A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  Kara Juro and his Situation Theater set up their red tent in front of Hanazono Shrine, next to a warren of alleys called the Golden Gai that had once been filled with brothels and had since turned into tiny bars plastered with movie and theater posters. With no room for more than ten people at the most, these places were frequented by artists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, and an assortment of nocturnal hangers-on, arguing about art and revolution, and scrapping in drunken feuds that only the true cognoscenti could possibly understand. Oshima Nagisa celebrated all this in a vivid but dated movie entitled Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969), a sly homage to Jean Genet featuring, among other Shinjuku legends, Kara Juro and his actors standing on their heads in front of Shinjuku station, dressed in loincloths, displaying fake gangster tattoos, and describing themselves to the camera as theatrical vagabonds.

  The embers of that age still glowed a little in the 1970s. Memories were fresh. There were enough people around who had been there when the students ran amok or when Kara’s actors staged a violent attack in the summer of 1969 on Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki headquarters, after Terayama, by way of a black joke, had sent Kara a funeral wreath on the opening night of his new play. During my time in Japan, there were still occasional brawls, but there was no more talk of revolution. Now, as I am writing this in 2016, the Golden Gai bars have been abandoned by their old clientele and become a destination, well advertised in Lonely Planet guides, for young Western tourists.

  I continued to meet Terayama from time to time at the first Tenjo Sajiki studio in the middle of Shibuya—the one that was assaulted by Kara’s people in 1969. This was perhaps the flashiest entertainment district of Tokyo, a cacophonous hub of department stores, bars, restaurants, short-time hotels, and movie theaters, a kind of neon-lit souk of commercial pleasure, like Shinjuku, but without any of its revolutionary aura. Shibuya was never a center of counterculture, but to a small-town boy like Terayama, longing for metropolitan escape, it must have looked like an urban nirvana.

  That first Tenjo Sajiki office and studio still bore the marks of 1960s hippy-dippy fashion. The facade of the building had a huge clown’s face stuck onto it, as well as plastic limbs, various painted mannequins, and signs of the zodiac. Inside were a coffee bar, a small theater, and a tiny office, where Terayama would receive people. He was always courteous, even friendly, but in a watchful way. Like Andy Warhol, he liked to gather misfits and exhibitionists around him and use them as props for a world of his own creation. He had the erotic imagination of an obsessive voyeur. But as a man he exuded coolness, professional efficiency, and distance. He was a loner in his theatrical lair. Our conversations were usually brief. He would sit back in his leather chair and make gnomic statements, like: “The Japanese are all masochists at heart.”

  In the late 1970s, when Shibuya began to shed its rougher edges and became the mecca of teenage culture, Terayama moved his company to Azabu, a quieter, more expensive area. Gone were the zodiac signs and plastic dolls. The new office-studio was slick with chrome furniture and chic black walls. It suited him. Like so much else that began in the 1960s, the Tenjo Sajiki had grown up and become more polished, more urbane. Terayama always retained his distinct northeastern accent, but it was as though years of living his metropolitan dream had gradually washed away the earthiness of his origins. (The old Tenjo Sajiki studio in Shibuya is now a fancy office building of steel and glass.)

  Kara Juro and his entourage could not have been more different. I can’t recall exactly when I first met Kara. In any case, I had seen several of his plays performed in various parts of Tokyo in that crimson tent. I was still involved with Maro Akaji’s Dairakudakan. Kara rarely took kindly to his star actors leaving the fold, which he saw as a form of betrayal, but there seemed to have been no animosity between Maro and Kara. Nor did they have much occasion to meet, or bother to see each other’s productions. They lived in separate worlds now. This was common among Japanese theater groups. They operated a bit like gangs, or clans, which sometimes clashed but usually stuck to their own turf, feigning supreme indifference to what anyone else was up to.

  My entry into Kara’s world was on a Sunday afternoon. That I do remember. I had called him one day, prompted perhaps by Ritsaert ten Cate, who presumably wanted me to contact Kara to look into the possibility of a trip to the Mickery Theater. Kara immediately invited me over to his house, which he shared with his wife, Ri Reisen, and their young son, Gitan. Ri was a tough Korean-Japanese beauty with a gravelly voice and the pout of a tropical fish. She played all the leading female roles in Kara’s plays. They had performed together since they first met as students. Kara’s productions had few other parts for women. I was told that Ri did not welcome the presence of potential rivals. It was also whispered that she had ample reason for caution. Their comfortable detached house, in a quiet western suburb far from the hubbub of Shinjuku or Shibuya, had a studio on the second floor.

  On one side of the studio, sitting on flat cushions, were Kara, Ri, and some of the senior actors. I recognized Kobayashi Kaoru, tall and sad-eyed, with short-cropped frizzy hair. Kobayashi, who was exactly my age, usually played the kinds of parts that Maro had performed in the 1960s: odd-looking sinister obsessives of one kind or another. Friends called him by his first name, Kaoru. Nezu Jinpachi, on the other hand, lithe and darker-skinned, a little myopic but more conventionally handsome, was always called by his surname. Nezu, whom Kara once described as the Tokyo James Dean, was invariably cast as the romantic lead, embarking on tangled quests for ghost-like women, or long-lost siblings, all played by Ri, who was about five years older. Kara himself played haunted eccentrics who usually fell victim to the machinations of more aggressive characters.

  Rehearsing a play at the Situation Theater studio

  Kara silently beckoned me to grab a cushion and sit down next to him. The room smelled of wood and sweat. A number of actors were rehearsing a scene from one of his shorter plays. Some of the men were dressed in tattered uniforms of the Imperial Japanese Army. A young woman in white underwear—not Ri, obviously—was screaming her head off. For the rest, my memories are unreliable; I might have confused some of the imagery with other Kara plays. But I think a fight broke out between the men. I know there was a huge amount of shouting, and faces were contorted with rage, or wide-eyed with fear or wonder. Puns and other wordplays came tumbling out at enormous speed. Bloodred water from a milk bottle was tipped over the head of one of the men. A blind figure in a white coat and dark glasses tapped his cane and sang a song from a popular movie to the greasy sound of saxophones from a tape recorder. All of a sudden the fighting soldiers were transformed into a backing chorus, waving their arms and shaking their legs like show dancers.

  I had trouble following the words, let alone the plot. To call this spectacle overacted would be a total understatement. The mayhem on the improvised stage of beer crates and frayed curtains was like that of a lunatic asylum. But what looked like anarchy was in fact a meticulously planned act of stylization. The actors used their bodies like dancers. Every emotion was expressed in an exaggerated physical manner. There was nothing remotely traditional about what I was seeing. But it was as though Kabuki had been reinvented in a completely modern fashion. (I wasn’t around at the time, of course, but one of Kara’s biggest stars in the 1960s was a handsome figure named Yotsuya Simon, who specialized in glamorous female roles. Simon later became even more famous as a maker of spooky dolls of dreamy nude adolescents.)

  Despite all the commotion onstage, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Kara himself. Totally absorbed in the action, his mouth soundlessly repeated every word, with an occasional smile at the wittiness of his own lines, while his small dark eyes burned with a weird intensity. There was nothing cool or detached about Kara. One sensed a volcanic energy in the man that was attractive and a little alarming. He was short and thickset, like a sturdy peasant, with the soft baby-face of a Japanese Orson Welles, a face that contained the sweetness as well
as the cruelty of an overimaginative child.

  So, he said, after the rehearsal was over, what did you think? We had gone downstairs. It was a chilly afternoon, so we placed our feet under an electric blanket covering the low table on the tatami floor. The room was filled with members of the group. Kara motioned with his chin for one of the younger actors to open a bottle of whiskey. The hierarchy was clear, even to me as a newcomer. When Kara spoke, everyone listened. Sometimes Kaoru, or Nezu, or another senior member of the group, would recollect some story from past performances. The younger actors just smiled and nodded their approval. Their main role was to make sure our glasses were filled at regular intervals, or be the butt of affectionate jokes. I felt as though I was in the midst of a close-knit family, with a patriarch, and in this case a matriarch, too—Ri had no trouble speaking up. None of the actors lived in the house, so far as I could tell, but there was an atmosphere of communal living.

  The Japanese have an expression for human relations that are sticky with the mutual obligations and dependencies of the collective life. They use the English word “wet.” Traditional Japanese family relations are “wet.” Yakuza gangs are “wet.” Behavior that is more detached, more individualistic, often associated with a Western way of life, is “dry.” Terayama Shuji was “dry.” Kara was most definitely “wet.”

  Wetness in Kara’s style was not just metaphorical. Not only did Kara often use water in his stage business—floods cascading from the rafters, or actors emerging from tubs of water, or sometimes from an actual river or canal—but images of oceans, pools, or swamps often recurred in his writing. Actors in the Situation Theater were extremely physical with one another. They screamed, they fought, they cried. This was very different from the Tenjo Sajiki, despite their street theater that sometimes provoked violent confrontations. Terayama used the individual eccentricity of his players, but mostly as human pieces in the chess game of his imagination. Visually, they were always interesting, but they didn’t act together so much as pose or speak in monologues, like figures absorbed in their own dreams.

  As a habitual outsider who could never fully commit to any kind of family, group, or circle, I should have been much more comfortable with Terayama’s world than with Kara’s. And yet I was instantly attracted to Kara and his group. The coolness of the Tenjo Sajiki and the kinky eroticism of Terayama’s fantasy world had inspired me to come to Tokyo. But after almost three years in Japan this was no longer as satisfying as before. I now yearned for the heat of Kara’s wetter universe.

  I must have mentioned Ten Cate’s hope to bring the Situation Theater to Amsterdam. Kara thanked me for relaying the invitation but did not express any interest. Why should they go west? He told me extraordinary stories about tours in recent years to Seoul, Bangladesh, and Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. The actors had learned to speak their lines in Korean, Bengali, and Arabic, crammed into their memories in a few months. I questioned, rather impudently, how much the audiences in Dhaka or Beirut had understood. “Oh, about forty percent,” Kara replied, his face creased with amusement.

  After the second bottle of whiskey had been emptied, Kara ordered one of the young players to bring out some snacks. Plates of pickled vegetables and dried octopus appeared from the kitchen. Nezu recalled an incident in one of the Palestinian camps. They had performed a much-revised version of Kaze no Matasaburo, the first play I had seen in Japan a few years earlier. For the performance in the camps the villain in the piece was dressed up as Moshe Dayan, and the Japanese imperial intelligence agency had been transformed into the Mossad. Palestinian commandos were invited to appear as extras onstage. Children threw stones at the actor dressed up as General Dayan. Kara’s eyes widened at the memory of this remarkable occasion. Like us, the Palestinians are a people of vagabonds, he said. He looked at me in wonder and said in a low voice: “And some of the men started to shoot off their Kalashnikovs. We were worried there would be a riot!” Everyone howled with laughter.

  I wondered what had drawn Kara to the Middle East. The reason for performing in Seoul was not hard to understand. Partly through his wife, he felt a kinship with Koreans. Often, during late-night drinking sessions at home, Kara would play sentimental Korean ballads on his tape recorder and wipe tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. The Palestinian cause in Japan might have had something to do with the residue of pan-Asian sentiment, once the staple of wartime propaganda, that ran through the Japanese Left of the 1960s and ’70s, a romantic attachment to struggles of non-Western peoples against “U.S. imperialism.” Kara had friends connected to the Japanese Red Army. One of them, a filmmaker named Adachi Masao, was living in exile in Beirut. Kara had acted in some of his movies, which were an odd but not untypical mixture of revolutionary attitudes and violent pornography. In one of the most memorable films, written by Adachi and directed by another radical director, named Wakamatsu Koji, Kara played an impotent serial killer who tortures several nurses to death in a hospital ward. Adachi had helped Kara with introductions to the Palestinians.

  Kara’s views on the Palestinian conflict seemed to be entirely based on emotion, the type of feeling that made him cry when he listened to Korean ballads. Whatever his plays were about, they could not be reduced to agitprop. Ending a play with a cry to “kill the Zionists!,” as Kara did in Syria and Lebanon, would have been unthinkable in Japan. Political agitation was not his thing. Kara liked to provoke through black humor and turning logic on its head. But I think he saw theatrical possibilities in real-life popular revolts. Whipping Palestinians into a frenzy by impersonating Moshe Dayan was just the kind of effect that he relished. “The situation,” he would often cry, “it is all about the situation.” Kara’s student thesis had been about Jean-Paul Sartre, a hero of the anti-imperialist Japanese Left. What he meant, I think, is that he wanted sparks to fly by matching his provocative theater to real-life drama. If the public confused them, so much the better.

  I must confess that I had not thought any of this through during that first wintry evening at Kara’s house. I was amused when Kara talked about shooting a Kalashnikov himself in one of the Palestinian camps. It was fun when everyone sang songs from Kara’s plays, clapping in rhythm, like Spaniards do with flamenco songs. Woozy with Suntory whiskey I clapped along with the others, as Kara sang the “Ali Baba” song from his 1967 play of that title. I remembered it from Oshima’s movie, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. Kara was impressed that I, a gaijin after all, knew his song. The actors joked that I had to be a “spy.” I was happy to participate in this warm wet world. It felt less like spying than like the beginning of another immersion.

  * * *

  • • •

  MADE TO FEEL welcome by Kara and his players, I began to hang out with them regularly. We would get drunk at Kara’s house on the first day of the New Year. I attended rehearsals in the studio. And I joined the small entourage that accompanied Kara on visits to his favorite bar in Shinjuku’s Golden Gai. Ri was never a part of these excursions. This was an all-male thing. Kara was the oyabun, literally father figure, a word commonly used for gang bosses. We were his kobun, his children, or gang members. There was a swagger about Kara as he entered his favorite haunts, and following him afforded a strange pleasure, a sense of belonging, even of reflected power.

  We always frequented the same tiny bar, called Maeda, which catered mostly to theater people. Film people went to another place, called La jetée, after the French cult movie directed by Chris Marker, who had had an affair with the woman who owned the bar. Writers and journalists went to yet another place. Strangers rarely strolled into these Golden Gai bars uninvited. Turf was carefully guarded here. The preferred drink was whiskey and water, mizuwari, kept in personal bottles that were marked with the names of regular patrons.

  Maeda had been the scene of some of Kara’s famous brawls. On one often-recounted occasion he had beaten up the novelist Nosaka Akiyuki, who had just won an important literary prize. After
too many mizuwaris, Nosaka, usually a gentle figure, taunted Kara that he had never won the prize. This stirred up the gang boss in Kara, like the time he received Terayama’s funeral wreath. I had seen it happen on other occasions. His baby-face would go livid and punches would fly.

  My own role in Kara’s entourage was unclear. I was obviously not one of the actors, nor had I accomplished anything important as an artist or intellectual. At that time I was supplementing my scholarship money with stints as a film reviewer for the Japan Times, a freelance translator, and an occasional assistant to Magnum photographers who came to Japan to shoot corporate annual reports. My main asset in Kara’s eyes was that I was a rare gaijin interested in Japanese movies and contemporary theater, and above all in Kara himself. A frequent topic of conversation was the question of talent, who had it and who didn’t. This was very important to him. To be a person without talent was to be beyond the pale. You could be a rogue, but you had to have talent. Kara might have spotted some possibilities in me, but if I had any talent at all, it was as yet unclear for what. The fact that John Schlesinger was my uncle was perhaps an asset of a kind. Kara much admired Midnight Cowboy.

  One night at Maeda I spotted the composer Takemitsu Toru sitting in the corner of the bar, nursing his glass of mizuwari, with a faulty neon light flickering on his bird-like features through a small window. Although he was among the greatest composers of his time, Takemitsu was quite shy. But he loved to sing Frank Sinatra songs after a few drinks. Not many words were exchanged between Kara and Takemitsu. Then Kara said something about his talent for singing, and Takemitsu’s sweet baritone voice, surprisingly voluminous for such a small man, filled the bar with “Fly Me to the Moon.”

  Japanese artists of Kara’s generation had a complicated attitude toward Western, and especially American, culture. Resentment, envy, and admiration were there in equal measure. I am convinced that Kara’s pan-Asian sentiments had something to do with his “gaijin complex.” Like Takemitsu, or Oshima, or indeed Terayama, he had experienced the national humiliation of being occupied by white men who were richer, physically larger on the whole, and more powerful than they were. Japanese men were particularly sensitive about this. Their sense of masculinity had been offended.