained the concept of his next play. It was to be called Unicorn Monogatari, Tale of the Unicorn Taito-ku Version.
Kara Juro in Tale of the Unicorn
Taito-ku was the name of the shitamachi ward where Kara was born. The play involved a labyrinth in Shitaya, his old neighborhood, and pork cutlets flying through the air, and a drag queen who raises a boy who was swapped in the Shitaya hospital for a girl, and a dog god, and men from a company dealing in baby swaddlers who fight over a plastic bag containing a placenta, and Sergeant Yokoi, the Imperial Army soldier who hid in the jungle of Guam until 1972, thinking the war was not yet over. The boy who was swapped in the Shitaya hospital as a baby was called Tessio, the Italian name for Theseus, and the girl was Adone, or Ariadne. And they drank each other’s blood, and she would lead him through the labyrinth with a ball of thread, all the way to Narnia, the imaginary land in The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, while Tessio waved his wooden sword and pulled a bicycle with a unicorn’s horn bolted to the handlebars.
Kobayashi Kaoru carrying a placenta
I listened and nodded, and understood nothing. “And you,” said Kara with a high-pitched chuckle, “you will be in the play. You will be Iwan the Gaijin, who might be a Russian but who claims to be the Midnight Cowboy.”
NINE
Plot is perhaps not the main point of Kara’s plays. I still don’t really know what Tale of the Unicorn was all about. Rather than addressing the story directly, Kara talked around the play and its associations, which always came back to his childhood.
I asked him once whether he ever went to see Kabuki. The answer was that he didn’t. No doubt, he said, “Kabuki is somewhere buried in my subconscious.” His most vivid memories of theater were of quite another kind. He often recalled the striptease theaters in Asakusa, near his home in Shitaya. In between acts, to give the girls time to change into another scanty costume, comedians would do short sketches, comic swordfights, and the like, lasting no longer than five or ten minutes. Some of the punters, who had come to see the girls, would take that time to look over the horse racing results. But Kara was fascinated by these short bursts of slapstick between displays of naked flesh.
“Mitikin,” Kara said in his excited half whisper, “at the Casino Theater. An alcoholic vaudevillian. He did the most amazing things. After locking swords with another comic onstage, Mitikin would rush out of the theater to the Asakusa temple, and rush back in again to resume the swordfight. I once visited him in his dressing room. He was munching rice crackers from a plastic bag. His shabby suit was covered in bits of cracker. And there were crackers all over the floor, too, which the girls crushed under their high heels. Suddenly Mitikin said: ‘Listen! Do you hear the sound of a snowstorm in the forest?’”
This rather puzzling anecdote hinted at something important in the way Kara viewed the world: the shabby ambience of striptease theaters in Asakusa, the eccentricity of the sad old comedian, but above all the sudden switch from the literal to the simile, which often involves switches from low culture to high. The squalid absurdities of Kara’s childhood world—the quarreling drag queens, the petty criminals, the sordid murder stories, the hookers—are woven into his own version of ancient myths: Ariadne helping Theseus to escape from the labyrinth in Tokyo shitamachi, looking for C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. Characters, too, metamorphose in unexpected ways: the old drag queen, O-Haru, who swapped babies in the maternity hospital, suddenly pops up as Sergeant Yokoi, the man who hid from the world for twenty-eight years. Kara’s plays unfold with the logic, or lack of logic, of dreams.
In short, there was nothing especially strange about my role as Iwan the Gaijin, who might be a Russian but claims to be the Midnight Cowboy.
My appearance in a ridiculous leather cowboy hat was quite short. In the third act, I was chased onto the stage by a marching band of the Narnia Volunteer Corps. The managing director of the baby swaddlers factory, who was also the dog god Yatsufusa, played by Kobayashi Kaoru, called me a Russian. I said I wasn’t a Russian. Who cares, he yelled, all white people look alike. Whereupon, pedantically, I tried to explain that the white race could be divided into Ge
rmanic people, or Slavic . . . Enough, shouted the dog god, from the point of view of the Peking Man, you’re all bloody foreigners. You’re a spy! Whereupon I cried out: “I am the Midnight Cowboy!” And so on it went for a while with more jokes about Russians, who had stolen Japanese territories in the Pacific after the war, and American GIs handing out chewing gum, a memory of which most people of Kara’s age would retain from the postwar occupation.
The point was of course not to ridicule foreigners. The joke was on common Japanese attitudes to gaijin. I was immensely flattered to be in Kara’s play. It made me feel accepted as one of the gang. Perhaps it even signified that I had some talent in the playwright’s eyes. Here, at last, was real immersion in a small wet corner of Japanese society.
One night, after rehearsal, we went on one of those nocturnal excursions to Shinjuku. It was a balmy night in early spring, when the neon lights blinked like stars over streets that were dense and warm with traffic and crowds. We ended up in one of Kara’s favorite haunts, a small bar popular with writers, called, if I remember well, Nadja, after André Breton’s surrealist novel about a love affair with a madwoman. The lighting was low, the tables black, the room fogged with cigarette smoke. Miles Davis was playing softly in the background. It was a jolly evening. Bottles of whiskey were drained at a fast pace. I was seated next to Kara at his table, a place normally reserved for a senior member of the group. He looked every inch the boss, dressed in a powder-blue blazer and red silk tie, ordering more drinks all around, his eyes reduced to tiny slits, like a big contented cat. Most people called me by my first name, pronounced Iwan, as it was in the play. Someone said: “Iwan the Terrible.” Someone else said: “Iwan the Gaijin.” No, said a third person, “Iwan the Henna Gaijin,” the weird foreigner; the foreigner, that is, who can speak Japanese, and who doesn’t act like a stereotypical gaijin. I laughed, but I wasn’t sure I liked the phrase. However well meant, it smacked a little of admiring a trained poodle for his adorable tricks.
Near the end of the evening, I found myself in the men’s room standing next to Nezu, who played Tessio in Tale of the Unicorn. He turned his handsome Tokyo James Dean face toward me, while I was concentrating on the white porcelain wall, and said: “You know, you can only really act in our plays if you are a Japanese.” I asked him what he meant. “Well,” he said, “you can’t act as a foreigner, if you are a gaijin.”
I muttered something in disagreement. But his words stayed with me. I thought of the onnagata in Kabuki plays, the men specializing in female roles. Real women can’t act these roles in the same stylized way. To get something of the flavor, women would have to play men playing women. I was a weird gaijin, supposed to play a Japanese acting as a foreigner. Perhaps that is what Nezu had meant to say. He may have been right. At least, that is how it felt to me sometimes.
Tale of the Unicorn would be performed in the red tent, of course. Our first stop on the tour was Osaka. The tent would be pitched on a grimy concreted hill in a park overlooking the city’s main zoo. Then we would move on to a riverbank in Kumamoto, an old castle town on the southwestern island of Kyushu. And from there to Kyoto, and finally back to Tokyo, where we would perform on a sooty spot between the railway lines near Ikebukuro station. The whole run would last for almost a month.
Before we left, I was taken by one of the actors, Fuwa Mansaku, to meet the editor of the Asahigraph, the now defunct weekend supplement magazine of the Asahi newspaper. The idea was for me to take photographs of our tour and write an article about it. The editor, a lanky long-haired hipster-type in a dark gray suit, was very keen, he said, to get the “gaijin’s view.” He might even have used the common phrase used in media circles at the time, when a person like myself was commissioned to write something: “Japan seen through blue eyes.”
I was overjoyed. Not only would I be one of the gang, but here was a chance to show that I had some talent, not only in my cameo appearance as the Midnight Cowboy, but as a writer and photographer. No longer just a film student, spy, or weird gaijin voyeur, but a person of substance, even if my eyes were not of the purest blue.
We set off early in the morning in a comfortable minibus, followed by a truck carrying the folded red tent. Kara and Ri were sitting near the front of the bus, chatting with Nezu, Kaoru, and other senior actors. We passed through the bland suburbs of Yokohama and the dusky green tea fields near Mount Fuji, whose cone was shrouded in fluffy white clouds. After a couple of hours, at some point between Toyohashi and Nagoya, I secluded myself in a window seat and started reading a book. I think it was a Dickens novel, David Copperfield perhaps. I liked reading such books on trips through Japan, or other parts of Asia: Jane Austen on a train to the northeast of Thailand, or Evelyn Waugh on a bus to the south of Taiwan. It was a way, I suppose, of escaping for a short while into an imaginary world that was reassuringly familiar.
I was woken from my immersion in David Copperfield’s world of Steerforth and Mr. Micawber by a voice in my ear. It was the bucktoothed Fuwa Mansaku. “Why are you reading a book?” he asked. “You’re not really used to traveling in a group, are you?” He did not say this unkindly, but it was a rebuke of sorts. One was supposed to join in, take part, share the experience of a common enterprise. To fall asleep on the bus was permissible, but reading a book was to shut oneself off from the others and clearly not done. I hastily put Uriah Heep and Betsey Trotwood out of my mind, and turned back to the real world of sitting with Kara and his players, drinking green tea from plastic containers, laughing at stories about old memories I could not share, and chewing on stringy bits of pale dried octopus on the highway to Osaka.
Tennoji Park, where we set up the tent after drilling holes in the rock-hard ground, is a remarkable spot. On one side is the zoo, so while rehearsing the story of a Japanese Theseus and Ariadne threading their way through Kara’s native Shitaya in search of a lost mother’s placenta carried in a gory plastic bag, we could hear the chattering of monkeys and the roar of a rather mangy lion moodily pacing up and down in his confinement.
On the other side of the park is an area called Shinsekai, or New World, a wonderfully seedy entertainment district, half nightlife area, half amusement park, built in 1912, inspired vaguely by a fantastical idea of New York and Paris. There is a broken-down Luna Park, a tower bearing a cursory resemblance to the Eiffel Tower, and rows of cheap restaurants specializing in plebeian delicacies such as grilled chicken gizzard and pig’s heart. After World War II, the once-modern New World became a slum, run by the yakuza. Hoodlums in shiny suits and white patent-leather shoes swaggered through its narrow alleys, frightening respectable folks away. Down-and-outs came flocking from all over Japan to the skid row nearby, rather like Sanya in Tokyo, where the more robust men were handed out day jobs by yakuza contractors, if they were lucky; if not, they would get drunk on a cheap potato liquor called shochu. Along with the eateries offering grilled intestines, there were still some old music halls left, where washed-up comics wasted their tired jokes on a small number of snoring bums. The New World was also a magnet for drag queens and whores fishing for johns who were too drunk to bother about gender distinctions.
So here was a distinguished guest actor in our troupe, named Tokita Fujio, playing the part of O-Haru, the drag queen, made up in chalky white powder with a smear of lipstick across his mouth and a red rose stuck in his woolly black wig, while some of the creatures lolling about outside our tent looked far more extraordinary. There were middle-aged men in tattered long dresses. Some sported vinyl miniskirts, their scarred skinny legs tottering on stiletto heels. The female prostitutes, too, were mostly on the elderly side, wearing similar getups to the men in drag.
I noticed a man slashing at bits of windswept paper with his blunted metal samurai sword. Someone told me that he fancied himself as Kunisada Chuji, a legendary nineteenth-century swordsman and gambler. No one spoke to him, and he ignored everyone around him, absorbed in his private dream world of outlaw derring-do. He
was there every morning, and sometimes in the evenings, too, striking martial poses and cutting down imaginary enemies.
Tokita Fujio as O-Haru, with Ri Reisen
The dress rehearsal did not go well. Kaoru had a sore throat. Lines were fluffed. The pacing was wrong. Lighting cues were missed. Kara was nervous and made some of us rehearse our scenes again. But all was fine on the first night. My line about being the Midnight Cowboy got a huge cheer. “Feels good, doesn’t it,” Fuwa Mansaku whispered to me in the wings. But the biggest applause came at the end of the play, when the back of the tent opened up, revealing a red excavator truck with a power shovel that scooped up Tessio and O-Haru, while the music swelled and Tessio cried out: “Go, unicorn!”
It was, perhaps, the best performance of the tour. Before returning to the Buddhist temple, where we all slept on the large tatami floor in the main hall at the foot of gilded wooden bodhisattvas, we repaired to an old-fashioned public bathhouse, frequented mostly by tired men returning from the construction sites. On the wall was a splendid mosaic of the boy Kintaro riding an orange carp, a familiar image I had seen on Horibun’s tattoos. We all shared the communal bath, of course, like rugby players immersed in the same scalding water, our red faces enveloped in steam. In the large temple hall, before laying out our futons, we drank copious amounts of beer, whiskey, and shochu. Kara did his rendition of “Ali Baba.” Ri sang something from another play called John Silver: Love in Shinjuku. We all joined in, clapping hands. Nezu played the guitar. We had a friendly argument about the fate of the Palestinians. A toast was made to Iwan the Gaijin. All was well. Communal harmony seemed in perfect order.
And yet, there was a little fly in the ointment, a minor source of tension, which I had been slow to pick up on. Whenever Nezu appeared onstage, a large contingent of teenage girls in the audience started screaming deliriously. This was not the usual sound of appreciation in the red tent. It was more like the swelling shriek of a collective orgasm. At one point, Kara, in his role as the director of the hospital in Shitaya, told the girls to stop making so much noise, while shaking his bamboo stick at them. Rowdy audiences had always been part of the Situation Theater’s neo-Kabuki style. Stars were used to being cheered. But the girls screaming at Nezu were not the usual Situation Theater fans. They were much younger. In fact, they were probably not really Situation Theater fans at all, but Nezu fans.