A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  Dancers in Hijikata Tatsumi’s Asbestos Studio

  I was tagging along with Maro. Come and meet Hijikata-san, he said. I knew who Hijikata was, of course. Everyone interested in theater and dance in Japan did. He was the father of Ankoku Butoh, or Dance of Darkness, the modern Japanese dance form more or less invented by Hijikata in the late 1950s as a deliberately grotesque aesthetic reaction against Western ballet and classical Japanese dance. Hijikata had just given up dancing himself, but as a choreographer he was still king of the Butoh world. The Asbestos Studio was his company. His father-in-law had owned the old asbestos factory. I had first seen Hijikata at a performance by Maro Akaji’s troupe. “There he is, there he is,” people around me whispered, as he passed by our seats with his chief dancer, Ashikawa Yoko. A tall man, with a wispy beard, thick black eyebrows, and long salt-and-pepper hair tied loosely in a knot, he looked like a guru of some sort, pretending to ignore the commotion his entrance had caused.

  I protested that I would have nothing to say to the great man. No, Maro insisted, I should be properly introduced. We went up the narrow stairs to a big loft-like space, where Hijikata was sitting at a long wooden table, talking to a number of people, most of whom I didn’t recognize. Ashikawa sat next to him, a fine-boned woman with small myopic eyes and a prominent jaw. Onstage, grimacing in white face, her eyes almost disappearing into their sockets, her blackened teeth bared, she looked like the decaying corpse of one of those stylized Kabuki actors in an eighteenth-century print.

  Hijikata told his star dancer to move up and patted the cushion next to him, telling me to sit down. Maro introduced me as a young film student who knew Donald Richie. Hijikata nodded politely. He had known Donald since 1959, when Hijikata gave his first Butoh performance, inspired by Mishima’s novel Forbidden Colors, about the seduction of a beautiful young man by a cynical old novelist. The show, in which a priapic Hijikata acted out the rape of the young man, danced by Ono Kazuo’s son with a live chicken squeezed between his thighs, had caused an uproar in Tokyo. Donald had come to see it with Mishima. He was so impressed that he decided to make a film with the dancer.

  Donald’s ten-minute film, called Sacrifice, shot with an 8mm camera, was long thought to have been lost, but was found and restored to its original, slightly underexposed condition. To the sound of Handel’s Messiah, a young dancer is assaulted by a group of delirious men and women in flapping kimonos, who shit and vomit all over him before castrating him with a meat cleaver.

  I had not seen the movie when I met Hijikata, nor do I recall whether I had even heard of it then. But I knew that Hijikata’s work was suffused with pain, torture, and death. He talked a great deal about Jean Genet. His favorite artist was Hans Bellmer, the German surrealist in Paris who specialized in mutilated female dolls and fine drawings of erotic perversities. Hijikata based several of his dance pieces on works by de Sade.

  “So, young man,” he said, kindly pouring a cup of sake for me, “what exactly do you do?” I explained that I was studying cinema. He grunted. “Studying, studying, we’re all studying, but what are you intending to do with your studies?” I mumbled something about photography and film, but without much conviction.

  “What was your name again?” I told him my name, Buruma, which in Japanese sounds more like “bloomers,” pronounced “Buroomah.” “Ah,” he said. “Underpants. So, my dear pants, what music do you like? Tell me something unusual, something I don’t know.” Too intimidated to answer, I asked him what his favorite music was. “Why change the subject?” he asked. “We were talking about you.”

  I could sense that I was boring him. He then decided to put on a little show, not for my benefit, but more in a fit of drunken lassitude, to change the mood. “Ashikawa!” he barked at his chief dancer. “Go out and buy some more sake.” She looked perplexed. “But, Sensei,” she muttered, “it’s past midnight. The shops are closed.” It was hard to tell whether Hijikata was really angry, or whether it was just for display. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Go out and bring me more sake!” He waved his hand dismissively. “Go, go, go!”

  And off she went, also for show, hanging around in the freezing night until she felt that it was OK to come back and tell the master that she had tried her best. In the meantime, Hijikata had given up on me, and talked rather interestingly about Hans Bellmer. His dolls of women in all kinds of grotesque contortions, made in the 1930s, were a protest against the Nazi cult of healthy Aryan bodies. Bellmer’s dolls bore a resemblance to Butoh dancers and their tortured movements. Japanese bodies, Hijikata explained, were not like long-limbed gaijin bodies: “All our power is in the thighs. So we don’t stretch when we dance, we squat, we like to get close to the earth.” This remark came back to me much later when I finally saw Donald’s film Sacrifice, when a woman slowly sinks her body over the sacrificial victim and pisses on him before she helps to slice off his balls.

  Hijikata then switched the topic to Abe Sada, the prostitute who cut off her lover’s penis after strangling him in an erotic game, the subject of In the Realm of the Senses. “I knew Sada,” said Hijikata. “She was an artist. Artists must be like criminals. They must draw blood.”

  While the sensei spoke, everyone around the table kept quiet, nodding at his aperçus. Silently, Ashikawa slipped back into the room. Hijikata didn’t even ask her whether she had managed to procure any sake. Perhaps he had forgotten all about it. “Pants,” he said, as I made to go back downstairs. “You know what you are? You’re a television.”

  I’m still not entirely sure what he meant, but I think I know. He had not meant it kindly, but he had a point. I was still soaking up the lives of others, studying instead of creating anything, reflecting back, like a camera, rather than giving anything of myself. But I had been offered the chance, in a minor way, to do so. In the year leading up to New Year’s Eve at the Asbestos Studio I had begun to dip one foot at least into the dance world myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  SOMETIME IN THE SPRING OF 1977, Ritsaert ten Cate turned up in Tokyo. I had seen him before in Amsterdam but never really got to know him. He was the founder of the Mickery Theater, where I had first seen Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki. The son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, Ritsaert was extraordinary to look at, especially in Tokyo. Very tall, clumsy in his movements, with a booming voice, he had a face like an unmade bed: hooded eyes, loose cheeks, lips like two cuts of liver, and long strands of blond hair streaming from the back of a large bald head. In moments of boredom, he was given to putting on silly Dutch voices, which must have baffled the Japanese. Ritsaert was also one of the most important international theater impresarios of the twentieth century. He nurtured the talents of Peter Sellars, Willem Dafoe, Robert Wilson, and many others. And the Japanese knew it, so he was treated with great deference.

  Maro Akaji

  Ritsaert had come to find out what was going on in the Japanese theater. And I was to be his guide. We buzzed around town in a yellow Fiat, driven by a long-haired photographer named “Herbie” Yamaguchi, who was the boyfriend of Terayama’s ex-wife, a chain-smoking former show dancer, to whom I gave weekly English lessons. Her stage name was Kujo Eiko. She managed the Tenjo Sajiki.

  Despite his shambling appearance, Ritsaert was a deeply cultivated man with an instinctive feel for the theater. “I don’t judge art with my head,” he liked to say, “I have to feel it in my balls.” He had heard about Hijikata and his Butoh dancers from Kujo, and seen some film footage. His aim, fruitless as it turned out, was to coax Hijikata into performing in Amsterdam. The main Butoh troupe in Tokyo, aside from the Asbestos Studio, was Maro Akaji’s Dairakudakan. Ritsaert wanted to meet Maro too.

  Maro agreed to see us at the Dairakudakan studio in a crowded residential area in the southeast of Tokyo. He looked as remarkable as Ritsaert. With a clean-shaven head, a black moustache drooping down the sides of his mouth, and observant hangdog eyes, there was somethi
ng melancholy and also faintly sinister about him. In fact, he was warm and humorous. But I could see why Kara Juro used to cast him as lugubrious ghosts and other grotesques, when Maro had been one of the main actors in Kara’s Situation Theater in the 1960s. I could also see why Maro appeared in many movies as a monster of one kind or another.

  Both Kara and Maro regarded Hijikata as their theatrical mentor. He had taught them to use the body as the central element in drama. Hijikata, and after him others in the avant-garde theater, rebelled against the academic style of theater in Japan. Too often, in the recent past, Japanese actors and dancers appeared to be mimicking Westerners. The way back to authenticity, as it were, was not to revive Japanese traditions, such as Noh or Kabuki, which had already become theatrical museum pieces, but to revive the spirit of Japanese drama, expressed through a stylized, sometimes violent use of the body. Terayama encouraged his actors to confront the audience physically. Kara’s actors used their bodies in the exaggerated manner of slapstick comedians. Maro left Kara’s group in the early 1970s to form the Dairakudakan, the most theatrical of the Butoh companies. Maro is not a trained dancer, but an actor who uses body language instead of words to perform his deliberately outlandish dance theater pieces. Kara and Terayama stuck with words. Maro abandoned them.

  Ritsaert and I sat on the wooden floor of Maro’s studio, watching his dancers moving like embalmed corpses slowly coming to life, limbs twitching, faces grimacing, eyes rolling, mouths opened wide in silent screams. They crawled and slithered, they squatted and twisted their bodies like those Bellmer dolls. Since this was a rehearsal, they did not wear the full-body Butoh makeup of white rice flour. But the men were all as hairless as Buddhist monks. Some had even shaved off their eyebrows. The loud metallic sound of Tangerine Dream, the German rock group, was jangling on a tape recorder.

  I asked Ritsaert what he thought, after we got back to his hotel. He shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t all that impressed. Hijikata was the real thing, he kept repeating. I couldn’t understand his skepticism. I thought the dancers were extraordinary. It was only later, long after he had returned to Amsterdam, that I grasped what Ritsaert knew instinctively. What we had seen at Maro’s rehearsal studio was a very Japanese phenomenon. A theatrical method that had been created by a great artist, through sheer daring and experimentation, had become established as a style, passed on by masters of various schools, all with their own variations. This had happened to the tea ceremony, once a spontaneous expression of aesthetic joy in drinking tea, now a rigid set of rules, to be learned by wealthy ladies who pay a fortune to the various tea ceremony schools. The same thing had happened to classical theater and to flower arranging. And now, in a way, it was happening even to a once avant-garde dance form.

  This didn’t mean that Maro’s group was mediocre. He was an extraordinary performer and his dancers were superb. Nor was he simply imitating his master. What was lacking was the danger of Hijikata’s early work, when anything could happen, and people could still be outraged. This was not just a matter of personalities. Much of what was developed in the 1960s became formalized, even mannered in later years. Terayama Shuji died in 1983. His acolytes still perform his plays in the style that he laid down; his theatrical innovations gelled into a set of patterns, as inflexible in their ways as the ritualized moves in Kabuki or Noh. This is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. But it is perhaps more pronounced in Japan.

  I was drawn to Butoh from the first time I saw it. Though highly sophisticated, it was yet another variation of the erotic, grotesque, absurd strain in Japanese culture, an avant-garde expression of nostalgie de la boue. My own interest in this doubtless sprang from a different source than Hijikata’s, who was born in the muddy rice lands of northeastern Japan. I was in any case ready to prove that I was more than a television camera looking from the outside in. As it happened, this coincided with a common desire among Japanese artists to reach out to the world outside their native archipelago.

  Unlike Hijikata, Maro was keen to take his company abroad. The Dance of Darkness had already spawned a number of groups in Japan, led by amazing personalities bearing odd stage names. “Bishop” Yamada once appeared in Maro’s studio with two young nude dancers on a leash crawling ahead of him like prized dogs. There was a lot of talk in the studio of spreading Butoh all over the world, like a movement that would grow and grow. The idea of half-naked Japanese dancers covered in white rice flour, twisting their bodies in a simulation of life after death, sweeping the world seemed preposterous to me. But I was wrong. Since the 1980s, Butoh troupes have performed in many parts of Europe and the United States, as well as Asia. The best-known group outside Japan is probably Amagatsu Ushio’s Sankai Juku, which has performed in more than sixty countries. In 1985, one of the dancers, suspended by his ankles on a rope dangling from the sixth floor of the Mutual Life Building in Seattle, fell to his death when the rope snapped. It was a frightful accident, of course. But the dancer never changed his rigid position, as though sticking to his performance as he plunged. The fatal act was called Dance of Birth and Death.

  Amagatsu was one of Maro’s main dancers when I began to visit the studio regularly. Born in 1949, he was six years younger than Maro. Hijikata was born in 1928, Mishima in 1925, Terayama in 1935, Kara Juro in 1940. There were rumors that Hijikata had trained to be a kamikaze pilot, but was saved at the last minute from suicidal death by Japan’s surrender. Terayama lost his father in the war and barely escaped from the bombing of his hometown. Kara was evacuated from Tokyo as a child, and came back to find nothing but devastation. Maro’s mother went insane after her husband was killed in the war. Amagatsu grew up in Yokosuka, a rough town that was once the main base of the Imperial Japanese Navy and was taken over in 1945 by the U.S. Navy. All these artists, in one way or another, were marked by the war and its aftermath. They grew up with horrific violence, or its wreckage. Mishima, a frail and bookish young man, was declared unfit for military service and regretted it forever. All he could do was act out brutal and heroic fantasies in his novels, as a film actor and a photographic model, and finally, for real, in the bloody coup de théâtre of his public samurai suicide.

  Death and rebirth are the main themes of the Dance of Darkness. Every piece directed for the Dairakudakan by Maro revolved around it. It was as though this form of dance theater reflected the painful rebirth of Japan from the ashes of the catastrophe it had unleashed. Butoh was not only a reaction to prissy Western and Japanese high culture; it was also the expression of several generations of Japanese who had lived with violent death. Hence, the mummified bodies in white makeup, twisted and contorted like corpses after a bombing raid, creeping back toward life.

  Despite the morbidity of their art, Maro and his troupe were enormous fun to be with. We would talk through the night about dance, culture, sex, and literature, while consuming huge amounts of alcohol. The one thing we didn’t do was drugs. In the chaos of the occupation years, many Japanese used a methamphetamine called hiropon, providing a tidy income for gangsters. Some rock and rollers took other kinds of speed pills. And young people could be seen slumped against the walls of underground shopping malls or railway stations sniffing glue from plastic bags. But even among “underground” theater folks, there was very little use of cannabis or cocaine. A famous female pop singer was caught once with some marijuana. She had to offer a public apology and was banned from the major television shows.

  Maro insisted that I train together with his dancers. It was no good just to be a watcher; I had to put my body into it if I wanted to understand what they were doing. And so I, too, wriggled and contorted and squatted, even though my dancing skills were minimal. But that didn’t seem to bother Maro. “Skill isn’t the point,” he said. “I want to know what you’re made of.” He would make me stand still on the studio floor and study me through rings of cigarette smoke, a bit like a palm reader scrutinizing the lines of a person’s hand. “Each body has a s
pirit,” he would say, “an aura.” I felt more comfortable dancing badly than having my aura examined in this manner. Maro took another puff of his cigarette, and just laughed.

  Since the contemporary arts in Japan receive no official subsidies, Butoh dancers were sent out to cabarets and strip shows to generate extra income for their groups. Hijikata started this practice. Maro, as well as Kara and his Korean-Japanese wife, Ri Reisen, used to perform something called “the kinpun show.” Their naked bodies—naked apart from a tiny piece of cloth covering the genitals, like a skimpy jockstrap—were painted gold, like the girl in the James Bond movie Goldfinger. They would dance in smoky little clubs on the outskirts of Tokyo to the music of Tom Jones or Barry Manilow on scratchy tapes, or sometimes in the better clubs to live bands.

  One day Maro announced that it was my turn to do a show. I protested that I wasn’t ready for it. Maro grinned, and said that all I had to do was to stand still, strike a pose, and let the girl do the dancing around me. My partners would be a couple, who went by the name of Dance Love Machine. They were excellent dancers, which made me nervous even about the prospect of standing still.