Lost Japan (7 page)

In the summer of 1977 my long college years ended, and I returned to Japan to work at a Shinto foundation called Oomoto, based in the small town of Kameoka, west of Kyoto. The founder of Oomoto had said, ‘Art is the mother of religion', and in keeping with his philosophy, Oomoto sponsors a summer seminar in traditional Japanese arts (tea ceremony, Noh drama, etc.), which I had attended in 1976. My job at Oomoto was to help with arts-related international activities.

However, my first months in Kameoka were extremely lonely. Although Oomoto provided the opportunity to study tea ceremony and Noh drama, their world of ritual failed to interest me. For a person of serious temperament, the quiet of the tearoom and the formality of Noh should be an inspiration. But with some feelings of guilt, I had to admit to myself that I did not have a serious temperament. I tried to distract myself by making the rounds of Kyoto's temples, but soon reached my limit of
raked sand. It was very frustrating. There had to be more than this zestless, ritualized Kyoto, with every tree pruned, every gesture a formula.

That summer, the old Mother Goddess of Oomoto had a visit from an important guest – the Tibetan lama Domo Geshe Rinpoche, abbot of a monastery in Sikkim. He was famed for his psychic powers. At the end of the summer, we met one day in a beer garden in Kameoka. Knowing Domo Geshe's reputation as a psychic, I came straight to the point and blurted out, ‘What should I do?' He looked me over and said, ‘You must seek out another world. If not on this earth, then the moon. If not the moon, then somewhere else. Without fail you will find that world by the end of the year.'

Domo Geshe went on to America, leaving his secretary, Gail, to take care of odds and ends in Kyoto. One day in December, Gail invited me to go and see a Kabuki play. I had been dragged to Kabuki as a child, but my only memory was of ugly old women with harsh croaking voices – the
onnagata
(male actors who play women's roles). I was not very enthusiastic about the invitation, but having nothing better to do I accompanied Gail into Kyoto to see the play at the Minamiza Theater.

It was Kyoto's
kaomise
(literally, ‘face showing'), when leading Kabuki actors come down from Tokyo to act in the gala performance of the year.
Geisha
dressed in their finery sit in the boxes that line the theater, and the refined matrons of Kyoto throng the lobby exchanging cruel politenesses with each other. But we were too poor to be a part of all that. We bought the cheapest tickets available and climbed to our seats high in the rafters.

As the dance ‘Fuji Musume' (‘Wisteria Maiden') began, I saw that the
onnagata
playing the maiden was not one of the ugly old women of my childhood memory, but was truly picture lovely. The flute and drums were fast-flowing; the sliding feet and impossible turns of the neck and wrists of the dancer were playful and sensuous – everything I had been missing. I was stagestruck.

After the dance, Gail informed me to my surprise that the
onnagata
, whom I had thought to be about twenty-five years old, was the veteran actor Nakamura Jakuemon, aged sixty at the time. On leaving the theater, Gail took me to a nearby teahouse called Kaika. The master of the teahouse asked me what I had thought of
kaomise
, and I replied, ‘Jakuemon was amazing. His sixty-year-old body managed to be totally sensuous.' The master gestured to the woman sitting next to me, and said, ‘She has an appointment with Jakuemon right now. Why don't you go along?' So before I knew it, I was backstage at the Minamiza Theater. One minute, Jakuemon was a vision dancing on a stage miles below me, someone I could only view from afar with no hope of ever meeting; the next, I was backstage talking to him.

Jakuemon, still in make-up, looked fortyish, like a refined Kyoto matron. But he had a sly grin, and a coquettish sideways glance flashed from eyes lined with red and black. This sideways glance, called
nagashime
(literally, ‘flowing eyes'), was a hallmark of beautiful women in old Japan, and is found in countless woodblock prints of courtesans and
onnagata.
I was seeing it at close range. An attendant dressed in black brought out a small saucer, in which Jakuemon blended white face powder and crimson lipstick with a gentle hand. Dipping a brush in the resulting ‘
onnagata
pink', he wrote the character
hana
(flower) for me on a square
shikishi
(calligraphic plaque). Then, with the removal of wig, robes and make-up, there emerged a tanned, short-haired man, who looked like a tough Osaka businessman. With a brusque ‘See ya', spoken in a gravelly voice, he strolled out of the room in white suit and shades.

In my case, the secret door to the world of Kabuki was the Kaika teahouse.
Kaika
, which means ‘transformation', refers to the Bunmei Kaika (Transformation of Civilization) that took place in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The master of Kaika was a former Kabuki
onnagata
, and the interior of the teashop was covered with Meiji- and Taisho-period theater
decorations. As it was close to the Minamiza Theater, Kaika was a meeting place for actors and teachers of traditional Japanese music and dance.

After my audience with Jakuemon, I was taken to see various other actors, among them Kawarazaki Kunitaro, a childhood friend of the Kaika master. Kunitaro, who was in his sixties, was a true child of the Meiji ‘transformation', his father having founded Tokyo's first coffee house on the Ginza at the turn of the century. As a young man, Kunitaro joined a group of leftist intellectuals who broke away from traditional Kabuki and cofounded a theater troupe called Zenshinza (Progressive Theater). Kunitaro was especially adept at
akuba
roles – sharp-tongued townswomen. Other actors would come to him to study his distinctive technique of
sute-serifu
– catty quips ‘tossed' at the audience.

I found it curious that the Progressive Theater featured something so retrograde as
onnagata.
Kabuki was founded by a troupe of women in the early 1600s, but during the Edo period, women were banned from the Kabuki stage because they were considered conducive to immoral behavior. The
onnagata
took their place. There was a brief attempt in early Meiji to replace
onnagata
with real women but the audience rejected them. By that point, Kabuki was so thoroughly imbued with the art of
onnagata
that real women did not play the roles properly. After Meiji, women found their place in modern theater. However, in certain unexpected pockets, such as Zenshinza and in Japanese dance,
onnagata
continue to exist even outside of Kabuki.

I soon heard of a particular
onnagata
called Tamasaburo. Unlike the others, he had achieved fame outside of Kabuki as his face was everywhere – on TV, on posters, in advertisements. In 1967, at the age of seventeen, Tamasaburo had caught the eye of the public with his appearance in the play
Sakurahime Azuma Bunsho
(
The Scarlet Princess of Edo
)
.
Yukio Mishima wrote a play for him; teenage girls besieged the theaters. For the first time in a century, a Kabuki
onnagata
had become a popular star.

The February after the Minamiza
kaomise
, I saw Tamasaburo perform for the first time, at the Shinbashi Enbujo Theater in Tokyo, in the dance ‘Sagi Musume' (‘Heron Maiden') – Kabuki's
Swan Lake.
In it, a young maiden dances as a white heron in the snow. Through successive costume changes, from white, to purple, to red, she passes through the stages of girlhood, young adulthood and first love. Then comes heartbreak: her wing (or sleeve) is wounded. She becomes deranged and whirls madly through the snow. At the end, mounting a red felt-covered platform, her face distorted with suffering and rage, she strikes a final pose.

The beginning of the dance was quiet. Sagi Musume, dressed in a pure white kimono, a white hood over her head, turned slowly at the center of the stage, her movement so smooth and perfectly controlled that she seemed like a marble statue. Though Tamasaburo had yet to show his face, he had already conjured up a quiet, twilit, snow-covered world. The hood fell, revealing the pure face of an angel, radiantly white. The audience gasped; this was not the usual
onnagata.
Impossible to describe, the beauty of Tamasaburo is almost a natural phenomenon, like a rainbow or a waterfall. At the end, when, her long black hair disheveled, Sagi Musume mounted the red platform brandishing a magic staff, she was like a shaman of ancient times, evoking the wrath of heaven. The audience around me wept.

Afterwards, a friend of the Kaika master took me to Tamasaburo's dressing room backstage. Out of make-up, Tamasaburo was a tall, thin young man, who looked not much different from somebody one might sit next to on the subway. In contrast with his sadness-tinged femininity of the stage, he was no-nonsense, cheerful, funny. He was then aged twenty-seven, two years older than me.

Kabuki, an almost perfectly preserved remnant of Japan's feudal past, is dominated by a handful of old families. Actors are ranked according to the importance of their hereditary names,
like barons and dukes in the peerage. Actors not born into a Kabuki family are doomed to spend their whole lives as
kuroko
– the black-clad attendants, supposedly invisible to the audience, who appear onstage to supply a prop and remove or adjust a piece of costume. At best, they might appear in a row of maids or retainers. But occasionally someone manages to gain entrance to the hierarchy from outside, and Tamasaburo was one of these.

Although not born into the Kabuki world, Tamasaburo began dancing when he was four. At the age of six he was adopted by the Kabuki actor Morita Kanya XIV, and appeared as a child actor under the name of Bando Kinoji. From then on, his entire life was devoted to the stage; he never went beyond high school. When I met him, he had just returned from his first trip to Europe and was dying to talk to someone about world culture. Fresh from Oxford, I seemed to him to be the ideal candidate. For my part, having just watched Sagi Musume, I was still marveling at his genius, and had a host of questions to ask about Japanese theater. We hit it off at once, and soon became fast friends.

From then on, I neglected Oomoto and stole every opportunity to take the train to Tokyo to see Kabuki. Jakuemon and Tamasaburo gave me free run of the backstage, and Tamasaburo's adoptive mother, Kanshie, was a master of Nihon Buyo (Japanese dance), so I would often watch her classes. For five years I more or less lived inside the Kabuki theater.

Kabuki seems to me to have the perfect balance between the sensuality and ritual which are the two poles of Japanese culture. On one hand, there is Japan's freewheeling sexuality, out of which was born the riotous
ukiyo
(floating world) of Edo: courtesans, colorful woodblock prints, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, ‘naked festivals', brilliantly decorated kimono, etc. This is a remnant of ancient Southeast Asian influence on Japan, and is more akin to Bangkok than to Beijing or Seoul. In fact, early Jesuits traveling from Beijing to Nagasaki at the end of the sixteenth century wrote letters in which they contrasted the
colorful costumes of the Japanese with the drab gowns of the common people of Beijing.

At the same time, there is a tendency in Japan towards over-decoration, towards cheap sensuality too overt to be art. Recognizing this, the Japanese turn against the sensual. They polish, refine, slow down, trying to reduce art and life to its pure essentials. From this reaction were born the rituals of tea ceremony, Noh drama and Zen. In the history of Japanese art you can see these two tendencies warring against each other. In the late Muromachi period, gorgeous gold screens were in the ascendant; along came the tea masters, and suddenly the aesthetic was misshapen brown tea bowls. By late Edo the emphasis had swung back to courtesans and the pleasure quarters.

Today, this war goes on. There are garish
pachinko
parlors and late-night pornographic TV, and there is a reaction against all that, which I call the ‘process of sterilization': the tendency to fill every garden with raked sand and every modern structure with flat concrete and granite. Kabuki, however, has the right balance. It began as a popular art, and is rich in humor, raw emotion and sexual appeal. At the same time, after hundreds of years, it has been slowed and refined to the point where, within the sensuality, there is that timeless ‘stop' – the meditational calm which is Japan's special achievement.

Kabuki, like all theater, is a world of illusion. With its extreme elaboration of costumes, make-up and the
kata
(prescribed ‘forms' of movement), it may be the most illusionistic of all: when the elegant court lady removes her make-up, one is left facing an Osaka businessman. Once, I was translating for Tamasaburo when an Englishman asked him, ‘Why did you want to become an actor?' Tamasaburo answered, ‘Because I longed for a world of beauty beyond my reach.' I, too, was bewitched by this elusive world of illusion.