Now, in the defeated 1990s, Yokoo persists in showing visible regret for lost innocence. If anything really defines the content of his work, it is an undeniable nostalgia, and this perhaps is what makes him so Japanese. He perfectly mirrors his generation—one for whom history is clearly cut in two: prewar and postwar.
Now, of course, Yokoo is the grand sensei. Official, even governmental Japan and its attendant academia not only accept him, they court him. He has lived to see his raunchy nudes used to sell foundation garments, has seen his little Fuji sell ice cream. His iconography has turned into "Tokyo Style" and been put to work promoting the very products it originally challenged.
But Yokoo, in his own way, has remained faithful to himself. The child is still there, fingers grubby, working away at his idea of the world.
Tatsumi Hijikata
The meeting came to order. A group of scholars had gathered to discuss and honor the work of Hijikata, now known as the founder of that important contemporary dance form, Buto. We were also to commemorate the death, which had occurred earlier that winter of 1986.
A noted dance critic was speaking. The audience, mostly students, was listening. I, also on the panel, due to speak later, looked out at those unformed faces and wondered what Hijikata would have thought about this. He had never been much interested in explication.
I remembered him in his early thirties, when he had only some thirty more years to go and was already thinking about death, searching for it, incorporating it into his works.
- See, he once said, gradually collapsing, knees rising to his chest, arms crossing, wrists turning, fingers outspread: It's like dying.
And then the splayed fingers turned outward, reached, growing like roots or tendrils; the head rotated, blind eyes looked up, legs stretched, unfolding from the squat.
This was what it felt like in the far north, in snowy Akita, where Hijikata, son of a peasant, was from. In the long winter you shrank into your body, made it as small as possible to avoid the cold. Then in the spring you reached up for warmth, for the sun. This was what his dance was about.
- Hijikata's artistic vision presents us with alternatives: are these then prehistoric folk, before the benefits of civilization, or are they a post-atomic people, after the bombs have returned us all to a primitive state?
The scholar was holding forth. Buto was rapidly becoming a major postwar aesthetic development. I tried to remember if Hijikata himself had ever made such claims for it.
Only once, that I could recall. We had been drinking in a small country inn near the sea. It was late summer. The rice was ripe, reminding him perhaps of northern fields.
- That's where it all comes from, he said: The paddy fields ... You have no idea how tired my parents used to get. They got so tired working in the paddies that they couldn't move. And yet they had to. It hurt to move. And yet they had to because they had to work. No energy, nothing to move with, and yet they moved.
I had already seen something of his work back then: the notorious Kinjiki of 1959, where all the movements expressed pain, where everyone seemed to be tied to the stage and straining at his bonds, and where death appeared on the boards.
Pain, exhaustion, death—these were the elements of his dance. But they were not dramatized, they were just there. Not something for a dancer to express; something for a body to show.
And I remembered Hijikata in a Ginza coffee shop—one long since torn down—saying in that occasionally dogmatic way he had: You can't just use the body, you know. It has its own life, you see, a mind of its own.
- And so we can now begin to codify the movements. First there is what we might call the squat. And here we must mention that it so resembles a movement used by Harald Kreutzberg that one wonders if Hijikata sensei had not perhaps been in some manner influenced by the German choreographer.
This was the second of the scholars, now just beginning. I was to follow him.
Hijikata's was a northern body, the skin white, the hair black against it. Not the sturdy Japanese peasant body you sometimes see, but the thin farmer's body, all tendon and narrow muscle.
I remembered his squat, and not just from the stage. Back then a lot of Japanese still knew how to do it—it was the normal position for resting by the roadside. Hijikata used to squat down to look at something, to read a passage, to talk.
Pain, exhaustion, squatting. The Japanese body is built close to the earth. Its center of gravity is low. Only Japanese could perform Buto. It has to be low, centered—as though the home of intelligence were not the cranium but the navel.
The navel! I suddenly remembered something else as I sat there looking at those young and unformed faces.
We were at the seaside inn. I was making a film and he had come along to help—no choreography, just a group of children, some fifteen little boys, to be controlled. The plot involved their killing a goat by accident, while playing at war, then holding a funeral for it. They were then meant to forget all about it, to return to being little boys. One of them, however, stays to watch the sea unearth the corpse. The film was called War Games.
Among the difficulties was the scene I wanted where the children, wide-eyed with knowledge of death, gradually forget what they have seen. They start to laugh, to play again, to go back to being children having fun on a beach.
And now I remembered how Hijikata, himself so death-filled, did it, that summer day twenty-five years before. Slowly—well out of the range of my camera—he pulled down his shorts so that his navel was exposed. Then, still slowly, he arched his back, stuck out his stomach.
The boys looked up from the mound under which they had buried death, their faces solemn, and saw this strange man with his shorts pulled down and his stomach stuck out. This surprised them but, filled with the importance of the goat's funeral, they did not smile. They looked, then looked away.
And there they are to this day, on film: the boys—now fathers of children like them—look up, sideways, abstracted, then look down again. It is as though the knowledge of death has confused them, as though they cannot detach themselves from it.
Then Hijikata undid the top button. The shorts slipped further. With one finger he pointed at his navel and suddenly smiled, all teeth, a small boy's smile.
The children looked up, then glanced at each other. One of them grinned, because he thought the man funny. He nudged the boy next to him, catching his attention.
In the film the child looks up and, as if thoughts of death were too much for him, he breaks into a smile. A moment later he nudges the boy next to him. He too raises his eyes. He seems to be saying: All right, it's just a dead animal.
Hijikata then began capering about. It was a kind of festival dance, a celebration after the rice planting, after all the back-breaking labor, the exhaustion. And the children recognized something. Two or three swayed, their bodies perhaps responding to his. Two or three laughed, perhaps from the pleasure of remembering other festivals they had seen.
In the film, several start swaying, as though to break whatever binds them to the mound they stand before. Then, suddenly, several more start laughing, as though they have found a way to escape from the fact that death lies at their feet.
The capering Hijikata pointed to the children's navels, one after the other, making a connection, pointing out a resemblance, indicating a natural order. If his was funny, so were theirs.
Soon all the little boys were laughing and pointing at each other, mouths open, eyes half-shut in mirth, and Hijikata still just outside camera range was dancing about, shorts slipping, the spirit of the festival, his navel like a large, comic eye.
In the film, the children begin to laugh and their laughter is infectious. They point at each other, soon laughing so hard that they seem frantic with joy, so strong is their relief at being delivered from death.
From peasant death to peasant life—it is not only pain but release from it that forms Hijikata's art. I see him now, hopping on one foot, then on the other, arms at antic angles, all
of this enormous rural energy threading its way through the steps of the festival dance.
- And so we honor here the founder of a new Japanese dance form, Buto. Its beginnings were not without controversy, and indeed many of its earlier elements have now dropped away to offer our dancers and choreographers a new set of movements through which they may express themselves. Here, of course, the influence of Tatsumi Hijikata has been seminal—creating as he did this new vocabulary for purely Japanese expression. Thank you.
He sat down. The polite applause continued for a while, then stopped.
The moderator introduced me.
I, still seeing those little boys disappearing down the beach, still seeing Hijikata cavorting alone against that sea, rose to speak.
Utaemon Nakamura
Yatsuhashi appears from behind the artificial cherry blossoms, accompanied by the other onnagata—all men as well—acting the part of attendants to the grand oiran, and followed by an entourage of young umbrella-holders, clog boys, and little girl apprentices with painted cheeks. High on her stilted sandals she performs that elegant stroll, the oiran dochu, the proud procession of the courtesans which opens the Kabuki drama Kagotsurube.
It is Utaemon who always plays this faithless oiran, grandest of all the old Yoshiwara courtesans. It is he who some two hours hence will be cut down by the sword of the man spurned once too often.
Expressionless, mouth pursed in the onnagata pout, a face forever complacent, body a mass of scarlet kimono with a great hanging butterfly sash and a high wig holding chopstick-looking bars of amber, a magnificently cocooned female, almost too slow, too stately to be entirely human, Utaemon places one stilted foot before the other.
And once again the aged Utaemon turns eighteen, as once more to shouts from the waiting throng he steps into the glare of the hanamichi runway, stares about with the scorn of the true courtesan, and begins that lofty procession through the Yoshiwara of two hundred years before.
And, in Tokyo at any rate, only Utaemon can do this. Shochiku, the company controlling the Nakamura Kabuki, is quite faithful—unlike Yatsuhashi. It has tacitly decreed that only Utaemon may play this faithless heroine, one of the great onnagata roles. No one else for the time being can have this part, not even the younger favorite, Tamasaburo.
This is not, however, the reason why Utaemon appears complacent. Onnagata always appear so. It has something to do with the male mouth in repose, also with the Cupid's bow of lip-rouge on which tradition insists. It appears offstage as well.
This is because, as the greatest of onnagata have often averred, to fully realize a woman on the stage one must retain all her characteristics off it. Hence perhaps stories of these impersonators wearing women's clothes around the house, using the female side of the public bath, the ladies' convenience, and so on.
Admittedly, some contemporary onnagata—Baiko, for example—leave the lady on the stage. They are married, have children, play golf and, at home, look like bank employees. But, says received opinion, the flower of the art is found only in those—and Utaemon is one—for whom the persona is inseparable from the person, who sustain this feminine creation throughout all the phases of masculine life.
Feminine is the proper term. The onnagata creates a man's idea of a woman. There is no distortion intended, but still the creation is that of a man, complacent mouth and all. So perhaps it is inaccurate to speak of a persona, to thus suggest that there exists some more authentic alternate. An actor visibly creates himself. We others do the same thing but we are usually not aware of doing so and, in any event, do not do it on the stage. The actor, however, knows what he is about. He consciously constructs himself and it is this fabrication that becomes authentic. Other professionals can recognize and admire it. Like Garbo.
When the Kabuki was making its first New York appearance in the late spring of 1960, she came to City Center every day. Then, one afternoon, she went backstage, determined to meet Utaemon.
When she was finally taken, by Faubion Bowers, to Utaemon's dressing room, Garbo waited while the actor was called. Was it all right if Garbo came in? Who? was the reply, probably incredulous. Then: No, it is not. I am old and not pretty at all. It's better if she sees me all made up. Besides, I'm all sweaty.
This was duly conveyed to Garbo who, straightforward as always, indicated her enthusiasm and regard with: But I want to see his sweat.
Unfortunately, she did not get to see it. Still, once made up, Utaemon did come out and with Bowers's assistance they talked.
Then it was time for Chushingura to begin, and Utaemon took his place for the opening scene. The clappers sounded, but just before the curtain began to slide aside, Garbo stepped onto the stage, ran lightly to the dais where Utaemon was sitting, and touched the onnagata on the shoulder. Startled, he turned. She waved. He waved back, the hyoshigi clapped faster and faster, the curtain was pulled open, and Garbo, at its very fringe, escaped into the wings.
One knows how she felt. Seeing Utaemon, or any onnagata, on the stage, one wants to touch him, to make certain perhaps that he is real, for a person contrived with such apparent artifice does seem unreal. And touching conveys, among other things, regard. Garbo, herself her own creation—those great, feeling eyes, the depths of her apparent understanding, the great strength of the woman, barely glimpsed and so often subverted by the whims of love—had contrived a female persona as surely as has Utaemon.
Utaemon's being an onnagata has allowed him to adopt a number of mannerisms we might think of as being feminine. Though in many ways his life is that of any artist—always teaching, practicing, seeing patrons and pupils—and though he allows himself a full schedule for masculine pleasure, including an interest in Las Vegas, he is also capable of a prima donna's exhibition of, for example, professional jealousy. His rivalry with Tamasaburo, that younger onnagata of whom the media make so much, occasionally surfaces.
He is also capable of displaying the airs of the courtesan he so often impersonates. Yukio Mishima once told me, though with how much truth I do not know, that Utaemon always expected jewels when the younger author had returned from abroad, and that he was particularly delighted with some Mexican fire opals he brought back, a fact that also delighted the grinning Mishima because—something not known to the onnagata—they had been dirt cheap.
Utaemon was also capable of pique, as I myself discovered. We were together in New York that spring of 1960 because I was doing the simultaneous (more or less) translation for the local audience, and during this period I had become friendly with the young man who held the umbrella over Yatsuhashi during her opening oiran dochu in Kagotsurube.
This resulted in my being called to the dressing room, where Utaemon was putting on his makeup for the evening's performance. Smiling, perfectly friendly, patting onto his face the dead white of the oiran, painting on those carmine lips, he talked about the weather, about the gratifyingly enthusiastic audiences, and the fact that my attentions were keeping the young man from his proper study and his habitual role in the household. This last was accompanied by the sweetest and most complaisant of smiles, and Utaemon's irresistible little bow, one that combines the winsomeness of an adorable child with the acumen of a woman of the world.
Naturally, I respected these wishes and no longer attempted to show the youth the sights of New York, and all would have been well had I not then been asked, no one else being available, to take Utaemon out shopping.
It turned out that he needed a pair of comfortable shoes to go with the Western suit he thought he ought sometimes to wear in New York and, no, he would not be bringing with him the large stuffed animal, a teddy bear, I believe, that he sometimes carried about.
We set off. Utaemon apparently felt some constraint because of our previous conversation. I felt none, but this was difficult to convey as shoe store after shoe store failed to have anything small enough to fit the onnagata's tiny foot. Was I not, the occasional glance, ever more beady, asked, choosing shops notorious for their large sizes? And was
I not doing this to discomfort, to have my revenge for some prior humiliation?
Finally—and I am certain that this was seen as the ultimate insult by the increasingly peevish onnagata—a suitable pair was found in the children's department at Macy's. After that my airy greeting of ohayo gozaimasu went unanswered for quite a time, and indeed relations which could have been called cordial were never restored.
His pique—understandable, perhaps, but as I say not a quality we usually associate with men, preferring, rightly or wrongly, to call the quality feminine—was yet more proof, if more be needed, of how deep went Utaemon's identification with the part he played.
Yatsuhashi is not all that scornful, all that cold. Indeed, she has a certain regard for the disappointed admirer who cuts her down. He had arrived an uncouth countryman and had pulled himself together through his love for her. If it were not that she had a younger lover whom she really loved, then perhaps she would have let the older man buy her out as he so wanted. Perhaps she would have ended up a comfortable mistress, or the proprietress of her own house, anything but the grandly attired corpse left lying on the stage at the close of Kagotsurube.
Utaemon makes us realize this. As we watch, this elegant and artificial creation comes alive, for it is human to have doubts, to realize that one is not, after all, consistent.
Yatsuhashi wavers and Utaemon shows us, by actually wavering, a solitary figure on the darkened stage, a person torn, like us. And yet, the difference.
Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People Page 12
