Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima

by Barber, Stephen

  Tokyo itself, for Hosoe, forms a living body that can mesmerize its inhabitants and induce engulfing sensations of astonishment. He has seen the city in a state of obliteration, and so that feeling of being corporeally stunned by Tokyo is sharp and immediate for him. He tells me that he was sent away from Tokyo as a boy by his father, a priest, in order to evade the wartime firebombings, and when he returned, arriving back at Ueno station from his exile in the wild rural zone of northern Japan, Tokyo had gone. Later, he wanted to discover more about the men who had made Tokyo disappear so fatally and completely, as though by a malign conjuring trick, and he began to hang around the bases of the occupying United States army, taking photographs of the wisecracking young Americans and learning their turns of phrase. In the autumn of 1965, twenty years after arriving back in Tokyo, Hosoe finally returned to the northern wilderness to which he had been evacuated, along with Hijikata, whose home that isolated terrain had originally been. As they travelled by car through the villages of the Akita region together, they created a work entitled Kamaitachi, in which Hijikata embodied a mythical, sexual creature who stalked the rice fields and attacked the peasants, leaving deep but bloodless wounds. At times, Hijikata ran in frantic abandon through the immense fields, and buried himself deep into the earth, under black skies. At other times, he seductively lured the peasants’ children away into his world. The smiling peasants carried Hijikata around on a bier, raised high above their heads – Hosoe had concocted the story that he and Hijikata were preparing a programme for a television company, and the peasants, in open-mouthed awe of the new medium of television, did whatever they were asked. For Hosoe, as he photographed, the bitter landscape around the dancing body of Hijikata appeared to convulse in gestures too, whipped with Siberian wind, glowering with pain and fury. Like the city of Tokyo, that black landscape also formed a living body in Hosoe’s eyes, dense and intoxicating as it pressed itself around the figure of Hijikata within it.

  On the day after Hijikata had died, in January 1986, Hosoe went to the Asbestos hall to photograph his dead friend. Hijikata had died suddenly; in the previous month, he had been preparing a work about the myths and gods of Akita, and was planning to perform himself, for the first time in thirteen years, in the form of a dance in which he would embody the riotous gods of wind and thunder, trampling furiously on a ground strewn with hundreds of thousands of fallen cherry blossoms. Then he had told Akiko Motofuji that his insides hurt, and he had been suddenly spirited off to hospital. A few seconds before he died, he looked at Akiko Motofuji and told her, “I am giving out the light of the gods”.

  Then he closed his eyes. Hosoe’s other friend, Yukio Mishima, had been photographed for the last time not by Hosoe, but by the Tokyo press media snappers, who had burst into the military office of the Ichigaya district where Mishima had committed ritual suicide in 1970, and placed his newly severed head neatly upright on the sodden carpet in order to photograph it. The image of Mishima’s intensely prepared, ultimate affrontment to the world had been stolen away from him. But Hosoe photographed Hijikata in his coffin, surrounded by flowers, his eyes closed but with his mouth open, as though exhaling one final time. It was the last image of Hijikata.

  Only the illuminated signs of lurid amusement arcades carried the detritus of Tokyo’s burning core out to the peripheral suburb where Yoshito Ohno’s father, the legendary dancer Kazuo Ohno, was giving a rare performance. He was well over ninety years old, and still dancing, in extremis. Like Hijikata, who danced just with his fingers on the hospital blanket covering his body as he lay terminally ill, Kazuo Ohno was dancing headlong, but slowly and lovingly, into death.

  Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno collaborated together over a period of several decades. Although Hijikata was the younger man by over twenty years, he directed Ohno’s work. They performed a version of Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady Of The Flowers in a desolate back alleyway behind the main Tokyo commercial district, the Ginza, at the beginning of the 1960s, with Hijikata’s head encased within a tight black hood, above his naked upper body, and with Ohno in an old dress and hat, incorporating the character of Genet’s transvestite prostitute, Divine, with an ultimate vulnerability. The American photographer William Klein documented the performance – the shirt-sleeved salary-men at the end of the street standing and staring in horror, as the spectacle avalanched its way down the rainy alleyway – and included it in his catalogue of Tokyo images. In other photographs of their later performances together, the two men lie entangled on the floor, with Hijikata crushing down violently on Ohno’s back, while Ohno’s face contorts in blissful submission. The obsessions of Ohno and Hijikata appeared to lie in acutely opposed directions – Ohno believed that his dance was endless and infinite, while Hijikata’s work was intently immediate and brutally cut – but they were insistently drawn back to one another. For Ohno, no such thing as an opposition existed, anyway.

  The event begins long behind schedule. The audience in the breathless hall is confronted with the sheer fragility of such a performance. Kazuo Ohno appears at last in a beam of light that traverses the stage. He dances in gestures that propel themselves forward for a moment and then stop suddenly, collapsing inward – gestures transforming themselves constantly, on a boundary between breathing and extinguishment. Ohno’s body, on its knife-edge, careers forward in intricate spasms of movement, then collapses again. As in the 1960s, Ohno dances in a dress, which he exchanges for another, several times during the performance, each time taking on more vivid extravagance, as his own movements gradually fade away into darkness. Between the short bouts of dance, lasting only a few seconds and lit only marginally, the air in the hall is tangibly black and silent. At some moments, Ohno dances alongside his son, and also with a presence at the back of the stage that first manifested itself as a discarded sack of debris, then mutated upwards into the human form of a young man in a black cloak, who stands at Ohno’s shoulder, as though supporting him into death. But at the end, Ohno moves alone, in fragments of gestures, dissolving.

  In an empty cinema, I watched a film dating from the autumn of 1973 of Hijikata’s last performance: an appearance of only ten minutes or so, at the end of a spectacle created at a hall in Tokyo by a group of his Butoh collaborators. Hijikata appeared alone, in isolation, when all of the other performers had left the stage. At that point, it had been fourteen years since he had undertaken the unique performance of Kinjiki with Yoshito Ohno that had ferociously activated his work in Tokyo. Until his death, another thirteen years later, Hijikata never performed before an audience again. He occasionally worked on collaborations in those years, especially with Kazuo Ohno and a performance artist named Min Tanaka.

  But otherwise, they were years in which he would remain mostly closed up, in seclusion at the Asbestos hall, drinking, teaching acolytes, arguing with friends about their favourite books, and growing increasingly enveloped by memories of his childhood world of Akita. He wrote about himself as “the ailing dancer”, his body inhabited by the capricious demons that terrorized the rural terrain of Akita at night, but living by some obstinate accident under the permanently glowing and pulsing sky of Tokyo, which never reached the pure density of blackness that he desired.

  At the time of his final performance, Hijikata’s hair had become so long and tangled that it stood upright on his head, as though it possessed its own autonomous existence. He had grown a long beard. In the film images, his last dance was one of limbs gone insane, but now so detached from the world which they used to move in tension with, that they simply convulsed intricately, in a jarred rhythm of their own.

  Those limbs carried the tautness of a body which had struggled intensively for decades with a kind of vital illness of incessant gesture, but that had now started to wind down into extinguishment, the bones grown brittle, the skin turning into a raw crocodile hide, the fingernails terminally twisting in towards the palms of the hands. Hijikata’s face was set deep in concentration, holding the slowly diverging, colliding trajectories of his
body together, in the infinite expanse of time that comprised the ten minutes of his performance. His face and body appeared to head off in different directions, turned sharply and synchronized for a moment, then tore apart again and veered away at even more extreme angles.

  In the last images of the film, Hijikata’s body was moving gradually towards the back of the performance space, and the film cut suddenly into darkness – the spectacle had been shot with a 16mm film camera that could only shoot its images for a set amount of time before the celluloid reel ran out. As with the film of the Revolt Of The Body performance which Akiko Motofuji had shown me, the final moments of the performance were missing. Across the visual screen of Tokyo, a million flashing images were seized and annulled every moment, but the last movements of Hijikata’s body had been transformed into void images, filmed by an empty camera, the end of the finished film spool clicking around uselessly in its container. Hijikata’s body had adroitly slipped through the hold of the image. In photographs, Hijikata briefly re-emerged from his isolation, a decade or so later, in the closing months of his life, looking exhausted, his hair still long but now confined under a beret, his beard cut down to a moustache. Finally, he appeared in his coffin in Hosoe’s photograph.

  Whenever I spoke in Tokyo to the friends and collaborators of Hijikata – to Yoshito Ohno, to Kuniichi Uno, to Akiko Motofuji, to Donald Richie, to Eikoh Hosoe – the voice of Hijikata was always present. During Hijikata’s lifetime, all of them had, in their different ways, been assaulted or pulverized by Hijikata’s presence, their lives set into upheaval or irreparably overturned by it. Searching to find a way to evoke his corporeal presence for me, they invariably seized upon his voice to project Hijikata, wryly imitating it or else allowing it to inhabit them for a few uneasy moments.

  The voice of Hijikata had a low, grumbling emphasis that rode along sequences of guttural intonations, strongly different from those of people born in Tokyo: a voice wildly scattering sounds which displayed an apparent astonishment that they had come pouring out of their speaker’s mouth.

  Hijikata’s language had relentlessly conjured up its own capacity to beguile his listeners, as it spoke of the corporeal forces that inspired him to dance or else brutally impeded that dance. He used an authoritarian tone that made imperative demands on a younger collaborator, such as Yoshito Ohno; then, that note of rigour would abruptly descend in scale, into a contemptuous cancellation of its own authority. And in the mouths and throats of all of Hijikata’s friends, that ghost voice wavered incessantly between gravity and laughter, breaking out from its driving obsessions into a great roar of utter self-deflation.

  All of those lined faces that spoke about Hijikata held the traces of some deep injury or other from their encounter with him. And every surviving voice that I heard taking on the voice of Hijikata formed a kind of broken medium, like the old women of Mount Horror, that had the power to materialize memory fragments of Hijikata in space. You need a wounded body and a wounded memory to make a dead man speak.

  The search through Tokyo for the traces of Hijikata’s presence took me finally back to the Asbestos hall, to the basement studio where he had undertaken his work. The previous occasion I had been there was to watch the films of Hijikata’s performances. But this time, the studio was empty of those images.

  The wooden floor of the studio formed an intricately stained surface, with engrained layer upon layer of dirt and sweat.

  For a time in the 1960s, Hijikata had run a riotous drinking club in the studio; at that time, Yukio Mishima would often visit the studio and, under Hijikata’s gaze, make shy, tentative attempts to dance there. At peripheral points on the floor’s surface, it appeared strangely scarred, as though the extreme momentum of a particular gesture had made Hijikata or one of his dancers unbalance, and plough the edge of a foot or hand into the surface of the wood. It was a small space, and the marks possessed a density, struck in intimate proximity with one another, forming the visual index of a delirious body in movement.

  The white walls of the studio were hung with thick black curtains, to be drawn together on the rare occasions when a performance took place, and also with a screen at one end, for the projection of films. Whenever Hijikata had shown the films of his performances himself, for visitors, he would lift up the projector into his arms and joltingly dance with it, so that the images of his dancing body ran up against the curtains and ceiling of the studio, becoming distorted, elongated or concentrated. But now, the curtains were pulled back and the screen was rolled up. All of the lights were full on, and the walls were naked. They bore the infused traces of damp, from the accumulated condensed heat of bodies.

  Below the roof, the metal framework of the lighting system criss-crossed the ceiling. Near to the entrance, a few photographs of Hijikata’s face had been pinned on the wall, hanging haphazardly. In one image, he had his face immersed in an enormous watermelon. In a far corner, an old heater erratically blew out warm air, making the only sound in the room. When the heater abruptly went dead, a deep silence set in.

  The studio had formed the site of Hijikata’s creation of unique images of the human body in Tokyo, experiments into death and into the potential of the anatomy, that were designed intensively, in preparations often extending over several years, before they were finally given two or three public performances, in halls across Tokyo, and then instantly evanesced. If there were to exist a tangible surviving trace of Hijikata’s presence in Tokyo, it had to be there, in that studio.

  But all of those innumerable gestures and experiments had vanished into the air, embedded only in the scars and marks on the floor. Where Hijikata had survived, it was in a work of deep incitement and provocation.

  The streets of Tokyo exploded into a wild procession of noise and human figures. It was the anniversary of the death of Hijikata, and the dancers from the Asbestos hall screamed their invocation of his presence into the Tokyo night. They spilled out in uproar from the basement nightclub where their celebration of mourning had been taking place, and started to career through the Ebisu district of department stores and markets. A hundred young dancers – some masked, some naked – moved out towards the railway station. Circling around the front of the procession, a gang of photographers, including Eikoh Hosoe and the pre-eminent instigator and recorder of Tokyo’s night outrages, Araki, took shots of Akiko Motofuji dressed in a scarlet cloak, accompanied by some of Hijikata’s surviving collaborators. The insurgent cacophony of the accompany-ing musicians propelled the spectacle along.

  As the procession traversed the Ebisu station complex, the salary-men and office ladies gazed in horror, turned and took off in fright. Those who failed to get away in time stood paralysed as the procession charged past, pressed back along the glass walls of the walkway that led into a department store. The security guards stood in frozen consternation, apparently unable to act, while the procession rampaged through the pristine aisles. The department store had only been built and opened over the last few months, but already it had merged seamlessly into Tokyo’s endless face of concrete and glass; now, that surface was momentarily shattered. The procession reached its most forceful evocation of darkness, death and obscenity under the eye-splitting over-illumination of the department store. From that point on, as the procession began to exit from the department store, twisting into a network of narrow market alleyways, it resonated with William Klein’s photographs from 1961 of Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno performing Our Lady Of The Flowers in the Tokyo backstreets. The procession for Hijikata’s death formed a gaudy and overloaded variant on Klein’s austere images, but Tokyo itself demanded ever more extravagance in its provocations.

  By the time the procession headed back for the nightclub, after an hour of outrage, it had fallen apart into a ragged concoction of trailing elements, gradually disintegrating in the darkness. The blaring musicians had become detached, and a few of the naked dancers followed forlornly, far behind, their slight figures almost lost under the now-closing maw of Tokyo that
had momentarily been prised open, all of its vivid scarlet underflesh and its insane ritual shockingly visible.

  But, in that instant, Hijikata had been resuscitated, and inflicted, one last time, upon the life of Tokyo.

  Then the door to the nightclub slammed shut behind the body of the last trailing dancer, and the city streets outside fell empty again – the domain of dirt, digital images and convenience stores, and of salary-men heading in a breakneck rush for the last commuter trains of the night, their faces imprinted in flashes from above with the illuminated and exclaimed names of consumer products, and by the burning images of Tokyo.