A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  It was in fact Nosaka Akiyuki, the novelist Kara had beaten up at Maeda, who expressed this most acutely in an extraordinary short story called “American Hijiki.” The main character is a young man called Toshio who grew up during the war being told by his teachers that Westerners were physically and mentally inferior to the tougher Japanese race. He was shocked to find out that this was not necessarily so. Years after the occupation was officially over, with a mixture of awe and bitterness, Toshio remembered a GI with “arms like logs” and his “manly buttocks encased in shiny uniform pants . . . Ah, no wonder Japan lost the war.”

  One day Toshio is obliged to entertain a middle-aged American businessman on a visit to Tokyo. The visitor, named Higgins, fondly recalls his time as a soldier during the occupation. They attend a live sex show, where Japan’s “Number One” will show off his prowess. Alas, Japan’s “Number One” has an off night and isn’t up to the task. All the humiliation suffered during those early postwar years comes flooding back, as Toshio and his smug white guest witness the collapse of Japanese manhood.

  That same night, when Takemitsu sang “Fly Me to the Moon,” while we were facing our mizuwaris on the bar, Kara asked me which Western playwrights I liked. This, too, was a regular feature in our conversations, the relative merits of this artist or that. It was a way of bonding over shared enthusiasms. Gaijin complex or not, Kara’s taste was never narrowly provincial. I mentioned a few names. Then he said, somewhat to my surprise: “You know who I like? Tennessee Williams. He’s really good, isn’t he?” The other actors sitting at the bar nodded silently.

  I could not quite square Tennessee Williams’s tender Southern Gothic sensibility with Kara’s raucous surrealism. The Glass Menagerie seemed a long way from Kaze no Matasaburo. I tried to see why timid Laura’s private dream world of glass objects would appeal to the author of roughhousing neo-Kabuki. It did not come to me till later that there was indeed a connection. For Kara, too, had a private dream world, filled with cruelty and tenderness, which was the basis of almost all his plays. As with Williams, and indeed with Terayama, this basis was formed by memories of his early childhood.

  Kara was born in the heart of Tokyo’s shitamachi. Before the war his family had moved into a wooden row house in Shitaya Mannencho, a neighborhood between Ueno and Asakusa, not far from the red-light district of Yoshiwara and the Sanya skid row. Mannencho used to be one of the most notorious slums in Tokyo, already known in the Edo Period as a nest of ragpickers, pimps, ditchdiggers, petty gamblers, and fairground entertainers. Kara’s family was actually more middle class, but his grandfather had dissipated the family fortune, which is why they had moved to this squalid area. To escape from the wartime bombing, Kara was evacuated to the countryside for a year. When he returned in 1945, at the age of five, most of the shitamachi had been obliterated, although oddly enough his own family house had been spared. Kara would often recall the pleasure of playing in the rubble with a clear view all the way to Mount Fuji. He also loved to tell stories about the transvestite hookers who lived in public toilets and fought one another in turf battles with knives. Or the pan pan girls, whores who specialized in luring American soldiers for quick sex in the ruins. He remembered the petty gangsters who prowled the streets, and the tofu seller’s daughter who hanged herself after gnawing the bones of her stillborn baby. He recalled the impoverished army veterans eking out a living by selling hot snacks in the street. His mother would take him to the jerry-built theaters in Asakusa, where he saw the popular comedians of the day and dreamed of being one of the Three Musketeers or the Count of Monte Cristo.

  Kara was by his own account a quiet bookish boy who got excellent grades in school. But the place he grew up in would shape his macabre imagination forever. However much he mixed up Greek myths or Japanese fairy tales, or bits and pieces of French existentialism, with pop culture and contemporary events, the extraordinary characters he observed in Shitaya Mannencho after the war would always keep popping up in his plays like ghosts that refused to slip away. They were the pieces of his glass menagerie, which he arranged and rearranged with every new drama.

  The world that Kara knew as a child was of course long gone when I lived in Tokyo. Shitamachi had been cleaned up considerably. Even the wooden houses that had miraculously survived in Mannencho looked quaintly traditional rather than poor. Kara certainly felt no nostalgia for it. I often heard him lament the fact that he had been born in Tokyo and not in the rural northeast like Terayama or Hijikata. He often felt that Tokyo culture was false and rootless. His nostalgie de la boue was for the muddier spheres of village Japan, still haunted by spirits, or the poorer, darker parts of Asia or the Middle East, such as Korea or Palestine, where struggles for life and death seemed more authentic, or at least more dramatic, than in prosperous, boom-time Japan.

  Perhaps it was just the mythical appeal, but like some other foreigners in Japan, I was drawn to the shitamachi, and often imagined moving there. The people in Ueno, Asakusa, or Shitaya seemed more down to earth than the more bourgeois denizens of the upper city. I liked the traditional air of their daily lives, their attachment to rowdy Shinto festivals, their quick sense of humor, and the general “wetness” of their culture.

  Kara dismissed my shitamachi yearnings as misguided romantic nonsense. There was nothing of any interest there anymore, he said. All of Tokyo had become middle class. And as far as traditional popular culture was concerned, from the corny patter of kimonoed stand-up comedians to the vulgarized Kabuki theaters, celebrated by certain nostalgic intellectuals, he felt complete contempt. He couldn’t understand what I saw in such things. No doubt it had something to do with being a gaijin.

  He was probably right about that. But I did in fact end up being pulled into a strange dark corner of shitamachi culture. This came about because of my other life as a photographer.

  * * *

  • • •

  DONALD RICHIE CALLED ME ONE DAY, not long after I met Kara. He had a proposal. Donald had long been interested in traditional Japanese tattoos, the kind that covered much of the body, from the shoulders to the knees, and sometimes to the ankles (although that was considered vulgar by the true connoisseurs). These body tattoos of mythical heroes, cherry blossoms, maple leaves, waterfalls, and fearsome protective deities had reached an extraordinary degree of refinement in Japan, while retaining a scandalous reputation among “respectable” people. Tattooed men or women were not allowed to enter most public baths, or pools. Tattoos, called irezumi by the uninitiated, and horimono by the insiders, were commonly associated with gangsters.

  It is true that most yakuza sported full-body tattoos. It is also true that the earliest tattoos were brands of punishment. In some regions, several hundred years ago, a criminal would bear the ideograph for “dog” on his forehead. Outcasts, who did ritually unclean work to do with death, were often branded as well. But by the late eighteenth century these marks of shame had been transformed into a high art. Some of the greatest woodblock artists, including Hokusai and Utamaro, made designs for body tattoos in various shades of blue, red, and green.

  Aside from gangsters, tattoos became popular among tough guys who prized the manliness of their occupations: firefighters, construction workers, palanquin bearers, and so on. The most popular motifs were borrowed from the fourteenth-century Chinese novel The Water Margin, about a gang of legendary bandit heroes, which became hugely popular in eighteenth-century Japan. Japanese toughs liked to have tattoos on their backs of Shi Jin, pronounced “Shishin” in Japanese, the brigand also known as “Nine Dragon” Shishin, because of his own elaborate tattoo of nine dragons depicted on his back.

  Donald’s proposal was to do a coffee-table book on traditional tattoos. The tattooist he had in mind was named Horibun II, son of the eminent tattooist Horibun I. Donald had approached him earlier, but somehow they had not hit it off. I never discovered the reason why. Would I try to get in touch? My Japanese would surely help. If I
showed proper respect, Horibun II might agree to be photographed this time. I was of course intrigued by the idea. One thing that made Horibun special is that he still practiced his craft by hand, and not with electric needles. The technique was the same as it had been in the eighteenth century. He lived and worked in a shitamachi area called Okachimachi, not far from where Kara grew up.

  Horibun II with a tattoo of Nine Dragon Shishin on his back

  I went to see Horibun II bearing an appropriate gift of expensive rice crackers. His house was in a narrow street of small wooden houses. Firebombs must have flattened the area in 1945, but the layout of the streets was much the same as it had been for centuries. There was a tofu shop on the corner. Farther along the street men in white bandannas were busy making tatamis. Laundry was flapping in the wind on the rooftops of the two-story houses. A weepy Japanese ballad came drifting from a radio somewhere. Women gossiped in Tokyo accents. An old man in wooden sandals was tending to his bonsai. This was about as shitamachi as it gets.

  Horibun said little at our first meeting, but was genial in a gruff kind of way. We sipped green tea in the room downstairs. A large man with rolls of fat on his neck, he wore a thick woolen waistband over a thin white shirt. I could see a bruise-like shade of blue just above the collar and flowers growing up his left arm. He told me to come back the following week. He would be working on a roof builder from Atami, a seaside resort south of Tokyo.

  The second-floor studio where Horibun worked was stifling. The man from Atami was lying facedown on a blanket. He had short-cropped hair and was wearing a white loincloth. The tattooist was sitting on top of him, as though he had wrestled him to the ground. He held an ink brush in his left hand, like a cigarette between his index and middle fingers, so he could ink the tiny needles before working them into the roof builder’s skin. I could see the outline, drawn with a Magic Marker, of one of the heroes from The Water Margin. The tight bundle of needles made a scratchy sound like the scaling of a fish as it went quickly in and out of the skin. Every so often, Horibun would wipe off the blood with a pretty colored cloth. The man said nothing much. Occasionally the pain would make him wince, but he tried not to show it. As the tattooist was working away, dipping, scratching, and wiping, he pointed out the most painful areas, where the nerves were closest to the surface, under the armpits or around the nipples. There are of course even more painful spots. I was told about a man who had the tip of his penis tattooed in the shape and color of an eggplant. But this was a specialized procedure that would only work if the pain afforded a keen pleasure. I never witnessed anything of that sort.

  Man being tattooed

  Horibun had taken off his white undershirt, revealing a splendid tattoo of Nine Dragon Shishin all over his back. I did not call him Horibun, or Horibun-san. In the world of traditional artisans, as hierarchical as the yakuza or indeed theatrical troupes, nomenclature was taken seriously. He was oyakata, chief, or patriarch, of his occupation.

  I did not realize it at the time, but apparently Horibun I was still around, although gravely ill. I never saw him alive. But I attended his funeral, as a way of showing my respect. The street outside the oyakata’s house was lined with men in black suits. Some of them wore the crew cuts and sunglasses favored by gangsters. Large white wreaths displayed the names of donors in graceful black ideographs. Inside was an overpowering smell of incense wafting from a large number of white pots. In the middle of an elaborate Buddhist altar surrounded by white flowers was a black-and-white photograph of the stern-looking tattoo master. In front of the altar was the casket. Inside the casket was Horibun I, freshly washed the day before by his family. He wore a white kimono, and the utensils of his trade were close at hand: bottles with different shades of ink, a lacquered wooden box with an array of needles, some longer than others, neatly divided in red, blue, and green sections. Above the collar of the kimono was the waxen face of the old man; you could just see the top of his body tattoo, which was the color of faded blue jeans.

  The oyakata was a man of few words. I never really got to know him well, but he tolerated my presence in his studio as he gradually, over many months, decorated the bodies of his clients with graceful and heroic images. I followed this process from beginning to end with the roof builder from Atami. There were others: a sushi chef, a carpenter, a construction worker, and one or two tough-looking characters introduced with a knowing chuckle to me as businessmen.

  I asked them why they did it, why they wished to brand themselves for life with these indelible artworks that would bar them from social respectability? Love of tradition was the most common answer. These were conservative men. But there was something else, linked to this, something that was harder to articulate. It was most apparent when we went on excursions to famous beauty spots, where the men would pose in groups standing under freezing waterfalls, or in front of shrines, or on rocks facing the ocean. Like motorcycle clubs, the tattoos denoted a common identity, a sense of belonging. The yakuza like to present themselves as tight-knit families bound by elaborate codes of loyalty. Much of this is nonsense designed to glorify criminality. But the wetness of gang life is surely one of its attractions to men with few other ties. Even tattooed men without any yakuza connections feel a bond with people who share their taste, precisely because social opprobrium singles them out.

  This familial feeling even extended to the wives. One of the men I photographed, a builder named Takeshi, told me that he had insisted that his wife get a full-body tattoo as well. According to his account, she had a green dragon curling all the way down to her thighs. But alas, he related with sadness, an unexpected cesarean section had made rather a mess of the image and now the dragon appeared to be sprouting two heads.

  I liked the oyakata and the men he tattooed. They were warm and remarkably gentle men. But I remained firmly on the outside of their world. Horibun had kindly offered to tattoo my arm or back. Several motifs were considered: Jizo, the sacred protector of travelers, and, more oddly perhaps, dead children; or Kintaro, the boy hero, battling a giant carp; or maybe just an elegant cherry blossom design. But I foolishly turned him down. I suppose I was worried about the irreversible nature of the thing; what if I got tired of Jizo or Kintaro, or the cherry blossom?

  I regret it now. And I never did move to the shitamachi, unlike Donald Richie, who lived in Ueno for more than three decades until the day he died in 2013, overlooking the lotus-covered pond where Kara Juro’s Situation Theater performed Kaze no Matasaburo when I first arrived in Tokyo. Once again, I had hovered around the edges of an exclusive world, content to remain a stranger.

  Takarazuka

  EIGHT

  I cannot remember why I chose Shojo Kamen, or Mask of a Virgin, to translate. It is one of Kara’s first plays and rather untypical of his work. He wrote it in 1969 for another theater group, Suzuki Tadashi’s Waseda Shogekijo, who were regular visitors to the Mickery Theater.

  I had never translated a play before. My writing experience was limited to movie reviews for the Japan Times. I still thought of myself as a photographer and aspiring filmmaker. Thinking about it now, I suppose that translating one of Kara’s plays was a way to get closer to him and his imaginary world that had enchanted me. Mask of a Virgin was, in fact, a good choice. It is one of Kara’s punchiest and most coherent plays. As in all his works, he concocted a surreal mixture of Japanese history, social satire, and a classic story reworked in his own inimitable way.

  The main character is a person who actually existed, named Kasugano Yachiyo. Born in 1915, Kasugano was the main star for many years of the Takarazuka, an all-female revue company. Worshipped by countless young Japanese girls, she specialized in romantic male roles, most notably that of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. She also played Hamlet to great acclaim. Kasugano, her stage name, literally means “forever blooming spring.” Short-cropped, mannish, and unmarried, Forever Blooming Spring was also known as Eternal Virgin, or so at least she is called in
Kara’s play. One of her last performances on the Takarazuka stage was a solo number in a dance revue entitled Proper, Pure, Beautiful, after the famous Takarazuka motto. Kasugano was then ninety-one. She died of pneumonia five years later. In her prime, she bore a slight resemblance to Liberace, but in a more masculine way.

  Takarazuka is a teenage cult in Japan. Young girls queue all night to get tickets and scream in ecstasy or swoon when one of the stars appears. Their androgynous quality is a large part of the attraction. Dreams of romance are safe from any sexual threat. (Dark stories about lesbian domination in the troupe do circulate in Japan, but these generally don’t reach the ears of the young fans.) I once took a certain camp interest in this cross-dressing phenomenon, and even went to the town of Takarazuka, where it all began in 1914. Once a mere hot spring resort near Osaka, Takarazuka is now a Lourdes for Takarazuka worshippers, who cross a pink bridge and pass a building called Illusion to get to the vast pink theater, where their dreams are acted out onstage.

  During the war, the Proper, Pure, Beautiful revue was mobilized to make military propaganda, celebrating ideals of Asian brotherhood or the superiority of Japanese howitzers. There are photographs of the ’Zuka Girls dressed up as Imperial Navy officers dancing on a stage made up to look like the gun deck of a destroyer. Kasugano spent much of that time performing in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. All this was swiftly forgotten after the war in a pink haze of Heathcliffs, Rhett Butlers, and dashing Austrian aristocrats.