A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  This might not have mattered so much if Nezu had acquired these fans as one of Kara’s star actors. This was not the case, however. Shortly before going on tour with Tale of the Unicorn, Nezu had been cast in a popular television drama, playing a sixteenth-century outlaw named Ishikawa Goemon, a kind of Japanese Robin Hood. After a failed attempt to kill the most powerful warlord in Japan, Goemon was boiled alive in a cauldron, thus giving his name to a special kind of metal bathtub that is still in use. To enter this tub, one must be careful not to get scalded by the hot metal casing. In any case, Goemon is a glamorous figure, and the Tokyo James Dean was on his way to becoming a national heartthrob. Ri was starring in the same drama, and clearly had an appetite to do more television. Kara had a role in the show himself, but it was a minor part, as a pirate chief. He might have felt a certain wariness, and perhaps intimations of disloyalty. I didn’t quite realize this at the time, when I was singing and clapping along at the Osaka temple, but I should have known something was amiss, when Kara, apropos of what I can’t remember, said in a fit of peevishness: “Nezu, you’re getting much too slick for your own good.”

  Nezu reacted by keeping his head down. But Ri was not the type to keep her head down. Her public rows with Kara were legendary in the small world of the Tokyo avant-garde. I had witnessed one or two of these explosions at their house. They were spectacular: Kara puffed up like an enraged bullfrog, Ri screaming her head off, tables of food being overturned. But I was assured that these episodes should be regarded as tokens of their passion for each other. They were like Stanley Kowalski and Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. Confrontation was the spring of their creative juices. Kara’s theater was unthinkable without the presence of Ri. And anyway, people said to me in private, Ri is Korean. Such outbursts are part of her Korean temperament.

  Next stop Kumamoto. The tent was raised on the banks of the Shirakawa River, in sight of Kumamoto Castle, a fine “old” building, constructed mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, damaged in the civil war in the late nineteenth century, and reconstructed in concrete in the 1960s. As our minibus pulled up near the site, we could hear the by now familiar screeches and yelps from teenage girls in Mickey Mouse T-shirts and pink ankle socks. Kara yelled at them to get out of the way as we got off the bus. I, too, perhaps to ingratiate myself with Kara, and partly as a show of fitting in, voiced my annoyance with the teenage groupies. Nezu, disguised imperfectly by dark aviator glasses and a baseball cap, said to me, in English, “I’m sorry.”

  Riverbanks in Japan were the traditional haunts of outcasts, fairground entertainers, gamblers, petty thieves, traveling players, prostitutes, and other riffraff. The slummy outcast or burakumin areas are often still to be found along the less salubrious urban riverbanks. Hence the identification of Kara and his troupe with the “riverside beggars” who formed the first Kabuki troupes in the beginning of the seventeenth century.

  The bank of the Shirakawa, where we were busily sticking tent poles into the muddy soil, was swarming with people. This time they were not drag queens or cheap hookers, but students banging on drums, playing trumpets, dancing, making out—in short, doing all the things for which there is little room or opportunity in the cramped confines of Japanese urban life. Two mannish-looking young women, with short-cropped hair and thick calves, strode up to our tent and introduced themselves as passionate Nezu fans. The couple looked like professional wrestlers. They told us they were employed as guards at a local women’s prison. Kara was not terribly pleased to see them, but their friendliness and sheer oddness broke the ice. They handed out boxes of delicious homemade rice balls filled with cod roe and wrapped in blackish-green seaweed.

  Kara, still in a grumpy mood, was doing his best to accommodate a local television reporter, a fat man in a white suit with chocolate-brown stripes, giving him a passing resemblance to an olive-skinned Fats Domino. But when asked to sum up the play in five minutes with a microphone held under his nose, Kara said no. I don’t know how the interview proceeded after that, but about fifteen minutes later I spotted the fat man on his hands and knees barking at a stage prop of a dog. That was the last we saw of him.

  The final rehearsal before our first performance in Kumamoto started late in the evening. Kara, in a soft leather jacket, stood in the murky reddish light of the tent in the hunched position of a boxer, his eyes fixed on the stage, silently mouthing the lines. Kaoru was still suffering from a sore throat. Rain was pelting down outside, creating a muddy delta around the tent, and making such a racket that it was hard to hear what was being said onstage. It was one o’clock in the morning by the time we were through, hoarse, hungry, and exhausted.

  The following day one of Kara’s oldest friends arrived on the scene, a cartoonist and manga artist named Akatsuka Fujio. His manga had become so famous that he was known as the Gag Manga King. Akatsuka had helped to finance the red tent. A pale, rather shy man, with a boyish fringe of black hair, born in Manchukuo the son of an officer in the dreaded military police, or Kempeitai, Akatsuka needed prodigious amounts of drink to unwind. Once he unwound, he was ready for anything. Araki, the photographer, had done a series of pictures of Akatsuka, dressed in a stripey T-shirt, fucking a young woman in a Shinjuku short-time hotel. To celebrate his visit to Kumamoto, Kara cast him as one of the nurses in the Shitaya hospital. His entrance was rather spectacular, for he swam to the tent in the Shirakawa River, before emerging onstage in his drenched nurse’s uniform. Perhaps it was the effect of the cold stream, but even though all he needed to do was stand onstage without saying anything, I had rarely seen anyone look so uncomfortable in the public gaze. He fidgeted about with a haunted look, desperate to dash back into the wings for a welcome glass of beer.

  There were other famous visitors who came around after the performance. Miwa Akihiro was one, an actor and a cabaret singer. Miwa always dressed as a woman, onstage and off. He was reputed to have been Mishima’s lover. They appeared together in the first film I ever saw in Japan, down in a small basement theater in Shinjuku. With a script written by Mishima himself, the movie, entitled Kurotokage, or Black Lizard (1969), is a perfect amalgam of homoerotic, sadomasochistic, Japanese–Oscar Wildean kitsch. Miwa plays the Black Lizard, a nightclub owner and criminal mastermind, a femme fatale oozing evil, who falls in love with the young detective working on her case. Mishima appears in the film as a buff gangster (all his body-building efforts on full display), who is murdered by the Black Lizard and turned into a nude sculpture for her to play with in her nightclub. Astonishingly, this morbid fantasy was first produced as a musical in 1962. Mishima, apparently, preferred the later version starring Miwa.

  Miwa spoke highly effeminate Japanese in a growling masculine voice. He claimed to be the incarnation of a pretty adolescent boy who led a seventeenth-century rebellion by Christian peasants against the samurai rulers in southern Kyushu. The rebellion ended with a massacre of all the local Christians. The boy’s head was displayed on a pike in Nagasaki, Miwa’s native town. I had been introduced to Miwa once before, in a Ginza nightclub where he sang French chansons à la Edith Piaf. I found him rather terrifying.

  The reaction of such visitors to my presence was usually something like: “My, my, look at how international the Situation Theater has become these days.” Sometimes, too, I would be pumped with questions about life in the United States, as if I knew. Under sufficient provocation, I would respond by putting on my supercilious Japanese act to the point, almost, of imitating Kara’s shitamachi accent. I must have been insufferable, not to say inscrutable. But in fact, none of these remarks by the distinguished visitors were meant to provoke. I suppose what irked me was the reminder of my uncertain status in the group: one of the gang, privileged gaijin, international mascot, or spy?

  Perhaps it was the presence of Miwa that affected my concentration. But the second night in Kumamoto was a minor disaster. I got to the bit about being the Midnight Cowboy all right, but then suddenly my mind
blanked. I saw Kaoru wait for my next line, with a slight nervous twitch in the corner of his mouth. Panic struck, my throat went dry, sweat stung in my eyes, and I could sense the audience wondering what was wrong. It was like being sucked into a void. The harder my heart thumped in my chest, the more the words escaped me. I did not have the professional skill to cover up and improvise until I calmed down. After long, endless, mortifying seconds had gone by, Kaoru audibly fed me my next line. It didn’t happen again, but it was petrifying while it lasted. And worse, Kara was deeply annoyed.

  We left Kumamoto in the minibus at dawn. Mist still clung to the road like shreds of gauze. Minutes later, we left the minor road to enter the highway heading north. There, on the corner, stood the two female prison guards, frantically waving their handkerchiefs. God knows how long they had been waiting to catch a glimpse of us (or Nezu) in the early morning. Most of us waved back.

  The riverbed of the Kamogawa in Kyoto is, in a way, a hallowed space, for that is where the Kabuki theater began. Around 1603, a former Shinto shrine dancer named Izumo no Okuni gathered a number of outcasts and prostitutes to form an all-female acting troupe. They danced on the dry riverbed and performed sketches of love trysts in the Kyoto brothels. The style caught on, not least in the pleasure quarter itself. A decade or so later, the authorities, in one of their periodic efforts to crack down on public lewdness and uncontrolled prostitution, banned performances by female actors. So young men took over and played the female roles. Apparently this did nothing to diminish the appetite for paying actors to have sex. So in due course, young men were banned from the stage as well, unless they shaved their pates in the adult fashion. And thus a great theatrical tradition was born that continues in a somewhat fossilized state today. One of the most moving performances I have ever seen in any theater was in Osaka, of a famous scene where a young samurai is forced to sell his wife to a brothel in Kyoto to raise money for a vendetta against a wicked courtier who had forced the young man’s lord to slit his belly. An up-and-coming actor played the role of the young samurai. His own father, the venerable Nakamura Ganjiro, then in his eighties, played his young wife. But I suppose this was no stranger than seeing Montserrat Caballé, also in Osaka, a few years later, sing Tosca when she was far too bulky to jump off the wall that was no higher than a shoebox.

  There, more or less on the same spot where Izumo no Okuni once danced, the red tent went up for the final performances before returning to Tokyo. We stayed in the same old student dorm where I had been with Maro’s Dairakudakan troupe. On the night before the opening show, Kara along with some of the main players and myself, ever the privileged gaijin, were taken out for dinner in Ponto-cho, an ancient district of cobbled streets and narrow alleys where Kyoto geisha flit in and out of graceful wooden and bamboo “teahouses.” On the riverbank there is now a rather hideous statue of a very respectable, even demure-looking Okuni, doing a kind of sword dance. Our host was a well-known surrealist poet, whose name now escapes me.

  We sat in a row at the cypress wood counter of an exclusive Japanese restaurant, where the raw fish was so fresh that some morsels were still twitching on the pretty porcelain dishes. One man, not in our group, was poking a trembling prawn with his chopstick. The prawn was dead, and could not have suffered, but there was an element of sadism about the scene that still sticks in my mind. The discussion on surrealism in Japan was fascinating and well over my head. Kara talked about André Breton, and about Nagai Kafu, the literary flaneur and keen visitor of Asakusa strip theaters, who was found dead in his study with breadcrumbs all over his suit. At some point in the evening, I thought it would be amusing to tell the distinguished poet about our encounters with Nezu’s screaming devotees. This was followed by an unamused silence. I asked Kaoru later whether I had made a gaffe. “Well,” he said, “we all know what you said was true, but we don’t necessarily have to spell it out, do we?”

  Our final performance in Kyoto was a triumph. It was a warm night. The Kamogawa shimmering with reflected neon lights never looked more beautiful. The audience was loud and appreciative, and the hard-core Nezu fans were not much in evidence. After we had scrubbed off our makeup, Ri left us to have dinner with a friend somewhere in town. The rest of us followed Kara into the minibus to celebrate our last night in an old Kyoto restaurant, where sword marks from boisterous nineteenth-century samurai could still be seen on the blackened wood of the entrance hall. A sumptuous dinner of traditional Kyoto cuisine was waiting for us in a large room on the second floor, where we sat down on silk cushions on an olive-colored tatami floor. In one corner of the room was a scroll painting of a Zen monk suspended above a lovely iris flower arrangement.

  This time, we had another guest in our midst. I recognized him instantly as a minor star in the yakuza movies. His name was Kawatani Takuzo, whose main role in gangster pictures was to pull fearsome faces and die, always in a violent manner, rather early on in the story. Kawatani was in fact a ham, cast more for his peculiar looks than his acting skills. His eyebrows met in a thick black line across his shifty little eyes, lending an air of dumb brutality to a man who seemed perfectly amiable offscreen. He had come to see our play out of deference to Ri. They had starred together in a successful TV drama.

  I wasn’t paying much attention to Kawatani, who was sitting next to Kara. I was at the other end of a long table. It is possible that Kawatani had already had a few drinks before we arrived at the restaurant, but he didn’t look particularly the worse for wear. But soon I sensed the beginning of an altercation with Kara. I wasn’t close enough to see what started it. Later, I was told that Kawatani had been needling Kara in a particularly sore spot. The theater was old hat, he supposedly claimed. Kara was wasting his time. He should be doing more television or movies, like Ri. And so, apparently, it went on for a while, until Kara suddenly made his move. He lurched toward his guest. The gangster actor’s face was drenched in beer, and Kara started furiously pummeling him with his fists. This was the sign for others to join the fray. For a short while, Kawatani was buried under a group of actors showing their solidarity by furiously pounding the small writhing figure on the tatami, lightly sprinkled by splashes of blood. Once he emerged from the scrum, it was clear that Kawatani’s face was a mess. A phone call was quickly made, and he was removed from the premises on a stretcher.

  I was speechless, as usual in scenes of actual violence. More than anything, it was the mob behavior of my fellow actors that shook me. Once again I felt I was out of step with the group, like when I was absorbed in David Copperfield on the way to Osaka. I can’t remember what was said after the fight. The evening is a blank until an hour or so later, when Ri finally turned up. She had heard what had happened and was in a howling rage. Standing in the middle of the room, she wagged her finger at Kara, who was still sitting on the floor, and started screaming at him. What did he think he was doing? How dare he attack her friend and colleague in this manner? Who did he think he was?

  Kara’s face went a darker red. He cursed his wife, grabbed a heavy ashtray, like a glass brick, and flung it at her. Missing her head by inches, the ashtray shattered the wall covered in elegant rice-paper paneling.

  I was so stunned that I didn’t really know what I was doing. But I remember getting to my feet and blurting out to Kara something absurd like: “You can’t do that to a woman!” There was a moment of baffled silence around the room. Kara could not believe what he was hearing. His furious eyes swiveled in my direction. His voice dropped to a menacing growl, like a dangerous animal under threat: “How dare you speak to me like that!”

  I still don’t know why I did it. What possessed me to humiliate Kara in this way in front of his actors? I should have known better than to interfere in a fight between husband and wife. What was behind this pompous gesture of chivalry? Could it have had something to do with my shaky sense of self in the midst of a Japanese theater troupe? Was it a displaced cry to be seen for who I really was? Did I even know myself?r />
  But I shall never forget Kara’s words, repeated in unabated anger in the bus on our way back to the dormitory: “So you are just an ordinary gaijin after all!”

  TEN

  Ah,” said Kara with a crooked smile, “I can see the whities already.” He used the word keto, literally hairy foreigner, a derogatory term used only for white people, even though the to refers to China, which in the olden days stood for the outside world.

  Kara was in a cheerful mood. We were entering one of the terminals of the brand-new Narita International Airport, still surrounded by high fences, numerous checkpoints, and thousands of security police milling around among Japanese and keto checking in. The construction of Narita on expropriated village land had been the last focal point of Japanese mass protest in the twentieth century. Before Narita was officially opened, left-wing protesters had managed to take over the control tower. Six thousand demonstrators tried to disrupt the official opening. A Japanese newscaster compared the place to the Saigon airport during the Vietnam War.

  We were soon to be on our way to New York, the first time Kara and Ri would set foot in a Western country.