JAPANESE COUNTERCULTURE

Japanese Counterculture

The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shūji

Steven C. Ridgely

A subvention for this publication has been awarded through a competitive grant from the University of

Wisconsin–Madison Provost’s Office and the Graduate School. Graduate School funding has been

provided by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) with income generated by patents filed

through WARF by UW–Madison faculty and staff.

Quotations of poetry throughout the book are reprinted here with permission of Miyoshi Daisuke, Kujō

Kyōko and Terayama World, Fukunaga Kayo, Nakamura Yumiko, and Saito Naoki.

Poems by Nakamura Yumiko copyright Nakamura Yumiko

transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ridgely, Steven C.

Japanese counterculture : the antiestablishment art of Terayama Shūji / Steven C. Ridgely.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8166-6752-9 (hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8166-6753-6 (pb : alk. paper)

1. Terayama Shūji, 1935–1983—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Counterculture—Japan. I. Title.

PL862.E7Z82 2011

895.6’8509—dc22

2010028451

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction. Global Counterculture, V i sual Counterculture

1. Poetic Kleptomania and Pseudo-L y r icism

2. Radio Drama in the Age of Television

3. Boxing—Stuttering—Graffiti

4. Deinstitutionalizing Theater and Film

5. The Impossibility of History

Conclusion. “Japanese” Counterculture

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Global Counterculture, Visual Counterculture

AJAPANESE EXAMPLE CANNOT PROVE COUNTERCULTURE to have been global. Yet if counterculture was a

global phenomenon, then we stand to learn more about it by looking at the work of a Japanese figure like

Terayama Shūji (1935–83). While slightly young for the beat generation, Terayama debuted in the mid-

1950s, and he was similarly entranced by improvisational jazz (both as music and as a model for

writing), similarly scandalous, and similarly positioned by the mid-1960s to be an elder leader (at around

age thirty) in youth culture’s Great Refusal. Terayama’s creative output shifts over time from haiku, tanka

(the thirty-one-syllable genre), and free-verse poetry toward radio drama, television scripts, and

screenplay writing for early 1960s New Wave films, then on to cultural critique, a novel about boxing,

and finally settling from 1967 on underground (angura) theater and experimental film, which would

occupy him until his death in 1983 at age forty-seven. His work in the 1960s makes a transition from

individual toward collaborative production and from verbal toward visual expression—a shift we see in

a number of Japanese authors in this period.

Terayama certainly stands out for his contribution to each of these fields but perhaps most importantly

for his shifts across media over time and his overtly transmedia projects. He was a decathlete more than a

specialist. As such, he is often praised in Japan as being “multi,” and it has become standard for any

description of Terayama to begin with a long list of his personalities. But this notion of a jack-of-all-

trades or a Renaissance man does not do full justice to the significance of Terayama’s movement across

different cultural forms. He was not working in all fields throughout his career, and so it is important to

recognize that Terayama’s participation in particular modes typically occurred when something significant

was happening in that realm (young poets seizing control of haiku and tanka in the 1950s, radio drama

experimenting with form and content after the brain drain to television around 1960, young assistant

directors given free rein in the New Wave as cinema combated television, the important boxing discourse

in the mid-1960s, underground theater in the politicized late 1960s, and experimental short film through

the 1970s after both the studio system and art-house cinema had collapsed). There is an important

historical embeddedness in Terayama’s work in each field that gets obscured when this movement is

painted over with the image of a clever dilettante.

However we want to characterize Terayama Shūji, we can safely claim him to be near the center of

Japanese counterculture—he wrote antiestablishment poetry in the imperial court’s genre; agitated for

sexual revolution; paired velvet platform sandals with suits; put together a theater troupe out of runaways,

street musicians, and transvestites who performed rock musicals and guerilla street theater; and directed

films that invoke Flaming Creatures or some of Andy Warhol’s projects. He collaborated in book

publishing, theater production, and filmmaking with major countercultural artists like photographer

Moriyama Daidō and the graphic designers Yokoo Tadanori, Awazu Kiyoshi, and Uno Akira. There are

markings of the 1960s Zeitgeist in Terayama’s movement across media as well. This vagabond pose—

never getting tied down, staying in motion, rejecting expertise and specialization, and refusing to keep a

job past the time it works for you—is central to understanding Terayama Shūji and is the reason treating

just one facet of his work (poetry, theater, or film) tends to miss the larger point.

We could also safely claim that Terayama was a participant in the global counterculture—his troupe

performed at Ritsaert ten Cate’s Mickery Theater in Amsterdam, at Jack Lang’s Festival de Nancy in

France, and at Ellen Stewart’s La Mama in New York; they were a hit in Shiraz; his films were shown in

Berkeley; and they toured the European festival circuit. Renate Klett (of Theatre Heute in Berlin) said

their troupe conveyed the spirit of 1968 better than any of the other performances she saw at the 1972

Olympics.¹When in Paris, he hung out with Jim Haynes (Edinburgh Fringe Festival cofounder, coeditor of

Amsterdam’s sexual revolution magazine Suck, and core member of Arts Lab in London).²He visited

Nelson Algren (whom he had hosted for two weeks in Tokyo in 1968) at his apartment in the Polish slums

of Chicago, the same apartment Simone de Beauvoire would have gone to during her affair with the “lost

generation” author of The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning.³He interviewed Michel

Foucault in Paris and angered him by repeatedly calling him a “structuralist.”⁴

If we look for counterculture in Japan, we can find men with long hair who are into psychedelia, young

people obsessed with the Stones and Hendrix and Godard films, and wanderers who set out on journeys

either across the country, or maybe more often, around the world. Many would see this as imitation. We

might try to mitigate discomfort with the notion of imitation by framing this in a globalization–localization

paradigm and to start digging around for the particular Japanese inflection of yet another wave of cultural

borrowing. This model has serious flaws almost anytime we speak of culture and its movement—

naturalizing the logic of imperialism—but counterculture may have developed and flowed in a way that

particularly frustrates efforts to see it as motion from center to periphery. Better to conceive

counterculture as a rhizomatically structured and globally synchronic mode—a new set of ideas and

methods that appeared around the world at roughly the same time. This is not to deny material exchange or

origins for these ideas but rather to recognize that the speed with which ideas, information, and even

people could move between Paris and Tokyo, say, was functionally equivalent by the 1960s to their

velocity between the East Village and Berkeley. Kerouac’s road trip from New York to California

certainly took him longer than Terayama’s flights from Tokyo to Amsterdam—it is this internationality that

so many of the clichéd markers of counterculture point toward. The Japanese in bell-bottom blue jeans

with a fresh copy of Sgt. Pepper and the American in a shiborizome (tie-dyed) shirt reading about

Eastern spirituality both had abandoned local or national modes of self-understanding in favor of

something even beyond cosmopolitanism—a postnational (for some cosmic) state of consciousness.

Counterculture was global from the start.

If counterculture was always already global—in its mindset, in its geographical distribution, and in its

patterns of movement—then the globalization paradigm and the localization-type questions that would

generate are not applicable in this case, and all for the better. Imagine trying to sort out what parts of

counterculture were Japanese and which were Western when Zen was more fashionable in the West than

in Japan. The globalization paradigm would inevitably gravitate toward claims about the enduring nature

of Japanese cultural patterns, that against all odds we could still find group orientation, vertical society,

minimalist aesthetics, and some hint of the samurai code in as unlikely a place as the “Japanese version”

of a hippie. Alternatively, assuming the 1960s youth to still be shell-shocked from the war (over before

most of them were born) and somehow resentful of America is a thinly glossed update to the old

Orientalism—any resentment toward the United States in the late 1960s had everything to do with

Vietnam, and as such was very much in solidarity with the American (and worldwide) student movement.

There would be real violence in a localization paradigm—a violence against the project of counterculture

itself, the kinds of global solidarity it had developed, and its own break with past practice. Such an

approach would serve only to rein in and tame Japanese counterculture, to sever the ties it made, and to

undo what it achieved.

We know too much about subcultures now, after Dick Hebdige and cultural studies, to stop short at

sketching out the countercultural style—we must analyze this formation as a set of particular relationships.

This is not to say that elements of countercultural style cannot be read semiotically—long hair speaks

clearly to years not spent getting shot at in Vietnam (around six inches per year) just as long hair on men

from places other than America or Australia showed solidarity with those nonsoldiers. These

communicative elements of style are important, but we stand to learn a great deal more from the structure

of counterculture—the specific tactics it used. What I hope to show with this book is how Terayama, as

both a practitioner and a theorist of counterculture (he would argue that practice should never follow

theory), developed and clarified a set of relations we might understand as the countercultural position.

His artistic practices demonstrate the potential of this mode of cultural production, and careful analysis of

them reveals a set of core principles used across a range of media and genres.

The cultural studies methodology Hebdige used (and helped to create) was itself a product of the

1960s—a countercultural intervention against the university from within by figures like Richard Hoggart

and Stewart Hall. This move to erode the elitism of the university from within the campus parallels efforts

in the art world to build up pockets of counterculture within major cosmopolitan centers like London,

Paris, and Tokyo. Terayama’s closest theatrical rival, Kara Jūrō, refused to take his troupe to these

wealthy cities, traveling instead to perform in Okinawa, Bangladesh, and the Palestinian refugee camps.

But we would do well to consider the way these two positions, as oppositional as they may seem,

actually worked in tandem—Kara creating links of solidarity with the global proletariat while Terayama

airlifted cultural sustenance to fifth columns in the finance capitals. Who cared if the art collectives were

doomed to collapse; longevity and institutionalization was never the point. This emphasis on the pocket of

time-limited freedom—what Hakim Bey would later describe as the temporary autonomous zone—as a

viable form of resistance rather than a pointless distraction marks the 1960s as an era in transition from

transcendent toward immanent forms of opposition. There was no more time to wait around for the grand-

narrative revolution; it had to be created in the gaps. Counterculture should be credited (or discredited?)

with a contribution to this shift.

If the now stabilizing field of visual culture is a relative of cultural studies—a corrective of cultural

studies’ lack of emphasis on the mediated image—then the roughly simultaneous emergence of the field of

cultural studies and the rise of counterculture might also be correlated with the “visual turn,” a shift from

linguistic to visual modes of understanding and models for analysis. It would be difficult to overestimate

the role of television in this shift, but we should also consider counterculture’s parallel move toward

visual (and audio and audiovisual) modes after the text-based beats. The underground theater movement

would not have had the force it did without the relationship between actors in the flesh and images on

television. This shift from linguistic to visual modes of representation is one we can trace (roughly) in

Terayama’s career, as he moved from poetry and scripts for radio to the boxing novel and finally settling

on directing theater, film, and photography projects. Terayama was certainly not the only Japanese writer

to make this transition: Abe Kōbō would move from fiction toward theater in the 1960s, and Tomioka

Taeko would shift from poetry toward film collaborations at the end of the decade. The core of literature

itself might well be understood to have moved away from the short story or novel and toward writing for

film, theater, and television in this period. If the countercultural project was consistently to intervene, we

might rightly understand the visual turn we witness at this time as counterculture’s effort to stay a step

ahead of the mainstream—a set of experiments with the rhetorical power of images to probe the way they

manage to generate enough truth value to be viewed as real.

Two figures are particularly important in clarifying and popularizing the English term “counterculture,”

and a brief outline of their work should help position the way the term will be used in this book. The

sociologist J. Milton Yinger spent much of his career working out the contours and social function of

counterculture (he initially proposed “contraculture” in 1960 but later capitulated to the mass-media

preference for “counterculture” in the 1970s), particularly in contradistinction to the category of

“subculture” as used within the field of qualitative sociology. He emphasized that a conflict element is

central in a counterculture and that norms within such a group “can be understood only by reference to the

relationships of the group to a surrounding dominant culture.”⁵This is distinct, then, from a subculture,

which he describes as having a set of common values but not necessarily ones contradicting the

mainstream norms. Yinger credits Talcott Parsons for coining the term and sketching out its parameters

briefly in The Social System of 1951, where he writes of deviant groups, such as gangs of delinquents,

stuck in the primitive stage of a “counter-culture” without a “counter-ideology” (a term he prefers to

Harold Lasswell’s still earlier use of “countermores”) that might legitimate them and aid recruitment.⁶

Already in Parsons we find traces of a distinction between a delinquent “counter-culture” described as

lacking a coherent ideology versus the overtly ideological groups of political revolutionaries in “radical”

movements—a distinction seen again in the 1960s between the politically serious New Left and the more

playful hippie/yippie/tranny/pot-smoking/psyche-delic/sexual-revolution/electric–rock ‘n roll/revolution-

of-consciousness cluster we tend to euphemize as “counterculture.”

Theodore Roszak is the other major figure we should credit with popularizing the term

“counterculture.” Roszak’s series of articles for The Nation in March and April 1968 on “The Counter

Culture” set out specifically to look for common threads between “the New Left, flower power, mind

explosion, psychedelia, pot, and Zen.” Roszak’s definition attempts to mend the rift (widening by 1968)

between the political and psychosexual sides of the movement.⁷These articles and his expansion of them

into his 1969 book on the subject, The Making of a Counter Culture, are focused on the historically

embedded late-1960s phenomenon, particularly in the United States (although he does acknowledge a

youth movement in Japan and Latin America). His core thesis is that counterculture arises as a rejection of

increasingly technocratic tendencies in cold war societies, where “postideological,” technologically

savvy bureaucracies run by “experts” and “specialists” seek to expand the common good by eliminating

inefficiencies through rational, objective analysis. Since the trend is found in both major American

political parties and in the Soviet bloc, the dissenting youth had to search for new alternatives to all

existing possibilities.⁸Roszak gives us a tour of where counterculture has gone to look for these

alternatives: R. D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse, Norman Brown, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, Allen

Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and Timothy Leary. Roszak’s book was translated into Japanese and published in

1972, resulting in two new words in the Japanese language: taikō-bunka (“opposition-culture”) and

kauntākaruchā, the second given as the pronunciation of the first in the Japanese edition of the book.

Tracing a lineage of these Japanese words for counterculture, we find a series of articles and

roundtables in the 1970s by sociologists like Takahashi Akira, Maekawa Tomokata, and Takada Akihiko,

all of whom, in line with Roszak, use the terms to refer to a primarily American phenomenon of the late

1960s stretching into the early 1970s. By this time, however, the moment had passed, and discussion is

often focused on what counterculture had morphed into (organic food cooperatives, nonprofit

organizations, citizens’ movements). Working back through earlier publications by these figures, however,

reveals Takahashi in particular to have been researching in real time the development of what would later

be called counterculture. Takahashi writes articles in the 1950s on mass communication and the political

influence of television, translates Beauvoir and Karl Mannheim, and writes on José Ortega y Gasset

before turning his attention almost exclusively to the American student movement in the early 1960s. He

starts a carefully documented eight-part series of articles on the American New Left and the student

movement in the journal Sekai in January 1967, chairs a roundtable on student movements around the

world for Asahi jānaru in April 1968, and publishes a book-length survey of worldwide “student power”

in October 1968 (“world” here is the United States, France, West Germany, Latin America, Eastern

Europe, Northern Europe, and Japan—South Korea, home to the only student movement that successfully

deposed its head of state, is conspicuously absent). In 1973, Takahashi releases an anthology of

translations covering Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, Timothy Leary, David Horowitz, and Abbie

Hoffman. The term “counter” appears in Takahashi’s writing on the New Left at least as early as January

1967, when he describes the “new radicalism” as a “movement giving birth to a theory” rather than as a

“movement born of a theory” and one in which the new 1960s activists take a “counter-stance” (taikō

shisei) to their more theory-oriented 1950s forebears.⁹Takahashi is often more thorough than either

Yinger or Roszak, published earlier, and (although an Americanist) tends to treat counterculture as a more

fully international phenomenon.

My use of “counterculture” will be closer to Roszak and Takahashi than to Yinger, it will lean more

toward the art world and further away from “lifestyles” than any of the three, and I will try to follow as

closely as possible Terayama’s preferred term, han-taisei undō (antiestablishment movement), which for

him was typically far to the psychosexual side of the spectrum discussed previously but with the

understanding (as with Marcuse) that achievement of the sexual revolution would entail a comprehensive

social reconfiguration as a matter of course.

Too much of the existing discourse on counterculture—Yinger, Roszak, and Takahashi included—

emphasizes the rebellion against a stagnant, conformist, dull, suffocating mainstream. The assumption is

that counterculture was primarily a reaction to an unbearable society. We stand to gain better insights,

however, with a more autonomist reading of the situation that sees counterculture as an instigating force.

Terayama makes particularly important contributions in this vein, which can help us visualize

countercultural patterns and sketch out a new theory of counterculture. I propose distilling his artistic and

political position into three clusters that clarify the countercultural form, particularly the oppositional

tactic of lateral motion, a reorientation toward a synchronic understanding of time, and the recognition of

the potential of agnosticism and indeterminacy to break apart static systems.

If we look broadly at resistance in the 1960s, lateral motion stands out as an important shift. We see

sidestepping, flanking techniques, and indirect confrontation across guerrilla warfare tactics in Third

World liberation movements, in the attention-dodging pose of the hipster (as described in Norman

Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro”), in civil rights protests at lunch counters instead of courtrooms,

in student occupations of university buildings supplanting direct attacks on parliaments, in transmedia

motion in the arts, and in the interdisciplinarity of new academic fields like semiotics and cultural studies.

The term “counterculture” itself may be misleading, then, since these types of maneuvers might better be

visualized as a 90-degree turn away from the square establishment than as a 180-degree reversal, which

comes off as a reactionary inversion and is easily dismissed as a childlike rejection of adult society. What

we find in this 90-degree, lateral movement is an emphasis on abandonment over destruction, on moving

sideways to capture and defend new territory rather than on attempting to seize existing (illusionary)

power centers. This visualization is particularly useful in explaining the apparent ambiguousness of

counterculture because a 90-degree turn from the mainstream could point in any of 360-degrees as it

moves away from that established axis (creating an entirely new plane of heterogeneous existence),

whereas a 180-degree turn is limited in movement to the same one-dimensional axis of that which it

opposes. It is, in fact, recognition of power’s need for opposition to justify its reign that may have led to

counterculture’s refusal to become that sort of predictable, and welcomed, frontal attack. The 90-degree

turn literally turns the tables, and the power center suddenly has to give chase, but by the time they find

these pockets of counterculture (now scattered in every direction), it is counterculture that is in the

position of defending its own territory against invasion, a useful boost for morale. Terayama visualizes

this tactic through the image of aerodynamics, in which an airplane does not confront gravity directly, but

rather uses a 90-degree lateral motion to trigger a reaction in the form of air resistance. His specific

suggestion was that street theater could similarly utilize opposition from police to help a play “take off”

(more on this in chapter 4).

This 90-degree turn from power and the lateral motion we find in countercultural tactics are paralleled

by a shift of time orientation, from a diachronic (past-to-present) toward a synchronic (cross-sectional)

worldview. It is here that we find the hints of antihistoricism that seem to align counterculture with an

adrift postmodernist stance and against rigorous historical consciousness (a tension that seems to have

carried through largely unchanged into the 1990s debate on art history vs. “ahistorical” visual culture).

Certain elements of this deemphasizing of history probably held true, where historical materialism was

seen as too calculating and square by hippies who had already begun living out their version of the

liberated, postrevolutionary life. I prefer to see the synchronic turn in counterculture, however, not as a

turn away from historicity or historical consciousness at all but rather as a shift of orientation within a

historicized field of consciousness that heightens the sense of interrelation between diachronic strains

precisely by focusing on the synchronic connections between them—it is in cross-sections of time that

differential development becomes clearest. That “history” was used as shorthand for the diachronic, here,

likely confuses the issue, but close attention reveals in countercultural discourse an engagement with, if

not a completely synchronic worldview, at least a double-axis version of the times. Terayama addressed

this issue in the mid-1960s by using a metaphor of history versus geography, claiming himself to be

against “history-ism” and of geographical orientation.¹⁰His focus is on spatial movement in the present

rather than that “which used to be in present-tense” and the set of causalities that have led to conditions of

the past shaping the form of the present. Nation-states, he points out, lose their legitimacy when

considered synchronically (the “imagined community” is no longer imagined, and therefore ceases to

exist). Terayama is most opposed to the general sense of passivity he sees among people overwhelmed by

an understanding of existing in a historically determined present, waiting around as observers for history

to take its course: “When I say that I hate history, what I basically mean is that I ‘dislike returning home.’

There’s nowhere we can return to. It’s meaningless to talk about returning to ‘medieval times’ or

‘primitive psychology’ or ‘the mainland’ or ‘religion’ or ‘hard and fast solutions.’ No matter how much

Sheckley and Bradbury vex themselves over the creation of a time machine, the past is always our first

‘lost home’ . . . we can ‘go,’ but we cannot ‘return.’”¹¹History functionally comes to represent, in

Terayama’s formation, either a passivity trap that locks us in stasis with the belief that individual action is

fruitless or, worse, a regressive force, a desire to reel back motion against the arrow of time. An image

from Terayama’s second film project (and the oldest extant), Kanshū (Caged prisoner, 1962), illustrates

this stance well, with a man immobilized as a human sundial.¹²Diachronic time has him trapped (at least

until dusk), and he is less mobile than the dog calmly strolling by in front of him (Figure I.1). The short

film is an abstract montage, but images of clocks and time predominate. Several wall clocks are smashed

or thrown out of windows as though to liberate their owners. This will become a common theme in

Terayama’s work, typically with wall clocks linked to the oppression of a central authority versus the

liberatory image of a wristwatch, associated with decentralization and autonomy (and a panic-inducing

threat to those whose worldview crumbles without an ultimate authority). The focus on synchronic time,

on a geographical orientation, and on a liberation from diachronic time aligns counterculture closely, then,

with the mindset of Mailer’s “hipster,” who “exists in the present, in that enormous present which is

without past or future.”¹³

If there is a “world turned upside down” (to use Yinger’s formulation) element to counterculture—a

strict inversion of the mainstream, protechnocracy worldview—it may be in assumptions about the effects

of knowledge versus agnosticism. If much of the great refusal is against pseudo-science and false

rationality being leveraged by the administrators against the administrated, then we might do well to view

the clash as one between a side that sees increasingly specialized knowledge (faked in times of crisis) as

the means toward keeping society moving forward against a side that sees society (particularly social

hierarchy) as being detrimentally locked in place exactly by that form of “progress.” The refusal, then,

might be one not just against technocracy but also for pockets of unpredictability as useful and necessary.

If the establishment wants to stamp out these pockets of unanswered or unanswerable questions (as it

sanitizes unregulated segments of urban space), counterculture wants to maintain them and build more,

seeing the agnostic pockets not as blockades to progress but as springboards for motion and sources of

energy for new ideas. For as much opposition as we find in counterculture to the base-superstructure logic

of “vulgar” Marxism, there are plenty of traces not only of political anarchism (mutual aid, classlessness)

but also of the vulgar anarchism of bohemian, ungoverned, unpredictable spaces.

Figure I.1. This human-sundial photograph was taken on the set of Terayama’s short film Kanshū

(Caged prisoner, shot in 1962, edited in 1969). Courtesy of Kujō Kyōko and Terayama World.

This dubiousness toward history (or rather the equation of history with truth) describes a situation we

might be tempted to associate with a postmodern cynicism or a poststructuralist entrapment in language.

But what Terayama seems to have discovered here was not the problem of alienation from reality but

rather the opportunities created when language (or image) has heightened rhetorical power. He finds here

a chance to fabricate history—starting with personal history as a test case—and ways to create false

realities that function as quasi-independent spaces from which to look back critically at the experience of

“reality” as lived in everyday life. Terayama cultivated a reputation as a liar and required the skill of

self-fictionalization for entrance into his theater troupe. The film scholar Yomota Inuhiko reports one of

Terayama’s interview questions (to a fifteen-year-old girl) at a tryout for the troupe: “Please tell us how

you felt the last time you had sex with your father.”¹⁴Her ability to transform herself into an incestuous

patriphile on the spot got her into the troupe; others too bound to their identities did not make the cut

(Yomota included). Yet to read this sort of test as an examination of the ability to ad-lib fiction as an actor

does not go quite far enough. The troupe itself might best be understood as a social experiment, an effort

to create a different kind of person and an alternative form of being in the young actors recruited into it.

The audience, then, was most likely only of secondary importance, serving as a sort of patron or witness

to the transformations taking place within these young amateurs thrust onto the stage.

It is tempting to read this self-fictionalization and generation of false history as a border crossing or a

blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality. But what Terayama was doing was more radical than

that: he was demonstrating that these categories have flexible boundaries, ones we can manipulate.

Recognizing that we will never get closer to reality than what we experience as reality (in

phenomenological terms), and that fiction and reality as discursive constructs are in a co-determined

relationship, Terayama realized that the boundary of reality could be shifted by pushing and pulling on its

perceived border within the realm of fiction. It is quite likely that he was much more concerned with

reality than with fiction but realized that it would be more effective to expand the reach of reality by

drawing back the border of fiction than to simply push reality further into fiction’s territory.

Although Terayama would certainly reject a biographical sketch in answer to the question “Who was

Terayama Shūji?” a brief tour of his background is in order. His active promotion of self-fictionalization

complicates this task, since his commentary on his own history (and repetitions of it elsewhere) is fraught

with conspicuously unreliable narration. Nevertheless, the standard narrative on Terayama’s biography

now reads roughly the following way.¹⁵He was born on December 10, 1935, in the northern rural town of

Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture, the hometown of the novelist Dazai Osamu. Shūji’s father, Terayama

Hachirō, was a police detective who moved the family often as he was transferred around Aomori in the

late 1930s. Hachirō was drafted and left for the front in 1941, leaving Shūji’s mother, Hatsu, to care for

their son. Hachirō would die on the island of Celebes of dysentery, news of which reached Hatsu after the

war in September 1945. During the war, Shūji and Hatsu lived in Aomori City, the metropolitan center of

the prefecture, until the air raids that burned the city on July 28, 1945 (about a week before the atomic

bomb was dropped on Hiroshima). They escaped and resettled over a restaurant owned by Hachirō’s

relatives in his hometown of Misawa, the city that is now home to the Terayama Shūji Museum. Hatsu

took a job at the U.S. air base in Misawa—a former Japanese Navy installation taken over by the Allied

forces after the war—while Shūji attended the local elementary school. His literary aspirations were

evident by his first year of middle school, when he edited and published a handwritten and mimeographed

weekly newspaper that included his own creative writing.

During the autumn of 1948, when Shūji was halfway through his first year of middle school, Hatsu

took a job at another Allied forces base in southern Japan (in Ashiya, near Fukuoka), and Shūji returned

to Aomori City to live with his mother’s relatives while she worked in Kyūshū, saving money to pay for

his college tuition. These relatives, the Sakamoto family, owned and operated an eight-hundred-seat

cinema in town called the Kabukiza, which gave Shūji access to a steady stream of films. He continued

work on the school newspaper at his new middle school, publishing free-verse poems and a number of

tanka. In high school, his interest shifted toward haiku, and his publication activities, in close relationship

with his classmate and rival Kyōbu Hisayoshi, would evolve from a high school haiku club called

Yamabiko (Echo) into a prefecture-wide high school haiku magazine called Aoi mori (Green forest, a play

on Aomori), and from there into a nationwide teenage haiku magazine launched in February 1954 called

Bokuyōshin (Pan/Faunus). Both Aoi mori and Bokuyōshin included contributions from the important

modern haiku poet Akimoto Fujio, who served as an advisor to the magazines.

Terayama moved to Tokyo in the spring of 1954 to begin studies at Waseda University. He wasted no

time making his move on the poetry world: he applied and was accepted into the free-verse poetry circle

Vou, run by Kitazono Katsue (or Kitasono Katué, as preferred by the dadaist poet and publisher of the

interwar magazine Ge.Gjmgjgam.Prrr.Gjmgem). Terayama published a handful of poems in Vou’s coterie

journal between July 1954 and June 1956. He continued work on Bokuyōshin and on a new youth-poetry

journal called Kōya (Wilderness), but his formal, national debut occurred in November 1954 (midway

through his first year at Waseda), when he won an open contest for tanka composition held by the

magazine Tanka kenkyū. It was also this fall when he would be first diagnosed with nephritis

(inflammation of the kidneys), which would develop into the more serious condition nephrosis and

require nearly continuous hospitalization from March 1955 to July 1958 for treatment and monitoring of

his kidney condition. The disease kept him on a restricted diet for the rest of his life, but his heavy

regimen of diuretic medication to assist kidney function eventually caused the cirrhosis of his liver that

would kill him in May 1983. He read and wrote during his three-year stay in the hospital, publishing two

volumes of poetry in 1957.

After Terayama’s release from the hospital in the summer of 1958, he began writing scripts for radio

dramas on the recommendation of fellow poet Tanikawa Shuntarō. The two would cowrite a radio

program called Oshaberi danchi (The gossipy apartment building), which aired in segments starting in

December 1959. Radio was, at the time, one of the few opportunities for young poets to make money.¹⁶By

1960, the turbulent year of mass protests by the student movement and organized labor against the renewal

of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty (which would extend by ten years the U.S. military presence in Japan at

bases such as Misawa, Yokota, Yokosuka, Tachikawa, and Sasebo), Terayama wrote scripts for radio,

theater, and film, engaging (often mockingly) the frustration of failed protest. The precedent set by the

1960 extension has been used to grant now-automatic extensions of the treaty every ten years.

Through the early 1960s, Terayama continued writing for radio, started writing for television, and

began publishing cultural critique on topics from the beat generation and right- versus left-wing politics to

boxing and horse racing. A twenty-four-part series of short essays first published in late 1962 in the

Student Times (a bilingual newspaper published by the Japan Times targeted at high school and

university students) established Terayama’s reputation as a cultural critic and solidified his alliance with

youth culture.¹⁷The series was known colloquially as Iede no susume (In praise of running away from

home), a play on nation-builder Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Gakumon no susume (In praise of learning), but

instead encourages severing one’s psychological bonds with family and hometown. The topics are

eclectic, but much of the book is an argument for relinquishing attachment to the familiar in exchange for

the vivacity of the unknown as well as an introduction to critical thinking, as Terayama guides his reader

to root out the agenda behind moral guidance narratives.

Terayama’s only full-length novel, Aa, kōya (Ah, wilderness) was serialized during 1965 and 1966.¹⁸

The main topic is boxing, explored through a frame of violence as communication, and Terayama was

drawing partly from jazz as a compositional technique as well as from Nelson Algren’s “neighborhood

novel,” which in Terayama’s case explored the seedy Kabukichō district of Shinjuku, Tokyo. This novel

pairs nicely with a book of essays Terayama published around the same time called Bōryoku toshite no

gengo (Violence as language), along with a number of pieces on boxing written in the mid-1960s.

In 1967, Terayama would launch an amateur, underground theater troupe called the Tenjō Sajiki. The

plan was to do around six new plays per year with Terayama as playwright, his wife Kujō Eiko (now

Kujō Kyōko) as producer, the graphic designer Yokoo Tadanori as artistic director (both sets and

posters), and Higashi Yutaka as stage director. The name of the troupe, best left untranslated, literally

means the “upper balcony,” or the cheap seats in a theater, which was taken from the Japanese title of

Marcel Carné’s film Les enfants du paradis (Children of paradise, 1945), released in Japan as Tenjō

sajiki no hitobito (The people in the upper balcony). Terayama claims in one magazine article from 1967

to have been making a playful inversion of the “underground” by naming his troupe after the ceiling.¹⁹The

subtitle of the troupe’s name may be more significant: engeki jikkenshitsu (theater laboratory, often in

their own materials as “A Laboratory of Play”) can be traced back to a sign Terayama posted on the door

of his apartment in the early 1960s proclaiming the space his “laboratory,” but it would have resonated by

1967 both with Ellen Stewart’s literally underground (illegal, and in hiding) “experimental theatre club”

(which Terayama first visited in 1966) and the Arts Lab in London, where Terayama’s friend Jim Haynes

was doing similar projects. In the context of modern Japanese theater history, this would also invoke the

1924 founding slogan of the Tsukiji Little Theater, “A Laboratory of Theater, A Freak Show for the

Masses” (Engeki no jikkenshitsu, minshū no misemono-koya), as former Tenjō Sajiki member Takatori

Ei points out in his recent book on Terayama.²⁰While Yokoo and Higashi would both leave the troupe by

1970, the Tenjō Sajiki would form the base of Terayama’s activities from the time of its launch until his

death around fifteen years later.

One puzzle regarding Teryama’s biography that has not been fully explained is the problem of his birth

date. Almost all publications since his death have listed his birth date as December 1935, but several

institutions (including the National Diet Library and Waseda University) continue to list his dates as 1936

to 1983. The standard explanation for this is that his mother was late in registering his birth (which

occurred at home), and she claims in her 1985 memoir that because she missed the deadline for birth

registration, she decided to lie on the paperwork and claim he was born one month later than he had been,

thus January 10, 1936.²¹This all seems perfectly rational and there is little reason to doubt the truth of this

story, save for Terayama’s claims about the malleability of history and the liberatory effect of self-

fictionalization. This narrative of the one-month-late birth registration, in fact, first appears in an

“autobiography” Terayama began serializing in 1967 called Tareka kokyō o omowazaru (Everyone longs

for home), which should be treated with extreme skepticism as it is riddled with contradictions, has been

shown to be embellished, and revolved around the general theme of the way rhetorical modes (like

confession) generate their own truth value and facilitate reception as historical fact. The subtitle of the

text signals this clearly, Jijoden rashiku naku (Not your typical autobiography), as does his explanation

that this autobiography will align itself more with a poetic, metaphorical understanding of history than

with a scientific one.²²One episode, for example, relates details of his first sexual encounter, building

and building tension before breaking it with: “This episode, however, is a lie.” The first confession is

revealed as false here by this second one, which we likely believe. We trust the confession of the lie

despite it being in the same rhetorical mode just revealed to have been deceptive. Terayama seems to be

leveraging our psychological need to balance the false with the true, to remove the lie and the memory of

being deceived by patching over the experience with trust.

With only one exception from 1966, all of Terayama’s publications prior to the publication of his

“autobiography” list a birth year of 1936.²³Even the book version of the autobiography itself, in which

the narrative of the 1935 birth year first appears, cites 1936 as Terayama’s birth year in the biographical

information at the end of the book. The two possibilities coexist for several years with the stability of the

1935 birth year not really taking hold until after Terayama’s death. Perhaps most interesting is the

possibility that Terayama himself did not even learn of his “true” birthday until sometime in the mid-

1960s.²⁴His date of birth, then, may have functionally shifted back one month around halfway through his

life, a perfect example of the malleability of history and a playful undermining of the authority of state

bureaucracy. In any case, if we cannot fully trust this “true” birth date narrative, we find ourselves forced

into a fittingly agnostic position about the most basic biographical detail of Terayama’s life.

The core problem with this birth-date issue and more broadly with Terayama’s biography is that the

reaction to discoveries of embellishment has typically been either to denounce him as a liar or to support

his claims and fill in the details with additional interviews with his acquaintances. But this sort of

positivist, scientific relationship with the past is precisely what Terayama’s playful manipulation of

personal history was mocking. We need a certain amount of data to prevent Terayama’s autobiography

from being read as fact, certainly, but it seems that the proper response to this sort of text is not so much to

fact check as it is to begin the process of liberatory self-fictionalization ourselves or at least to recognize

the point of such an exercise. Demythologizing Terayama, or counterculture, or the sixties may actually be

a reactionary response, one that serves mainly to assimilate that deviance back into the technocratic

establishment.

This book is not a literary biography, but I do take up broad critical problems in Terayama’s work

roughly in the order they arose before moving back and forth in time as necessary within the chapters to

work through those problems and put them in context. As much as I want to resist a developmentalist

model, there is an accumulation of experience and production on some issues that make it easier to

organize the book as a whole in roughly chronological thematic chapters.

In the first chapter, I analyze Terayama’s tanka from the 1950s, paying particular attention to instances

of appropriation, quotation, allusion, and especially critique. After an extended analysis of the

relationship between Terayama’s most famous poem (from 1956) and the film Casablanca, I move back

to 1954 to look at Terayama’s public debut with a set of poems called “Chehofu-sai” (Chekhov festival).

These poems sparked a plagiarism controversy when it was discovered that Terayama had appropriated

sizable sections of his tanka from both contemporary haiku poets and his own previous haiku

compositions. I look at the critical response that followed these accusations, along with Terayama’s own

response, with the hope of finding a way past the stalemate between those who saw this as unethical and

others who saw Terayama leading the charge for making language public property.

In chapter 2, I focus on two simultaneous technological shifts—the introduction of television into

mainstream Japanese society and the transition of radio from monaural to stereophonic broadcast—and

the ways Terayama engaged with those changes. He, along with other young poets, found work in radio

after established writers moved to television, pairing the youngest writers with a medium threatening to

become obsolete. The situation led to several experimental radio drama projects designed to hold on to

the youth market, often with subtexts reflexive of radio’s newly blinded status relative to television. The

technology of stereo came first to radio, however, and Terayama was also commissioned to write scripts

for radio to showcase stereo technology in ways other than hackneyed footsteps progressing across a

room. The result was an extraordinary stereo radio drama called Kometto Ikeya (Comet Ikeya), which

uses documentary and scripted footage, mono- and stereophonic sound, and a blind narrator whose

position relative to the other characters seems ambiguous if not physically impossible. I link the

positioning function of stereo to the countercultural politics of decentering and deuniversalizing, so just as

universals were revealed as centered particularities and then decentered within political critique, so too

does stereo radio seem to reconfigure the universality of monaural sound into an embodied, centered

particularity.

Chapter 3 concerns the interaction of violence and language, which Terayama addressed through the

themes of boxing (linguistic representations of violence), stuttering (violated language), and graffiti

(violating language). Tracing this boxing-stuttering-graffiti discourse through plays, poems, essays, a

novel, and finally the performance of a live funeral for the dead antagonist of the wildly popular boxing

comic Ashita no Jō (Tomorrow’s Jō), I work through Terayama’s analysis of the reality effect of these

forms as well as their potential to revitalize countercultural spontaneity in the face of a trend toward

social bureaucratization. By bundling this cluster of language and violence themes to jazz improvisation

(both through direct reference to jazz and in using chord sequences as an organizing principle of his

boxing novel), Terayama links these ad-libbed forms to a sensation of time-embedded presence—a

temporal sensation that compliments the spatial sensation of position discussed in chapter 2. Ultimately,

Terayama celebrates these serendipitous formations as resistant to the sterilizing of culture and as a

socially positive type of violence, in the sense used by Georges Sorel for the assertion of power by the

low upon the high (vs. “force,” power working from the high upon the low).

In chapter 4, I move from analysis of violence and language to an analysis of violence and sex. While a

broad trend of eroticized violation narratives emerges in Vietnam-era Japan (seen in the work of

Mishima, Ōe, Shibusawa, Wakamatsu), the critique of sadism through sadism-themed texts was countered

in Terayama’s work by alignment with the contractual libidinal economy of nineteenth-century Austrian

novelist, Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, after whom the term masochism derives. Terayama’s direct

reference to the locus classicus of masochism (Venus in Furs) in his best-known play, Kegawa no Marii

(Marie in furs), leads me to read the play against Gilles Deleuze’s essay (“Coldness and Cruelty”) on the

role of contracts and institutionalism within a masochistic system. The presentation of this play in

Shinjuku Bunka Art Theater, the main countercultural cinema of the era, as well as a direct reference to

the play in a subsequent Terayama film (shown at the same cinema), calls into question the relationship

between live drama, film, and the institutions (both material and discursive) that house them. Terayama

has, by this point in the late 1960s, moved toward images and dialogic, collectively produced projects,

utilizing the medium of film to (ironically) rehumanize the interaction between actor and audience and the

medium of theater to toy with scriptedness and spontaneity.

In the final chapter, I look carefully at a set of Terayama’s projects that all share the title Den’en ni

shisu (Death in the country): a television drama from 1962, a tanka collection from 1965, and a feature

film from 1974. In this case, unlike in his debut, he recycled his own material and repeatedly deployed a

set of signifiers (clocks, axes, household shrines, red combs, and Mt. Fear) in a way that generated new,

mythlike narrative streams. This set, on further analysis, appears to derive from childhood memories of

his home province in northern Japan (Aomori) mixed with later news items and tourism campaigns that

billed the area as prehistoric and mystical. As such, the ten-year Den’en ni shisu project charts the loss of

Terayama’s hometown and childhood past and the recreation of it as a knowingly fictional construct. This

process parallels his protagonist’s attempt to liberate himself from his own history played against the

impossibility of history itself, in the sense of a return to a past that no longer exists.

Ultimately, the significance of this book should extend beyond both a case study of counterculture’s

manifestation in Japan and a text-and-con-text analysis of the heart of Terayama’s transmedia career. My

intention has been to demonstrate the intimate connection between transmedia artistic practice and

counterculture in order to highlight the way art can function as politics. The driving force behind this

project is a search for a methodological approach capable of handling countercultural subject matter in a

way that honors the principles of the countercultural position—oblique opposition, synchronic

orientation, indeterminacy. Discovering that methodology and embodying a political position that takes

full stock of the cleverness of countercultural tactics is, in the end, perhaps the most important impact of

an encounter with the ideas of someone like Terayama Shūji.

CHAPTER 1

Poetic Kleptomania and Pseudo-Lyricism

The novel: it’s a mirror one carries down a road.

—Saint-Réal

Stendhal, The Red and the Black

The green seed is inside the sun.

—Sorel

Terayama, “Chekhov Festival”

FIXED-VERSE POETRY MAY SEEM A strange place to find an avant-garde movement by young Japanese poets.

Free verse is intuitively a better fit, or if there was going to be a move toward a rigid form to toy with the

Sartrean paradox of freedom experienced as resistance to oppression, then we might expect to see a move

toward haiku, the shortest fixed-verse form. And it is this pair, free verse by Ginsberg and haiku by Gary

Snyder, that comes to characterize the American beat scene. The shake up in Japanese poetry in the 1950s,

however, occurred in the thirty-one syllable genre of tanka (the standard short form, referred to in other

eras as waka or simply uta). In context, however, this makes perfect sense. Haiku, long a comedic form,

had already been radicalized, but tanka (despite modern work by Masaoka Shiki, Ishikawa Takuboku,

Yosano Akiko, and others) remained the most austere and somber of the poetic genres, the one with the

closest relationship to the long tradition of high-brow Japanese literature (Genji, the major medieval

courtly anthologies), and the imperial flavor of these poems had been restored as the Japanese soldiers of

World War II were expected to be uplifted by verses by Emperor Meiji, grandfather of Hirohito. Tanka,

then, was the perfect target for an intervention. Akimoto Fujio, a haiku poet partially responsible for

radicalizing that genre in the 1930s, sums up the situation in a 1955 essay on the two forms: “I’ve cried

after reading tanka, but never after reading haiku. And I’ve laughed out loud after reading haiku, but never

after reading tanka.”¹

Terayama Shūji leapt from haiku and free-verse poetry into the world of tanka in 1954 to compete in

an open contest organized by the young editor of one of the two major national tanka journals, Tanka

kenkyū (Tanka studies, the other major journal is called simply Tanka). Terayama won the contest, the

second of its kind, but what this debut is best remembered for is the plagiarism debate that followed.

Terayama was quickly discovered to have appropriated large sections, often verbatim, from several

contemporary haiku poets and in other cases to have rearranged and lengthened his own haiku by the

fourteen syllables necessary to convert them into tanka (a graver crime than plagiarism to several critics).

I will retrace highlights from this debate in the course of this chapter with the goal of finding a

perspective that breaks the gridlock between defenders of intellectual property and the proto–open source

faction (with its strange alliance with the established premodern tradition of literary appropriation). To

do so, it will be useful first to break with chronology and look carefully at a slightly later case of poetic

allusion (in this case, a scene from Casablanca) to gain some insight into the complexities of Terayama’s

manipulation of a base text, which in this case, I will argue, is deeply analytical. From there I will return

to the debut and the plagiarism debate to look at ways Terayama frustrated efforts to maintain separation

between genres by moving laterally between them. At the end of the chapter, I will look at a

reappropriation of Terayama’s Casablanca poem, itself critical of the fictional narrator Terayama is

credited with adding to the genre of tanka.

Terayama’s debut would not be the last time he was charged with plagiarism; these accusations

continue throughout his career, and he eventually turns the situation on its head by naming his plays and

books after existing works but then altering the content beyond what could be considered adaptation. He

also writes a handful of short prose pieces on the problem of plagiarism that clarify his position. One, a

1960 short story called “Tōsaku” (Plagiarism) tells the story of an aging, established writer mentoring a

young upstart.²The old writer is frustrated at having never produced a masterpiece (despite his rank

within the literary establishment), whereas the young student is now becoming cocky about his talents,

having just completed a piece he expects will win him the coveted Akutagawa Prize. The old writer tires

of the student’s boasting and decides to falsely accuse the student of plagiarizing a French story he claims

to have read in the past. The student then commits suicide, driving the old writer, in his guilt, to promote

the story as a masterpiece. This, I think, is where a typical parable of this type would end and we would

ponder the ethics of plagiarism relative to the impact of an accusation of plagiarism. But Terayama adds

one final paragraph, in which the old writer receives a letter from the translator of a story that the student

had indeed plagiarized, word for word. This changes things considerably. Either the old writer’s clouded

memory had served him in the initial accusation but he suppressed it in his guilt, or this was just a lucky

guess that helps explain why the student would have been grief stricken enough to kill himself instead of

holding his ground. But the larger suggestion, which Terayama will clarify later, is that the accusation of

plagiarism is so elastic that it could be used against anyone, since we all do it all the time (and should).

That we are all already plagiarists is the gist of a short essay called “Tōsaku-byō” (Literary

kleptomania) that Terayama would write in 1961: “The first symptom of the disease is showing interest in

what other people are doing.”³As the condition grows more serious, the individual starts to be conceived

as a part of broader society and (gasp) begins interacting with it. Terayama notes that since we are the

authors of our own everyday lives, it follows that brushing one’s teeth in the morning, reading the

newspaper, eating food in a particular way, walking with a certain gait, and choosing appropriate clothing

are all plagiarized from a set of notions of normal behavior. Communication itself is necessarily

plagiaristic, and artistic experimentation with a ban on appropriation would find itself in a barren

wasteland, in Terayama’s vision, looking like “Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid in a showdown over some

little potato patch.”⁴As much as he might envy the antisocial lunatic hiding away in a corner somewhere,

Terayama claims that his social tendencies, diseased though they may be, pull the kleptomaniac in him

back into a system of give and take. Looking closely at some examples of Terayama’s use of appropriation

in his early tanka will reveal the charge of plagiarism to be overly simplistic.

Reading Casablanca

Terayama’s most famous poem was first published in April 1956 and has since been printed and reprinted

in at least five of his works, is now on the cover of several anthologies, and has become standard reading

in literature classes for first-year high school students throughout Japan. It reads,

matchi suru tsukanoma umi ni kiri fukashi misutsuru hodo no sokoku wa ariya

In the moment of match-strike, with fog thick on the sea—how could any homeland be worth throwing

away my life?⁵

With four images of ephemerality in a row—the match, the moment, the fog, and the disposable human life

—this poem at first seems to be a relatively conventional expression of either Buddhist notions of

transience or a comment on the brevity of tanka itself. There is one use of wordplay: the word misutsuru

spoken aloud would normally be understood as “to forsake,” written as a compound of the characters “to

see” and “to throw away,” but here Terayama has replaced “to see” with “body.” An alternative meaning

of the second half of the poem, then, might be rendered as follows: “Is there any homeland worth

forsaking?” Any full reading of the poem will have to integrate both of these meanings, as antithetical as

they may appear: one possibility is that this is an image of someone making the decision between dying

for country and abandoning that country in the brief moment of striking a match to light a cigarette. The

phrasing, however, suggests yet another possibility. Sokoku wa ariya (Is there a country?) is a rhetorical

question, implying that there are no nations for which it is even worth bothering to decide between these

two options. Pushing the grammar to its limit, sokoku wa ariya could also be read as a question regarding

the very existence of that homeland itself—“Is there even a homeland at all?” That is, the poem may be

asking whether the “homeland” is an artificial construct and therefore not something concrete enough to

even begin considering whether to defend or abandon, as it is certainly not real enough to die for.

In Japanese, kuni (country) is both a nation and a part of a “land”; wagakuni, then, can refer either to

one’s nation (Japan) or to the rural area one considers to be home. As such, it shares the possibility of

representing a part of the whole nation with the English word “country.”⁶Yet it is different in one

important regard: kuni cannot refer generally to the whole of rural regions as “the country” can in English

—the term still carries some flavor of a feudal domain—and so it is always constituted as a part of some

whole and one that assumes the existence of other kuni making up the rest of that whole. The various

domestic kuni constitute Japan just as the various global kuni constitute the world, and much of the

project of national unification after 1868 (by Fukuzawa Yukichi and others) might then be understood as

an effort to redefine kuni not as a term for the provinces of Japan but rather for the modern nation-states of

the world—a process simplified by using the same term as had been used much longer for provinces

under the shogunate. The divisions between domestic districts and all their claims to local autonomy

dissolve as the word for the autonomous governmental unit slips from this local level to the level of the

nation. Terayama makes direct reference to this slippage in a haiku first published in 1953:

kusamochi ya kuni ideshi tomo no uwasa mo nashi

Chrysanthemum rice cake—not even a rumor of my friend who left our hometown⁷

The word kuni in this poem is a gloss of the compound normally read kokyō, or hometown. By glossing

the term, Terayama is pointing back to that forgotten transitional moment when the word was redefined—

without the gloss, a reader would not have read the compound kuni, but if Terayama had used the

character for kuni, most readers would have understood that to denote the entire nation-state rather than

the regional hometown. The disappearance of the friend in the haiku, then, is paralleled by a

disappearance of the kuni understood as regional hometown. The subtle reference to this chrysanthemum,

the symbol of the imperial line, draws the emperor and the militarist state into association with these

disappearances as well, which would have been particularly resonant during the early postwar years.

Sokoku in the tanka above may not go so far as to suggest the disappearance of the nation itself, but

Terayama could have been suggesting that the “country of the ancestors” (sokoku) had changed so much in

modern times that the term’s referent lacked enough consistency over time to retain a useful meaning.

Returning to the match-strike poem, we may conclude that it stands well on its own, particularly as an

expression representative of the generation who concluded that Japan’s effort to unify Asia by force had

been criminal or at least fated to fail. However, several poems and a few films have been cited as

possible sources for its content. Nagao Saburō, in his 1997 study of Terayama, points out two haiku by

Tomizawa Kakio from 1940 and 1941, when Japan’s war with China was well under way:

ippon no matchi o sureba mizuumi wa kiri

When I strike one match—fog on the lake⁸

metsumureba sokoku wa aoki umi no ue

If I shut my eyes, my homeland is just over the blue sea⁹

Yet another possibility is a tanka from Ishikawa Takuboku’s Ichiaku no suna (A fistful of sand, 1910)

collection:

machi sureba

nishaku bakari no akarusa no

naka o yogireru shiroki ari no ari

When I struck a match

there was a white ant crossing

inside those two feet of light¹⁰

None of these poems, however, use the notion of misutsuru, which is of central importance to Terayama’s

poem. Yamada Taichi, a scenarist for radio and television and one of Terayama’s oldest friends, writes

that the poem might be a reference to the ending of one of the actor Kobayashi Akira’s films.¹¹But since

Kobayashi’s first film, Ueru tamashii (Hungry ghosts) opened on October 31, 1956, roughly five months

after the publication of Terayama’s poem, such a connection is chronologically impossible.

All of these possible references help to place particular images from the poem, but the most important

may be Nagao’s brief comment, almost in passing, that the poem resonates somewhat with the end of

Casablanca. Nagao points out the fog in both scenes, the common theme of the lost homeland, and the fact

that Terayama wrote a fan letter to Humphrey Bogart while in high school.¹²Picking up where Nagao left

off, it will be useful to look carefully at Bogart’s striking of a match and the link between that match strike

and the forsaking of one’s nation. That link is at the crux of the poem and worth further attention.

Terayama probably saw Casablanca at his uncle’s cinema, the Kabuki-za in Aomori City. He had

moved in with his aunt and uncle during his middle and high school years (1948–54). There would have

been an opportunity for him to see the film ten times or more, especially considering his habit of returning

home from school to read in the cinema as films were screened. Terayama’s fan letter to Bogart, written

during his first year of high school, coincides well with Casablanca’s release in Japan around 1949. So if

the poem describes the end of the film, then Terayama has obviously changed the airport to a harbor, but

the fog and the tension over the decision of whether to defend or forsake one’s nation are certainly

present. But where does this match strike fit in?

Casablanca balances a shifting web of allegiance, duty, desire, trust, and risk among five characters:

Rick Blaine, the suave American bar owner who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and who

has two exit visas to leave French Morocco; Louis Renault, the French officer appointed by the Vichy

government as police prefect in Casablanca but who consistently hints at his sympathy for the anti-Nazi

rebels; Victor Laszlo, the Czechoslovakian leader of the resistance who is attempting to flee to America

before the Nazis incarcerate or kill him; Ilsa Lund, Laszlo’s wife who had an affair with Rick in Paris

while under the impression that Laszlo had been killed; and Heinrich Strasser, the Nazi officer sent to

recover the missing exit visas and monitor the movements of Laszlo.

In the final scene, Renault and Ilsa both assume that it will be she and Rick who will get on the

airplane with the visas, fulfilling the passion rekindled between them the previous night. Rick turns the

tables, though, when he hands the visa papers to Renault and has him fill in Laszlo and Ilsa’s names.

Renault is impressed by Rick’s political idealism and his cool savvy in tidying up a potential mess—with

just a few words he had convinced both Ilsa and Laszlo that the old flame from Paris had burned itself

out. Having sent them off, Rick has only a few seconds in which to confirm that Renault has committed to

the resistance with him, a confirmation requiring more communication than words alone can offer—Rick

operates at critical moments primarily with eye contact. The sequence is worth close analysis with

Terayama’s poem in mind (see Figure 1.1).

RENAULT: What you just did for Laszlo, and that fairy tale you invented to send Ilsa away with him.

I know a little about women, my friend. She went, but she knew you were lying.¹³

Notice Rick moving to light his cigarette, the shot carefully framed so that the “Absolutely No Smoking”

sign in the background is perfectly aligned with the line of sight between Rick and Renault, punctuating

Rick’s renegade character:

Figure 1.1. Rick on the verge of lighting a cigarette directly under a sign reading “Absolutely No

Smoking” in the final sequence of Casablanca (1942)

RICK: (Smoking) Anyway, thanks for helping me out.

(RICK’S face reveals nothing.)

RENAULT: I suppose you know this isn’t going to be very pleasant for either of us, especially for you.

I’ll have to arrest you, of course.

Rick has lit his cigarette during the quick cut to the shot of Renault. By the time the camera returns to

Rick, he is already smoking, but it is precisely during that brief gap that eye contact with Renault has

guaranteed his safe escape, along with that of Laszlo and Ilsa. The “moment it takes to strike a match” in

Terayama’s poem, then, may have been pointing to this critical turning point in the film, a moment the film

does not actually allow us to see. The precise instant the Franco–American alliance against the Nazis is

formed is simultaneous with this invisible match strike. Confident that Renault is on his side, Rick is now

free to challenge Strasser when he shows up seconds later to prevent Laszlo’s escape. Strasser moves to

telephone the radio tower, Rick threatens to shoot him, and Strasser takes a hasty first shot. It misses, Rick

returns fire, and his bullet connects. The flash of Rick striking the match has, in effect, been displaced for

a few cuts and transferred from the tip of his cigarette to the tip of his gun (Figure 1.2). Terayama may

have hinted at such a connection by titling the set of poems in which matchi suru was first published

“Shotgun Blast” (Ryōjū-on). In front of several witnesses, Renault turns to his men and says, “Round up

the usual suspects.” Rick’s intuition had, of course, been correct. He was finally back in the fight but had

managed not to show his cards until the last possible moment, maximizing his ability to operate under the

cover of his reputation as the disinterested American—the propagandistic elements here are obvious: the

United States’ delayed entry into the war was part of a savvy plan to maximize potency by playing neutral

until the moment was right. Rick finishes his cigarette, Renault offers to arrange passage to a free French

garrison outside of Casablanca, and they walk off together into the thick fog (kiri fukashi): “Louis, I think

this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” (Figure 1.3).

If the Casablanca connection is a strong one, then the term Terayama has chosen for “homeland” may

also have a link to the film. Sokoku literally means “the land of one’s ancestors” and was likely chosen

over other options with similar meanings such as bokoku (“motherland”) or wagakuni (“our nation”).

Sokoku is conspicuously patriotic and resonates closest with the showdown of patriotic songs sung in

Rick’s Place, started by the German soldiers but quickly overtaken by a group singing in French, led by

Laszlo. Both Vaterland, from the chorus of “Die Wacht am Rhein”—Lieb Vaterland, machst ruhig sein—

and patrie from the first line of “La Marseillaise”—Allons, enfants de la patrie—are rendered into

Japanese as sokoku in the script.¹⁴This battle of patriotisms—in Japanese not Vaterland against patrie,

but sokoku against sokoku—reveals its arbitrary nature more clearly in translation. Both sides end up

fighting for country in the abstract, and they are all dissolved into a single team of patriots.

Figure 1.2. Rick fires a shot at Strasser, the Nazi.

Figure 1.3. Rick and Louis, now allies, walk off into the thick fog and plan for Rick’s escape.

To the possible referents for sokoku, then, we should add France, Germany, and the United States to

the assumed referent of Japan. To the possible meanings of misutsuru, we should add “throw down

another’s life” to “throw down one’s life” and “forsake.” Casablanca has expanded as well in its

interaction with Terayama’s poem. The final scene becomes a play of light layered over the rapid shift of

alliances so carefully plotted by Rick. The displaced match strike might in fact be seen as split in two—

half is displaced forward to the gunshot that kills Strasser, and half moved back to the carefully timed

glint off Ilsa’s tear as she walks to the airplane with Laszlo (Figure 1.4). The dead Nazi and lost love are

held in balance as the tradeoffs of war. But read against the poem—against the dilemma of killing or

dying for country—we might also recognize just how close Rick may have been to killing Renault in the

moment of that match strike. By then he had committed himself to seeing Laszlo and Ilsa off to safety, so if

the eye contact made with Renault had not fully convinced him that they would join forces, then Rick

likely would have shot both Strasser and Renault, which would have meant almost certain death for

himself. Was Rick prepared to die? Without that nonverbal assurance (transcending the babel of

Casablanca) at the precise moment of the lighting of his cigarette, Rick may have chosen not between

killing or dying for country but both killing and dying for country. The wordplay in the poem certainly

allows for such a play of meaning, and it may be that the full potential of the poem is realized only when

read in relation to this film.

Figure 1.4. Ilsa, having rekindled her romance with Rick just the previous night, sheds a tear as she

walks toward the airplane with her husband Laszlo, the resistance organizer.

“Chekhov Festival” and the Plagiarism Controversy

Terayama made his public debut in 1954, at age eighteen, by winning a poetry contest run by the journal

Tanka kenkyū. The submission was a set of thirty-one-syllable poems composed mainly on the theme of a

war orphan’s coming of age. His was the second such award given for the competition, which was

designed largely in response to the deaths in 1953 of two of the genre’s great modern masters—Saitō

Mokichi and Shaku Chōkū (the tanka pen name of Orikuchi Shinobu)—and to the launch of a rival

magazine by the Kadokawa company in January 1954 devoted to preserving their legacy. After their

deaths, the future of tanka seemed destined to pass into the hands of their students, many of whom were

already in their sixties. The editors at Tanka kenkyū, however, were at the time mostly in their twenties, if

that. Sugiyama Seiju, for one, began copyediting for Tanka kenkyū directly after high school at age

nineteen. His head editor, Nakai Hideo, took his position at age twenty-six. From the late 1940s and into

the early 1950s, the young editorial staff had almost no control over content and was instructed to publish

in accordance to a ranked chart of the various tanka coteries.¹⁵Things were extraordinarily bureaucratic,

mechanical, safe, and stable. Nakai recalls the following circumstances:

Two stars of the Romantic period, Kitahara Hakushū and Yosano Akiko, had passed away in 1943, so

when I first became involved in editing during 1949, poets still active today [in 1971] such as Toki

Zenmaro and Tsuchiya Bunmei, as well as Sasaki Nobutsuna, who was born in 1882, were the

eldest group. They were followed by Saitō Mokichi, Kubota Utsubo, Yoshii Isamu, Shaku Chōkū,

Maeda Yūgure, as well as Onoe Saishū, Ōta Mizuho, and Kawada Jun—all of whom were well-

loved major poets with tanka in the primers, and they were all still healthy and active. Under them

the forty and fifty year old layer was still thicker and wider, so even poets near forty years old with

a great deal of experience like Miya Shūji and Kondō Yoshimi were being treated as absolute

newcomers—there was simply no space at all for those in their teens or twenties to emerge. If there

were space it would be in a coterie association where they would write poems under the direction

of a master, as if they were pruning bonsai trees. Being in my twenties at the time I felt that the

situation was very odd and it frustrated me.¹⁶

Nakai decided to intervene. He wrote anonymously for his own magazine denouncing the absence of

space for poets in their teens, twenties, and thirties to publish. Were not younger poets best suited to

express the concerns and emotions of an adolescent mind?¹⁷When Nakai was given more control over

content in late 1953, the first thing he did was to announce an open contest in which anyone was welcome

to submit fifty tanka to the magazine. The winner of the first contest was announced in April 1954. Nakai

selected thirty-two-year-old Nakajō Fumiko, who composed vividly on her experience of mastectomy

after being diagnosed with breast cancer. The initial response was negative—her poems were

sensationalist and melodramatic—but praise from the novelist Kawabata Yasunari quieted her critics and

affirmed Nakai’s selection.¹⁸

Terayama read Nakajō’s poems, and he cites them as his inspiration to switch from writing haiku to

tanka.¹⁹He submitted fifty poems to the next contest and won with a set he called “Chichi kaese” (Give

me back my father), but that was published as “Chehofu-sai,” or “The Chekhov Festival.” Nakai drew the

title from the following set of verses:

tabakobi o yuka ni fumikeshite tachiagaru Chehofu-sai no wakaki haiyū

He stomps out his cigarette on the floor and stands up—a young actor in the Chekhov Festival

Chehofu-sai no bira no harareshi ringo no ki kasuka ni yururu kisha tōru tabi

A Chekhov Festival poster hung on an apple tree—it sways gently with each passing steam rain

kago no momo ni hoho itaki made oshitsukete Chehofu no hi no densha ni yuraru

My cheek pressed against crated peaches until it hurts—swaying in the electric train on Chekhov

Day²⁰

The critical response to Terayama’s poems followed a path opposite Nakajō’s case. The initial reaction

was positive, claiming that he had captured the exaggerated emotions of adolescence and that the poems

were fresh and exuberant.²¹Several of the tanka mark themselves as youth poems directly:

bansei o agete kugatsu no mori ni ireri Haine no tame ni gaku o azamuki

I let out a barbaric roar and enter the September forest—forsaking my studies for Heine

tabako kusaki kokugo kyōshi ga iu toki ni asu to iu go wa mottomo kanashi

When my cigarette-smelling language teacher says it “tomorrow” is the saddest word of all

kubikazari wa mozō naran to hitorigime ni onore nagusamu aware na Romio

Now convinced the necklace he bought was a fake—self-consolation for a pathetic Romeo²²

Such praise lasted only a few weeks, however, until several critics pointed out the excessive borrowing

from recently published haiku by Nakamura Kusatao and a few others, as well as cases in which

Terayama had simply lengthened his own haiku into tanka.

Nakai himself may have been the most frustrated by Terayama’s apparent plagiarism. It was he, after

all, who had selected the poems, which meant that his qualifications as judge of his own contest were

now suspect. Not only that, but the premise of his greater cause—creating space for young poets—had

been discredited. Could these poets really be trusted to contribute to the genre? Yet the heated debates that

arose in the wake of Terayama’s award did not end up hurting tanka as a genre or as a business. The

opposite was more likely the case. Suddenly “avant-garde tanka” (zen’ei tanka) became a catchphrase

that a broad range of authors wrote about, including practicing tanka poets like Tsukamoto Kunio and

Okai Takashi, but extending even to the cultural critic Yoshimoto Takaaki.²³

Those involved in the plagiarism debate over Terayama’s poems quickly settled into two camps. On

one side were the haiku critics, who were still stinging from an essay by Kuwabara Takeo called “Daini

geijutsu: Gendai haiku ni tsuite” (A second-rate art: On contemporary haiku, 1946). In the essay, he

claimed to have proven that the so-called contemporary haiku masters were no more talented than high

school students by asking the master poets to rank poems by both groups without knowing who had written

them.²⁴The inconsistency of the results seemed to prove his point, and it sent shock waves through the

haiku world, threatening the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. While generally assumed to be an attack

on a lack of talent in the master poets, Kuwabara’s survey could also be taken as proof of talented

teenagers. In either case, the logic of the existing gerontocracy had been undermined.

Established haiku critics were the most critical of Terayama, accusing him not only of the ethical

breach of stealing phrases but also of undermining the separate identities of tanka and haiku. Haiku critic

Kusamoto Kenkichi explicitly scolded him: “I will say it again to this teenager, Mr. Terayama. As I stated,

haiku is not a formula or a cipher, let alone a crossword puzzle for emotive language. When a form exists

over a long period of time there arises a sort of formulaic convenience in it—as well as a mechanistic

laziness, certainly. But taking advantage of this convenient inertia and indulging in crossword puzzles is

the ‘forbidden game.’ It is one which you should restrict yourself from doing, particularly in order to

discover the hidden, luxurious, uncultivated realms through which your path may travel.”²⁵Another critic,

Wakatsuki Akira, acknowledges that Terayama had stepped beyond tactful allusion but praises him for

reintegrating some sense of social connection into what had become a bleak and lonesome pair of genres.

He claims the limited length of the forms had too long been used to excuse solipsistic verse: “The

position of tanka and haiku within contemporary life depends on whether or not ideas with social

universality are used ‘as elements’ in the poems themselves. Too often poets (of both tanka and haiku)

satisfy themselves by expressing egoistic solitude. Admittedly, it is particularly difficult in the case of

short-form poetry such as tanka and haiku to incorporate a sense of social connection into that solitude—

and so we find no shortage in the documentation of the unbridgeable psychological rift between the

personal solitude of the author and the currency of ideas shared among the masses.”²⁶

On the other side of the debate were a group of young tanka poets who saw Terayama as a hero in the

fight against language conceived as an individual possession. To them, Terayama was a leader in the

movement to return language to its rightful place in the public sphere—they argued that criticizing

Terayama for quoting phrases required the erroneous step of assuming that he was taking something

privately owned away from one person and claiming it for himself. Saitō Shōji, for one, writes that “these

were never anyone’s possessions from the start, and Terayama is not assuming them to be his own.”²⁷

Rather, he celebrates Terayama’s poems as representative of a break from “a Romantic ethic that claims a

poem to be private property.”²⁸Language, Saitō’s side argues, ought to be one realm preserved for the

public domain, where words and phrases are duplicated and reused but never qualify as legal

possessions. One of the poems in Terayama’s debut seems, in fact, to touch on this very theme of the

conversion of the commons to private property:

hitotsubu no himawari no tane makishi nomi ni kōya o ware no shōjochi to yobiki

Planting a single sunflower seed I pronounce the wilderness my maiden land²⁹

Hishikawa Yoshio was the most outspoken in his defense of Terayama’s poems:

At present, when the younger generation’s rise to power is increasing with tangible energy, it seems

inevitable that a generational shift must soon occur. As for the entrenched poetry establishment

[kadan], one can easily expect the authority of “elders” to result in friction and opposition. Yet the

younger generation is level-headed. Even if we hold the authority of these elders in contempt for the

weakness of their intellect and lack of creativity—for their over-generous opinion of their own

lukewarm adolescence—we still have not used unrestrained, brutal criticism as a weapon. If there

were an all-out battle between these opposing generations it is clearer than the light of day that we

would completely conquer them.³⁰

This plagiarism debate quickly settled into a stalemate. Both sides agreed that Terayama conspicuously

borrowed considerably more from the poems of others than would usually be expected even in a

deliberately allusive composition. Then critics split into camps to either praise or condemn Terayama on

ethical grounds. What is missing from the discussion, however, is attention to what Terayama actually

does with the quotations—what exactly he adds to them and how, but most importantly what kinds of

interactions he sets up between his source materials and the additions to them.

The most-often cited example of excessive quotation was a poem that borrowed from a haiku by

Nakamura Kusatao. Terayama’s tanka reads,

himawari no shita ni jōzetsu takaki kana hito o towazuba jiko naki otoko

Quite a chatterbox there under the sunflower—without engaging others, a man without a self³¹

Compare it with the haiku by Kusatao:

hito o towazuba jiko naki otoko tsukimigusa

Without engaging others, a man without a self—evening primrose³²

Terayama has quoted fourteen syllables from Nakamura’s haiku, which makes up nearly all of the haiku

but less than half of the new tanka. What existing scholarship has seemed to miss about Terayama’s poem,

however, is that he has left himself exactly seventeen syllables for his addition—precisely the length of a

new haiku. Terayama is not just mixing quotation from haiku in his tanka, then, but literally composing

haiku within the genre of tanka. This quotation may seem excessively long, but it is still within the

guidelines set by the early thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara no Teika’s for the maximum permissible length

of quotation in waka—fifteen or sixteen syllables, or essentially half of the poem.³³Leaving sufficient

space for additional composition is the governing principle here—there is no consideration of an ethical

limit to appropriation—and the clear assumption is that knowledge of the quoted poem is expected of the

reader (making attribution unnecessary and patronizing). This poem is best understood, then, as a collage

comprising the quotation from Kusatao and the following new, original haiku by Terayama:

himawari no shita ni jōzetsu takaki kana

Quite a chatterbox there under the sunflower

Alternatively, we could focus on the strongest image in Terayama’s addition, the “chatterbox” (jōzetsu).

By adding a negative term, he may not so much be embellishing Kusatao’s haiku as attacking it. Looking

closely at the strong images added to the other poems cited as plagiaristic reveals this type of addition to

be a consistent pattern. In one case, Terayama shifts the image of a cigarette toward a more optimistic

tone by ironically having it snubbed out. Kusatao’s haiku reads,

tomoshibi no hi o tabakobi to shitsu Chehofu-ki

Lighting a cigarette with the lamp—requiem for Chekhov³⁴

Terayama lengthens and reworks this into his tanka:

tabakobi o yuka ni fumikeshite tachiagaru Chehofu-sai no wakaki haiyū

He stomps out a cigarette on the floor and stands up—a young actor at the Chekhov Festival³⁵

Maintaining this reference to Chekhov may seem excessive, but Terayama’s shift from Kusatao’s

“requiem” (ki) to “festival” (sai) is significant. A “requiem,” for Chekhov, mourns his loss in a nostalgic

mode—the time orientation is toward the past. Kusatao’s poetic voice longs, here, to be in a past when

Chekhov was still alive. Terayama’s “festival,” however, is a celebration in the present of the still-living

version of Chekhov (as texts, brought alive by theatrical performance). The Chekhov Festival is

synchronically oriented, and if there is diachronic motion, it is to pull Chekhov forward into the present

tense. This small, but critical, variation is in fact thrown into relief by Terayama’s reuse of “Chekhov”—

without this level of sameness we would likely not pause here to contemplate the slight difference.

In another case, Terayama adds the stench of manure and removes an origami flower. The resulting

image is extraordinary: blues music (hika, lit., “sad song” in the poems) from U.S. Army barracks in

remote northern Japan during the Allied occupation (1945–51), where a young Japanese boy is in earshot

and curious. But recognizing the roots of blues in black culture, the protagonist of this poem makes an

associative leap over the military occupation to link himself and his fertilizing chores back to African

American slaves and forty-acre farmers. Saitō Sanki’s haiku reads,

kami no sakura kokujin hika wa ji ni shizumu

Paper cherry blossoms—the black man’s blues song sinks into the ground³⁶

Terayama’s tanka reworks the poem into the following:

kawakitaru oke ni koyashi o mitasu toki kokujin hika wa daichi ni shizumu

As I fill a dry bucket with manure the black man’s blues song sinks into the earth³⁷

The clearest example of an attack may be the following, in which a bird, an image from another of Sanki’s

haiku, is shot and killed. Sanki’s poem reads,

waga tenshi naru ya mo ononoku kansuzume

Might be my angel—a winter sparrow shudders³⁸

Terayama reworks this into a tanka that reads,

waga tenshi naru ya mo shirenu kosuzume o uchite shōen kagitsutsu kaeru

Having shot the little sparrow that may have been my angel I return home smelling the gunsmoke³⁹

A pattern forms among these poems, in which Terayama’s tanka mock (jōzetsu), defile (koyashi), crush

(fumikeshite), and kill (uchite) elements within the haiku that they invoke. This is certainly not the

standard allusive practice within the waka and tanka genres.

Here it becomes clear that categorizing these poems as “avant-garde tanka” (zen’ei tanka) is not only

taxonomic but can be a useful tool for analysis. If we compare Terayama’s poems to a classic from the

historical avant-garde, such as Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa painting, for example, several things

become clearer. The first is that the quoted text is not the ultimate target of the mockery—Duchamp was

not ridiculing either the Mona Lisa or Da Vinci, but rather those who take the painting too seriously. It is,

along with being a joke, a jab at the polite culture of museums—what Peter Bürger writes of as the avant-

garde’s attack on “the status of art in bourgeois society” and the “distribution apparatus on which the

work of art depends.”⁴⁰No one would bother to call Duchamp a plagiarist because his use of the Mona

Lisa is so conspicuous and because it is so clear that the Mona Lisa is merely background to his flourish,

the mustache, which is the part of the work that we rightly understand to be his, and which we also rightly

understand to be largely meaningless outside the context of the replica of the Mona Lisa onto which it is

painted. The base text and the flourish cannot be separated here—they are symbiotic. Assuming

Terayama’s poems to operate in a similar way might get us a bit further toward understanding how they

function.

Read as avant-gardist poems, these tanka begin to resonate closely with a photograph that appears

repeatedly across Terayama’s work. The image is a simple black-and-white portrait of Terayama’s

mother, but the photograph has been torn into several pieces, sewn back together, and reframed (Figure

1.5). A narrative develops across these torn fragments, the thread, and the reframing—we imagine a son’s

passionate moment of anger, followed by his regret for the attack, and finally a recuperation of affection.

Terayama has shifted the static image into a realm of narrative potential far more present and tangible than

would be possible with a clean photograph. And it is precisely because the base object here, the original

untorn photograph itself, is culturally understood to be so objective—in contradistinction to composition,

choice of content, or any other product of the photographer’s expressive mind—that the hand of the author

and the subjectivity of the narrator are thrown into such clear relief by these rips and the thread.

Terayama’s conflicted narrator is hyperpresent in the sewn photo. Similarly, by attacking other poets’

haiku—tearing off a piece of a poem and sewing it together with a piece of his own—Terayama’s poetic

narrator becomes hyperpresent in his tanka as well.

Figure 1.5. This torn-and-stitched-back-together photograph of Terayama’s mother appears in the film

Den’en ni shisu (Death in the country, 1974) and Terayama’s photography collection, Terayama Shūji

gensōshashinkan: Inugami-ke no hitobito (Terayama Shūji’s fantasy photo studio: Members of the

Inugami clan, 1975). Courtesy of Kujō Kyōko and Terayama World

The satirical appropriation of the classics may be avant-gardist here, but appropriation itself has a

long and distinguished history specific to the genre in which Terayama wrote these poems. Quotation in

the thirty-one-syllable form traces back at least to Fujiwara no Teika’s formulation of honkadori, the

waka practice of “borrowing from the original poem.” As Edward Kamens has argued, honkadori might

best be understood as a quasi-religious rite in which the spirits of the dead poets of the past are kept alive

while reaffirming and regenerating the practice of waka composition itself.⁴¹If this is the case, then

Terayama may have inverted the devotional nature of such quotation—it is as though he is performing

some kind of black-magic curse on the honka (original poem). Yet, since he admitted elsewhere that the

haiku poets from whom he borrowed were his favorites, it might be most accurate to look at these attacks

on the original poems as fundamentally Oedipal—these are the poetic fathers Terayama both idolizes and

seeks to overcome.⁴²

Terayama’s use of quotation compares in an interesting way to a descriptive model of honkadori

practice suggested by the critic Asanuma Keiji: “An endless play of sending and receiving arises between

the honka and the poem. It is similar to the play of reflected images that emerge between two facing

mirrors. This play is limited to the space between these two texts (mirrors)—unable to escape and touch

anything in the real world but also incapable of rising above to move toward any sort of Ideal. A limitless

play emerging within limitation, an endless cycle of play, which has in some way severed its connection

to ‘that which exists as itself’—it is play esthétique.”⁴³Asanuma describes Teika’s method as one that

breaks down the idealization of canonical poems by playfully quoting, manipulating, and rewriting them.

The act of honkadori, then, forcibly shifts the classic poem from a “work” to a “text”—the process of

quotation denies generation of the symbolic aura of the idealized “poem.” But in Terayama’s case, the

honka were published just a year or two before his own. Teika, conversely, would only use poems that

were already several hundred years old as honka in his work. There are a few important implications in

such a difference.

First, no one except perhaps young Terayama himself would have considered Kusatao’s haiku to be a

classic by 1954 (particularly the “man without a self” poem, released earlier that same year), so if we

choose to call this honkadori, then we might also have to recognize that Terayama has radically adjusted

literary time—the category of the “classic” here signifies any poem of the past. In a separate haiku

collection, for instance, he categorizes the early twentieth-century poet Ishikawa Takuboku as part of the

classics (koten): his collection Kafun kōkai (Pollen voyage) includes a chapter called “Migite no koten”

(Right-hand classics), which opens with a section titled “Takuboku kashū” (Poems by Takuboku).⁴⁴Then,

if we maintain Asanuma’s analogy, the mirrors have been pushed very close together in Terayama’s debut.

By squeezing the infinite play between honka and poem into a smaller and smaller space, these poems

have been compressed—as though to force them to burst from the limitations of the form.

The mirrors are almost touching, then, quickening and intensifying the reflection between them. It is not

just the honka that is getting attacked and crushed—the entire poem is being compressed in the vise of

these mirrors. So is this radically new? Surely in this particular manifestation, but taken broadly, the

practice lines up nicely with the entire repertoire of waka techniques, all of which seem, at their core, to

be designed to compress more information into the genre’s fixed length of thirty-one syllables. Mitate

(elegant confusion), where one image is aesthetically confused with another—as in falling cherry

blossoms and snow—allows for a reuse, and thereby a doubling, of information. Utamakura (pillow

words) tap an entire lineage of associations with a location or an object with a single word. Kakekotoba

(pivot words) operate like an overlapping hinge in the poem, functioning once for what comes before it

and again, in a different way, for what follows—effectively extending the poem by the length of the pivot.

These are all technologies of compression in their most basic form, and in that sense, Terayama’s

compression of the honkadori mirrors fittingly extends this aspect of the classical tradition.

Shifting from diachronic to synchronic analysis allows us to recognize that Terayama’s use of a

compression device was as much a timely technique embedded in its postwar moment as it was a

continuation of classical method. In 1948, the abstract painter and sculptor Okamoto Tarō published an

explanation of his aesthetic theory of taikyoku-shugi, or “polar-oppositionalism.”⁴⁵The goal under his

system was to isolate representations of absolute opposites—rationality and absurdity, or materialism and

idealism—and then push them as closely together as possible, but without allowing them to merge. This

was thesis and antithesis without synthesis in Okamoto’s mind—synthesis being the trap the avant-garde

had fallen into in the 1930s that led to its staleness. Okamoto suggests that this antisynthetic compression

of opposites generates an outflow of energy the artist can harness and use to drive a creative explosion

that will manifest itself as a piece of art. This period also sees the shift from fission to fusion-based

nuclear weapons—from split-explosion to compression-explosion—as well as the polarization of power

during the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, politically compressing other nations

into allegiance to one or the other power.

The intertextual links in Terayama’s poems, however, extend beyond just the set of poems from which

he borrowed. A number of the debut tanka allude to literary works but then inflect the original text

slightly. A careful look at a few of these instances turns up several interesting new connections not

explored in existing criticism, possibly due to the distraction of the plagiarism controversy. One of

Terayama’s debut tanka evokes Poe’s “The Premature Burial”:

oto tatete hakaana fukaku chichi no kan orosaruru toki chichi mezamezuya

My father’s casket dropped loudly into its deep grave—what if it wakes him up?⁴⁶

Poe’s story is an account of several cases of such live burial: “To be buried while alive is, beyond

question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”⁴⁷

However, while the piece does take live burial as its general topic, it is much more keenly focused on the

relationship between belief in the truthfulness of a piece of writing and its potential for emotional effect,

pointing out fiction’s relative inability to horrify. As such, the story is primarily a study of the rhetorical

production of truth value. It opens in the following way: “There are certain themes of which the interest is

all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere

romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend, or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only

when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and sustain them . . . it is the fact—it is the reality—it is the

history which excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence.”⁴⁸The crime, then,

which Poe ultimately invites us to question, is not so much live burial as the artificial production of truth

value through linguistic devices, and he gives readers a grand tour. He opens with a straightforward claim

of legitimacy: “We have the direct testimony of medical and ordinary experience to prove that a vast

number of such interments have actually taken place.”⁴⁹Then, he continues with an appeal to probability:

“When we reflect how very rarely, from the nature of the case, we have it in our power to detect them, we

must admit that they may frequently occur without our cognizance.”⁵⁰He then ends with a confessional

account: “And thus all narratives upon this topic have an interest profound; an interest, nevertheless,

which through the sacred awe of the topic itself, very properly and very peculiarly depends upon our

conviction of the truth of the matter narrated. What I have now to tell is of my own actual knowledge—of

my own positive and personal experience.”⁵¹Terayama, through his reference to live burial, may have

been alluding to this sort of manipulation of truth as a study in fictionality. Here fiction is a literary lie that

momentarily convinces us of its truth but then reveals itself to be false—enabling in readers a keener

awareness of our vulnerability to the power of rhetoric.

If Terayama was referring not only to the horrific image in Poe’s story but also to the study of the

production of false understanding through the exploitation of assumptions bundled with particular

rhetorical modes, then we might expect other, similar cases. There are at least two more important

references to texts focused on truth value. The following poem uses an image from a children’s story by

Tsubota Jōji called “Mahō” (Magic):

kono ie mo dareka ga dōkemono naran takaki hei yori koeideshi ageha

Is there a prankster in this house, too? A swallowtail butterfly flies out over the tall hedge⁵²

The story is of a boy, Zenta, attempting to convince his younger brother, Sanpei, that he has magical

powers. Zenta’s claims fail to convince Sanpei until a monk passes by the garden where they are playing

and Zenta announces that he will change the monk into a butterfly:

A monk passed by outside the hedge. He wore a yellow surplice over his black kimono. Seeing him,

Zenta said in a quiet voice, “Sanpei, look! See that monk there. I’ll turn him into a butterfly for you.”

“Yeah! Quick, turn him into a butterfly!”

“Wait, wait.”

“No, Zenta! Hurry up or he’ll get away!”

Just then the monk passed the house.

“Now he’s gone! You let him get away! I wanted to see a person change into a butterfly.”

“It wouldn’t have worked. He’d have gotten mad if I’d have changed him right then. You’ve got to

be careful so they don’t know. I can do it no matter where he is, so it’s better to wait until he’s not

right in front of us.”

Then it happened. A black swallowtail butterfly flitted over on the wind.

“There! He’s here, he’s here!”

Zenta looked at it and said in a loud outburst, “Look, it’s the monk from just now! He turned into a

butterfly and flew over to us. Quick, huh?”

Sanpei got a strange feeling. The butterfly and the monk really did look similar.⁵³

Terayama’s poem is not a simple retelling of Tsubota’s story. By adding mo (“also”) after kono ie (“this

house”), the image is shifted a degree away from the original. We imagine someone walking down the

street, seeing a butterfly rising over the hedge of someone’s garden, and at that moment recalling

Tsubota’s story. The poem, then, documents the way the experience of reading literature interacts with

everyday life—one’s knowledge of the Zenta and Sanpei story conditions the response to seeing a real

butterfly float over a hedge. There is a revealing and important comment in the story itself, however,

immediately following the previous scene:

“Wow, Zenta. Did you really use magic?”

“Yeah. I really did.”

“Really? But when?”

“Just now.”

“Now? But you didn’t do anything.”

“I did, but secretly so you wouldn’t see. That’s why it’s called magic.”⁵⁴

That’s why it’s called magic. Zenta’s trick would lose its charm if it operated in clear view with its

mechanism exposed. Fictionality in Terayama’s poems can be seen, initially at least, to work in the same

way—these quotations are tricks that slip quotation in where lyrical expression should be. Keeping this in

mind, there is one final allusion that helps to fully contextualize this kind of play with quotation.

Tracing out the intertextual play at work in these poems provides a number of hints as to Terayama’s

poetics and the sensibility toward fiction driving his project. But one seemingly minor line in the debut

poems is essential to understanding exactly how quotation functioned in this set. After the title of the

poems that won the Tanka kenkyū award, “Chekhov Festival,” but before Terayama’s name or any of the

poems, there is a single line printed in a font slightly smaller than that used for the poems:

aoi shushi wa taiyō no naka ni aru

The green seed is inside the sun.

Soreru

Sorel⁵⁵

Convention signals this to be a typical epigraph—a direct quotation. With no more information, we are

left to decide whether this is from Julien Sorel, the romantic protagonist of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir,

or the political philosopher Georges Sorel (whose work on violence Terayama admired). Both were

available in translation by the time Terayama debuted and he makes reference to both in his later writings.

When the Chekhov poems were reprinted in Terayama’s first book of tanka, however, Soreru was

expanded to Jurian Soreru, so we must assume this to be from Stendhal. But, as several critics have

pointed out and as Terayama finally admitted, this line is simply not in Stendhal’s novel,⁵⁶which in a way

—especially in the context of the other quotations—makes perfect sense. These poems are first a study in

rhetorical conventions and assumptions about genre. The quotations in the poems, what get cited as

plagiarism, are part of a larger project of putting certain types of language in places that they do not

belong. There is quotation where lyricism should be, but there is also lyricism where quotation should

be.⁵⁷Terayama is playing, like Poe, with truth value by exploiting the reader’s exaggerated trust in certain

types of rhetorical formations—the quotation-shaped expression that creates its own validity, as well as

lyrically shaped expression that generates its own honesty. And, like Zenta, he does not reveal the

apparatus behind the trick, choosing instead to leave it in the open unexplained. And yet what none of the

critics mention about this epigraph is that Stendhal himself did precisely the same thing throughout his

novel. Nearly every chapter of The Red and the Black opens with an epigraph either completely fictional

or misattributed.⁵⁸What this means is that Terayama’s epigraph is a direct quotation of Stendhal’s

technique—an appropriation of method masked as a reproduction of content.

Under a strict definition of plagiarism as an unattributed quotation used without permission, there is

certainly plagiarism in Terayama’s debut poems—maybe twice as much as was first apparent. Using that

definition, however, Duchamp and Eliot would be just as guilty. The alternative is to recognize that the

charge of plagiarism requires a dubious claim of access to authorial intent—that the unattributed quotation

was used with the hope that readers would not discover the source. However, the way the response to

Terayama’s debut moved so quickly to a debate on the ethical use of other writer’s language—particularly

in a genre historically so open source in its promotion of borrowing—may speak more to the times than

specifically to Terayama. The attack on poetic quotation here exceeds the notion of copyright as a time-

limited monopoly, moving much closer to the contemporary concept of intellectual property, a more robust

and permanent ownership of ideas. And for professional writers emerging from war-torn Japan, the quick

reestablishment of a viable market for literature and a strong defense of their right to profit from writing

were critical. Terayama’s intervention here may have served as a reminder regarding the costs of moving

writing toward this kind of legalistic model. The accusation of plagiarism may operate most

fundamentally as an excuse to abandon analysis of a text prematurely. This may have been the process

through which the analysis of Terayama’s first poems were cut short by both his critics, to write him off as

a hack amateur, and his admirers, to paint him as a rebel genius. Terayama’s own response to the debate

he sparked broke apart this stalemate and suggested a new technique for combining emotional authenticity

and imaginative creativity.⁵⁹

Neolyricism and Fiction of Possibility

Frustrated with the shallowness of the debate that followed his debut, Terayama wrote to explain the

methods he used in the Chekhov poems in an essay titled “Romii no daiben: Tankeishi ni tsuite no

echūdo” (Romy’s proxy: An étude on short-form poetry). He opens the essay, which goes on to spell out

some of his specific techniques and objectives, with the following:

Where shall I begin? Right, I should first announce my name. I am a third-party, commonly known as

a fictional character—one that exists within my author, Terayama Shūji.

Let’s assign me a temporary name, say, “Romy.” It’s actually quite obvious why my author chose

to have me, rather than himself, deliver this deceptively simple argument about commonality between

the two genres of short-form poetry, tanka and haiku. I have already experienced his Romantic future,

and yet we are not one in the same. It looks like my existence won’t be recognized by the tanka and

haiku establishment, though, consisting as it does only of memorialists like Ishida Hakyō with his

claim that “haiku is confessional fiction [shishōsetsu].”

And yet, the very fact that I’m speaking right now proves my existence—and we ought to assume

that many more like me will appear. My author, out of sympathy and desire to protect me, takes full

responsibility and writes for me by proxy.⁶⁰

This opening is a clever retort. In essence, it reveals the mode of lyricism to be necessarily one not of

writerly method but of readerly interpretation—an analytic framework applied to a text—that too easily

exposes itself to being duped. By excluding the possibility of fantasy, embellishment, or any other

fictional elements, it also imposes severe limitations on the range of forms compatible with it. The

assumption that the genres of tanka and the critical essay have some sort of natural link to direct

expression by an author is exposed here as absurd by capsizing the logic of the assumption on its own

terms: rather than the author (Terayama) producing the confessional text, the confessional text here has

created its author (Romy). The rhetoric of lyricism gives life to this narrational voice. This one-to-one

correlation of life and art, borrowed for effect from the “memorialists,” paradoxically embodies

Terayama’s fictional narrator here, so much so in this case that it is Romy who becomes the author and

Terayama who becomes the stand-in for him, his narrator. Romy writes, therefore he is—or, rather, Romy,

having written in the past, comes to be in the present.

The tanka and haiku circles of the moment may have been dominated by a lingering attachment to

confessional forms, but as a teenage poet from one of the most traditionally impoverished areas in Japan,

Aomori prefecture, Terayama became the perfect target for a renewed and intensified search for the

authenticity of lyrical expression. It may not be particularly surprising that urban critics and editors would

search for that authenticity in someone from such a doubly naïve category as the rural schoolboy. Nakai

Hideo himself was clearly taken with what he perceived to be the pure lyricism of a young, unscathed

rustic. He writes the following on Terayama’s haiku:

These poems, composed during high school when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, are the best of

the collection in terms of their innocent beauty—they are dream-lamps that cast a faint light onto the

childhood of the reader. They possess the freshness of fruit that will never rot. The apple orchards

of the north country where Terayama Shūji was born and raised expand within the author, the boy

playing there just as he likes, grabbing a piece of fruit the color of women’s skin in a Renoir and

biting gently into it with his white teeth. The teenage author transmits the psychology of love with

exquisiteness unreachable by an adult—we may have examples of elegant expression in symbolist

poems, but not the insides of a teenage boy reflected with this degree of clarity and nostalgia.⁶¹

Terayama himself considered his experiments with artifice to be faithful to a different type of authenticity,

that he tries “to compose on what Nerval called, ‘that which is seen, without concern for whether it was

or was not a real event—that which has been clearly perceived.’”⁶²Objective faithfulness to the subject’s

imagination may, in this system, qualify as a new type of lyricism. In a twist on phenomenology’s removal

of the distinction between objective reality and subjective response, Nerval may have moved toward

reportage of all sensations, but Terayama, working from the same premise, seems to have begun

examining the creation of an authenticity effect within himself, which then generated seemingly lyrical

poems. He expresses frustration, for example, that so many people asked if he had ever actually sold the

communist newspaper Akahata (Red flag) after reading the first poem in his debut:

Akahata uru ware o natsuchō koeyukeri haha wa kokyō no ta o uchite imu

A summer butterfly passes over me as I sell copies of Red Flag—Mother is back home hoeing the

fields⁶³

The poem summarizes an ethical problem at the heart of left-wing politics: who will bear the labor

burden on the road to social change? Yet the typical reaction to the poem was not to consider such a

dilemma or the image of the butterfly that transcends and bridges mother and child but to want to know

whether Terayama is really a communist. He addresses the problem at a published round table shortly

after his debut:

I’d like to unravel one more thing: the problem of fiction. It seems that until now whenever people say

fiction they only ever mean absolute fantasy. I feel that we’ve got to integrate something else we

might call “the fiction of possibility” [kanōsei fikushon] into our work. For example, when I

composed the poem, “A summer butterfly passes over me as I sell Red Flag,” everyone instantly

started saying: “You sold Red Flag?” or “stop lying” or “you’re dishonest.” Kitamura and I had a

long debate about this the other day, and it’s true, I have never sold Red Flag, but I know a lot of

people who do, and when I muster up my empathy for those people I feel justified in saying “I sell

Red Flag.” By giving tanka primary significance and subordinating everyday life to the poem, I was

able to live within a consciousness that was selling Red Flag, even if I hadn’t physically stood there

selling it. We’ve got to start using this type of fiction of possibility.⁶⁴

By “fiction of possibility,” Terayama seems to claim the potential of fiction to create a legitimate reality

(one in which Terayama himself truly possessed a consciousness that sold Red Flag)—which is a very

different claim than the more familiar insistence that author and narrator (even in first person) are fully

separate entities. Terayama is arguing for a rational acceptance of the reality of his fictionalized and

fictionalizing poet self—a loyalty (shared with his reader) to the veracity of imagination, which trumps

the typical bindings of factual experience.

The frustration Terayama describes here parallels contemporaneous commentary by Alain Robbe-

Grillet on his nouveau roman. Labeled “antinovels,” the type of writing Robbe-Grillet was doing was

considered a direct attack on narrative itself—an attempt to destroy the tradition of the novel. He

responded to critics by explaining that his project was to describe contemporary reality with greater

precision in order to be accurate to a lived experience that did not fit into smoothly flowing prose. This

was accuracy to experience operating with recognition that “objectivity in the ordinary sense of the word

—total impersonality of observation—is all too obviously an illusion.”⁶⁵The period of the nouveau

roman immediately follows the period of neorealism in film, which might be described in a similar way.

Relative to earlier films, they may appear clumsy and disjointed, but it was a willful roughness that

recognizes that using the earlier realist mode would come off as forced—previous patterns had become

incapable of producing the immediacy of neorealist looseness. Film critic André Bazin describes the

genre in the following terms: “In Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà and Allemania Anno Zero and Vittorio de

Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette, Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism in its stripping

away of all expressionism and in particular in the total absence of the effects of montage. As in the films

of Welles and in spite of conflicts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the

ambiguity of reality.”⁶⁶Terayama writes directly of neorealism after winning the tanka contest: “In terms

of method, I am attempting to grasp the point of contact between neorealism and emotion.”⁶⁷Yet his

insistence that this new “fiction of possibility” maintains a form of authenticity and a legitimate sincerity

implies that he is still committed to the principle of lyricism, albeit in some kind of new inflection—

thinking of this as pseudo-lyricism may in fact fall into the trap Terayama was arguing against here. Given

the cluster of similar updates to realism across several cultural forms during the 1940s and 1950s,

signaling Terayama’s style with something like “neolyricism” might help to accentuate the link to these

other cultural forms. In this context, we are also better situated to recognize Terayama’s extension of the

classic poetic emotional outburst to include contemporary neorealist experience, one that recognizes the

constructedness of all things experienced as “true.” Such a term would be most effectively understood not

as a list of traits but as a new set of problems concerning the nature of expression: Can quotation function

as a tool of expression? Do we have any other option? Has there ever been a purer form of lyricism—one

that had a somehow more unmediated access to life devoid of reference to other things?

Liberational Self-Fictionalization or Alienation?

Terayama’s match-strike poem, in turn, served as the base text, a honka, for a tanka by a young political

poet named Kishigami Daisaku. The interaction between these two young poets, including Kishigami’s

critique of Terayama and Terayama’s critique of Kishigami (and others like him), offers an opportunity to

explore the ways in which Terayama’s political thinking around 1960 interacted with his writing. In April

1960, at age twenty, Kishigami published the following tanka:

ishi hyōjii semarigoe nakigoe o se ni tada tanagokoro no naka ni matchi suru nomi

He turns his back on expressions of will, on voices trapped by poverty, on weeping voices, and just

lights a match in the palm of his hand⁶⁸

This poem is a play off of Terayama’s best-known tanka as well as an indictment of his lack of support

for the protests against the renewal of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, which would be renewed about a

month after the poem’s publication (allowing a continued U.S. military presence in Japan). Kishigami and

Terayama had met briefly in the run-up to the renewal, when Kishigami invited Terayama to speak at a

poetry event at his university. During that meeting, Kishigami asked Terayama what he thought of the

demonstrations, and to his disappointment, Terayama told him that they had little chance of changing

national or U.S. policy and that a mass movement of young people running away from home or dismantling

the universities would have a much greater impact on society. Both remarks turned out to be prescient for

events in the late 1960s when runaways would join Terayama’s theater troupe and when student radicals

barricaded themselves in campus buildings, functionally shutting down most of the Japanese university

system. When Kishigami asked if he wrote agitation poems, Terayama replied, “Is there any type of poetry

other than agitation? [sendō de nai shi nado sonzai suru mono darō ka?]”⁶⁹The encounter sparked

essays from both sides that provide a window into Terayama’s politics at the time as well as a strong

critique of both his politics and his poetics.

Kishigami’s analysis of the fictionalized first-person narrational voice in Terayama’s tanka, which had

by that time been recognized to be his main contribution to the genre, was neither to celebrate the division

of author and narrator nor to denounce it but rather to historicize it as the type of subjectivity needed to

cope with the contradiction between celebrations of postwar democracy and the reality of individual (and

collective) agency crushed under the 1950s Japanese economic machine.⁷⁰Freedom is to be found in

one’s imagination and not in real life. Kishigami argues that Terayama chose to simply document his own

self-alienated response to the era, a choice made to the exclusion of developing some form of resistance

to the social order that had forced fictionalization of the self. Here we finally see a more grounded

challenge to Terayama’s neolyricism—not one that challenges the possibility of fictionalizing the

narrational voice in a poem (which Terayama addressed in “Romy’s Proxy”), but one that takes on the

core psychological origin for making that choice: alienation as a result of unacceptable social conditions,

that is, democracy in name only that refused demands for a referendum on the continued presence of U.S.

troops within Japanese borders. Kishigami’s essay on Terayama was published in September 1960, just

months after the controversial renewal of the security treaty. In December of that year, he would hang

himself, leaving suicide notes to friends claiming that he felt trapped by unrequited love, as well as a

longer final statement in which he directly addresses the important poet-turned-philosopher Yoshimoto

Takaaki: “Mr. Yoshimoto, I am going to die clutching a collection of your poems. Before my hand stiffens

this book of poems will probably fall to the floor and be soaked with rain. You were the only one I cared

about losing to!”⁷¹Had Terayama been more supportive of Kishigami’s political position, these final

words would likely have been addressed to him.

Part of what Kishigami may have been reacting to was a short essay Terayama had published in

August, a month before Kishigami’s critique was released, which attacked the lemming-like mood of the

antitreaty demonstrations with less restraint than he had shown in their personal exchange. Terayama

begins the essay by reporting on his own experience of marching in a demonstration where he was

frustrated by how somnambulant the protests had become. He recounts wanting to scream out, “Long live

Prime Minister Kishi!” or “Come on in, Ike!” just to wake people up from their daze. Midway through the

essay he states, more clearly than anywhere else, his personal political stance at the time:

Maybe it’s that I don’t have any desire for a “good” government. I might have caused a

misunderstanding by saying that I’d rather be the protesters’ flag or that I look forward to anarchy,

but my hunch is that socialism would be unfit for self-discovery. It is precisely because Japan and I

are not unified under a “good government” that these times feel so alive and fresh. But if a socialist

nation would be an unfit location for the discovery of the self and for my artistic acts then a

monopoly structure under capitalism would be no better. It is when a single ideology matures and

comes to unify an entire nation that our decline as humans begins and when we will begin losing

sight of the objective of the artist’s mission, which must always be oppositional.⁷²

Terayama attempts to set up a third position within the struggle—one he addresses more specifically in

another article published during the same month: “I wanted to write about a young person who dwells in

this politicized era and yet feels completely disconnected from it. The invisible burden these young

people bear is that directionless and illusionary causality called ‘history.’ I believe that the ones who

make history are neither the state oppressors or the revolutionaries, but rather a third zone of people who

resist the revolutionaries with an invisible form of power—I have often felt that the potential for

unleashing passion rests only in the vitality of young people in that third zone.”⁷³At the time of writing

these pieces, Terayama had just been released from the hospital where he had spent over three years, time

he would have spent at university had he not dropped out, while being treated for nephrosis (the kidney

condition that would eventually kill him). He was bedridden but alert enough to read, and the Spanish

Civil War was one of the topics he studied—so the third position of anarcho-syndicalists pinched

between Franco’s army and communists demanding consolidation of the resistance was a likely model for

his thinking.⁷⁴Terayama’s position could also be compared to that of the New Left (then just forming),

and its third position against both Stalinism and the military-backed expansion of market economies.

Terayama’s political thinking shifts somewhat from before his time in the hospital—when his poems were

dotted with references to adolescent communists and seemed to delight primarily in the rebelliousness of

that category—toward a more clearly anarchist stance that denounced any desire for centralized political

power. A thread through much of Terayama’s subsequent work is satire of the will to power and

especially of the desire to be ruled, the main obstacles to classlessness.⁷⁵

In conclusion, a close look at Terayama’s debut reveals a clever manipulation of the genre-based

expectation for lyricism and prohibition of fiction hidden beneath the plagiarism controversy for which he

is still remembered. A core element of Terayama’s fiction-making method is clear here—the opportunistic

use of his reader’s assumptions to generate an impossibility or a truly fictional situation (e.g., the

existence of Romy). What is critical here, however, is that this method is more than a simple attack on

literary orthodoxy. Slipping plagiarized poems under the nose of a young editor is one thing, but

transposing quotation for lyrical expression and lyrical expression for quotation in a way that exposes the

rhetorical function of both is quite another. Compressing a subtle reading of the end of Casablanca into

thirty-one syllables is a still greater feat. What seems to drive this entire process is surprisingly not a

critique of the constructedness of authenticity or the limitations on our access to the real but rather a claim

that a clear distinction between fiction and reality is itself a distortion of everyday lived experience. The

incorporation of imaginative self-fictionalization, of popular culture, and of lies in Terayama’s

understanding of authenticity is, then, simply a consequence of the inclusive stance he has taken on the

process of literary production itself.

CHAPTER 2

Radio Drama in the Age of Television

THE TRANSISTOR RADIO, THE STEREO phonograph, and the television were all introduced to the Japanese

public at about the same time at the end of the 1950s. Tokyo Tsūshin Kōgyō (later Sony) would release

their TR-55 pocket-sized transistor radio to the Japanese market in 1955.¹The first stereo records were

released in 1958 and could be played first on the new Victor STL-1S “Stereophonic Sound System.”²

Television broadcasting, which had begun on a small scale in 1953, was popularized by the completion of

Tokyo Tower in December 1958 and the scramble to buy sets to watch the imperial wedding in April

1959 between current emperor Akihito and the former commoner Michiko.

Sound was suddenly on the move—down the street, back and forth across a room, and in danger of

being chased out of the marketplace and culture itself by television’s new combination of sound and

moving images delivered directly to living rooms. Established radio drama scenarists began moving from

radio to television, throwing the new commercial radio networks (legalized in June 1950) into a minor

crisis and marking for some the end of the “Golden Age of Radio Dramas.”³Listener- and viewer-ship

numbers moved dramatically between 1959 and 1963, with television use overtaking use of radio midway

through 1961 according to surveys done by the Cabinet Ministry (Figure 2.1). Radio stations, much like

the film studios, addressed the threat of television by recruiting young writing talent to create fresh

material—programs targeted at the demographic of the scenarists themselves. At the moment when

assistant directors like Ōshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro, and Yoshida Kijū were being invited to direct

their own features to revitalize the film studios (and capture the leading edge of the baby-boomer market),

Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) and various regional commercial radio broadcasters also began airing

radio dramas written by young authors and poets. Abe Kōbō and Tanikawa Shuntarō wrote scripts, and

Terayama began writing for radio in 1958 on Tanikawa’s recommendation. Writing for radio paid well,

and as such it helped this young poet (fresh out of a three-year stay in the hospital) launch a professional

writing career that would have been impossible had he limited himself to publishing poetry.

If photography can be credited not only with pushing painting away from portraiture toward abstraction

but also with forcing a reconceptualization of painting as something intimately tied to the brush stroke, to

the canvas, to color, and to the texture of paint—that is, if the foregrounded material properties of the

medium shifted, or were even discovered, as a result of an interaction with the development and

popularization of another visual medium—then we should expect that something similar probably

happened to radio through its relationship to television. Did this retroactive production of “essence”

effectively create features experienced as core to, or at least intimately related to, broadcast radio? Does

radio’s “blindness” relative to the visual media (a problem we can trace back at least to Rudolph

Arnheim’s mid-1930s “In Praise of Blindness” in his book on radio) shift in a significant way during the

transition from film to television?⁴

Figure 2.1. Radio listenership versus television viewership rates according to surveys done by the

cabinet ministry of around three thousand citizens. Data from Hōsō ni kan suru yoron chōsa (Tokyo:

Naikaku Sōridaijin Kanbō Kōhōshitsu, 1962).

If we look toward television as one of the forces mediating and conditioning our reception of radio,

and particularly as a force that would have been in a listener’s mind as television was rapidly spreading

through consumer culture, an apt approach to the radio dramas of that era might parallel visual culture’s

emphasis on the mediation and regulation of images—an “audio culture” methodology. Following Irit

Rogoff’s suggestion that a critical theorization of visual culture would focus on images (and their

contested histories), viewing apparatuses (and their cultural narratives and technologies), and

subjectivities of identification (the positions from which and through which we view), we could then, in

the case of audio culture, develop a “curious ear” as we work to theorize the contested histories of

sounds, the cultural narratives and technologies of listening apparatuses, and the positions from which and

through which we hear.⁵My particular interest in this case will be in historicizing these sounds, listening

apparatuses, and positions of hearing to try to get a sense of what these radio dramas might have “sounded

like” in the context of their historical moment. In this way, we may be able to tweak Walter Benjamin’s

claim that “during long historical periods the mode of sense perception of human collectivities changes

with their entire mode of existence” toward recognizing that a broad shift in perception (e.g., radio as

“lacking” visuality) could occur over short historical periods as well, keeping pace with the rapid

dissemination of technology like television.⁶

Terayama’s Debut(s) in Radio

Yamada Taichi, a scenarist for radio and television and a college friend of Terayama, goes to great

lengths to point out that, despite Terayama’s own claims to the contrary, the 1958 radio drama Jiono was

in fact Terayama’s debut, not Nakamura Ichirō, which would come out the following year in 1959.⁷

Jiono, tobanakatta otoko (Giono, the man who didn’t fly) first aired in October 1958 on Fukuoka’s Radio

Kyūshū Broadcasting–Mainichi channel. Radio Kyūshū Broadcasting (RKB) was the fourth national

commercial radio station, established in 1951, and had just merged with Mainichi Television (connected

to Mainichi Newspapers) earlier in 1958.⁸There is a good chance the Giono of the title refers to Jean

Giono, the French author of the “Pan” trilogy” that had been translated into Japanese in 1941 as

Bokuyōshin (Pan/Faunus), which was also the title Terayama and his co-editors had chosen for their

national teenage haiku journal.⁹

The narrative of Jiono, tobanakatta otoko is fairly straightforward: Giono and his three friends

(Gigalo, Ace, and Loner) break out of prison, but Giono’s friends are quickly caught. Giono is less

interested in the money they buried than in getting back together with his old flame, Mari. He asks about

her at a bar where she used to work:

GIONO: I waited for her like a squirrel waits for dusk.

WOMAN: Well, I guess dark got here before dusk, wearing a bowtie. He was a sailor.

GIONO: No!

WOMAN: She wasn’t selling much after the guitarist died. She was like a tree without roots.

GIONO: Mari.

WOMAN: That sailor caught the tree you let fall. Mari can’t get by without a man.¹⁰

Giono wanders off in search of Mari but stumbles into a “forest of forgetfulness” in which memories do

not exist. This leads to a utopic sociality, since there is no memory of the distinction between self and

other, not to mention personal names, social roles, or any kind of authority structure. Giono asks for Mari,

but he is told that anyone in the forest can become Mari; all he has to do is address someone as such. In

fact, he could have as many Maris as he desires.¹¹This is the purely synchronic paradise Terayama will

write more about later in terms of “geographical” orientation versus “historical” orientation.

Giono finally does find Mari, but she has been assimilated into this group. She cannot remember Giono

but tells him that memories are filled with envy and that if she tries to remember him “the past will come

back for revenge.”¹²A police officer finally catches up to Giono and offers to let him escape if he is

willing to lose all of his memories—this is his chance to “fly away.” But Giono chooses to keep his

memories of the Mari who could remember him and to go back to jail rather than to stay with Mari (and

forget his years of longing for her). It is with Terayama’s second aired radio drama that he shifts toward a

more direct engagement with television, which may have been part of the reason Nakamura Ichirō would

be awarded a major prize, launching Terayama’s career in radio and leading him to claim it as his

“debut.”

Terayama’s second radio drama played in February 1959, also on Fukuoka’s RKB-Mainichi, and

would later win the chair’s prize (Kaichōshō) at the annual commercial radio awards ceremony

(Minpōsai). Terayama writes that he intended Nakamura Ichirō to be the story of someone who “wanted

to disappear, but ended up becoming famous.” This, he writes, could be seen as the inverse of an incident

at the televised imperial wedding. A young man charged the procession of the royal wedding between

Prince Akihito and the commoner Shōda Michiko—the young man had “wanted to become famous, but

ending up disappearing,” as the police quickly captured him and escorted him away. As a minor (nineteen

at the time), his name was withheld from the press, but he was nicknamed the “stone-thrower boy” (tōseki

shōnen) because he threw a baseball-sized rock at the couple before dashing out of the crowd and trying

to climb onto their carriage. Guards captured him before he reached the procession, and the entire event

was over in seconds.¹³

The stone-thrower boy explained his motivation for the attack on the imperial wedding: “I am against

the Emperor System [tennōsei]. I heard that they used 230,000,000 yen [$639,000 in 1959] of tax-money

on the newly constructed Crown Prince’s palace and it threw me into a rage. My plan was to drag them

out of the horse-carriage.”¹⁴After the incident, he was dubiously diagnosed as a schizophrenic and

institutionalized. The novelist (and later governor of Tokyo) Ishihara Shintarō interviewed him two

months after the incident, sympathizing in an article in the journal Bungei shunjū with the stone-thrower’s

claim that it is the “normal” people who are crazy not to be rising up against the emperor system.¹⁵

Terayama’s radio drama shares little else in common with the incident, however. It was written as a

mock news flash (in the style of War of the Worlds), reporting “on the scene” about a man walking across

the sky, several stories above the traffic. His name, Nakamura Ichirō, was chosen because it is the most

common name in the Tokyo telephone book, and he is portrayed as almost perfectly average: a door-to-

door insurance salesman in his midthirties who decided to jump off a building after being dumped by his

girlfriend.¹⁶But gravity did not take effect: “I completely lost confidence in myself and jumped off the top

of a building, but I didn’t fall. All of a sudden, without really realizing it, I was staggering across the

sky.”¹⁷After his failed suicide (the pinnacle of despair Terayama’s fellow Aomori-born writer Dazai

Osamu and his protagonists so often experienced) and the backfiring of his effort to erase his existence, he

is propelled into the news headlines, flooded with requests for product endorsements (of shoes, balloons,

toys, and clothing), and becomes the subject of the hit song of the week, a new tune called “Skywalker.”

What is noteworthy about the piece is its steady reference to television. The first instance comes in a

list of caricatured headlines from the major newspapers:

ASAHI: A Man Strolls across the First Sky of Summer, A Landscape Sketch from the Nakagawa

Region

MAINICHI: A Miracle in the Age of Television, What Did the Sky-Man See? A Bird’s Eye View of

the Realities of Urban Life among the Masses

AKAHATA: Bad Politics Drove Him to the Sky. There Will Be No Arcadia for Humanity without a

Revolution¹⁸

Standing out among the mockery of the Asahi’s artsy flourish, the Mainichi’s fetishistic populism, and

Akahata’s spin of anything and everything into another cause for insurrection is this strange line about a

“Miracle in the Age of Television.” Is the implication that a new, seeing-is-believing rationality ushered

in by television should have demystified the news? By pointing out what was now seemingly impossible

on television (realistic reporting of false events), Terayama demonstrates how the new technology created

a small window of opportunity for fiction within a medium that appeared destined for obsolescence.

Reference within this radio drama to Gekkō kamen (Moonbeam mask) by a group of Nakamura’s

youngest fans is another nod to this new “age of television.” Gekkō kamen was Japan’s first domestic

television superhero, star of a series that aired on Tokyo TV between February 1958 and July 1959, so it

would have been at the peak of its popularity when Terayama’s radio drama was aired in February 1959.

The point is likely a simple one: the reality of Nakamura (within the narrative) is processed by these

children through the filter of a visual text—in parallel to the way radio, by the late 1950s, would forever

be experienced through the filter of its relationship to television.

The “miracle” of Nakamura’s antigravity moment comes up once more in the drama as part of a

conversation between two puzzled academics:

SCHOLAR 1: Levitation? Even if we were to posit him as nearly empty, Professor, it’s just not

possible, is it?

SCHOLAR 2: I saw the miracle myself.

SCHOLAR 1: Scientists mustn’t believe in miracles.

SCHOLAR 2: Nevertheless, Professor, I did see it. And seeing it is rational positivism, you see.

SCHOLAR 1: I hear Nakamura Ichirō refused a physical examination.

SCHOLAR 2: What? He refused to cooperate with science?

SCHOLAR 1: He must be up to something, no doubt about it.¹⁹

The satire here is only partially about the intellect of “intellectuals”—the rest is better read as a critique

of the hype about television. Optimists may have hoped for more reliable news reporting, with visual

evidence backing up the stories. But the perceptive link between vision and authenticity also sets up new

opportunities for exploitation, both by the arbiters of truth (on television), and the creators of fiction (on

radio). Terayama seems to be suggesting that the shift of truth value toward television at this moment may

have opened up an opportunity for radio to benefit from its relative reduction in truth value in the wake of

the transition—this may have been radio’s opportunity to exploit its medium in that particular cultural

moment as a new space for fictionality and imagination.

Adult Hunting and Emperor Tomato Ketchup

Radio’s potential for fictionality, for fake truth, would be pushed further with Terayama’s most notorious

radio drama about a revolution against adult society by elementary school children. Otona-gari (Adult

hunting) was broadcast in February 1960 by RKB in Fukuoka.²⁰This project would develop into a

scandal involving the radio station, a local school from which child actors were recruited, two teacher’s

unions, and prefectural government. Terayama would later rewrite this narrative a number of times in the

mid-1960s for production as a television program or a film, but it was not until 1970 that the film version,

Tomato Kechappu Kōtei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup), would be shot. It opened as part of a Terayama and

Jean-Luc Godard series at the Sōgetsu Art Center in June of that year.²¹Tracing out some key features of

both of these projects and the transition from radio to film should prove useful in making sense of the

media consciousness underscoring these projects.

The frame used in Otona-gari is similar to Nakamura Ichirō: both are comical, mock news stories,

but in Otona-gari, the live reports are of an insurrection in progress by elementary school students who

have taken up arms and are rounding up all the adults. In this sense, the precedent invoked here is less the

radio version of War of the Worlds (1938) than the earlier Broadcasting the Barricades by Ronald Knox,

a 1926 British Broadcasting Corporation radio drama presented as breaking news from a riot in

downtown London, where the unemployed marched and the “National Movement for Abolishing Theatre

Queues” was leading an attack on the National Gallery, eventually toppling Big Ben with trench

mortars.²²

The revolution in Terayama’s drama is sparked by a boy fed up with his father, who had locked the boy

in a shed for failing to complete his science homework. This Mr. Kaneda returned to the shed to find a

sign reading, “Revolution! Everyone wake up!” shortly before being assaulted by his son. The narrative

proceeds with councils of the revolutionary children formulating policy for dealing with the captured

adults, reconfiguring society “of, by, and for the children,” and eventually creating an independent

republic out of the southern Japanese island of Kyūshū, where the radio drama broadcast occurred. A

segment from one of the children’s council meetings should clarify the type of parody Terayama was using

for this project:

CHILD 6: So, first, our next move.

CHILD 3: I think we should start by seizing all the adults’ property.

CHILD 7: No, first we need to shore up our own organization.

CHILD 3: We should value most those furthest from the adults.

CHILD 6: You mean by age?

CHILD 7: But the organizational superstructure may not function due to ignorance.

CHILD 3: Adult hunting is a child’s right. There’s no need to value the voice of superstructure like

the adults do in our organization.

CHILD 9: According to Marx’s German Ideology . . .

CHILD 3: Marx is an adult!

CHILD 10: Yeah, we’re not communists, we’re child-ists.

CHILD 3: I think we should blow up some statues, incinerate some books, at least get the fairytales.

CHILD 7: Fairytales and textbooks. It’s those textbooks that are the source of all our misery.

CHILD 3: But sometimes there’s something interesting in the textbooks. The cooking sections at least.

But those fairytales, they always treat us like idiots.

CHILD 11: Getting the adults’ property is fine, but in due time. The important thing is what we’re

imagining.

CHILD 7: Like Robinson Crusoe.

CHILD 3: Robinson Crusoe is an adult!²³

Whereas Knox’s drama was a fairly straightforward attack on revolutionaries as being as petty as

impatient theater-goers, the mode of parody in Terayama’s project is more ambiguous—it is difficult to

parse whether this is a mockery of the student movement (which was in full force at the time of release in

opposition to the U.S–Japan Security Treaty up for extension in June 1960 and again in 1970 at the release

of Tomato Kechappu Kōtei) or agitation for that struggle to radicalize beyond peaceful marches through

the streets.

The core flaw of Otona-gari, likely there by design, is that the children simply cannot muster enough

menace to frighten their audience. It is this gap between the written word and the spoken performance that

creates the joke, and our consideration of the potential of the young to accomplish an insurrection is

where the comedy moves into critique. The disparity between the written plan and the spoken

performance is doubled in the later film version, particularly when these elementary school guerillas are

supposed to not only round up the adults and shoot the resisters but also rape their women. The Emperor

Tomato Ketchup himself, given this task and a harem for it, clearly has no idea how to perform a sexual

assault (thankfully) and quickly transforms the scene into a playful episode one might expect to see in a

public bathhouse anywhere in Japan, patting his “victim’s” breasts like they were drums.

There is a double alibi set up in this structure. The first is for Terayama himself, who uses this parodic

form to deflect criticism of the piece as agitational. He would use this alibi in the controversy following

the broadcast, which would move through local media into a flare-up in an existing Left–Right battle

between two teachers’ unions, and eventually into a review by committees in both the prefectural

legislature and RKB.²⁴Terayama was interviewed by the weekly magazine Shūkan bunshun in the midst

of the turmoil where he claimed the project was “a satire of people who support a romantic revolution

without any clear vision” and that it was “both a satire of the Zengakuren [student movement] and

sympathy toward them.” Letters were sent to RKB complaining that the radio drama was “tero, ero, guro”

(“terrorism, eroticism, grotesque,” a play on the ero-guro-nonsense of the 1920s and 1930s), to which

Terayama responds, claiming the drama was a simple parable in which “the romantic revolutionaries are

‘children,’ the sympathizers who are unable to act are ‘teenagers,’ and those who try to preserve the status

quo are ‘adults.’”²⁵Conservative groups wanted someone punished for allowing local elementary school

students to participate in the recording, and they were successful in causing enough of a stir that a manager

at the radio station was fired, but the groups seem to have been after an authority from the students’

school. Judging from Terayama’s remarks after things settled, he seemed regretful that Otona-gari had not

been more agitational than it had been, claiming that it had ended up a “charming trifle” (aikyō aru

adabana).²⁶

The other alibi, however, is for the student movement of 1960, as well as any other insurrection by the

young. Youth use this alibi as a shield under which to undermine the ageist hierarchy (which had

originally created the protective umbrella of “childhood” now being turned against them). The patriarchy

is forced into a corner here: it must either maintain its elevated position and protect the children from

harm by not fighting back (but therefore risk losing in a violent struggle) or concede its higher position

and take up arms against the young, treating them as equals (by redefining them as adults). Either way the

hierarchy collapses at, importantly, the hands of the young.

The problem these young revolutionaries face in Otona-gari is ultimately their own inevitable aging

into the adults they oppose. This develops gradually over the course of the drama—first in a reluctance to

incarcerate their favorite sports heroes, then in a confrontation between a father and son (a child called

Freckles tries to help his father escape by boat, but another child guerilla guns him down), and on to the

final scene in which one of the boys notices that he has begun growing facial hair. The narrative needs to

stop here, effectively, because the project short-circuits at precisely this moment—a critique Terayama

was likely leveling at the student movement, which in both 1960 and again in 1970 risked losing ground

by staking too much in toppling the security treaty and in marking the movement as one of students. What

was the plan after graduation? Tomato Kechappu Kōtei, too, concludes with a shot of the newly bearded

and mustachioed boy tyrant and his lieutenants—once they manage to adjust these props correctly, the film

seizes up in a freeze frame (along with the logic of their project) until the final credits roll (Figure 2.2).

The thematic breach of trust between parent and child in the narrative of Otona-gari is paralleled by a

breach of trust between broadcaster and listener in the medium of radio. This format of the simulated

news broadcast, in fact, poses a greater threat to the public order than any agitational content within the

narrative of this drama. We see hints of reaction to this threat in reports that the initial response from the

public to this broadcast was concerned not with the impact on young listeners or the treatment of child

voice actors but with the use of actual place names within the city of Fukuoka in the broadcast.²⁷That is,

the radio drama was not marked as sufficiently fictional to reassure its audience of its parodic, and

therefore benign, status. As a not-quite-fictional text, Otona-gari picks up some additional truth value by

appropriating rhetorical tactics from the news media, but more importantly, the fake-news style

simultaneously exposes and erodes some of the truth effect of the standard news broadcast as a form.

When we become conscious of the layers of rhetorical markers used to brand the news as news, those

markers not only lose their impact but also begin to erode our confidence in these sources—why should

they need to trump up their reports with so much flourish if not to deceive?

Figure 2.2. Emperor Tomato Ketchup, now bearded and mustachioed, has outgrown his children’s

empire in the freeze frame that ends the 1970 film.

The opening sequence of Otona-gari is a veritable tour of rhetorical markings of the “news.” First is

the “special report” music, coded to standard news bulletins and dramatizing the breaking story. Next, a

classic, interrupted broadcast line: “We had planned to broadcast ‘Love Song on the Horizon’ this

evening, but due to breaking events, we will now turn to news and live coverage.”²⁸The news is the news

here because it is not a fictional drama. Next comes a retrofitted authenticity, leveraging guilt on an

audience not quite up to date on events (which they will sublimate beneath belief): “You must have

already heard by now, but a group of children are rioting in the Nishijinmachi District of Fukuoka City.”²⁹

The concrete place names enhance our trust with their scientific precision, which will continue as the

announcer tracks the group’s movement across major landmarks in the city in which this drama was

broadcast. This trust is facilitated by radio because the geographical precision is paired with a lack of

visual confirmation—our imagination of these scenes will inevitably be more potent than any broadcasted

image could be.

This rhetorical play with genre markings and the signifying system that makes a set of statements

“news” is peppered here with comic asides about a slogan of “hunting adults” and organizers wearing

straw hats, part of a child’s school uniform. After this newslike opening, the mode shifts toward a more

straightforward drama, but the reflexivity regarding radio, and particularly commercial radio, continues

throughout the program. The revolutionary children turn to their own radio to gauge reaction to the

revolution around the country, checking a number of channels (expanded by the legalization and promotion

of commercial radio after the war). We hear an ironic advertisement for baby powder followed by a news

bulletin, and then a conspicuous channel change to coverage of a baseball game, then another change to

more news. This is a condensed summary of the trade-offs of allowing for-profit broadcasting: plenty of

channels and plenty of repetition. The advertisements are important here, too, since they function much

like fictional radio dramas to provide a necessary foil for the news: the news becomes nonfictional when

juxtaposed with fiction, just as it becomes noncommercial and objective (and thereby ripe for product

placement) when juxtaposed with advertising.

The revelation of the need news has for advertising may get too clear in a later section—cut from the

broadcast—in which “Hinomaru-ya” candies are plugged in the script immediately after a list of

directives from the police:

• Do not allow children access to radios, television, or newspapers.

• Do not allow children access to sharp objects, even for craft projects.

• Increase their intake of sweets.

• Be as friendly as possible.

Tone shifts suddenly.

• Need a treat? Try Hinomaru Lackerbies, Lackerbies make kids happy!

Tone returns to normal.

• Do not allow children to assemble, even siblings.

• Do not be too strict about discipline and allow them as much freedom as you can.³⁰

The problem of product tie-ins with whatever new crisis the news is announcing and the production of

a listenership scared into consumption is perhaps too clumsy here, so the producers may have been trying

to be helpful. But as one of only a few lines cut from the script, and certainly not in interest of time, it

does seem likely that this jab at commercial radio practice was redacted in this case.

The flap over Otona-gari was tidied up in the end by declaring the radio drama to be a “fairytale for

adults”—that it took the form of a children’s story but was broadcast at a time intended for an older

audience.³¹We often find claims that Terayama loved reading Shōnen kurabu (Boy’s club) during the war

years and that his style well into the 1970s was in a mode nostalgic for those adventure tales aimed at

stoking bravery in young Japanese boys.³²But if Terayama is invoking the children’s fiction of wartime,

those stories were anything but innocent. Take the work of Minami Yōichirō, for example, who wrote

regularly for Shōnen kurabu during the 1930s before moving exclusively toward publishing books for

young boys from 1939 until after the war. In the introduction to his early 1941 Soromontō tanken

(Expedition to the Solomon Islands), he explains clearly to his young readers that

they say “a drop of gasoline is equal to a drop of blood.” That gasoline comes from oil. Airplanes,

tanks, and armored vehicles all move using gasoline as fuel. Even submarines use heavy oil, which is

taken from naturally occurring oil.

Lots of other machines run on crude or gasoline, which is so important that it must never run out.

With a shortage of oil we could never win a war.³³

The expedition, then, is explicitly to discover oil in the Solomon Islands for the benefit of the Japanese

war machine. Minami, a globetrotting boy scout, would publish a youth-targeted hagiography of Hitler

with the same publisher later that year, in August 1941, under his real name, Ikeda Nobumasa: “I tried in

this book to trace the Führer’s path from impoverished orphan to ruler of Germany, and further on to his

spectacular victories in the war . . . You, my readers, are the second citizenry that will now determine the

fate of the nation. You are the adoration and the treasure of your homeland. With a taste of the attitude and

spirit that saw young Hitler become Hitler the Führer, I believe you will be moved and you will learn a

great deal.”³⁴The Hitler and Nazi references in Otona-gari, with its rounding up of adults in hiding—

which expand in to more direct references to incinerating humans in Tomato Kechappu Kōtei—may have

been linked to a particular, time-bound formation of childhood, that is, the young Japanese boy fed

“adventures” and biographies of “heroes” from a world that (by age ten in Terayama’s case) would have

become categorically evil. If Terayama’s fictional world was fairytale-like, then it was this kind of

tainted, saccharine, sinister sort of fairytale, and particularly the revolt against it, that interested him.

There is a brief reference to ketchup in an earlier Terayama short story from 1960 that might shed some

additional light on the film version. “Ningen-jikkenshitsu” (Human laboratory) is one of Terayama’s only

full-fledged short stories and concerns the life of Kita Kiyoshi, a hyperrich, Wagner-obsessed son of a

war criminal. He enjoys imagining himself as a young Hitler, and nicknames his Korean friend “Kubizek”

after Hitler’s childhood friend and fellow fan of Wagner operas. Proclaiming the pleasure of Auschwitz to

have been a matter of kind, and not of number, Kiyoshi hatches a plan to capture and slowly starve a

prisoner:

“Hey, Kubizek!” said Kiyoshi, “I’m serious!”

“Heil” responded Yi earnestly, drawing his hand away from his tomato sauce stained trousers.

“Heil, Hitler!”³⁵

The “tomato sauce” here is from the hot dogs these two enjoy eating, a likely candidate for the origin of

the title of Tomato Kechappu Kōtei (which also includes a human “pet”). They then capture an unlucky

Mr. Nakamura, who is slowly starved and made to do useless tasks on the Kita property. Nakamura

resists at first but eventually realizes that this situation is no more absurd than his office job, and he

begins asking for more strenuous tasks. This erodes Kiyoshi’s pleasure, as his domination is assimilated

by Nakamura’s emerging masochism. The story, and this unsustainable system, ends with Kiyoshi forcing

Nakamura to join a marathon passing by outside the Kita home, with the implication that he will be

released into an entire group of likeminded people who are willfully doing gratuitous labor. This study in

the psychology of the domination fetish is paired with a second narrative about a gang of delinquents who

do drugs, listen to jazz, and take road trips on a whim, living in the moment and for serendipity, and for

whom pleasure has no relationship at all with power hierarchies—they are the bohemian, beat generation

alternative to struggles on the power ladder.

Tomato Kechappu Kōtei draws, then, both from Otona-gari and “Ningenjikkenshitsu” but refuses to

allow any sort of flowing narrative to develop. There is no dialogue, but instead intertitles and voiceover

are used to list articles from the new “Tomato Ketchup Constitution” and to read aloud letters from

children to their parents.³⁶What might be most significant about this film is not its content but rather the

way it was made, that is, the counterproposal it suggests to film’s reaction to the threat of television in the

1960s. If film’s reaction was first to go bigger, with widescreen formats like Cinemascope, and later to go

artsier and more contemplative—in the case of Japan with the Art Theater Guild (ATG) films—then

Terayama’s suggestion with Tomato Kechappu Kōtei seems to have been to scale down rather than up.

The ATG films were already famously low budget at ten million yen, but Tomato Kechappu Kōtei was

completed for about one-tenth that figure, 1.3 million yen (or roughly US$3,500 in 1970), which made

independent financing possible.³⁷At around seventy-five minutes, it was essentially a feature-length film

shot on 16mm, breaking away from both the experimental short-film model as well as the trappings of

commercial financing and distribution. These circumstances allowed Terayama to assemble an unusual

group: camerawork was done by the art photographer Sawatari Hajime and the two assistant directors

(both in their midtwenties) were Kawakita Kiyomasa, a radical in the Zenkyōtō movement at Nihon

University, and Matsuzawa Yao, a woman involved with avant-garde theater. As such, Terayama drew

together the politically radical and artistically vanguard elements of counterculture to make a first stab at

a more substantively independent cinema. The do-it-yourself aesthetic and wry sense of humor driving

Tomato Kechappu Kōtei is slightly ambiguous in the film, where the children are almost alarmingly able

to deadpan their way through a game of table tennis, for instance, in which a bound, naked adult woman is

used in place of a net. It is considerably clearer in a photograph of Terayama himself on the set, posing on

a mash-up of bicycle and mannequin parts they called “the pleasure machine” (kairakukikai; Figure 2.3).

After Otona-gari, Terayama would continue to write for radio at a pace of about three new scripts per

year until 1969, when Mokushiroku (Apocalypse) would mark the end of his steady output. There would

be one last radio drama in 1980, an adaptation of an Izumi Kyōka short story called “Tsume no namida”

(Fingernail’s tears). Noteworthy among Terayama’s 1960s radio drama work is the March 1961 Itsumo

uraguchi de utatta (Always sang at the backdoor), a quasi-documentary about Terayama’s courtship with

Kujō Eiko (now Kujō Kyōko). Mō yobu na yo, umi yo (Stop calling to me, ocean), from August 1961,

traces the development of a friendship between a Japanese boy named Shunta and a black American

soldier named Bobby. This friendship is broken up by protesters of the security treaty, and a suggestion is

made in passing that it may actually be more “democratic” (on a global scale) to have the U.S. bases in

Japan so that the different races have more chance to interact. Terayama also does a series of folktale

style dramas during the years 1962 through 1964, including Osorezan (Mt. Osore, lit. “Mt. Fear”), based

on the mountain in Terayama’s home prefecture of Aomori associated with Buddhist hell; Inugami aruki

(Dog spirit walking), about the belief of a dog curse on particular families that ostracizes them; and

Yamanba (Mountain witch), long a figure of the noh and kabuki stages, this first commission from NHK

would win Terayama a grand prize in the radio division of the Prix Italia contest for broadcasting.

Positioning the Narrator in Stereophonic Space

Radio surpassed television in the material progress of its sound technology with the advent of stereo

radio broadcasting in Japan, the most primitive form of which occurred in 1952, the year before NHK

began its first television broadcasts.³⁸It may have been in this early era of the technology that scenarists

were most conscious of radio’s material properties. Terayama’s first experiment with stereo was a

collaboration in 1966 with NHK radio producer Sasaki Shōichirō on an hour-long radio drama called

Kometto Ikeya (Comet Ikeya).³⁹Building off of a set of Sasaki’s interviews with a young stargazer named

Ikeya Kaoru, who had just discovered a new comet in 1963, Terayama added a fictional narrative to

complement the documentary elements.⁴⁰In his notes to the script, he describes the project in the

following way: “When creating this piece I thought up a method in which one would feel their way

through a mental labyrinth as reality and non-reality (fiction and documentary in content; monaural and

stereo in technological form) criss-crossed through layers of the three-dimensional stereo space.”⁴¹In

preparing this nonvisual radio drama, then, Terayama visualized a sound space in which document and

fiction are mapped onto multidimensional sound fields and unidimensional sound layers within three-

dimensional space.

Figure 2.3. Terayama blithely mounts a “pleasure machine” on the first day of shooting for the 1970

film Tomato kechappu kōtei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup). Courtesy of Kujō Kyōko and Terayama World.

Photograph by Sawatari Hajime.

The decision to use both stereophonic and monaural sound in one composition sets up several

interesting, and difficult, analytical puzzles. First, once a sound field is established as stereophonic

(which happens from the start in this case), can listeners distinguish between monaural sound and stereo

sound centered between the left and right channels? Imagine a conversation between A, B, and C, for

example. If A is placed to the left, B in the center, and C to the right, is there any material difference

between a conversation recorded in stereo and one in which only B’s lines have been replaced by a mono

recording? In both cases, the amplitude of B’s voice would be evenly balanced between the two speakers,

creating the effect of centering within a space conceived of as multidimensional but that could easily slip

into sounding like an unpositioned, monaural voice if the space were reconceived of as nonstereo. The

next question that arises, then, is whether mono can be established in contradistinction to stereo, or

whether the establishment of stereo space conditions the reception of mono voices, bending them into

centered voices between the speakers.

Before stereo broadcasting was possible over a single FM channel, the creation of a stereophonic

sound field with broadcast radio required two receivers (very rare for families at the time, so the second

set was typically borrowed from a neighbor). One was tuned to NHK 1 (594 kHz) and the other to NHK 2

(693 kHz)—the method itself was called rittai hōsō (lit., “three-dimensional broadcasting”). The

announcer would ask listeners to adjust the volume on both sets until his voice became centered between

the two radios. What is critical here is that the announcer’s voice started as an unpositioned, ethereal,

narrational, ubiquitous, monaural, universal sound emanating from two speakers at the same time. It was

then conceptually shifted into a positioned, concrete (but absent), and particularized presence centered

within the stereophonic space before the stereophonic broadcast even began. This shift was importantly

discursive, enabled by the slippage structure inherent in centered particularities—the centered

particularity can slip into a universal, but a universal can also be slipped into a centered and particular

position. The nature of the sonic space went through three stages of mental preparation: deliberately

setting up the stereo apparatus, listening to the announcer “announce” the establishment of the stereo

space, and then finally the modulated broadcast producing the effect of a spatialized sound field—but the

transition had to be coached. Language here is performing the action of creating stereo from monaural

space.⁴²Having calibrated the apparatus, NHK would then broadcast a series of stereo sounds such as a

train passing from left to right, which must have been an extraordinary experience at the time—

particularly for the living room.⁴³The earliest of these broadcasts was done on December 20, 1952, when

NHK broadcast a stereo version of Wagner’s Tannhäuser as part of their Saturday concert series.⁴⁴

During 1953 and 1954, NHK would use the technology for nine programs, the third of which was Japan’s

first stereo radio drama—a recording of a shinpa performance called Musuko no seishun (My son’s

adolescence) by the Meijiza troupe. It was broadcast on March 22, 1953, just one and a half months after

television broadcasting began on February 1.⁴⁵

Considered broadly, then, the two new additions to the simple, monaural radio broadcasting of the past

were split between the media of television and radio in 1953—television added moving visual images,

and radio added stereo. Starting in November 1954, stereo broadcasting through the rittai hōsō system

was fully integrated into NHK’s weekly radio programming with a show called Rittai ongakudō (Stereo

music hall), which aired for thirty minutes each Saturday afternoon.⁴⁶These broadcasts became such a

regular feature that by 1958 Columbia released a single “stereo set” system, Model 31, with both a

turntable and two receivers (one for each speaker) to better facilitate NHK’s three-dimensional

programming.⁴⁷The artistic potential surrounding slippage between mono and stereo space at this hinge

of centered voices is a material property of the medium that Terayama would playfully exploit in Kometto

Ikeya, adding a degree of reflexivity that likely contributed to it winning the Prix Italia for radio drama in

the second year that the contest included a category specifically for stereo dramas.⁴⁸Kometto Ikeya

became a poster child project for early FM stereo broadcasting. Those who had upgraded their stereo

equipment were privy to a sneak preview of the drama via NHK-FM on August 31, 1966 (when it had

been nominated for a Prix Italia award).⁴⁹After receiving the award on September 26, encore broadcasts

were done via the rittai hōsō system of NHK-1 and NHK-2 on October 2.⁵⁰

These problems of distinguishing between stereo and monaural sound are particularly fascinating when

they are considered as metaphors for the relationship between the particular and the universal. As such,

this experimentation with stereo may help us think through issues of the slippage of power from a centered

particularity to a universal or from a universal to a centered particularity. Can we hear any difference

between a centered voice of power and a “universal truth,” a “universal human right,” or an “international

standard”? Is the struggle to maintain the concept of universality waged, then, primarily by attempting to

center the ideas that compete for universality and allowing the automatic mechanism of slippage between

centered particularities and universals to do the rest of the work? If a universality is then positioned

within a three-dimensional space (e.g., by the presence of another voice to the side), then does that

centered voice lose its authoritative aura?

Slippage between a positioned stereo voice and an ethereal monaural voice is one of several types of

slippage in the drama—the main type being quick shifts between initially unrelated narratives. Clips from

the documentary-style interview with Ikeya Kaoru about his discovery of the comet are intercut with a

fictional drama about a runaway businessman, Hasegawa Tadashi, in such a way as to willfully confuse

the audience. For example, both events were reported in the newspaper on the same day, and the naïve

narrator of the drama insists on a causal relationship between them. Later, a man visits Mrs. Hasegawa to

ask about her missing husband. Just after he knocks on the door and asks, “Is this the Hasegawa

residence?” the drama cuts to the recording of the Ikeya interview, where Ikeya is being asked about the

moment he found the comet as well as metaphysical questions about what he thinks it all might mean. At

the end of the Ikeya interview, the man asks, “Where do you think it’s going?” (Doko e iku to omoimasu

ka?). The question is left unanswered, and then repeated, but it is Hasegawa’s wife who answers it. She

would have heard the same line as “Where do you think he’s going?” effectively setting up an extended

pivot word (kakekotoba), a standard technique of the tanka genre in which Terayama started his literary

career. There is a note in the script at this point that reads, “This question will act as a bridge crossing.

Ikeya’s response and Mrs. Hasegawa’s response must transition smoothly and within the same space.”⁵¹

That transition is paralleled by a shift in action from the left channel to the right speaker. Ikeya’s interview

took place only on the left speaker (technically mono, but positioned as “left” within the stereo space), but

the dialogue with Mrs. Hasagawa occurs on the right. The audio jump cut from the left to the right channel

that links these narratives parallels the earlier conceptual leap that the narrator underwent to link the two

newspaper articles (one about Ikeya’s discovery and another about Hasegawa’s disappearance).

What Terayama is toying with here is an exaggerated version of the implied connection between

conspicuously disparate items in newspapers, which Benedict Anderson famously described as one way

that disparate groups of people under the umbrella of a nation are unified through the construction of

“imagined communities”:

What is the essential literary convention of the newspaper? If we were to look at a sample front page

of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali, a

gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by

Mitterrand. Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer

caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each

other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition (a later

edition will substitute a baseball triumph for Mitterrand) shows that the linkage between them is

imagined.⁵²

The newspaper, by Anderson’s explanation, operates like a classic novel plot to imply (and often fulfill

an expectation for) an interconnectivity between otherwise independent lives—the novel is “a device for

the presentation of simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty time’” and, as such, is “a precise analogue of the

idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”⁵³

In Kometto Ikeya, Terayama exaggerates the community-generating function of the newspaper format—

extended to the extreme of direct and monolinear causality. The drama opens with its narrator (a naïve,

blind, adolescent girl) reading separate articles about Ikeya’s comet and Hasegawa’s disappearance in

her Braille newspaper. She then becomes convinced that some form of the law of conservation of matter

(or maybe reincarnation) was operating on a cosmic scale, such that the runaway salaryman, Mr.

Hasegawa, would transform into the comet that Ikeya discovered: “Why would a new star appear? Maybe

something old disappeared from this world in exchange.”⁵⁴This mockery of overapplication of the

conservation principle shows up often in Terayama’s work and might best be understood as a critique of

zero-sum logic. In his 1964 radio drama Yamanba, the protagonist is faced with his limited food supply

and is told that in order to marry a wife, he must first kill his mother.⁵⁵Later, in a 1973 play called Mōjin

shokan (Letter on the blind), a group of magicians have the following conversation:

MAGICIAN 2: Hey, keep your eyes shut!

MAGICIAN 1: Me?

MAGICIAN 2: I told you to keep them shut!

MAGICIAN 1: What for?

MAGICIAN 2: I can’t see when you open your eyes.

MAGICIAN 1: You can’t be serious.

MAGICIAN 2: The number of eyes in the world is a set quantity, you know. So if one person opens

their eyes, someone else has to close theirs.

MAGICIAN 1: But there are lots more people who can see than who are blind, your calculation must

be off.

MAGICIAN 2: Idiot! That’s why you’ll never land a leading role. The balance of open eyes and

closed eyes is all well regulated by night and day. When it’s day in Shanghai, it’s night in

England. When we’ve got our eyes open the people on the other side of the ocean have theirs

closed.⁵⁶

In the case of the blind narrator of Kometto Ikeya, there is more driving her to conclude that these events

are linked than simply their rough simultaneity or an exaggerated faith in karmic balance. After learning of

both stories and knowing that both occurred on the same day, she says in a loose and speculative tone,

“There’s a connection, there must be a connection. Even the smallest events in back alleys could all be

connected to me. The song I sang today might have cheered someone up on the street, and the delayed train

I rode today may have reminded someone else of a suicide on the tracks and made them sad. But,

[suddenly lucid] the day will surely come when I meet those strangers.”⁵⁷It seems to be the desire for

community, in this case, that drives her overreading of the possible connections between stories in the

newspaper—that is, the potential for expanding her community underwrites this bridging of disparate

events. Terayama’s contribution to Anderson’s analysis, then, might be to look at the micromechanics

driving the maintenance of an individual’s desire for social connectivity. What is critical here is the

timing: the blind narrator’s expectation of balance and her desire to find some kind of absence to match

the appearance of the comet comes before she learns of Hasegawa’s disappearance—she learns of the

new existence and then searches for what may have been lost in order to even the scales.

Terayama is also invoking a line of mythology in this narrative found at least as far back as Cicero—

one that explains that the spirits of the dead become stars in the night sky. Cicero’s comments on the topic

in his Tusculan Disputations draw on the Pythagorean notion of the permanence of souls, adding,

If the soul, as we regard it, belongs to the four classes of elements of which all things are said to

consist, it consists of kindled air . . . and such a soul necessarily strives to reach higher regions . . .

If it survives unadulterated and unchanged in substance, it is of necessity carried away so rapidly as

to pierce and part asunder all this atmosphere of ours . . . When the soul has passed this tract and

reaches to and recognizes a substance resembling its own, it stops amongst the fires which are

formed of rarefied air and the modified glow of the sun and ceases to make higher ascent. For when

it has reached conditions of lightness and heat resembling its own, it becomes quite motionless, as

though in a state of equilibrium with its surroundings, and then, and not before, finds its natural

home, when it has pierced to conditions resembling its own, and there, with all its needs satisfied, it

will be nourished and maintained on the same food which maintains and nourishes the stars.⁵⁸

Tracing the lineage of these ideas helps make sense of why the interview of Mrs. Hasegawa might focus

not only on her husband’s disappearance but also on the possibility of his death, as well as why the

interview of Ikeya challenges him on metaphysical questions regarding the ultimate origin of the comet he

discovers. Here, we are being asked to consider the possibility of a human soul transforming itself into a

star—that Mr. Hasegawa has literally become Comet Ikeya.

Stranger than the slippage between two narratives in the drama is another slippage between the

narrator and other characters. Their relationship—specifically, their awareness of each other—is never

made fully clear, or perhaps more accurately, it is put into an ambiguous, perplexing state from the start

and then consciously and cleverly maintained in that state of indeterminacy until the end. All of this is

complicated by the narrator’s blindness and the additional possibilities that generates—others could be in

the same room, but she might not know it. The drama begins with the narrator reading aloud from a Braille

newspaper about Ikeya’s discovery of this new comet. She then speculates that something else must have

disappeared to balance out its appearance and concludes her monologue by asking if anything has in fact

disappeared. Then, the man who will later interview Ikeya and Mrs. Hasegawa asks a question that at

first seems to be directed at her. Next, we jump to small talk among “voices” in a café, which seems to

respond to this man’s question. Although it initially seems as though all four of these characters are in a

single space and speaking to each other, it turns out that this is logically impossible and that there must in

fact be three layers of independent dialogue intercut in a deliberately confusing arrangement:

BLIND GIRL: Somebody . . . somebody tell me. What was it that disappeared?

MAN: Wha? Did you just say something?

VOICE 1: I didn’t say a thing.

VOICE 2: You must be hearing things.⁵⁹

This conversation in the café moves to headlines from the newspaper and eventually remarks on the

oddness of a comet’s discovery and the disappearance of a businessman occurring on the same day,

apparently answering the girl’s original question. Where at first it seemed that the man and the girl are in

conversation, we quickly correct that to assume that the man is speaking with the “voices” in the café. In

other words, we assume for a moment that the girl has become a participating character within the story,

but then she is just as quickly withdrawn back to her position as the disconnected narrator.⁶⁰Yet,

following the dialogue carefully, we notice that the man never speaks again in the café scene among these

“voices,” and even after the voices in the café have discovered and read aloud the two headlines (which

the man must have heard if he had been there with them), the man credits not the voices from the café but

the blind girl with conveying the news to him: “The words of that blind girl from this morning are still in

my ears: Is there a connection between the new comet Ikeya Kaoru discovered and the businessman who

disappeared?”⁶¹So the man seems not to have been in the café at all. And yet now he credits the girl,

meaning that information is flowing from her to him, but earlier lines had demonstrated that the girl

learned of the missing businessman from the voices in the café. There is a time-violating flow of

information here from the voices to the girl to the man, then, that never seems to develop into actual

dialogue (despite our instinct to hear it as such). While the girl is the blind one, no one else seems to

notice her in the café (if she was actually there), and the audience of the drama struggles to visualize her

position among the other characters—she is both present and absent simultaneously, much the same way

as her voice (centered between the speakers, or in mono, we cannot know) is both there and not there.

At this point, the girl delivers the lines “There’s a connection, there must be a connection,” mentioned

previously, as though she has just found the disappearance she was searching for at the moment the men in

the café read the headlines. Of course, this could be another trick—the note preceding her line says that it

is to sound “like a voice from a different dimension”⁶²—she could just as easily have read the same story

in her own Braille newspaper, with the two independent discoveries juxtaposed for effect. Or Terayama

could be playing a bit more here with the creation of an imaginary community of fellow newspaper

readers. The point is that we, as the audience, are led to create the causality between characters and

events first (and search for proof of that link later) within the radio drama in exactly the same way that the

blind narrator links disparate events in the course of the drama itself.

Notes in the script regarding the use of monaural voices within this otherwise stereo production begin

in the second of four segments. The interviewer from the first scene has two monaural monologues

overlaid onto a conversation among Hasegawa’s friends, who are playing a game of go. The narrative

returns to the go players and then shifts to a representation of the merging of stars and humans that forms

the central theme. Terayama’s note reads, “From another dimension, a child’s voice reading out the names

of the constellations draws gradually nearer, starting with Andromeda and continuing in alphabetical

order. This should express the Milky Way galaxy. Then, using a piano, another celestial body expands in

the form of a celesta. A man begins apathetically reading names from the telephone book in alphabetical

order. It should feel forlorn like counting stars in the vast night sky. The two voices move toward the

center, merge together, then are blown away by the wind and disappear.”⁶³This is the confluence of two

voices: one associated with Ikeya’s comet, as a celestial body among the constellations, and the other

associated with Hasegawa, as one of many anonymous names from the telephone book (Hasegawa

Tadashi was selected as one of the most common names after Nakamura Ichirō).⁶⁴They have moved from

their discrete positions within the stereo field (i.e., one left, one right) and merged at the critical point at

the center where sound can slip from a centered presence into being an ethereal, monaural, universalized

narrational voice. Most critically, it is at this center point where the voices risk losing their position-

based presence and disappear. The false universals, once exposed, can no longer exist within this

stereoized, particularized space.

Ikeya Kaoru was not the only one gazing at the night sky to look for new stars in January 1963; his

discovery came at a time of broad popular interest in outer space. The combination of Sputnik (1957), the

U.S. response with Explorer I (1958), and Kennedy’s May 1961 announcement that a man would walk on

the moon by the end of the decade laid the foundation for a new fascination with outer space. The

landscape of the heavens was suddenly transformed into a potential destination. But it may have been the

launch of the Telstar communications satellite, and the first successful transatlantic transmissions of

television using the new transceiver in June 1962, which fully activated public interest. Catching a

glimpse of Telstar in the night sky must have seemed a rite of passage at the time. Telstar was one of the

first artificial “stars” in the heavens—one could no longer even look straight up at night without the risk

of seeing traces of human intervention. Anticipation was particularly high in Japan because the promise of

live satellite broadcasts of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was well positioned to be the space age’s first

global television event and would have been so had Kennedy not been assassinated. The first experiment

to test the satellite relay system between Japan and the United States was scheduled well in advance for

November 23, 1963, and a recorded address from Kennedy to the Japanese public was planned using the

new technology.⁶⁵The Asahi’s front-page headlines on the morning of November 20 included an

announcement of the upcoming historical broadcast, “First TV Broadcasts over the Pacific, Ten

Experiments Starting the 23rd”: “The first experiment is planned to run from 5:26 to 5:46 A.M. on the

23rd, and the second from 8:58 to 9:15 A.M. the same day. If reception is good, plans include the

broadcast of a taped message from President Kennedy. A live broadcast would be impossible because the

transmitter, which is in the Mojave desert south of Los Angeles, is not linked to Washington.”⁶⁶The

Japanese public awoke on November 23 and turned on their sets hoping to see Kennedy’s greeting but

instead learned of his assassination, which had happened just a few hours earlier (Kennedy was shot at

3:30 A.M. Japan time on November 23).⁶⁷The satellite broadcast of the Olympics was accomplished,

although only to the United States (with a special announcement by President Johnson in 1964), and only

in short bursts. Since the satellites were not yet positioned in higher, stationary orbits, they only provided

about a twenty-minute window for linking the continents.

Ikeya Kaoru’s comet discovery on January 3, 1963, occurred during the hopeful expectation following

Sputnik and Telstar and was not yet marred by Kennedy’s death announced by early satellite television.

The space theme was in the midst of an optimistic peak in January 1963. Most of the major papers ran a

small piece announcing Ikeya’s discovery by January 8 or 9, often embedded in a cluster of outer-space

articles. The Asahi, for example, writes of his discovery on a page facing installment number seven of a

fifteen-part series called Chikyū no nakama-tachi (Friends of Earth), which had been running since the

first of the month with boxed pieces on topics like Mars and the Mariner 2 satellite. The Mainichi

essentially announces 1963 to be the year of the Telstar with a half-page photo of its transceiver radar

dome on January 1’s front page: “The Telstar Base—A huge white dome sits in a clearing of pines in the

city of Andover, Maine in the northeastern United States. Since the launch of the Telstar satellite on July

10, 1962, which announced the dawn of a communications revolution, this transceiver of continent-linking

outer space television has been letting out its high pitched hum. We are not far from the day when the

entire world can enjoy the same TV programs.”⁶⁸Under the photo is a poem by Japan’s postwar bard,

Tanikawa Shuntarō, comparing the new radar domes to Mongolian yurts and Eskimo igloos and diffusing

anxiety about a potential intercontinental ballistic missile function in the cold war by noting that humans

make yurts, igloos, and radar domes, and that our human curiosity about outer space will never cease.⁶⁹

On the same day, in the Asahi, the Nippon Electric Company (NEC) ran a full page advertisement

dominated by an image of the Telstar circling the Earth that announced their production of a thirty-meter-

wide parabolic antenna that was capable of receiving signals as weak as one ten-quadrillionth of a watt,

that the majority of the microwave transceivers for television around the country were NEC products, and

that their “television and radio broadcasting equipment is used not just domestically but has been

exported abroad, and has come to play a leading role in the acquisition of foreign capital.”⁷⁰On January

6, the Asahi ran a short article on that same NEC antenna titled “Rushing Construction for the Olympics:

The Outer Space Transmission Center—First, the Completion of the Parabolic Antenna,” which detailed

some of the struggle between the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and the Finance Ministry to

approve accelerated funding for the remaining equipment needed to have the transmission center in

Kagoshima up and running by the Olympics in 1964.⁷¹

If Nakamura Ichirō, the 1959 radio drama, operated in a relationship with the first wave of television

to hit Japan in time for the imperial wedding, then Kometto Ikeya was set against the second wave, often

characterized as the color-television boom immediately preceding the Tokyo Olympics (which was much

more significantly the advent of global television through the use of satellite transmission). Rather than

sitting at the breakfast table reading the Asahi and (perhaps subconsciously) imagining a nation of other

Japanese reading the same newspaper, television audiences could watch the Olympics in 1964 and

imagine the growing community of television-owning global citizens who were watching exactly the same

images at essentially the same moment—satellite television stood to synchronize a global collectivity

through simultaneous and instantaneous access to the news.

There are two moments in Kometto Ikeya that suggest Terayama may have been considering the

clustering of the Olympics, new celestial bodies (a conflation of comet discovery and artificial satellites),

and an emergent form of globalism. The first is a direct reference to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The

Olympic theme song is played to introduce a scene in which the man who interviewed Mrs. Hasegawa

searches in vain for her missing husband among the massive crowds after hearing from an acquaintance

that Hasegawa had been spotted at the games. His wife finally gives up waiting for him after a year and a

half has passed, and the narrative follows her throwing away his things that had remained in their home in

the interim. The final scene includes a brief, but important, reference to another comet discovered by a

Japanese astronomer: “‘Even if you can’t see it, if you think you can see it . . . then you become able to

see it.’ What sad words those are. And yet they seem to me to be like an astrological puzzle. Just as I

calculated from the mystery of the Crommelin Comet that disappeared the moment it was discovered,

searching for it, tracking it down, the way this single businessman’s route got pinched between Leo and

Corvus, it just couldn’t be true. You can’t retract a human heart that’s grown distant with only the strength

of Newton’s universal gravitation.”⁷²This short statement is extremely dense. The creation of existence

through belief in existence can be read as a broad comment on the nature of knowledge or as a more

specific reference to the creation of stereo space by the radio announcer’s speech act claiming himself to

be a centered presence between the speakers. The Crommelin Comet is also of particular interest because

it was discovered several times throughout the nineteenth century, never by Crommelin himself, and was

first photographed by Yamazaki Masamitsu on October 26, 1928. Yamazaki was not credited for the

discovery, however, because poor weather conditions prevented confirmation until after the comet moved

out of visible range—it had literally “disappeared the moment it was discovered.”⁷³Had Yamazaki been

able to communicate with Tokyo (and Tokyo with Copenhagen) as quickly as Ikeya could in 1963, there

would have been a better chance of him being recognized for the discovery. Advances in the speed and

range of international communication by the 1960s set up a structure in which this nineteen-year-old could

be fully credited and his comet known to astronomers around the entire world as Comet Ikeya. The global

recognition is marked in the domestic name for the comet (Ikeya Suisei, with Ikeya’s name in the phonetic

katakana), and further extended in the radio drama to its international name: Kometto Ikeya, or Comet

Ikeya.

The blind narrator, a fairly obvious self-reflexive comment on the relationship between listeners and

the medium of radio, is not the only case of a blind character showing up in Terayama’s radio dramas.

They are so common, in fact, that the Terayama scholar Moriyasu Toshihisa concludes, “The use of blind

protagonists in this aural medium of the radio drama, where listeners are forced to experience the aural

experiment together with the characters, might rightly be seen as no more than an orthodox device based

on the particularities of the medium.”⁷⁴It is doubtful, however, that radio audiences ever felt “blind”

before the popularization of television, so if this is a comment on the properties of radio, then it might be

better understood as a statement about the way particular aspects of a medium do not reveal themselves

until a new technology threatens to replace it. Because Terayama’s radio dramas were all written during

the period when television was first threatening, and then truly overtaking radio as the normative medium

for broadcast news and entertainment, any reflexivity would naturally engage the historical nature of this

situation—Terayama was writing blind protagonists into his radio dramas at the very moment radio was

becoming a blind medium in the face of television’s vision. Ikeya’s discovery of the comet correlates,

then, with the moment the transition from radio to television was effectively complete.

Looking carefully at the meaning of blindness in the text of Kometto Ikeya, it quickly becomes clear

that sensory perception is closely linked to the production of truth value. Unlike the sighted characters, the

blind narrator refuses to believe in the existence of things until she can physically touch an object. It may

seem a pedantic point to make, but Terayama is suggesting some fairly sophisticated ideas. One is the

rhetorical power of visual media, with this visual addition to broadcasting serving as a force against the

perhaps natural tendency for the truth value of any particular medium of communication to fall (i.e., are

new media ever less persuasive than the old?). NHK was particularly attuned to the truth value of this

new “seeing-is-believing” medium. The opening question the section of their 1993 survey on television,

which compared television to newspapers, was “Which one do you think conveys the truth?” Respondents

favored television to newspapers 39 percent to 28 percent (but clearly distrusted both).⁷⁵

The narrator’s insistence that she would not believe in anything she could not touch invokes Diderot’s

Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See. Diderot’s piece is concerned with insights made

possible by the restriction of perception in much the same way Terayama seems to have been interested in

the possibility of radio in the age of television. Much of Diderot’s text focuses on the blind Cambridge

mathematician Nicolas Saunderson, including the following striking refusal delivered on his deathbed to a

clergyman offering his last rites: “‘Ah, sir,’ replied the blind philosopher, ‘don’t talk to me of this

magnificent spectacle, which it has never been my lot to enjoy. I have been condemned to spend my life in

darkness, and you cite wonders quite out of my understanding, and which are only evidence for you and

those who see as you do. If you want to make me believe in God you must make me touch Him.’”⁷⁶The

narrator of Kometto Ikeya has a similar exchange with Ikeya Kaoru:

GIRL: Mr. Ikeya! What’s a star?

IKEYA: Stars are visible all the time, but only the people who realize that stars are shining up there

can see them. Even if you’re blind, as long as you realize that it’s there you can see it.

GIRL: Have you ever touched one?

IKEYA: No, I’ve never touched one. Meteorites are a kind of star, and I’ve touched one of those. Your

hand can’t reach them, not even if you stand on tiptoe. They’re really, really far away.

GIRL: Then no one really knows the nature of the stars!⁷⁷

Terayama would return to Diderot’s text again in his play, which borrows its title (Mōjin shokan, quoted

earlier), further exploring the problem of knowledge’s relationship to perception, the production of truth

value in that process, and the paradoxical advantages to perceptual restraint.

There is one final feature of Kometto Ikeya that is less apparent in the script than in the sound

recording but that recurs enough to become conspicuous and provides further evidence that the interaction

between audio and visual representation forms the core of this experiment with stereo. While stereo

technology allows voices to be placed left or right along a line between the two speakers, the project

seems far more interested in creating illusion of depth and verticality: layers of sound moving forward

and back from the listener or up and down. Such a sound field is technically impossible without

additional speakers and so must be approximated using distance from the recording microphone, muffling,

amplification, and other techniques. These methods manipulate tone color and trigger our perception to

categorize the sounds as nearer or farther away based on memory of similar sounds and their qualities

relative to other sounds within the drama. (It is useful to remember that the daily experience of three-

dimensional sound fields is always mediated by our two ears, meaning that sound recorded with two

microphones and replayed through two speakers or headphones can accurately reproduce the biological

apparatus.)

But why would Terayama focus energy on developing depth in a radio drama specifically designed to

exploit the new possibilities of stereo? There are a few interesting possibilities. The first is that this

parallels the longer history of stereo technologies, which were first (and for a much longer time) a visual,

rather than audio, means to fool human perception. Using two slightly different photographs, one viewed

with the left eye and the other with the right, stereoscopic images with the illusion of depth entered world

culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Wheatstone’s reflecting stereoscope (1838) was

popularized by its exhibition at the first World’s Fair, the “Great Exhibition of All Nations,” in London’s

Hyde Park in 1851. In 1862, the Holmes stereopticon was released and quickly became the world

standard, again popularized through the World’s Fairs. The mass-market View-Master, which has almost

managed to keep stereo photography alive to the present day, was introduced in 1939 and sold well at the

New York World’s Fair that year.⁷⁸Stereoscopic images add positionality forward and back from the

viewer, and the Kometto Ikeya production crew may have been attempting to create a similar kind of

sonic depth of field.

Another compelling possibility is that the Kometto Ikeya production staff wanted to emphasize the

stimulation of imagination that occurs when expression is pushed beyond a medium’s ability to faithfully

represent it. If the medium itself offers the placement of sound on only one dimension (the line between

the speakers), Terayama wants to push it to two dimensions (a plane stretching from the speakers to the

listener) to demonstrate the presence of human imagination in the creation of the sensation of presence—a

presence both artificial and under the subject’s control. Sasaki Shōichiro, the production director for

Kometto Ikeya and interviewer of Ikeya Kaoru, worked with the sound technicians at NHK to attempt to

make an approximation of sound so that it sounded as though it was moving vertically upward toward the

heavens, which would extend the flat, two-dimensional sound plane formed between the speakers and

listener into a fully three-dimensional (rittai) space.⁷⁹The constant tension between people on Earth and

stars in the sky throughout the piece reflects this fundamental problem facing stereo sound—that is, the

material difficulty in creating the illusion of vertical movement with right and left channels. The NHK

radio director Okino Ryō, who worked with Terayama on the 1967 radio drama Mandara and the 1969

Mokushiroku, addresses the problem of hearing vertical motion through stationary speakers in a 1970

round table:

Speaking of waterfalls, when I dove into stereo in probably 1961 or ’62 an overwhelming majority of

people thought the downward motion of a waterfall would come through in stereo. But stereo is just

right and left, so that was absolutely impossible. And even today, a lot of people believe that with a

flowing river the sound itself moves. But when a river is flowing, the sounds don’t move at all.

What’s making the noise is water hitting rocks or pilings, so the noise itself doesn’t ever move side

to side. But if we visualize it we see a moving river. We think the sound must be moving, too, but

we’re being fooled. Stereo seems to cause these sorts of illusions.⁸⁰

Here we can return to the taped quotation from Ikeya that is repeated like a mantra throughout the piece:

“You see it because you believe you can see it. Even if you can’t see a comet, once you believe you can

see it, then it becomes visible.”⁸¹This line was not scripted by Terayama but came directly from Ikeya in

interviews with Sasaki and thereby forms the most important part of the documentary side of this project.

Had Ikeya said the same thing about sound, he would have been nicely in line with Okino’s point, making

a perfect summary of the technology of stereophonic radio and the conceptual prerequisite to “hearing” a

voice as centered between two speakers. His comment is even more extraordinary, however, since it

implies that vision, too, is not a pure sensation but one inflected, and possibly enhanced, in its interaction

with imagination.

CHAPTER 3

Boxing—Stuttering—Graffiti

WHAT GENERATES THE SENSATION OF presence and immediacy in the sport of boxing? Is it the flirtation with

death (and murder) that excites both boxer and boxing fan? If so, is the possibility of death in the ring

required for that excitement? Does boxing need an occasional sacrifice to maintain its truth value? Joyce

Carol Oates confesses (as do many others) that she is drawn to this descendent of gladiatorial battles with

deep, conflicting emotions about her complicity in the injuries that result.¹The allure of the sport may be

as simple as a desire to see a human life end in spectacle—which may not be as ugly an impulse as it

seems if it is ultimately a drive to rewrite knowledge of the more typical banality of death and the way it

dovetails so seamlessly into the flow of everyday life.

Is this sport a sample of pure violence, held just within the limits of legality? It can look like

sanctioned assault, brought to the edge of murder—or at least a simulation of murder in cases of a clean

knockout, the unconscious boxer felled like a tree in the ring, rendering the score and all the judges

irrelevant with the winner upright and the loser prone on the mat. Boxers may seem more alive because of

this tangible risk of death, and the sport may be appealing because the audience can participate

vicariously in that affirmation of life and will of the winner exchanged for the denial of life and will of

the opponent. This may be a structure at work in generating the sport’s appeal, and if so, it creates a zero-

sum system that requires not only death but also occasional homicide in order to generate the perception

of human life.

Boxing, however, may appeal less for its reality effect than for its fictionality. The sport is filled with

simulation: shadowboxing against imaginary opponents, knockouts that in another context would be

murders, punches driven by fear of failure rather than anger. It fascinates because it stands in the liminal

space between the upper limit of civil society and the bottom limit of war culture. It may be this insight

into human nature—the ability to will transitions between brute and compassionate behavior—that creates

the fascination with the sport. The “reality” of boxing, then, may have something to do with this mixture of

real and fictional elements, and it may appeal to fans and others because it parallels the mixture of direct

and imagined events within our everyday experience.

Terayama spent much of the 1960s fascinated, along with much of the world, with boxing and the

problems it forced viewers to face. The sport encapsulated a debate between self-determination (let ’em

fight) and interventionism (call off the fight) that would resonate with Third World independence

movements, civil rights, and the students behind the barricades. Terayama’s spin on this discourse,

however, would be to position boxing in a cluster of formations, including stuttering, graffiti, jazz, and

gambling, which, in their ad-libbed style, enhance a sensation of presence and a feeling of being in the

now.

Death in the Ring

The ethical dilemma of death in the ring—letting the boxers fight with the goal of a knockout versus the

obligation of intervention by authorities (doctors or referees) to protect the prizefighters from themselves

—would become the dominant boxing narrative of the 1960s. But Terayama’s first boxing piece, a

screenplay called Jūkyūsai no burūsu (The nineteen-year-old blues, 1959) also opens with this very

problem:

SCENE 1: In a boxing ring. A middle-aged boxer is continuously punched by a younger boxer, Shōji.

Pushed against the ropes, he can no longer put up a fight. Next, faces of the crowd laughing hard,

cramming hotdogs into their mouths, drinking Coca-Cola, hooting, and whistling. Suddenly the

crowd quiets. The middle-aged man is dead.²

The scene that follows depicts another middle-aged man, accompanied by a young sidekick, running up to

the top of a building with a chicken in his arms. They have apparently made a bet about whether chickens

can fly, the older man claiming that the bird will manage to slow itself down enough in the panic of free

fall to land safely on the pavement and the boy demanding cigarettes if his own prediction, that it will fall

like a rock and die, turns out to be correct. The older man drops the bird, and it falls hard to the ground

only to get run over by a truck—moot point.

Why this strange juxtaposition? Why open with the middle-aged man being battered to death in the ring

followed by the killing of this bird? Did the older man exempt himself from blame for the bird’s death

with his good faith that it could fly (as gamblers at the fight might exempt themselves from blame by

arguing that they had bet on the dead man)? Terayama may be opening with this pair of images to

inaugurate a debate about the nature of responsibility for death in the ring—namely, by asking if the act of

stepping into a boxing ring amounts to a relinquishment of a claim to murder, if the boxing ring functions

as a tiny square of extraterritoriality inside of which the rule of law does not apply. Or Terayama may be

asking whether this was a case of criminal recklessness—was the man on the roof responsible for the

death of the bird despite believing it could fly? Did Shōji kill the older boxer, was it pressure from the

crowd that kept the fight going too long, or was this criminal neglect on the part of the referee or the man’s

trainer? Alternatively, is the flurry to name a murderer or a set of complicit parties actually driven by our

discomfort with this extra-legal space—do we start pointing fingers because even one small square of

lawlessness is too much for us to handle?

These are the questions of individual or combined culpability that Bob Dylan would later ask after a

March 1963 ring death in his song “Who Killed Davey Moore?” Dylan interrogates the referee’s

judgment, the crowd’s desire for blood, the manager’s nonchalance, forces of the gambling economy, the

boxing critic’s dependence on the sport, and the challenger’s need for a job and then follows each with a

predictable excuse. Moore’s death was particularly troubling because it was the third title-bout case of

death in the ring in as many years during the early 1960s.³The first, Harry Campbell’s routine loss of a

ten-round decision to Al Medrano at Madison Square Garden, occurred in May 1961. After the fight,

Campbell fell into a coma and died a few days later. This was reported in the newspaper Asahi shinbun

with comments that the fragility of veins and arteries in the brain make it possible to burst them during a

match, but aneurysms are difficult to diagnose and almost impossible to predict.⁴This first case was

dismissed as a freak accident. The weekly magazine Shūkan Asahi ran an article that asked, “Is Boxing a

Murder Contest?” after the similar ring death in 1962 of Benny Paret, which occurred not even one full

year after Campbell’s. The article runs through an interrogation of possible suspects (referee, manager,

mob, and audience) similar to Dylan’s list and settles on the likelihood of a multiple and tangled

complicity that might call for outlawing the sport.⁵

The Asahi jānaru, in a telling break from the other Asahi weekly, responded just two days later with a

counterargument, stating that boxing is actually one of the safer sports and citing the following statistics:

in 1961, there were thirty-one student deaths recorded for American football and only nine deaths

worldwide for boxing; between 1955 and 1958, there had been fifty sports-related deaths in the United

Kingdom, among which one was a boxer and fourteen were cricket players—and yet there was no public

outcry for the banning of football or cricket. According to the article, “In a rank-order of risk for personal

injury insurance in the U.S., boxing ranked seventh, even lower than American football and pro-

wrestling.”⁶Norman Mailer makes an astute comment on Paret’s death in an article he wrote for Esquire

in February 1963 (one month before Davey Moore’s death): “Children had seen the fight on television.

There were editorials, gloomy forecasts that the Game was dead.”⁷The strong reaction to death in the

ring may have been due to its having been televised, although Mailer quickly deflects his analysis to

blame the “establishment doctors” and “mass media.” Still, Mailer defends the sport because “it showed

a part of what man was like, it belonged to his ability to create art and artful movement on the edge of

death or pain or danger or attack, and it had much to say about the subtleties of human style.” Mailer

seems even further drawn in by the sport after witnessing Paret’s death in person: “No, I was not down on

boxing, but I loved it with freedom no longer. It was more like somebody in your family was fighting

now.”⁸Terayama read Mailer’s essay in its Japanese translation and praised it in a profile of him

published in Asahi jānaru in December 1964.⁹

Mailer seems to support the notion that the appeal of boxing is in its flirtation with injury and that the

spectacle’s tingle rests in our knowledge (perhaps subconsciously) that we may witness a human death. It

almost goes without saying that the pleasure of watching boxing is the guilty pleasure of witnessing

sadistic behavior—that we enjoy the vicarious infliction of pain. Yet there are elements unique to the

sport that remind us that it is primarily a clash between two masochists who have trained themselves

ruthlessly, and particularly in the lighter weight divisions, who have been on painful, near-starvation diets

in order to stay within a weight class before the bouts. Each of the three major ring deaths in the early

1960s occurred in the lighter weight divisions, and two of them were title bouts. A champ who cannot

make weight before a title contest sacrifices the belt without a fight, and it was likely the combination of

these anorexic diets and the blows to the head caused the aneurysms that killed Campbell, Paret, and

Moore.

Terayama became friends in the early 1960s with a boxer named Harada Masahiko, known at home

and abroad as “Fighting” Harada, who would become a world champion amid the series of major ring

deaths. Born in 1943, he joined a boxing gym and began training at age fourteen. Two years later, he went

professional in the lightest weight class, the flyweight division with a limit of 51 kilograms (112 pounds).

In February 1960, at age sixteen, he took the national flyweight belt from Ebihara Hiroyuki, who would go

on to win a world championship himself. Harada’s first chance at a world title came in October 1962,

when he was given a fight with the champ, Pone Kingpetch of Thailand, who was looking to pad his

record with a series of easy wins. Harada surprised him in front of the home crowd in Tokyo, knocking

Kingpetch out in the eleventh round. At age nineteen, Harada was the youngest flyweight world champion

on record. Three months later, he would lose the title back to Kingpetch in Bangkok and vow to leave the

lightest division. In May 1965, Harada moved up a weight class to bantamweight and took the world title

from the Brazilian Eder Jofre, whom many critics rated to be the strongest boxer at the time, pound for

pound. Harada defended that title four times, including a rematch with Jofre in 1966, until he finally lost it

to the Australian Lionel Rose in February 1968. All six of those bantamweight title matches remain to this

day in the top twenty-five most-watched events in Japanese television history.¹⁰At the end of the 1960s,

after losing his bantamweight belt, Harada moved up yet another weight class to try for what he called a

“triple crown.” He challenged Australian Johnny Famechon in the featherweight division in July 1969 but

lost a controversial one-point decision. After being beaten decisively in a rematch back in Tokyo, Harada

retired after the match (at age twenty-six) and has managed a boxing gym ever since.¹¹

There are three important ways in which “Fighting” Harada should be historicized. First, his career

overlaps perfectly with both the rise of a broad international interest in boxing (driven largely by the

career of Muhammad Ali) and the period Terayama was writing on the sport. Second, his all-attacking

style (running from his corner to meet his opponent each round, punching constantly with both arms)

risked shifting the sport away from the gracefulness Mailer so appreciated, seemingly confirming the

sport’s reputation for simple aggression. Third, his dramatic weight loss before matches (several

divisions worth) put him at risk for the same type of aneurysm that killed three lighter-weight boxers in

the period of Harada’s rise. These elements of Harada’s career emphasize, and sometimes establish, the

themes that dominated Terayama’s writing about the sport throughout the decade. Terayama writes in

1965,

What was an “angry sport” is now in the process of shifting toward being a “hungry sport.” At the time

of his title match the buzz wasn’t “How much does Harada hate Jofre?” or “How angry is Jofre?”—

it was only questions about dropped weight. If you eat you might go over the weight limit, so they

fight after starving themselves. In the ring they end up swinging wildly just to try to knock away their

visions of meat and fish. But weight is just a problem of external restrictions, the problem of passion

is different. This problem of “dropped weight = empty stomach” links up to the genre of politics.¹²

The combination of Harada’s all-attacking style with his brutal training regimen sets him up perfectly as

an embodiment of the sport’s contradictions. By linking this to politics, Terayama seems to be asking who

is in power and by what structure that power might exchange hands.

Terayama is one of many boxing writers who focuses in on a particular image from the sport to answer

this question. The image is of a boxer, usually late in the fight and being badly beaten, struggling to see

because his eye has swollen shut from too many punches to the brow. He wants to continue, though, often

to save his pride by finishing the bout even if the decision is already obvious. In those circumstances, a

boxer might ask his “cut man,” whose usual job it is to close wounds, to pierce the swelling around his

eye with a razor. That drains the blood from the contusion, and the new cut can be quickly closed with

clotting agents, allowing the boxer’s swollen eye to open up enough to see. Terayama writes a tanka with

this image that is included in a collection called Den’en ni shisu (Death in the Country, 1965):

miru tame ni ryō mabuta o fukaku sakan to su kamisori no ha ni chihei o utsushi

About to cut both eyelids deep in order to see—the horizon reflected on the razor’s blade¹³

This poem juxtaposes the image of a boxer having his eyelids cut open with an homage to Luis Buñuel and

Salvador Dali’s surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou, in which a woman’s eye is famously depicted as

being sliced with a straight razor. There should be little doubt of the nature of this act—the boxer is

willing to be cut for a chance at winning the fight or at least salvaging his pride. If this were a suicidal

moment, then he would have the razor turned on his neck; if it were murderous, then he would turn it on

his opponent.

A similar image appears within a novel that Terayama claims was the model for the screenplay quoted

at the start of this chapter: Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1941). Near the end of Algren’s novel,

the boxer-protagonist has the following exchange with his manager between late rounds of a match:

“Cut the eye for me, Case,” Bruno asked. “It’s swellin’ tight as a drum.”

He closed his eyes when he felt the knife: then the loose wetness of the blood down his cheek and

the cool touch of collodion as it began to freeze over. He sat then, his eyes watering and his mouth

dripping from the sponge, with the towel about his neck, looking like an oversize baby on a stool

about to blubber for oatmeal.¹⁴

The same scene would appear again at the end of Rocky, with Rocky Balboa begging, “Cut me, Mick,”

but his manager imploring him to give up: “You don’t wanna do it, kid!” In each of these cases, the

interest is in this masochistic element in an otherwise apparently sadistic sport. The impulse among

critics and theorists of boxing to search for a culprit in their analysis of death-in-the-ring cases may, then,

have to do with a discomfort with not only the legal exceptionality of the ring but also the type of

psychology that could, in such a moment of intensity, still direct the blade inward, onto oneself. The great

irony here may be that we recognize this kind of self-sacrifice as emblematic of the sport but still resist

the idea that boxers possess the autonomy to accept risk of injury in the ring.

The Reality Effect of Boxing

In a short piece introducing profiles of Japan’s world-championship boxers (forty-one between 1952 and

2000), “Fighting” Harada concludes with the following lines on the appeal of boxing as a sport:

“Thinking back, I really believe that boxing is a wonderful sport. After punching each other in the ring the

two always naturally embrace the moment the bout ends and say, ‘good fight.’ That’s not a scene you see

very often in other sports. It’s because you battle in earnest, it’s not faked, it’s real [tsukurimono de wa

nai honmono dakara].”¹⁵The suggestion here is that the reality effect of boxing is established not by its

relationship to death but by its relationship to “faked” action.¹⁶Boxing stands as real against the falseness

of scripted entertainment.

If boxing has a pure opposite, then it may be professional wrestling. One is ad-libbed and real, the

other choreographed and fake. And yet boxing and professional wrestling, historically, are not the distant

cousins they may seem to be. Under the nineteenth-century London Prize Ring rules, boxers were allowed

to grapple with each other, and the signature headlocks and throws of pro wrestling were integral to the

sport. It might be accurate to think of pro wrestling as an offshoot of boxing, comprising the elements that

were shed as boxing became the pure punching sport we know it as today. The London rules were

abandoned only after a famous two-hour, bare-knuckled match between John Sullivan and Jake Kilrain in

1889, for which Sullivan had trained with champion wrestler William Muldoon.¹⁷

Kōrakuen Hall, next to the Tokyo Dome, to this day alternates between boxing and pro wrestling

matches, as did the Kuramae Kokugikai stadium, just south of Asakusa, before it. Kuramae was primarily,

at least in name, the home of Sumo from 1954 until 1984, before that sport moved to its exclusive location

in Ryōgoku. But it was also at Kuramae that both the professional wrestler Rikidōzan and the boxer

“Fighting” Harada came to fame, and the audience sat in the same seats as they would to watch the

yokozuna on other nights. Kuramae, then, was used specifically for these particular one-on-one contests

of strength and quickness, as well as various, and never fully determinable, levels of choreography. We

would be wise to remember that the greatest amount of gambling money is made by fixing contests the

public trusts to be left purely to chance and skill.

The reality effect of boxing in the 1960s, as well as the privileging of that element of the sport, may

have been set up in contrast to the popularity of pro wrestling in the 1950s. At that time, Rikidōzan was

challenging American wrestlers with his “Karate Chop” and almost single-handedly popularizing

television in Japan, then still something people watched as huge crowds in the streets. It is fitting, too, that

the transition from the peak of pro wrestling (roughly 1953 to 1963) into that of boxing (roughly 1964 to

1970) perfectly overlaps with an update in the reality effect of television, which moved from black-and-

white to color broadcasts at approximately the same time. The color technology allowed boxing’s clearest

proof of its reality—red blood—to transfer directly from the ring to the living room.¹⁸Yet, there remains

a great deal of reality within pro wrestling as well: Rikidōzan had been a real Sumo wrestler, he really

weighed 250 pounds and had to do a lot of real training to maintain that physique, he really did lift other

huge men up into the air and slam them down on the mat—all of which required a very real amount of

strength and agility. The athleticism and spectacle of pro wrestling were both very real.

The fundamental difference between pro wrestling and boxing might be what we watch for and what

we hope to see. In pro wrestling, we want to see rules broken, the excesses like throwing opponents out

of the ring, or the cheap shot behind the referee’s back. It is the treachery and the vigilante-style revenge

that follows that appeals to the viewers and participants. In boxing (one would hope), we do not watch

for the ear bitings, low blows, or cheap shots after the bell but rather for a clean, fair fight where the

stronger boxer wins a deserving victory. We want the rules followed strictly. And if we accept Gilles

Deleuze’s delineation between sadism and masochism—the claim that these are fundamentally distinct

and incompatible libidinal systems—then we ought to see pro wrestling as a sadistic sport, one in which

the violation of a contract is eroticized, whereas boxing is a masochistic sport where the maintenance of

the contractual agreement (amid great pressure to break it) is the basis of pleasure.¹⁹

It is important to note that within the broad history of boxing commentary, an emphasis on the reality of

boxing is rare. We usually find contextualizations of matches within frameworks of struggle between races

(Max Schmeling defeating Joe Louis for Hitler’s Aryanism) or classes (the working-class boxers

performing for a bourgeois audience), or as proxy battles between nations, or most recently as a comment

on gender. But it may be a great disservice to the boxers themselves to reframe their sport as anything

other than as one skilled and well-trained fighter against another. Terayama writes an interesting piece on

this topic in December 1965, profiling a Zainichi Korean boxer named Kaneda Morio. One might expect

reportage on a minority boxer to celebrate the channeling of discrimination-fueled anger into motivation

in the ring: “There are many boxers from his home country who can only capture glory by ‘knocking down

the Japanese.’”²⁰But Terayama points out that assumptions about the symbolic meaning of a bout can end

up being just as discriminatory. In Kaneda’s case, concern over the political implications of a North

Korean competing for the Asian championship led to him being banned from international competition,

despite having won the middleweight belt within Japan. The audience’s desire to have boxers stand in as

metaphors for hot-button political issues might fuel ticket sales and even motivate the boxers themselves,

but it is also alienating. In this case, the boxing association’s inability to handle a case of hybrid

nationality resulted in a lower level of competition and a potentially false belt for whomever Kaneda

would have faced.

This reality effect of boxing—its relationship to the sensation of presence, to an enhancement of

perceived vitality—was precisely the theme that Terayama would focus on in his major boxing project of

the mid-1960s. In March 1965, Terayama began serialization of a novel called Aa, kōya (Ah,

wilderness). It was published in monthly installments in the magazine Gendai no me until September

1966, then edited somewhat and released as a book in November 1966. The narrative concerns the

simultaneous development of two new boxers, Barikan (an introverted, shy stutterer) and Shinjuku Shinji

(an optimistic, proud ex-con)—they train in the same gym, and the narrative leads up to a showdown

between them in the ring.²¹The first direct mention of enhanced reality through boxing comes midway

through the third chapter (of fifteen): “Once their first opponents were decided, boxing suddenly began to

have a sense of reality [genjitsukan] for Barikan and Shinji. But it was completely unlike the blurred

photos of loudmouthed Clay or Liston the Bear. The reality that someone’s muscles in this city of Tokyo

were being trained in order to break their jaws was reality enough.”²²The reality effect (literally

“reality-sensation” in Japanese) originates with the imagination of physical pain in the ring, a pain

coupled with the humiliation of defeat, and that pair is sufficient motivation for Shinji, who revels in the

opportunity for glory. But Barikan cannot fight driven only by fear—the avoidance of a negative result is

not enough for him—he needs something positive driving his punches. What he needs is genuine anger

toward his opponent, which Shinji can generate at will (by creating a fictional version of his opponent in

his mind, then transferring the anger from that fiction into reality in the ring), but Barikan lacks that

capacity. He seeks out his first opponent before their match, hoping that something in their interaction will

frustrate him enough to cultivate the anger needed to fight: “Barikan was puzzled about why he should

punch out this man without having any sort of individual reason to do so. Wouldn’t he have to meet him at

least once before the event?”²³So he finds the address of his opponent and visits him at home, but has

nothing to say once he arrives. The other boxer brushes him off, suggesting that if he has something to

communicate, he should do it through their managers. Barikan ends up feeling jealous that his opponent

had already developed a loathing for him and concludes that generating anger must be part of his training.

Barikan is quintessentially passive, as his personality is purely reactive. His emotions and actions are

completely determined by those around him, and he never has an assertive moment in the entire novel—

never an imaginative moment, never an original thought, never a spontaneous idea. In the ring he is a

counterpuncher: “He always fought in a crouching style, never using his long reach, and fought only by

countering.”²⁴He is a pathetic protagonist, but it is extremely difficult to sympathize with him, which may

be why the novel itself was not a great success in Japan (it was, however, translated into both German

and French).²⁵The narrative becomes far more interesting when reconceived as a socially critical parody

of counterpuncher politics, however, especially when Terayama juxtaposes this portrayal with a collage

of contrasts: a series of extemporaneous forms, chance operations, and ad-libbed culture.

The first, and most important, of these spontaneous forms is modern jazz, the improvisational mode that

flourished in Japan and around the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Terayama’s afterword to the novel

opens with the following:

Aa, kōya is the first full-length novel I have ever written. I tried to write this novel using the method of

modern jazz. The way I did it was to treat the characters like instruments in a combo, decide on the

basic story as a chord name, and then fill it in with completely improvised depiction. It is, therefore,

very haphazard and far away from any sort of composition or design. But this form of manipulation,

deciding by ad-lib as I wrote where the characters would go (and myself with them), was a fresh

experience for me. Typically novelists give themselves over to a particular pre-determined idea,

then take the position of confirming it throughout the writing process, but in this novel there was not

a single thing set at the start.²⁶

This combination of structure (in the chord name, or the selection of a scale) with improvisation within

that structure is a perfect cognate for boxing itself—the boxer enters the ring with a set of punches (jabs,

hooks, uppercuts) and combinations (two- or three-punch sets like riffs) but must improvise the

arrangement of those elements on the fly and in relationship with the movements of the other boxer, just as

the musicians in a jazz combo will play off of each other. Structure and improvisation coexist here.

Terayama speaks explicitly on this issue in an interview with the composer Takemitsu Tōru: “Jazz taught

me that ‘fixed forms and freedom are not an antinomy.’ When I was young I thought that the opposites of

form and structure were freedom and liberation. But jazz showed me that form and structure are

synonymous with freedom and liberation. To put it another way, there is a superimposition in jazz of

images of bondage and confinement with images of liberation and freedom.”²⁷Jazz and boxing are

emblematic of improvisation here—Terayama calls boxing “a physical ad-lib”²⁸—as they constitute a

tangible example of a dialogic process that creates something beyond the initial imagination of the

participants.

Terayama had been interested in jazz since the 1950s, and it is likely that he first encountered it while

living in Misawa during his middle-school years in the late 1940s, during the Allied occupation. Misawa

was a major military base for Japanese forces during the war and was quickly overtaken by American

forces once the war ended—a major U.S. military installation remains there today. Two of the tanka from

Terayama’s public debut mention “black men’s blues songs” (kokujin hika), the first of which was

mentioned in chapter 1, and the second of which makes specific reference to a military base:

barakku no rajio no kokujin hika no basu hirogaru kagiri mugi aomi yuku

Just as far as the bass of the black man’s blues song carries from the radio in the barracks—there the

wheat greens²⁹

These songs could have been anything from gospel to blues to jazz, but it is likely that his first experience

of black music occurred there in Misawa. Terayama’s interest in jazz gained momentum once he was in

Tokyo, resulting in a book called Jazu o tanoshimu hon (Enjoying jazz, 1961), which he coedited with

the music critic Yukawa Reiko. Terayama writes of being a “Yellow Negro” in those days, playing off of

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (1956).³⁰In 1962, Terayama

mused on the possibility of “action poetry” that would operate like a modern jazz performance—not the

re-presentation of a score or enaction of a theory, but an instigation, a new “action” generated

spontaneously. In the first section, he writes of his interest in jazz as it developed by spending time in a

jazz club called Kiiyo in Shinjuku’s seedy Kabukichō district: “A friend of mine asked me, ‘Why do you

listen to modern jazz?’ I’m interested in modern jazz because it’s action. When someone mentions a piece

by Wynton Kelly, they’re not talking about the chord name of a song he played or the score he arranged.

They mean the action that took place in some club near dawn with rotten apple cores and cigarette butts

and whiskey bottles strewn all over—people are able to powerfully connect their consciousness with his

by taking his work to be that action alone.”³¹Terayama is interested in reconnecting poetry to action in a

way that would have particular poems remembered as embedded in space and time, rather than severed

from life and dehistoricized in the form of books, mediated by the mechanical, antihuman, timeless, and

placeless medium of movable type.

Returning to Aa, kōya, we find the text documenting an act of writing from a particular place and time

—it is more analogous to a live recording of a concert than an engineered studio production. Terayama

moves in this direction by overwriting the specificity of location and historical moment, and his

references to establishments in Shinjuku’s Kabukichō district are so obscure that nearly every page has

two or three footnotes (necessary even for the primary target audience of fellow Tokyoites). The text is

peppered with references to pop songs that had just been released, news items, and television

commercials, all probably timed with the monthly installments during its serialization. This method may

have been more than just a way to document the era—it was a creative process (maybe the only one) that

allowed the artist to continue living in the present tense during the creation of the work. Rather than

imagining the final product and then spending the time creating it, waiting to arrive at that future moment,

or reliving memories of the past in order to recreate a situation that is already over, Terayama wrote

within the moment of his life as it was being lived. He was certainly not the only artist using an

improvisational style during the 1960s—it may have been the dominant mode within popular, and

certainly within countercultural, forms. The graphic designer Uno Akira, for example, who designed

several posters for Terayama’s theater troupe and collaborated with him on many projects, describes his

method as one in which he begins a drawing with a single human figure somewhere on the page, then adds

other elements that the figure he has drawn reminds him of—if the shape of a girl’s leg calls to mind a

horse’s head, he draws a horse’s head near the girl’s leg; then when part of the horse reminds him of

something else, he adds that to the piece. Uno, like Terayama, seeded his projects with form, then allowed

it to develop, as if on its own, through a kind of iterating dialectic between the artist and the artistic

product itself.³²

Terayama’s position in relationship to the problem of boxing and death begins with a redefinition of

“life” that limits its meaning to life led in an ad-libbed fashion. By reconceptualizing life to be the

perception of physical, and especially mental, presence in the here and now—something enhanced by

improvisation and the witnessing of improvisation but suppressed by resigning to a reactive stance—

Terayama also redefines “death” to be stasis, stability, and predictable routines. The salaryman, then, is

willfully already dead, whereas the boxer—despite risking injury (not because he risks injury)—is alive,

particularly in the ring. Death in the ring, in Terayama’s framework, is more a return to society’s norm of

stasis than an extraordinary event. This deconstruction of the simple opposition (and codetermination) of

life and death parallels a relationship between rationality and insanity in regard to jazz that Terayama

comments on further along in the interview with Takemitsu cited previously: “Rationality and insanity are

not simply opposites—the actual opposites are rational insanity versus insane insanity, or else insane

rationality versus rational rationality. In the 1960s, Marcuse led us to expect an anti-linguistic trend that

takes insanity created by rationality to be fake, and only deranged insanity to be truly insane, but I still

feel like that’s ineffective. I do think, though, that there is a great suggestion in his ‘distancing from

language,’ and ‘suspicion of rational decisions.’”³³Similarly, it seems that Terayama (along with much of

1960s counterculture) had reconceived of the relationship between life and death to be primarily between

dead life and live life. This position distances Terayama from aligning boxing’s allure with death. Both

the pitying of boxers for facing such danger as well as the use of ring death to enhance the potency of

fiction tighten the link between death and boxing in public discourse, which then leads to increased

fetishization of the death spectacle and demands to ban the murderous sport (removing another avenue of

social mobility). But Terayama seems to be claiming that this sport can be about life without

simultaneously being about bodily death. In fact, he makes a clean distinction between the life-force of

boxers and the death drive of university students and salarymen within Aa, kōya.

Only one group of characters in the novel has no substantive relationship to Barikan, Shinji, and their

boxing gym: the members of the Waseda University Suicide Research Society. This parody of Terayama’s

alma mater stands in contradistinction to the virility of Shinji in particular. Their first appearance in the

novel occurs in the third chapter—they are sitting next to Shinji in a cafe debating plans for the group:

A student with a face just like the movie actor Kawasaki Keizō is explaining the construction of a

suicide machine. “It’s a device that lets you die while you’re sleeping,” says Kawasaki Keizō. “I

thought of it while I was looking at a drawing of François, and the principle is the same as a bucket

in a well. On one side you hang an ax, and I’d be sleeping under that. On the other side you hang a

bucket filled with water and the weight balances them both out. But the bucket has a hole in it so the

water leaks out and makes it lighter. I’m sleeping, so I won’t be able to know how light the bucket

that’s holding up the ax is getting. Suddenly the ax will fall and I’ll die. Well, that’s the general

idea.”³⁴

One of Kawasaki’s friends argues that the machine (clearly a twist on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the

Pendulum”) would fall too slowly to kill him—the design was flawed. Kawasaki brushes off the comment

and says to the group, “I’ve spent twenty-one years preparing to die, every day since I was born.” At this

point, Shinji, who had been listening in from the next table, says to him, “So, how much time have you

guys spent preparing to live?” Kawasaki then turns to his girlfriend: “There are some optimists in this

world . . . but the optimistic people die, too.”³⁵

There may be more to this than just associating higher education with preparation for a deathlike

existence and juxtaposing Shinji’s life-force with the pessimism of these students. They are flippant and

cool in their rejection of the possibility of successful opposition to fate, but they eventually reject the

potential for any sort of self-determination whatsoever. Terayama might have been playing with an

association between self-determination and suicide, two meanings embodied in the single Japanese word

jiketsu (“to decide for oneself”).³⁶The students, fundamentally, want to take possession of their own lives

by being the agents determining their own deaths, perhaps as an expression of free will, but one that

eliminates that same human will in the process of its demonstration. Their vicious circle has just enough

internal logic to maintain itself. Shinji argues with them for a bit longer but then closes his eyes and starts

to daydream about his girlfriend.

The Suicide Research Society reappears occasionally through the novel, almost for tragicomic relief.

Realizing that they are all too timid to test their own suicide machines, the group places a want ad for a

suicide volunteer. It is at this transitional moment, when the suicide club decides to go out looking for

someone to murder (in the name of euthanasia), that “a sense of reality [genjitsukan] began to grow in the

suicide machine blueprint sitting on the table.”³⁷The same word is used here for the suicide club students

as had been used for the boxers. This suicide discussion draws us back to the second chapter of the book,

where Barikan is reading a manga in the gym while Shinji trains. It is called Gasu jisatsu (Suicide with

gas), and the protagonist wants to kill himself but frets over the best method. Finally, he decides to buy a

sweet potato snack for his sister and he kneels down behind her as she eats it, his hands clasped together

in prayer until she farts on him. Standard scatological manga slapstick, but Barikan does not laugh.

Suicide is something you ought to do on your own, he thinks. He contemplates the disillusionment in the

protagonist—“Reminds me of someone,” Barikan thinks.³⁸It is reminding Barikan of himself, of course,

and Terayama suggests through his ironic tone that what Barikan needs to get out of his humorless rut is a

willingness to immerse himself in illusion.

Barikan’s reason for taking up boxing is made clear in the first section of the novel. He has a stutter,

and the self-help book he bought—How to Cure a Stutter—recommends that he try nonlinguistic methods

of self-expression, such as athletics: “Languages have national boundaries but sports do not.”³⁹After

seeing an advertisement for a boxing gym in the newspaper (“Come on in, Weaklings!”) and concluding

that his stutter is due to physical weakness, he joins the gym. Boxing does not help, though, so he tries

visiting a treatment center for “stuttering, embarrassment, and fear of people,” but cannot afford the costs

of therapy. Terayama satirizes Barikan here for assuming his stutter to be a sign of weakness, when in fact

he is using it to rationalize his own reactive and overly cautious personality. In other works, Terayama

revisits the theme with scenes that praise stuttering—it is the one form of language that carries proof of its

improvisational nature. This issue will come up again in Terayama’s 1971 film Sho o suteyo machi e

deyō (Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets):

To keep from stuttering I pick words I definitely won’t stutter on, but then I end up saying things I

didn’t really want to say . . . They told me singing could cure my stutter, so I sang “The Woman from

Hakodate” a hundred times. But isn’t stuttering a kind of philosophy? The rising sun stutters its way

between the buildings. Beethoven’s Fifth stutters “da, da, da, daaaan.” Peace stutters over the

scorched earth in Vietnam. Clouds are stuttering vagabonds. The Straits of Korea are a stuttering

borderline, have you seen it! Order and subordination are smooth, but the sun has a stutter, the human

heart has a stutter, every kind of resistance stutters, it stutters and stutters and stutters as it shouts.⁴⁰

This is an homage to a short 1960 essay by the composer Takemitsu Tōru called “Kitsuon sengen:

Domori no manifesuto” (Stammering declaration: A manifesto on stuttering):

We should stutter when we’re looking for a method to communicate our ideas clearly to another

person. The most moving part of Beethoven’s Fifth is the theme of Fate knocking on the door, it

stutters so wonderfully:

Da, da, da, daaaan.

Stuttering lets you digest your words once more inside your heart.⁴¹

This juxtaposition of fate and stuttering is made even clearer in Terayama’s script, where Beethoven’s

Fifth is referred to as his unmei kōkyōkyoku (symphony of fate). Takemitsu continues, “Stuttering is not

regressive. It is progressive. It may be medically categorized as a type of functional problem but within

my metaphysics stuttering is a song of revolution.”⁴²This praise of stuttering is a recognition that polished

language is scripted, evidence of a time in the past lived for the future (coupled with a time in the present

lived as repetition of the past), whereas the stutter itself confirms the extemporaneousness of the stuttered

speech—and its challenge to fate. Fate knocks on the door in a stutter as though to gain entry to a

serendipitous space from which it has been excluded.

Yet Barikan never embraces his own stutter—he seeks only to hide it, to escape it, and to tidy it up. As

the novel progresses, he comes to embody all that is not spontaneous. He loses his first match by knockout

after entering the ring and virtually forgetting to fight. After a few punches glance his face, he throws a

few in return, but the reality effect and heightened sensation of presence associated with boxing are

completely lost on him; in fact, he becomes even more distant inside the ring: “He wanted to escape the

loneliness of being in the ring as soon as possible. He felt like he was in a ridiculously ‘distant place.’

Expanding completely beyond the edge of his psyche, the audience on the other side of the ropes was

suddenly millions of light-years away.”⁴³Barikan loses focus again later in the match and is caught by a

straight shot to the brow, which knocks him down and, briefly, unconscious. Shinji, however, in the

following match, makes quick work of his opponent, pounding him until even his own manager has to

shout for him to stop.

There are hints in the text that this core difference between Barikan and Shinji’s personalities in the

ring is linked to each boxer’s relationship with his father. As Shinji slams his opponent in the ring, he

replays in his mind a memory of his father being beaten up by a bartender: “‘It’s over?’ Shinji asked as he

returned to his normal self. Who is this guy sprawled out next to my new shoes?”⁴⁴Shinji’s vigor, then, is

the product of a smooth transfer of vengeful anger toward the bartender who abused his father to his

opponent in the ring. Barikan’s father, however, left home when Barikan was young, leaving him with an

unfulfilled longing for that relationship. Locked in a hold in the middle of his match, Barikan thinks to

himself, “I want to stay just like this”—a proxy embrace with his missing father.⁴⁵Barikan constantly

fantasizes about father–son communication. Looking out over the “neon wilderness” of Shinjuku one night,

he focuses in on the Suntory whiskey sign: “Why does the Y in the ‘Suntory’ sign on Nishiguchi Hall

always take longer to light up? (He was dull-witted enough to think that it might be some kind of key to

understanding his life.) Is the Y some kind of secret code to me from my missing father? Or is that Y a

lonely stammer among the other neon lights? It’s probably a stutterer like me.”⁴⁶Barikan’s frustration with

stuttering throughout the narrative is paired with Terayama’s inconsistent, episodic, lurching style—he

stutters his way through the composition, jumping from one narrational mode to another, from first- to

third-person narration, and he inserts poems, song lyrics, and bold-faced lines sporadically throughout the

text. While Barikan retreats in shame, Terayama pushes forward, embracing the sensation of presence

delivered by the roughness of that linguistic texture.

The sensation of presence is mentioned again immediately after Barikan and Shinji’s debut fights.

Shinji is at the horse-racing track with their trainer, One-Eye (Katame), who has taken him out to

celebrate his win. Terayama opens the chapter with the following description: “The horse-track was

packed with people. Thousands of vagrants were enjoying the mood of ‘the lost home’ up in grandstands

in the clouds. Everything progresses in the present tense [genzaikei] here, once something has passed it’s

instantly worthless. Bets from the previous race, old newspapers, empty beer cans. Property-less men and

forgotten women. ‘The Present’ [genzai] throws all that away and continues bounding forward.”⁴⁷An

earlier reference to horse racing appears when Barikan and Shinji first visit One-Eye’s boxing gym,

where they find horse-racing newspapers scattered all around. Immediately following that description,

and in conspicuous juxtaposition, is a scene where One-Eye has both of them strip down and show him

their bodies, poking at their legs so he can size them up “just as though he were sizing up horses at a

stable.”⁴⁸Here again we find boxers in a liminal space—human, and yet functioning precisely the same

way as animals do in the gambling economy (One-Eye mentions his support of the two boxers as an

investment of his capital in a gamble on their careers).⁴⁹And yet the existence of gambling in both of

these arenas speaks to the unpredictable nature of the events and their tangible demonstration of an

unknowable future. Losing at the track, then, might be even more exhilarating than winning, in that it

concretely confirms the ad-libbed nature of an unscripted future. At the track, One-Eye explains to Shinji

that one horse, one of a family of horses that consistently wins, is far faster than the rest. Shinji asks him if

there is anyone foolish enough to bet on other horses. “‘Oh, there sure are,’ One-Eye said, cracking a

smile. ‘Everybody wants to beat their own fate. We always try to believe in the power of human

intervention. Don’t you think a life led without challenging the star you were born under would be

flavorless and cold?’”⁵⁰One-Eye goes on to pick an underdog and wins big. Gambling stands with

stuttering here as a challenge to determinism itself, as wins at the track become a tangible means of

exploiting other people’s belief in inevitability.

There is a moment about halfway through the novel when it seems that Barikan has willed himself into

independence and broken from his cycle of introversion, shame, and reactive thinking. After finally

winning a tough match, he quits One-Eye’s gym, moves out of his apartment, and joins the Sasazaki Gym

in Meguro (where “Fighting” Harada trained in the 1960s). In a letter he writes to Shinji, however, it

becomes clear that the sudden severing of connections is actually driven by a desire to link back up again:

Depending on my record, we might have a chance to cross gloves (as equals) in the ring. Actually,

that was the goal I had in mind when I decided to change my registration. (We couldn’t fight each

other while we were in the same gym).

Until now I was like your sidekick [otōtobun], and I used to think that being near someone who’s

got good luck would somehow rub off on me and I’d become lucky, too. But when I thought about it, I

realized that there are some lives that just don’t involve chance. That’s when I gave up on “chance”

and decided to try messing things up on my own. Goodbye, and thanks.⁵¹

It is Shinji who suffers more from Barikan’s departure, getting more and more depressed and longing for

his old friend. Barikan, however, seems to be strengthened by his new independence. He starts

frequenting a bar near his new apartment, makes some friends, and even seems to finally begin curing his

stutter: “As he spoke to them he felt an inexpressible sensation of liberation [kaihōkan]; it was because

he was unexpectedly speaking without stuttering.”⁵²

At this point in the novel, Barikan’s program for curing his stutter is finally starting to work. He has

found a way to communicate through sports, which has given him the confidence to liberate himself from

powerless relationships and stand on his own. Paralleling this development in the text is commentary

about the relationship between violence and communication. Terayama channels this topic into the

narrative through the diary of Miyagi, the owner of a discount store in Kabukichō and the brother-in-law

of One-Eye: “Lately, I’ve become more interested in ‘violence’ than in ‘language’ or ‘sex.’ Violence as

communicative action. Violence as a method of solidarity . . . at any rate, there is no room for alienation

within ‘violent’ action. That’s how I’ve gotten interested in boxing recently. This lonely violent action

where you understand your opponent by punching him, it’s a society of two without a third party

intervening . . . You can’t love someone without hurting them. And you can’t hurt someone without loving

them, either.”⁵³Violence here is direct, unmediated communication—a form of language not deflected

through the slipperiness of signification.

Terayama would take up the opposite relationship as the theme of a series of essays called Bōryoku

toshite no gengo (Language as violence), which was serialized in the monthly Gendai no me (the same

monthly that Aa, kōya was published in) starting in 1968. With subsections on topics such as “Poetry

Read on the Run,” “Group Poetry,” “Unaccounted-for Poems,” “Linguistic Engineering,” and

“Graffitology,” Terayama works to generate a metaphysics of violence as it relates to language and

poetry. It is important to recognize from the start that the definition of violence that Terayama uses

throughout this inquiry is specific and limited: “Sorel, in his Reflexions sur la violence, divides violence

[bōryoku] into two categories: that which is directed from the low toward the high is called ‘violence,’

and that which is directed from the high toward the low is called ‘force,’ or what we might call

‘authority’ [kenryoku]. Adapted to language, I feel that the printed word is authoritative, and that spoken

language is violent.”⁵⁴Terayama is reworking and extending an argument he made first in the 1962 essay

on action poems and then again in a book of literary criticism from 1965 called Sengoshi: Yurishiizu no

fuzai (Postwar Poetry: The Absence of Ulysses): that the formality and universalism of standardized

language and its monopolization of publishing stifle the soul of living language, with its regional accents,

awkward phrasing, and unpolished texture. The piece on graffiti in Bōryoku toshite no gengo, however,

is new. Graffiti appears briefly in Aa, kōya, but without much evidence of the level of theorization

Terayama had devoted to stuttering and boxing. There is penciled graffiti of boxers’ names on the walls of

a training gym and later a reference to the walls of Barikan’s apartment, which he has punched until they

are blackened and dented, as a “diary written with his fists.”⁵⁵There is also a quotation from a Vladimir

Mayakovsky poem—“Some people’s hearts are in their chests, but mine fills my entire body”—that

appears twice in the text, first without explanation and later as a line Shinji liked enough to copy into his

journal.⁵⁶The poem would appear again in the film Sho o suteyo, machi e deyō, this time written as

graffiti on a wall. Terayama’s graffiti comprises literary quotation, chalked statements on rugby fields,

and absurdities on walls in the city or written on the pavement itself—these are suggestions for new

directions graffiti might expand.

The directness of graffiti is similar to that of boxing in that there is no mediation by the printed word,

editing, market-driven apparatuses of distribution, or state censorship. Comments on the wall of a

bathroom seem to speak directly and yet with an anonymity perhaps unique to the form:

Whether or not it’s true for poetry, graffiti is doubtlessly a sacrifice made through language. Writers of

graffiti become “Invisible Men” in the process of writing on the bathroom walls. Contrary to the

way the Negro has been painted into the dusk of history through social discrimination like Ralph

Ellison’s protagonist, graffiti writers erase themselves as they write—“the generation of erasure”—

a single wall, with language as its medium, provides the appeal to erase the self. We might say that

this is the sacrifice of graffiti’s poetics, one which corresponds to the way in which poets of the past

sought to erase nature by writing.⁵⁷

The practice of graffiti is linked to an effacing of the individual’s place in the process of communication,

an erasure of the narrator in parallel to the fictionalization of the poetic voice discussed in chapter 1. But

in poetic graffiti, left unsigned on the walls of a bathroom, Terayama finds new hope in a form of

communication devoid of self-promotion: “When I was younger I thought that the fantasy of becoming

invisible and the desire to become a poet stood in an antinomy. But now I can positively say that these

two dreams are not contradictory at all.”⁵⁸Here again he returns to this consistent theme of apparent

opposites revealed as noncontradictory—rationality and insanity, structure and freedom, and here the

Invisible Man and the poet.

The final showdown between Barikan and Shinji is described from all sides as a communicative act.

At the initial handshake, Barikan says to Shinji, “It’s been a long time,” but he receives no reply. As the

first round begins, Barikan follows Shinji around the ring “as though he wanted to talk to him,” but Shinji

continues to deny him communication.⁵⁹In the second round, Barikan starts longing to have a “meaningful

conversation with Shinji, but Shinji’s words only transmitted pain to his body, they never sank in with any

meaning.”⁶⁰By the third round, Barikan is slower still, feeling light-years away (again), and Shinji is

gaining momentum. The bout becomes so imbalanced that Miyagi begins to wonder to himself if Barikan

is actually suicidal—whether he stepped in the ring and dropped his guard, hoping to die. Here some of

the novel’s themes, which had each taken solos as chapters during the course of Terayama’s text, begin

interweaving into a final ensemble. It is beginning to look like there might be a death in the ring, and the

audience has started to search for a culprit. Shinji had begun preparing for this process well in advance,

thinking to himself, “He is probably hoping that I’ll knock him down. That by being beaten to a pulp and

completely bloodied up we’d have some kind of inevitable relationship. That’s his trap. But even

knowing that, I’ll train hard to fulfill his desire—this is going to be a brutal match.”⁶¹He is correct in a

way: what Barikan wants is a confirmation of the role of fate that he senses binds him to Shinji—and

Shinji, although inclined to challenge what he perceives as his fate, also feels bound as a sort of guardian

figure for Barikan to provide him with what he desires. Shinji is rewriting his role from proactive sadist

into that of the masochist’s partner, following the instructions of someone who desires pain—this is the

moment in which responsibility for any possible damage to Barikan is transferred onto Barikan himself.

In the fourth round, Barikan’s mind has begun wandering as Shinji continues to punch him—there are

shouts from the crowd to throw in the towel and the referee tries to stop Shinji but he, too, is no longer

mentally present in the ring. The punches continue, numbered for us up to eighty-nine, well beyond the

point when the match was decided, and in a strange parallel to Mailer’s description of the twenty-five

unanswered blows to Benny Paret’s head in 1962 and to “Fighting” Harada’s style of wailing away until

he got the total knockout. The last page of the novel is a copy of a death certificate confirming that an

aneurysm sustained during the match killed the twenty-year-old boxer; and so Terayama did end his novel

with a ring death, after seeming to spend the majority of the text working to break down the

codeterminative relationship between the reality effect of boxing and the risk of death in the ring. It reads

like an easy out, a simple way to tie things up, and even when read symbolically—completing the

walking-dead counterpuncher’s drift from one kind of death to another—it still leaves one hollow. Why

finish with such simplicity, with no effort to frustrate the coupling of boxing with death? There is one

strange part of the death certificate, however, that may be suggestive: Barikan’s real name (Futaki Kenji)

has been replaced with that of his missing father (Futaki Takeo). It is possible that this was a simple

mistake, but it would not be unlike Terayama to slip a strange puzzle into a place like this. Takeo has a

shadowy existence in the text—Barikan searches for him unsuccessfully, he is the one recruited by the

suicide club as a potential guinea pig for their machine, and he wanders Kabukichō alone—but he never

interacts directly with the main characters. Barikan looks to Shinji as a replacement for his runaway

father, but here the missing (but living) father replaces his present (but now dead) son. Maybe this is the

best Terayama could do to frustrate the process of naturalizing the boxing-equals-death equation, a

wrench in the works at the very moment of ring death. It is accomplished with sufficient irony to throw the

awkward twists in logic used to justify the beating—he must have been suicidal—into relief. Barikan was

the least suicidal character in the novel—certainly less so than the Waseda students, lonely Miyagi, and

his ethereal father. He may have been the one most interested in cultivating a meaningful, real-time

interaction with others, even more so than Shinji. Yet it was his efforts in the direction of sociality that

made him a social outcast. Terayama’s critique may ultimately have been directed at the paradox of a

society that alienates those working against alienation.

The Funeral of Rikiishi Tōru

Terayama would be involved with a third death-in-the-ring narrative at the end of the 1960s. It came

midway through the wildly popular manga Ashita no Jō (lit. Tomorrow’s Jō, but with the sense of an

underdog that fans hope will “beat ’em next time”). This series by Takamori Asao and Chiba Tetsuya ran

in the weekly Shōnen magajin from January 1968 until the protagonist, Yabuki Jō, dies in the ring in the

final episode, five years later. Around the halfway point in its run, however, there is a showdown

between Jō, the underdog working-class hero, and his rival (almost more of a coprotagonist than an

antagonist), the handsome and talented Rikiishi Tōru. They are also friends, congratulating each other on

particularly good punches and politely shaking hands after their bouts. The two are a good match, as well.

Rikiishi has a longer reach, but he drops so much weight before the bout that his stamina is low. Jō has a

smaller frame, but fights with the heart readers expect from a boxer from the slums. Midway through the

fight, Jō is clearly losing the long-awaited showdown—he is completely exhausted, falling to the mat

from the momentum of his own missed punches—but then manages to land a lucky temple shot on Rikiishi.

This turns out to have been the killer left hook, which bursts a vein in Rikiishi’s brain. But close

inspection reveals that Rikiishi may have been set up for the deathblow by comments from the crowd. The

fans, seeing the pathetic state Jō was in, were first screaming for the referee to stop the fight, or for Jō’s

trainer to throw in the towel. But Jō’s trainer (another “one-eye”) thinks he sees enough “fight” in him to

keep Jō in the match. Rikiishi is distracted by the heckling, however, and loses his focus. The frames

immediately preceding the temple punch show Rikiishi glancing toward the crowd, taking his eye off of

Jō for a split second—precisely the moment Jō lands his punch. What could have distracted him?

One fan shouted for Rikiishi to “finish him off” [todome o sashite yare yo], and another yells out that

leaving him half-dead [namagoroshi] would be a sin. The direct reference to death, although probably

metaphorical, draws Rikiishi’s attention enough that he glances conspicuously to the side. The announcers

comment that he looks exhausted, too, and that he may have dropped too much weight before the match. It

is in this state of contemplation that Rikiishi receives the fatal punch, cleverly tipping the scales on the

common conception of death in the ring. It is the fear of killing Jō that paradoxically kills Rikiishi—had

he just remained focused on the fight, he probably would have blocked the punch and lived. The irony, in

this case, is that Rikiishi actually wins the fight, by an uppercut knockout in the eighth round. Jō regains

his senses after the ten count only to witness Rikiishi collapse as he reaches forward for their postbout

handshake. Recovering in his locker room after the match, Jō learns that Rikiishi died and screams out in

grief.

Terayama writes an analysis of Rikiishi’s death for a newspaper about one week after the episode was

published in Shōnen magajin. The title of his article, “Dare ga Rikiishi o koroshita ka” (Who killed

Rikiishi?), invokes the press following the ring deaths of the early 1960s as well as Dylan’s song. His

critique and conclusions, however, deviate considerably from previous iterations on this theme. Terayama

opens by claiming that “there were two deaths depicted in the most recent episode of Ashita no Jō. One

was the death of ‘tomorrow’ as Yabuki Jō lost by a knockout.”⁶²Jō’s potential to become a star boxer

was stopped short by this loss, but what Terayama focuses on is the shattering of his dream to use boxing

prize money to clean up the slums, adding parks to the riversides, a hospital, eldercare, apartments, and a

supermarket—that was the future [ashita] that died in the ring. Terayama’s sympathies are not with

Rikiishi, who he sees as reflective of authority within the social establishment: “He dominates with his

American Superman-like face, his backing by capitalists, his rationalist decision-making, and advanced

technology.” Rikiishi is the technocracy personified here. Acknowledging that the meaning of the text is a

collaborative production by the writers and the readers, Terayama asks whether the meaning of Rikiishi’s

death was effectively “a lynching by the eyes of the readers of the authority that toppled Jō?” Terayama

answers his own question in the negative, adding that “to boxers, death outside the ring isn’t ‘death’—it’s

nothing more than a rest from life.” But in Rikiishi’s case, Terayama argues, this was not even an

honorable ring death because “Rikiishi was dead from the start.” Unlike Jō, he never had a reason to fight

and only played a reactive role in the text (another counterpunching figure like Barikan): “Rikiishi was

born as an illusion in the heart of Jō, and he disappeared along with Jō’s bankruptcy in the ring.” For

Terayama, Rikiishi proxied for the illusion of establishment authority, an authority that disappears once

relinquished. He concludes the piece with the following: “Rikiishi did not die, we just lost sight of him—

an almost maliciously accurate reflection of the sentiment of 1970. There might be a bit of the chalked

graffiti saying ‘Shatter Illusions’ still left inside Yasuda Hall at Tokyo U., and you can strain your ears all

you want but what you hear isn’t demo chanting or broadcasts from the clock tower. It’s not even the ‘shu,

shu’ of Jō’s breath as he shadowboxes. All you hear are the empty, February winds.”⁶³Rikiishi died with

the fading of the antiestablishment movement. The public response to Rikiishi’s death, however, was

anything but illusory.

Kōdansha’s editorial division was flooded with consolation letters, funeral flowers, and even gifts of

money following the death of Rikiishi on the pages of Shōnen magajin.⁶⁴The idea to hold an actual

funeral for Rikiishi came first from Higashi Yutaka, the original stage director for Terayama’s troupe, who

had recently left to form his own company. Higashi’s troupe, the Tokyo Kid Brothers, had integrated

Ashita no Jō into their third production, called Ōgon batto (The Golden Bat), which ran from late 1969

into 1970. One scene of the play was a reenactment of the latest episode of the boxing manga, changing

each week to stay current with the narrative. That play was already doing live-action reproductions from

the manga, including Rikiishi’s death and the funeral scene from the print version itself. Higashi

suggested to Terayama that he organize a formal, public funeral for Rikiishi, and Terayama’s proposal to

Kōdansha was approved enthusiastically.⁶⁵The date was set for March 24, 1970, and the event would

take place on the sixth floor of Kōdansha headquarters (Figure 3.1). The event was advertised in Shonen

magajin itself, alongside the continuing serialization of Ashita no Jō. The organizers had planned for five

hundred, but over seven hundred people attended to watch an actual Buddhist priest perform the death rite

and to see the Tokyo Kid Brothers reenact the fateful bout. Judging from photographs, the audience was a

mix of elementary-school students and college-aged men, and they did line up at an altar complete with

flowers, candles, incense, and a large image of Rikiishi to pay their respects.⁶⁶The newspapers reacted

with headlines like “Predictably Manga, an Expression of Discontent with the Times” (Asahi shinbun),

“They Know It’s a Joke—Is This the Mood of the Era?” (Tōkyō shinbun), and “An Unprecedented Manga

Funeral!” (Sankei shinbun) (See Figure 3.2.). Terayama’s support for a project like this is consistent with

his efforts to demonstrate that the path between imagination and reality is not a unidirectional flow in

which real events are filtered through consciousness and reworked into fictional texts. This is fiction

moving concretely into the real and life integrating, more than imitating, art. Terayama again reminds us

that real events are conceived of and executed within consciousnesses flowing with a mixture of fiction

and truth. This would be further exemplified exactly one week after Rikiishi’s funeral, when nine radical

college students from the Red Army Faction hijacked a Japan Airlines domestic flight and then forced it,

at swordpoint, to deliver them to Pyongyang, which it did, and where they remain today. The leader of this

so-called Yodo-gō incident (Yodo was the name of the airplane), Tamiya Takamaro, concluded his public

statement about this underdog’s victory during the hijacking by famously proclaiming, “We are Ashita no

Jō.”⁶⁷

Figure 3.1. A full-page ad in the weekly Shōnen magajin for a funeral service to be held at Kōdansha

headquarters for Rikiishi Tōru, the rival boxer in the manga series Ashita no Jō (Tomorrow’s Jō, 1968–

73)

Figure 3.2. A mix of teenagers and college students line up to pay their last respects to Rikiishi Tōru

at the funeral service at Kōdansha headquarters. Terayama helped organize the event. Courtesy of

Kujō Kyōko and Terayama World.

Paralleling this process of documenting instances of fiction moving into reality was Terayama’s

clustering of extemporaneous cultural forms—jazz, boxing, gambling, stuttering, and graffiti—and linking

them to the enhanced sensation of presence. His characters are not centered on a diachronic timeline; they

gain no self-awareness from knowing their position within a historical lineage. It is the crosscut in time—

the experience of synchronicity—that grounds them and provides a base for their experience of being. The

broader project may be to fictionalize and shrink both the future and the past so that the present becomes

bigger and more real, an inhabitable space.

The commonsense understanding of the present moment as an infinitely brief, one-dimensional point

crushed between the monoliths of past and future is flipped on its head here. The structure is inverted so

that the present expands to become the only experienced (and therefore real) form of time, overwhelming

both past and future. By severing the present from the web of diachronic causalities—all the deterministic

causes and effects that generate the notion of fate—Terayama can zoom in on moments that demonstrate

the unpredictability of experience by highlighting ad-libbed forms. It is there, in the three-dimensional

present, that we find potential for a true sensation of presence—one produced not in contrast to death as

biological death but in alignment and solidarity with life conceived as mobility, as visceral consciousness

of being in the now.

CHAPTER 4

Deinstitutionalizing Theater and Film

THE CONSPICUOUS AMOUNT OF ATTENTION paid to the relationship between sex and violence in the late

1960s might best be understood as an attempt to expose the erotics of war as a first step toward

deconstructing that relationship. Too much emphasis, however, has been placed on simply repeating the

link between Eros and Thanatos. Social realism as a tactic is always vulnerable to being misinterpreted

as a statement on the immutables of human nature, whereas satire or nonrealist forms of representation are

often clearer in their critique of aberrant psychology or society gone wrong. The focus within cultural

production on sadism, something we might paraphrase as eroticized violation, may have resonated in the

1960s with the presence of American troops in Vietnam and the Soviets in Czechoslovakia, but we must

admit that sadistic narratives failed in the greater project of decoupling sex from violence and, in fact,

may have served to further concretize and naturalize that association.

While Shibusawa Tatsuhiko was fighting an obscenity charge on his translations of the Marquis de

Sade’s writings, while Ōe Kenzaburō and Mishima Yukio were writing sex-and-violence fiction, and

while Wakamatsu Kōji and other “pink film” directors were shooting sex-equals-violence films,

Terayama Shūji began an inquiry into the dialectical libidinal economy of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

Where de Sade eroticized the breaking of social and personal contracts, Masoch eroticized the production

and strict maintenance of a contract between two free subjects. The masochism of Venus im Pelz (Venus

in Furs) is not so much a masochism of whips and chains as it is a testing of the limits of contractual

agreement. Masochism, argues Gilles Deleuze, is a libidinal system fundamentally incompatible with

sadism—there can be no mixing of the two into a coherent system of sadomasochism because the sadist

severs contracts and establishes a new set of laws while the masochist deinstitutionalizes and sets loose

calcified social relations by moving from a model based on the inherited laws to one based on individual

contracts negotiated only between the parties impacted by them.¹Sadism appears revolutionary in its

destructiveness but it reinstitutionalizes a new order even more brutal than the old. Masochism, on the

other hand, might be seen to represent a postrevolutionary rebuilding of the social contract on a

synchronic rather than diachronic model. Terayama produced two texts that read well against these ideas

of masochism and deinstitutionalism: a 1967 play called Kegawa no Marii (Marie in furs) and the 1971

film Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets). This chapter will explore

these two projects in depth in order to root out the particular set of institutions Terayama targeted for

intervention as well as the counterproposals he suggests to replace them.

Masoch’s Venus im Pelz was translated into Japanese (from an English version) by the novelist Satō

Haruo in 1957 as Kegawa o kita Viinasu (lit. “The Venus who wore fur”). Terayama’s title for Tenjō

Sajiki’s third play, Kegawa no Marii, certainly his most famous makes direct reference in its title to the

locus classicus of masochism itself. The play was in fact translated into German for performance in

Frankfurt as Marie im Pelz.²Terayama’s play does not follow Masoch’s narrative at all, however, and the

reference may have been mainly a joke. The protagonist is a transvestite named Marie, played by the

transgendered lounge singer Maruyama Akihiro (now Miwa Akihiro), who opens the play by having his

legs shaved by a servant while he sits in a bathtub in the center of the stage. Never in the play is there a

fur coat like the one Wanda taunted Severin with in Masoch’s text, so we are left to conclude that the “fur”

here is that on the human animal himself and that the removal of the fur from Marie’s legs is what creates

a woman from the man.

The main narrative is the story of an eighteen-year-old boy named Kinya, who is locked up in the

apartment he shares with Marie, who insists on being called “mother.” Marie treats Kinya as though he

were half his age, claiming to be sheltering him from the ugliness of the outside world. Kinya is fully

indoctrinated and nonresistant, dallying his time away in fantasies, occasionally chasing butterflies

(indoors) that his mother has painted to resemble exotic species, and pressing them in books to expand his

already large collection. Marie, for her part, flirts with a sailor. Conflict begins when the neighbor girl

stops by while Marie is away and she tries to explain all the things he is missing by staying inside. As she

moves to kiss him, he attacks her, strangling her to death with the same ruthlessness as he dealt to his

butterflies. He escapes the apartment briefly, but returns dutifully to Marie in the final scene.

The narrative is a spin on a play that Terayama admired, Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s

Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (written in 1959, performed in London in 1961 and Off

Broadway in New York in 1962).³It was Kopit’s debut, and in his case, the boy’s mother, Rosepettle,

was genetically female and kept her son Jonathan locked up in their hotel room in Havana—he has

collections of stamps, coins, and books, but there are no butterflies; what becomes a carp in Terayama’s

play was a piranha in Kopit’s, and Terayama omits reference to the dead, stuffed father in the closet and

the monstrous, constantly growing Venus flytraps on the veranda featured in the original play. The central

problem of both narratives is the logic driving the boy’s acceptance of his imprisonment and his full

assimilation into the disciplinary regime—a nearly perfect example of Gramsci’s understanding of

hegemony. The following is Jonathan’s defense of his house arrest to the girl next door in Kopit’s play:

“No! You-you don’t understand. It’s not what you think. She doesn’t lock the door to kaka-keep me in,

which would be malicious. She . . . locks the door so I can’t get out, which is for my own good and

therefore . . . beneficent.”⁴Jonathan’s degree of indoctrination reflects his mother’s level of faith in the

righteousness of her decision, and it does have its own internal logic. Jonathan’s mother begins dating

“The Commodore,” a wealthy man with a huge yacht, who empathizes with her overprotected son, to

which she replies:

And I feel sorrier for you! For you are nothing! While my son is mine. His skin is the color of fresh

snow, his voice is like the music of angels, and his mind is pure. For he is safe, Mr. Roseabove, and

it is I who have saved him. Saved him from the world beyond that door. The world of you. The

world of his father. A world waiting to devour those who trust in it; those who love. A world

vicious under the hypocrisy of kindness, ruthless under the falseness of a smile. Well, go on, Mr.

Roseabove. Leave my room and enter your world again—your sex-driven, dirt-washed waste of

cannibals eating each other up while they pretend they’re kissing. Go, Mr. Roseabove, enter your

blind world of darkness. My son shall have only light!⁵

The narrative is a spoof of security overdone and concludes with an interesting twist. The neighbor girl

who seems to be encouraging Jonathan to break away from the bonds of his mother and escape into the

world turns out to be motivated by just as monopolistic an attachment: “Forget about your mother. She’s

gone . . . Come and let me keep you mine. Mine to love when I want, mine to kiss when I want, mine to

have when I want. Mine. All mine.”⁶Her focus is so intent that she carries on even as the stuffed corpse

of his father falls twice out of the closet right onto her lap. The strangulation may not have been overly

pathological, then, with Jonathan trapped on both sides by women demanding absolute control of him

(something both of the women conceived of as “love”).

Terayama writes about Kopit’s play in the early 1960s, well before the founding of the Tenjō Sajiki, as

part of what would become one of his most representative books. The text, a suggestion to run away from

metaphorical “homes” of all types, is now known as Iede no susume (In praise of running away from

home), a play off of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s famous Gakumon no susume (In praise of learning) from the

mid-1870s. Terayama’s project started as a half-year serialized column (July through December 1962) in

a high school and university student–targeted bilingual newspaper called the Student Times (published by

the Japan Times), which was repackaged and lengthened into a 1963 book called Gendai no seishunron

(On contemporary youth) before being rereleased under the title Iede no susume in 1972. The very first

installment in the newspaper series describes the basic plot of Kopit’s play: “This drama begins with an

only son and his mother on a world tour staying in a hotel room in Cuba, but because she’s afraid to let

her beautiful boy see the ‘ugly world filled with vulgarity,’ she keeps him locked up in the room of their

hotel.”⁷Terayama’s text, both in the newspaper and as a book, is agitation for relinquishing (rather than

attacking) comfortable but tightly controlled conditions over the lure of security found in the status quo—

this is a liberation politics based on exodus. As such, it is primarily interested in institutions and in the

competing forces of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization—particularly in how the institution of

the family is replicated in municipal, regional, and national structures to fully integrate a citizenry.

Terayama seems interested in unwinding institutionalized society (the kokka, or “nation family”) not from

the top, by dismantling the structure of nations, but from below, by dissolving the family with its internal

class structure and set of prescribed responsibilities. The family or, rather, the family system (ie seido) is

the focus of his attention—but it is important to remember that this is primarily metaphorical, speaking to

all family structured institutions (“home” [ie] appears in quotation marks throughout the text). The basic

proposition is for disinterested abandonment rather than violent destruction, since any attack carries with

it a strong trace of attachment—the object of attack must be destroyed for fear that its existence might lure

the rebel back. Abandonment implies the opposite: runaways demonstrate their independence from that

which they relinquish by walking away. Yet Terayama recognizes that the unwinding of one institution is

no guarantee against the rise of another in its place: “It is, of course, an error to examine the ‘home’ only

from the perspective of the vertical axis between parents and children. The reason being that the thing

which begins disintegrating is a ‘home’ created by the two parents. Even as humans are being liberated

from an institution (whether matriarchal or patriarchal) they begin assigning roles to other people and

transitioning into another institution—which is a flawed form of thought, and the deformation that results

from that mistake is extending outward into every part of the world.”⁸Deinstutionalization initially done

in the name of classlessness is too often betrayed by the reestablishment of new class-based structures in

the place of the old. It is here, then, that Terayama’s inquiry into the nature of institutionalism and the

invocation of Masoch in Kegawa no Marii cross paths. Gilles Deleuze makes a useful distinction

between masochism and sadism in his analysis of Venus in Furs, phrased in terms of institutions and

contracts:

We are no longer in the presence of a torturer seizing upon a victim and enjoying her all the more

because she is unconsenting and unpersuaded. We are dealing instead with a victim in search of a

torturer and who needs to educate, persuade, and conclude an alliance with the torturer to realize the

strangest of schemes. This is why advertisements are part of the language of masochism while they

have no place in true sadism, and why the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates

and destroys them. The sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations.⁹

Deleuze further delineates the masochist’s contract from the sadist’s institution: “The contract

presupposes in principle the free consent of the contracting parties and determines between them a system

of reciprocal rights and duties; it cannot affect a third party and is valid for a limited period. Institutions,

by contrast, determine a long-term state of affairs which is both involuntary and inalienable; it establishes

a power or an authority which takes effect against a third party.”¹⁰A transition between institutionalism

and contract-based relationships, then, is also a shift from a diachronic system of rights and duties to a

synchronic one in which social relationships are renegotiated by the members of that society itself rather

than by their forebears. This is a shift seen before in Terayama’s work, and it may be the most critical to

understanding the thrust of his greater project. At every opportunity he urged an adjustment in perspective

from chronological flows toward cross-sections of the present.

The central problem of both Kopit’s and Terayama’s plays concerns the way in which the mother

creates an authoritative institution out of the imprisonment of her son while keeping him convinced that he

is there under his own will. This means that these are plays about the disguising of institutions as contract-

based systems. This is further complicated by Marie’s transvestism, a conspicuous assertion of the

persuasive and performative (and therefore contractual) nature of gender.¹¹Marie operates within a

masochistic mode in terms of her identity and in relations with those outside of the family, but in a sadistic

mode within it. She is a sadist who has manipulated her victim into conceiving of himself as a masochist,

which may seem a stable system. But the moment he fully accepts the situation is also the moment that the

erotic crumbles, for it needs resistance to uphold it (violation equals pleasure). Kinya and Jonathan are

both trapped in the apartment but not in the way that they seem—we might expect them to resist, but

resistance is precisely what their sadistic mothers desire (to confirm the violation), and so their strongest

form of effectual opposition to that desire appears to be complete sublimation. They fight back by not

fighting back at all—perpetuating the stasis and demonstrating nicely how a sadistic power system

maintains both its own power and the logic of sadism as a structure for maintaining order. The better

option, which neither boy seriously considers, is to simply sneak away alone without a fight—to become

a runaway. A sustainable relationship between mother and son within this structure requires a cycle of

resistance, counterresistance, and restabilization of self-discipline.

In Terayama’s play, Marie disciplines Kinya with a tape-recorded message that entertains, instructs,

and gives orders while she is out of the apartment. Her voice lectures him first on educational institutions:

There are lots of different kinds of schools, my boy! It’s not just those buildings with blackboards

that you ride your bicycle to carrying all those textbooks. Reformatories can be schools, and bars can

be classrooms.

Your mother’s school was a prison. A school of old, nasty concrete, and my classmates were

murderers, pickpockets, and thieves! But I didn’t go there looking for glory or adventure, it was for

serious education.

At a normal school they teach you to be good. That amounts to saying, “All you do is lie, so force

yourself to be truthful.” But what I learned in prison was the opposite. “All you do is tell the truth, so

force yourself to lie.”¹²

This link between educational and correctional facilities resonates with Erving Goffman’s description of

“total institutions,” where the social spheres typically separated into spaces for work, play, and sleep—

with different authorities in each realm—are conflated here into a single system under a single authority.¹³

Marie’s control over Kinya is totalitarian, but the situation does not fit the second part of Goffman’s

description, that “each phase of the member’s daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a

large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together.”¹⁴And yet

the crux of this second requirement may not be the mass nature of daily activity so much as the lack of any

counterexamples to the disciplinary regime. Without contrast, the totality maintains its logic whether the

institutionalized number one or one hundred. Goffman goes on to make the strange claim that “the

formation of households provides a structural guarantee that total institutions will not be without

resistance.”¹⁵He is profamily but antiasylum. But in the case of Marie and Kinya, or Rosepettle and

Jonathan, the household is the total institution. Terayama may be effectively challenging Goffman’s

solution to the problem of total institutions by asking if the proposed structure of resistance is not just as

totalitarian as the institution it seeks to displace. Is a strong household just as imprisoning as an asylum?

Is reinstitutionalization, rather than deinstitutionalization, a true solution or only a superficial changing of

the guard?

A text that may resonate more closely with Kegawa no Marii is Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual

Revolution, which Terayama would make repeated and specific reference to starting in the late 1960s.¹⁶

Reich’s theory was that mass sexual repression enforced through a socially compulsory system of

heterosexual monogamy and the denial of sexual self-determination to minors creates a widespread

neurosis as well as a mysticism that maintains and regenerates that repressive system. He credits this

repression with everything from pedophilia, prostitution, and rape, to fascism and Stalinism. The only

escape, Reich claims, is a fundamental revolution in sexual ethics and a rewriting of the sexual economy

itself. Committed relationships would demonstrate their commitment not through institution-based

certificates issued by state authorities but by loyalty within a mutually agreed-upon contractual

arrangement including the possibility of sexual freedom beyond that relationship. Reich argues that the

existence of sexual enforcement is evidence against its claim to the naturalness of that being enforced—

that “natural” sexuality would never require a system of restrictions.¹⁷

Goffman and Reich’s ideas can open up Terayama’s play in two ways. First, there is a parody of the

“structural guarantee” against total institutions that Goffman finds in the household: Marie’s apartment is a

prison. Second, and this is where Terayama’s play parts with Kopit, we find an inversion of the typical

compulsory heterosexual upbringing of children by heterosexual parents. Marie forestalls the gendering of

Kinya until the final scene of the play once Kinya has returned after escaping into the streets. The scene

could have been staged in a lighthearted and parodic way, but Miwa Akihiro’s performance, overplaying

the adoring voice of a mother dolling up her genetically male child in dresses and bows, came off as

chillingly sinister:

Look, you’ve come back. (To the servant) Just as I told you he would. (Happily) You’ve been a bad

boy, making a mess in your room and not cleaning it up. You must do as you’re told or there’ll be no

more butterflies. (Puts her arm around him and sits him down on the bathtub) Kinya, I bought you

a wonderful present in town today. (Takes out a wig) From now on you’re going to be a very

beautiful little girl. (Places the wig on Kinya’s head) Look! It suits you perfectly, just as I thought!

(Prepares lipstick, the theme song begins playing quietly) Look up at me now, that’s it. (Begins

making up his face, the boy gradually changes into a girl). Kinya, you’re going to be the most

beautiful girl in the whole world! (Curtain closes slowly as Marie laughs while the doll’s features

come into relief).¹⁸

The power of this scene is in the implications of its social inverse: the forcible gendering and

heterosexualization of children within the institution of the family. This is simultaneously a defense of

transvestism on libertarian grounds and an indictment of the top-down social institution of gender

formulation that we are accustomed to as the status quo.

This call for social reflection on gendering is paired with theatrical reflexivity in Kegawa no Marii.

While Kinya is listening to Marie’s lecture on the tape, there is a clatter at the window of the apartment

that Marie seems, impossibly, to hear, saying, “Someone’s here. Stop the tape!” Kinya does as he is told

and the neighbor girl pops in through the window to convince Kinya to run away with her. The moment is

jarring, though, calling attention to the scripted nature of the play in a way that might not be possible

without the use of prerecorded lines delivered via a recorded-sound apparatus. Our suspension of

disbelief is forcibly shattered in quasi-Brechtian fashion through this moment of reflexivity, but then, just

as quickly, illusionism reincarnates itself in its previous framework. “Someone’s here. Stop the tape!” is

particularly important because it acts to disassemble the institution of realism into which the play’s

audience will always drift without these reminders. And yet even with these moments of reflexivity, the

reinstitutionalization process begins immediately following realism’s breakdown, recalling Terayama’s

comment on the error of reformulating institutions immediately after our liberation from them. Suspension

of disbelief returns, again and again.

Once the girl has asked Kinya to leave the apartment, Marie’s tape starts up again on its own: “Get out,

whore! Harlot! Make a pass at my little boy and you’ll never know the end of it!” Marie’s spirit returns to

break again the illusion and to make the play simultaneously more real and more fictional. The things

happening on stage cannot occur in everyday life; they contradict the material properties of the technology

of recorded sound—and yet the play is being performed by very real people using conspicuously

materially bound technologies. We, as an audience, are of a split consciousness at this point, aware that

we are watching a fabrication but suddenly entering a more truly fictional text, one in which the

fundamental nature is becoming unclear. What had been an exaggerated but still plausible narrative shifts

here toward the fantastic. Kinya turns off the tape recorder and begs the girl to leave, but she wants to stay

and take a stand against Marie: “Let’s wait here, together, and watch that old bag lose her composure. Life

is about calling the bully’s bluff—without lies, the truth goes away; without masks, you can never see

someone’s real face.”¹⁹The dual presence of truth and fiction, and their codeterminative relationship, is

right here on the surface of the play at the very moment that the dual nature (plausible and fantastic) of the

play is being reconstituted and enhanced with these tape tricks. Marie does return, but as a ghost with her

angered voice booming from all corners of the apartment—her disembodied voice is at once impossible

and yet still integrated into the narrative as it interacts with Kinya and the girl.

This libidinal drive to draw fiction into reality or reality into fiction whenever either is getting too

close to dominance is something Terayama wrote on in other places around this time, including his

analysis of the motives driving nineteen-year-old Nagayama Norio to go on a shooting spree between

October and November 1968, killing two security guards and two taxi drivers in Tokyo, Hakodate, and

Nagoya: “There are no means of investigating his motives other than pursuing the reason he sought

‘theater’ within reality, just as we seek reality within theater. However, finding reality within theater is a

design for happiness, whereas we can say that ‘seeking theater within reality’ signals a loss of

imagination.”²⁰This is not a process simply of drawing elements of reality into a fictional realm but of

seeking a clearer view of reality from the standpoint of fiction—of exiting the real in order to get a clean

look at it from a viable vantage point. This recognition of fiction’s codeterminative relationship with

truth, and therefore of theater’s codeterminative relationship with everyday life, constituted Terayama’s

theory of performance, that is, his dramaturgy. The art critic Hariu Ichirō puts it in the following terms:

“The core of Terayama’s ideas is the effort to find a point of departure for emotion to flow once we

realize that there is no hometown we need to return to, that there is no home at all. At that point reality can

be seen as a type of fiction, or alternatively, we try to find a way to recapture reality from the side of

fiction—that was Terayama’s unique methodology.”²¹There is an urgency here to recognize that the effort

to purge fiction from reality or reality from fiction is not only an impossible task but also a volatile and

potentially dangerous one.

Terayama’s metaphorical project of deinstitutionalizing lived reality occurred at several important real

institutions in Tokyo. The first of the Tenjō Sajiki plays, Aomori-ken no semushi otoko (The hunchback of

Aomori prefecture) was performed at the Sōgetsu Art Center, the nominal home to the Teshigahara family

of ikebana (flower arranging) artists and instructors but that also functioned as an important site for

contemporary fine art and performance through the 1960s. Teshigahara Hiroshi’s interest in filmmaking

led to the use of the hall for a number of film festivals and screenings, and it served as a gathering place

and performance venue for artists such as composer Takemitsu Tōru, novelist and playwright Abe Kōbō

(both of whom collaborated with Teshigahara on film projects), poet Tanikawa Shuntarō, Fluxus artist

Yoko Ono, critic and filmmaker Donald Richie, poet and composer John Cage, and others. Terayama was

a fringe member of the clique and performed several poetry readings at the Sōgetsu Art Center during the

early 1960s. When Terayama’s troupe formed in 1967, with Yokoo Tadanori designing posters and stage

sets and a group of amateur actors and a stage director (Higashi Yutaka) fresh from Waseda University,

the Tenjō Sajiki debuted at Sōgetsu, likely the most important institution in Japan at the time supporting

the contemporary arts.

The troupe’s second play, Ōyama debuko no hanzai (The fat girl of Ōyama’s crime), was performed at

another landmark institution—one of the last remaining vaudeville houses in Tokyo, the Suehiro-tei in

Shinjuku. This time the theme of the play was matched to the venue—it starred a fat lady and a circus-like

cast and played to packed houses for its run of four days. Seats in the upper balcony (tenjō sajiki in

Japanese) were discounted. The troupe’s producer, Kujō Kyōko (a former actress and, at that time,

Terayama’s wife), reports calling the Suehiro-tei daily for weeks to persuade them to rent out their theater

for a play, a practice without precedent and one that has never been repeated, particularly after the rowdy

mobs broke the ticket-booth window as they jostled in line for seats.²²

Kegawa no Marii was the third of the Tenjō Sajiki plays, and it was performed not on a typical stage

but on the narrow strip of space in front of the screen at the Shinjuku Bunka Art Theater, the flagship for

films distributed by the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) and a central institution for Tokyo counterculture. The

ATG, a subsidiary of Tōhō, was run by a group of film critics granted relative autonomy in selecting,

promoting, and distributing art films to seven ATG cinemas in Japan. They formally began coproducing

domestic films in 1968—the first three of Terayama’s feature films were granted half of their budget from

ATG funds and they were screened at ATG cinemas. Shinjuku Bunka was emblematic, then, of the new,

quasi-independent art institutions supportive of (or at least catering to) young, baby-boomer era

countercultural trends during the late 1960s. This is where students went to see Godard’s and Ōshima’s

films. It was half a block away from Hanazono Shrine where Kara Jūrō pitched his red tent for the first

plays of the Japanese underground theater movement, around the corner from the gay quarter, and down

the street from Beheiren’s “folk guerillas” who were singing songs against the Vietnam War in Japan’s

busiest train station.

The slippage between fiction and reality at work in Kegawa no Marii, then, was enhanced by the

institution in which it was performed. To the audience, most of whom would have been used to watching

films in Shinjuku Bunka, this play was a truer kind of live action and a challenge to the perceived reality

of cinema.²³This may have been conceived as a film performed in the home of filmed plays. Such a

theatrical affront to the reality effect of cinema might first seem to claim relative realism for theater over

the illusionism of celluloid. But the juxtaposition, paradoxically, also cannot help calling attention to the

extreme fictionality of theater itself. These are real people on stage, after all, pretending to be something

they are not, saying words divorced from their true character, and moving in ways willed but not fully

free. How could things be any more purely fictional? Film’s mediation between the profilmic moment

(actors in front of the camera) and the audience’s reception adds a layer of documentation—we watch a

truthful capture of the purely fictional act of theater. Terayama’s mantra, and his fascination with the

potential of theater, was that this description of the nonreality of actors on the stage is an almost perfect

description of everyday life. This type of fiction is reality for most people; we are alienated from our own

characters, from our words, and from our actions—reciting lines and performing acts according to the

script of our various institutions (e.g., jobs, family, etc.).

The interaction between film and theater in the Tenjō Sajiki project can be traced back further than

Kegawa no Marii, however. Terayama named the troupe after the Japanese title for Marcel Carné’s Les

enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945), which was released in Japan as Tenjō sajiki no

hitobito (The people in the upper balcony). Carné’s film is itself a film about theater—specifically the

bohemian theater of the Boulevard of Crime outside Paris in the decades preceding the revolts of 1848.

The free exchange between actors and audience, near anarchy on the streets, and the prerevolutionary

spirit of the masses in the upper cheap seats with whom the actors most closely identify and for whom

they perform: these elements form a nexus of culture that Terayama likely sought to evoke and recultivate

by naming the troupe after this film. It is possible to trace a set of possible direct influences—the

protagonist Baptiste alternates between masculine and feminine personae much like Marie—but those

specific links are less useful for understanding Terayama’s project than broader ones regarding medium

crossover and its relationship to reflexivity. Much of Les enfants du paradis has to do with Baptiste’s

mime acts on stage within an otherwise talkative play, and he inevitably steals the show with his

masterfully expressive gestures. Presented in the medium of film, this might be read as some sort of

comment on the exaggerated expressivity of silent films once contextualized by the talkies, or it could be a

warning against letting the silent form go extinct. But it also shows the fascination with restricted

perception to be something that predates the cinema—mime acts started well before the silents. The will

toward silent film may date back to the mimes, or even farther back to Diderot and his effort to access

gestured communication by covering his ears at the theater. Carné’s film tells us something about our

assumptions about film and theater in the course of this interaction—Terayama’s film-referencing theater

and theater-linked films will likely do the same.

As a play performed in a cinema, Kegawa no Marii functionally removed the mediation of camera and

projector, offering audiences true “live-action.” The performativity of gender that forms the core theme of

the play—particularly the satire of sadistic gendering of children by parents within a totalitarian family

structure, and the call for gender to be recognized as a contract-based prerogative of the individual—also

comments on the institutionalization of our assumptions about theater and film. These themes and

problems would be carried over to Terayama’s first feature film, Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, a film that

when read against the Tenjō Sajiki’s theater projects of the same period should reveal more about the

process of deinstitutionalization.

Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets

In April 1971, around four years after the Kegawa no Marii performances in Shinjuku Bunka, Terayama’s

first major feature-length film was screened in that same cinema. Titled Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, it

was one of the “ten million yen” ATG coproductions (around US$28,000 in 1971), each of which

received half of that already rock-bottom budget and were expected to pull together the other five million

independently. The film is a collage-like rock musical that traces the coming of age of its young male

protagonist, Kitagawa Eimei (played by Sasaki Eimei), within the bohemian counterculture of Shinjuku

circa 1970. Eimei’s family is already somewhat bohemian: he is being raised by his petty-thief

grandmother and his delinquent father (who owes him money). Eimei in turn looks after his sister,

Setsuko, who the family worries has developed a romantic attachment to her pet rabbit. Eimei tries to join

a soccer team but never gets promoted above janitorial duties, and his sexual initiation with the team’s

patron prostitute is a disaster. Eimei’s grandmother arranges to have Setsuko’s rabbit killed in order to

force her to socialize, which sends her wandering distraught into the soccer team’s locker room where she

is gang-raped by the entire team while Eimei tries in vain at the door to stop them. All of this is intercut

with footage of street theater and “happenings” from Shinjuku: video versions of homosexual wanted ads,

hippies smoking marijuana on the streets, fantasies of human-powered airplanes, a manifesto on stuttering,

graffiti everywhere, and other seemingly random excerpts from Tokyo’s counterculture. By the end, Eimei

has become confrontational and assertive, his sister has fallen in love with her rapist and moved in with

him and his girlfriend, and Eimei’s plot to liberate himself from his family is foiled when the ramen cart

he bought to put his father back to work turns out to have been stolen.

Sho o suteyo machi e deyō compares well with Kegawa no Marii in several ways. The core narrative

concerns the emancipation of a young man, particularly the process of recognizing the manner of his

entrapment and the following effort to escape. In both cases, they ultimately fail: Kinya returns to Marie

obediently, and Eimei is dragged away in the final scene by police officers. Both narratives are driven by

audience curiosity regarding the sexual or gender ambiguity of these young, male protagonists. To these

thematic parallels we must add a direct quotation of the play within the film: Miwa Akihiro is again in the

bathtub demanding to be shaven (this time his underarms rather than his legs)—in this case, when Eimei

visits a queer brothel in an apparent fantasy near the end (Figure 4.1). But Kegawa no Marii was

ultimately about a masochistic alternative to sadistic power structures—which is to say, about a

deinstitutionalization rather than a reinstitutionalization of power. Does the continuity between Kegawa

no Marii and Sho o suteyo machi e deyō stretch beyond these links—the parallel narratives, the

crossovers from theater to film, and the direct quotation of the play within the film—all the way to this

larger discourse on the problem of institutionalism? If Terayama’s engagement with the problem of

institutionalism continues here—particularly the problem of diffusing a calcified structure of laws into a

new set of negotiable contracts—there is an exciting possibility that this film could speak to issues of

power and stability within an antiestablishment institution such as the ATG itself.

Rather than simply charging the ATG with hypocrisy, Terayama’s work seems to ask whether film

could still exist in a deinstitutionalized form or if its material dependencies will always require change to

be a reinstitutionalization of some kind. The ATG was an institution established in opposition to the larger

institution of commercial narrative film, which was already in serious decline in Japan by the time the

ATG began officially coproducing domestic films in 1968 with Ōshima’s Kōshikei (Death by hanging).

But as a subsidiary of one of the surviving major studios, Tōhō, it had little potential for completely

overthrowing the system of film production and distribution, since any substantive resistance would have

gotten the entire project cancelled. The available options appeared to be hedging bets and hoping for

reform of the studios by reinstitutionalizing them on ATG’s art-house model (conscious of dependence on

the support of the profit-seeking majors and their investors) or abandoning the existing system of

production and distribution altogether and starting anew with full independence from both those existing

systems. These alternatives sparked a lively discourse among filmmakers, and one way to read Sho o

suteyo machi e deyō is as a contribution to this debate.²⁴

Figure 4.1. Miwa Akihiro is a prostitute named Jigoku (Hell) in the film Sho o suteyo machi e deyō

(Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets, 1971), a twisted reprise of his role in the play Kegawa no

Marii (Marie in furs, 1967).

The film version of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō was the final installment of a larger project that had

first been a book done as a collaboration between Terayama and the graphic designer Yokoo Tadanori

and later became a Tenjō Sajiki play. The book version of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō was published first

in February 1967, and another printing was timed with the release of the film in 1971. Its physical

appearance is striking: the dust jacket is printed on both sides with Yokoo’s trademarked rising sun and

disembodied mouth on the front, a blond woman topless and lactating on the back, women’s underwear as

if on an invisible person on the front flap, an image of Terayama encased within layers of decorative

frames on the back flap, and the Beatles on all four panels of the opposite side. The cover itself has yet

another design with a jockey sitting on a horse skeleton straddling train tracks, on the back is a photograph

from behind of a nude, blond woman standing in water.²⁵The table of contents is modeled on monthly

magazines but does not begin until page twenty-two, following two vignettes. Cheap newsprint is used

throughout, with sections near the beginning and end printed in red ink, probably to simulate the look and

feel of manga weeklies like Shōnen magajin. Drawings, newspaper clippings, photographs, and mock

advertisements decorate most pages. There is a flipbook cartoon in the upper left margin that shows a

countdown from the number seventy down to zero followed by a finger poking a woman’s nipple, which

then triggers an explosion that shatters the entire planet to bits. A half-sized, glossy blue insert appears

midway through the book with a brief autobiography of Terayama. Text is in one, two, or three columns on

the page, suddenly shifting its orientation in one section to force readers to rotate the book ninety degrees,

but then back to normal ten pages later. The content of the pieces ranges from “introductory” instruction

manuals on delinquency, jazz, and running away from home (selections from the Iede no susume essays),

to sex, sports, profiles of entertainers, and neomythology. Which is to say that it is not “about” anything at

all, and that any attempts to read this text looking for a core theme would face not only a realization that

there is none but also (and more importantly) a realization that we have been conditioned to unify texts no

matter how fragmentary they appear. The entire project could be described as a foregrounding of

bookmaking style itself as well as an exposure of the rigid uniformity within most printed matter. When

rereleased in paperback, Yokoo’s embellishments and the range of printing styles were removed, leaving

only Terayama’s collection of essays in a tidy and uniform format—and more than missing the point in a

gross distortion of the original. At its core the original publication was a conspicuous treatment of the

materiality rather than transparency of words as distributed through the printing industry, and a showcase

for the eclectic style both Terayama and Yokoo were using at the time.

The theatrical version of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō was a loosely scripted play that featured teenage

poets reading their poems on stage—it was conceived as an experiment in stage verité. Sasaki Eimei, the

lead in the film, was one of the young poets recruited to perform in the play, which was performed in

Tokyo during August and September 1968 and then again in March 1969 before moving to Nagoya in

October 1969, Sapporo in January 1970, and Ashiya in April 1970. The play shifted as new poets were

constantly integrated, and it drew material freely from Terayama’s Iede no susume essays.²⁶The script

found in Terayama’s collected plays, then, must be considered just one manifestation of the performance,

which was willfully designed to change with time, exaggerating theater’s assurance that each performance

be slightly different. By launching these high schoolers onto the stage and into the public eye, Terayama

was fast-tracking them into the entertainment industry, bypassing the universities altogether. This position

is consistent with his argument against the university system as discussed with the young poet Kishigami

Daisaku (see chapter 1) and with Marie’s lecture to Kinya in Kegawa no Marii when she lists off prisons

and bars as alternatives to the classroom. At a moment when much of the student movement was sparked

by tuition hikes and overenrollment, Terayama was promoting the abandonment of university education

(including the personal and family debts incurred and the expectation of mainstream employment after

graduation) in exchange for immediate participation in an independent, bohemian movement in the arts.

The one fully scripted scene in the stage version of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō’s narrative speaks directly

to this problem and merits close attention.

In this scene, the two characters that appear amid the poems in the theatrical version of Sho o suteyo

machi e deyō are a high school student preparing for the university entrance examinations and his

Japanese teacher. We first encounter them as they sit in adjacent stalls in the bathroom, talking about

reading on the toilet:

TEACHER: All I want is to read to my heart’s content someplace where I’m not interrupted by life . . .

There is nothing more pleasant that “reading in the toilet” in our modern rushed society, even

from the standpoint of time efficiency.

STUDENT: They should just go ahead and put bookshelves in the stalls.

TEACHER: Exactly, I agree. It’s the Ministry of Education’s duty to fill all public restrooms with

books! (laughs)

STUDENT: It is an education issue, isn’t it. But with that plan the more constipated you are the better

your chance for joining the intelligentsia!²⁷

Satire of the joys of social atomization misconceived as independence appears throughout Terayama’s

work. Reading here stands in broadly for antisocial introversion. In a later scene, the teacher is literally

walling himself into a room of books, using them like bricks. The student approaches him and asks if he

has read anything interesting lately and then uses the typical word for “book” (hon), which is quickly

corrected by the teacher to the snootier “volume” (shomotsu)—used in an abbreviated form in the play’s

title. The title of the work was likely taken from the afterword to André Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres

(The Fruits of the Earth, 1897) in which the narrator repeatedly demands that his imagined reader,

Nathaniel, “jette mon livre” (throw out my book). Gide’s paradoxical recognition and rejection of his

own didactic impulse (still in the didactic mode: “Don’t obey me!”) is something found in Terayama’s

project as well. The title used for the French release of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, in fact, was Jetons

les livres et sortons dans les rues, collectivizing in Terayama’s case the film audience and suggesting that

all books must go.²⁸The title draws this line from Gide together with a more explicitly revolutionary one

—a 1911 work by the philosopher Tanaka Ōdō called Shosai yori gaitō ni (Out from the studies and into

the streets), which was a slogan used by proletarian writers to protest the anticommunist Peace

Preservation Law (Chian iji-hō) of 1925. But rather than a return to the pastoral countryside as in Gide’s

narrative (or a dispatching of college students to farms as in Mao’s Cultural Revolution), Terayama’s title

suggests that his audience abandon the false comforts of their isolation and begin to interact with real

people within the streets of the cities—he promoted urban immigration similar to his own. At the time of

the play version, this walling up behind books would have particularly resonated with the barricades

strategy the students were using in their opposition to tuition hikes, embezzlement, the Vietnam War, the

1970 renewal of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, and other grievances. Often misunderstood as opposition

to the student movement, Terayama may again (as he did in 1960) have been calling for a broader

insurrection, one that did not do its opposition the favor of containing itself within the campuses.

With Sho o suteyo machi e deyō existing in these three forms—book, play, and film—but with tenuous,

if any, narrative links between them, the project as a whole refuses both the typical link between genre

and medium as well as the unity of a single work of art. The project has a rhizomatic structure, appearing

here and there in different forms, and hinting at something much greater lurking beneath the surface and out

of sight. But it would be a mistake to conceive of even this greater Sho o suteyo machi e deyō project as

complete unto itself because elements within the text link not only to other manifestations of Sho o suteyo

machi e deyō but also to Terayama’s other projects. The quotation within the film of Miwa’s performance

as Marie in Kegawa no Marii draws a tangible and undeniable link to that play, breaking apart the

possibility that the greater Sho o suteyo machi e deyō project could be a closed text. Miwa’s appearance

in the film rewards Terayama’s fans who knew his work well, but it also jars those trying to make sense

of the film—we have shifted so many times by that point (the scene occurs about two-thirds of the way

through the film) between fictional and documentary modes that most viewers had probably given up

attempting to understand it through a customary framework.

The film’s attack on audience comfort begins with the opening sequence. It starts with a full minute of

blank screen, in which we hear shuffling sounds, some muttering, then Terayama’s directorial voice over

a megaphone calling out blocking, and finally the sound of film running through the camera. Then a jump

cut to Eimei (it is left unclear whether this is the actor Sasaki Eimei or the character Kitagawa Eimei) in

monochrome facing us directly with his accusatory challenge: “What the hell are you doing? (Nani shiten

da yo) All of you sitting there waiting around in a dark cinema. Nothing’s gonna start.” In these ten

seconds of film, Terayama has already severed the typical bundling of film viewership to pure image

consumption—our passivity and vulnerability are being attacked (Figure 4.2).²⁹Eimei continues:

It’s empty back here behind the screen. All the people back here are getting sick of waiting just like

you. “Isn’t there anything cool going on?” (Lights a cigarette) The difference between out there and

back here is that it’s no-smoking for you, but back here we’re free. (Takes a long drag)³⁰

Behind the gag about smoking is a more serious reference to two important critiques of the medium of

film and the way it is typically received. The first is to the willful passivity of the audience mentioned

previously. If cinema operates sociologically to mass produce an agency effect within the everyday lives

of audience members in contrast to their sedated consumption of films—that is, passivity inside the

cinema making us feel subjective outside of it—then Terayama may have been attempting an inversion of

that structure here. By attacking that passivity and demanding active participation in the creation of the

film, the cinema becomes the locus of agency for the audience, throwing the passivity of the everyday into

relief.³¹Cinema more real than reality itself risks sparking despair in its attempt to motivate action—this

cinema could agitate for a requestioning of agency in everyday life and the social system of illusions that

produce false sensations of agency.

Figure 4.2. Eimei addresses the audience directly at the beginning of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō

(Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets, 1971), distinguishing the smoke-free cinema from the

freedom actors have behind the silver screen.

The other critique of the film medium present in these first lines has to do with the temporal disconnect

that separates the moment of filming from the moment of projection. Film mechanically severs the human

link between actors and audience that participatory theater sought to reconnect. Here, as Eimei speaks

directly to us about this screen behind which, or, to follow Eimei’s lines literally, within which

(sukuriinu no naka de), the actors wait for some kind of beginning along with the audience, we are made

conscious of the material impossibility of synchronicity between the human actors behind the celluloid

images and audience in the seats of a cinema. We are also made conscious of how strange the moment of

filming must have been for Eimei—speaking directly to the camera but imaging it to be the audience

separated from him by a not-yet-present screen that would collapse his three-dimensional body into a

two-dimensional image. It was certainly as strange for him to make as it is for us to watch. Suddenly we

are thinking about production rather than immersing ourselves in consumption, recognizing the properties

of the distribution apparatus of images, and becoming conscious of the severing of the people who

produce from the people who consume.

Engaging the material and imagined properties of the screen in this first shot was the first of several

screen-related “expanded cinema” experiments Terayama did through the 1970s. The most famous of

those was a nine-minute 16mm film called Rōra (Laura) from 1974, in which three prostitutes on-screen

face the audience directly and begin taunting an accomplice in the audience for expecting to see nudity in

an avant-garde film, eventually challenging him to join them inside the screen.³²The accomplice (always

Morisaki Henriku) stands, and they continue to beckon him on until he physically pushes himself through

the screen and, somewhat predictably by this point, then appears on the screen as part of the film—the

trick screen uses Ace bandages stretched vertically over the front of a wooden frame. The three women

proceed to strip him naked, forcing him to actively show something that he had hoped passively to watch,

and then shove him back out of the film and into the audience, where he exits the cinema nude, clutching

his clothes. The point is a simple one: the seemingly material constraints of the filmic medium are not

actually capable of restricting expression in the ways they first appear. In fact, the opposite may in fact be

true: by establishing an assumption like the screen’s impenetrability, the materiality of cinema creates

fictional potential using those expectations. Shinpan (The trial, 1975) used the screen in the opposite way,

ending with accomplices and audience members physically pounding nails into the white, plywood screen

used for the film. Nitōjo: Kage no eiga (The two-headed woman: A shadow film, 1977) uses shadows

both existing on the film image and others added to the screen from two sources: the projection booth and

by backlighting people walking behind the screen. The shadows they cast on the back of the image are

visible to the audience due to the semitransparency of the silver screen. Terayama often mentioned his

high school days spent living behind the screen of his uncle’s cinema in Aomori as the root of his interest

in the back surface of the screen, which may be the source of the idea, but the effect of these projects is to

destabilize and exploit audience assumptions about the material properties of the apparatus of cinema and

to open new possibilities for fictionality in the process.³³

The use of camera noise in the moments before Eimei appears onscreen in Sho o suteyo machi e deyō

contributes to another instance of cinematic reflexivity, but it does so with an interesting ambiguity.

Because we can only hear the sound of film running through a machine and are unable to see the apparatus

itself, we cannot be certain whether this sound is coming from a camera or a projector. It could be either,

and as such we should read it as being both, which puts the audience in a strange place. The running film

sound is loud relative to the other background voices and even loud enough relative to Eimei that it seems

that we, the audience, are being positioned adjacent to whatever it is that is making the noise. We could be

in the position of the cinematographer holding the camera at the moment of shooting, of that of the director

sitting next to a projector in a small screening room preparing for editing, or of the projectionist in the

booth during the film’s exhibition. The ambiguity opens the possibility of these three important moments in

the creation of a film being collapsed into a single productive instant—of impossible synchronicity made

possible—and this impossible subject position is offered to the audience of the film. These are three

moments of production exposed, conflated, and repositioned onto the viewer.

Eimei continues his monologue, suggesting that the rebellious ones in the cinema could use the

darkness and their own anonymity as an alibi: “If you were thinking of pulling off something devious there

in the dark, it won’t do to just sit there all proper like that. Try stretching your hand over toward the next

seat. Stroke the knee a little, see what happens. Don’t worry about botching it up . . . no one even knows

your name. No one knows my name either.”³⁴Again the gag veils a more serious critique, this time of the

notion that watching a certain type of film (political, counter-cultural) in a certain type of cinema (ATG,

other art houses) is in itself a “devious,” political act—Terayama denies the claim to substantive politics

within one’s selection of products in the marketplace. But this line is also about the hidden power of

anonymity. Too often we assume that power comes only with prestige or social status and that our ability

to impact social structures is dependent on being close to the top of those structures. Here the opposite is

true—anonymity provides cover. Most important, however, is Eimei’s identification with the audience in

terms of their equally anonymous status. Despite this Brechtian breaking of the fourth wall in facing and

addressing us, Eimei manages to link himself to us in a direct way. Rather than imagining ourselves in his

position, we identify both ourselves and Eimei as members of the same collectivity.

This countercultural collectivity contrasts with the newspaper headline Eimei mentions near the end of

his monologue about a young man, ethnically Korean but living in Japan, who has crashed a hang glider he

was trying to use to fly back to his homeland:

“Fixed-Wing Glider Crashes into Tsushima Channel: Adolescent Korean Male, Ji Hōgen, Dead on

Arrival”

I was stunned and looked up into the sky. Cloudy, then clearing; occasional showers. On wings of

cheap steel, an unarmed Korean trying to fly back to his homeland. As envious as I am of those few

meters of sky you flew through, that air gives me a bitter chill. Like a steel-press operator groaning

under the weight, I’m a human-powered airplane [jinriki hikōki], only make 28,000 yen a month.³⁵

Images of this human-powered airplane appear throughout the film, and considering that the production

company Terayama set up to coproduce the film with ATG was called Jinriki Hikōki Sha (The human-

powered airplane company), it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this image to it. The

human-powered airplane never flies in the film; the attempts are always futile. In the newspaper headline

the glider’s flight is an attempt to return to an ethnic homeland this Korean probably never knew. Later,

when Eimei runs away from his father down the railroad tracks, the film cuts to a fantasy with Eimei’s

first attempt to fly the glider, but his father is easily able to keep up with him on foot (Figure 4.3). The

glider appears twice after Eimei’s encounters with the soccer team captain girlfriend, who he is clearly

attracted to. The second fantasy depicts Eimei trying to persuade her to fly away with him, but she is

unconvinced that it would work. After this series of escape fantasies, the final appearance of the human-

powered airplane shows it engulfed in flames, with the implication that Eimei had lit it on fire. This

image of the destruction of a failed means of escape is critical to the film, and more complex than simply

an image of despair preceding a reassimilation to the status quo. This incineration image follows

important lines by the member of the soccer team who “went political” and is now being pursued by the

police: “Once in middle school I picked up a baby lizard in a park. Put it in a Coke bottle and raised it

there. It got bigger and bigger until it couldn’t escape. Lizard in a Coke bottle! Lizard in a Coke bottle! Do

you think you have the strength to break free? It’s the same for you, Japan! Isn’t it the same? Japan! Shame

blows across the Korean Straits again, could you be worth me throwing away my life for, oh Homeland?

My Homeland, are you worth it?”³⁶There are at least four major narratives being pulled together in these

lines. The lizard grown too large to escape its home is from Ibuse Masuji’s “Sanshōuo” (The salamader,

1923), in which a salamander grows too large to fit through the opening of the cave it lives in. The Coke

bottle update to that narrative, which probably represents capitalist expansion to the Left and American

corruption to the Right, could have been a reference to the huge Coke bottle on the poster for Satō

Makoto’s play Isumene chikatetsu (Ismene subway, 1966), which was probably the first Japanese play to

proclaim itself “underground theater.” The third reference is to the hang-glider death in the waters

between Japan and the Korean peninsula, linking back to the start of the film, but it is cast through a fourth

reference to Terayama’s famous tanka on patriotism: misutsuru hodo no sokoku wa ari ya (is there any

homeland worth forsaking?), as discussed in chapter 1. So added to the critique of willful atomization

mistaken for freedom that we saw in the play version of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, here we find what

first appears to be an attack on the will to freedom when that has become impossible. Is the nation even

worth attempting to rescue—are we not trapped inside it? And yet it may be possible to read this burning

glider as perfectly consistent with Terayama’s critique of liberation misconstrued as freedom from social

ties. The juxtaposition of these lines raging against entrapment with the image of Eimei burning his own

glider makes a powerful suggestion about the proper target for abandonment. What would Eimei have

been free from in his human-powered airplane other than a web of connections to other people? Realizing

that is what he sought to escape, Eimei burns the airplane to relinquish that false hope, in the spirit of

recommitting to sociality (Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.3. Eimei escapes from his father in a human-powered airplane (jinriki-hikōki) during a

fantasy sequence near the beginning of the film Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Throw Out Your Books,

Let’s Hit the Streets, 1971).

This burning human-powered airplane also forms the ending of a Tenjō Sajiki play called Jinriki

hikōki Soromon (Solomon: The human-powered airplane, 1970). It was first performed in November

1970 as a street theater project in Shinjuku, part of which took place just outside the Shinjuku Bunka

where Sho o suteyo machi e deyō would be screened about five months later. The audience for the three

performances was partially recruited by offering free tickets to bystanders willing to participate in

preperformance events. The homage anthem to yakuza film star Takakura Ken in Sho o suteyo machi e

deyō, for example, is a reworking of one of these recruitment techniques in which a Tenjō Sajiki actor

posed as a street musician outside the Shinjuku Tōei cinema (just around the corner from ATG’s Shinjuku

Bunka), singing an ode to Takakura and his line “shinde moraimahyō” (“I need you to die” in the

working-class Tokyo dialect). Takakura Ken’s films were screened in nonstop succession at that cinema,

between about eight and thirteen per year throughout the 1960s, with this particular installment, Shōwa

zankyōden: Shinde moraimasu (Shōwa tales of brutality and chivalry: You will die for me, 1970),

opening in September, just two months before the Tenjō Sajiki’s street theater performance. Terayama’s

song is filled with homoerotic innuendo toward Takakura’s fanbase, but it also suggests that the all-night

screenings may also have served as a homeless shelter for Tokyo’s working poor. Airline-style tickets for

the street theater play were given out free to anyone who spontaneously joined in with the Tenjō Sajiki

actor’s anthem (Figure 4.5). Recruitment for the play also took place at a busy intersection on the opposite

side of Shinjuku station, where actors rewarded those willing to answer a survey with questions such as

“Are you satisfied with monogamy?” and “What type of crimes have you enjoyed lately?” There were

three meeting points for the 4:00 P.M. start of the play: at Shinjuku station’s east exit, the west exit, and on

the second floor of the Kinokuniya bookstore between the station and the cinema district. At the heart of

the project was a flirtation with quasi-spontaneous revolution in the streets. This loose coordination of

action across several parts of Shinjuku was paired with the alibi of theater’s fictionality—“It’s just a

play, officer, don’t worry”—energizing the dynamic between the actors, the audience, and the urban space

itself. Shinjuku was reconceived as the sky through which this “human-powered airplane” of the

coordinated groups would fly, as is made clear by the clouds on the maps that all participants were given

(Figure 4.6). There are a few more possibilities that suggest other meanings for this project, some of

which hinge on how we handle the name of this airplane: “Solomon.” This may refer to King Solomon,

the monarch who reigned over Israel’s empire at its greatest size before seeing it crumble. After two

major film versions of King Solomon’s Mines, the name “Solomon” may have been more associated with

adventures through uncharted parts of Africa than with Israel, but reference, in 1970, to Israel’s historical

empire must have invoked the Six-Day War of 1967 when contemporary Israel expanded its borders

significantly. When this play was performed, Terayama would have just returned from a 1969 trip to

Israel on an Israeli government grant, so these issues would have been fresh in his mind.³⁷Juxtaposing

Solomon with the Six-Day War is politically clever in that it simultaneously reminds Israel of its own

expansionist precedent and the failure that followed, just as it also undermines the logic of opposition to

Israel’s right to exist on historical grounds—that this is “Arab soil”—since the Israelis could also restake

a claim to the Solomonic kingdom if previous historical borders justify war. The suggestion, then, is that

the Arab-Israeli negotiation will need to be done on synchronic, not diachronic, terms.

Figure 4.4. Eimei watches his airplane burn in a sequence near the end of the film Sho o suteyo machi

e deyō (Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets, 1971), which was borrowed from the end of the

Tenjō Sajiki street theater performance called Jinriki-hikōki Soromon (Solomon: The human-powered

airplane, 1970).

Figure 4.5. The airline-style ticket for participating in the 1970 street theater performance Jinriki-

hikōki Soromon (Solomon: The human-powered airplane). Courtesy of Kujō Kyōko and Terayama

World.

Figure 4.6. The map envisioning the streets of Shinjuku as a clouded sky through which would fly the

street theater performance Jinriki-hikōki Soromon (Solomon: The human-powered airplane). Courtesy

of Kujō Kyōko and Terayama World.

Another possible source for Jinriki-hikōki Soromon is the Solomon Islands, which hosted the fierce

Guadalcanal Campaign between the Allies and Japanese forces, made famous as the location of

Kennedy’s shipwreck and rescue. Supply routes to Australia were at stake, so the area around the

Solomon Islands was a critical space in the Pacific war. Recall, too, Minami Yōichiro’s 1941 adventure

novel for boys, Soromon-tō tanken (Expedition to the Solomon Islands). That novel includes a scene in

which a shipwrecked boat is burnt by the heroes to help them keep their cover in the jungle, but results in

them being rescued by a seaplane.³⁸Terayama may have been deliberately invoking these historic battles

or Minami’s book, something he may have read as a boy during the war. The broader implication may be

that the performance was partly a military operation conducted in the Shinjuku “theater” of war.

An important hint for understanding the function of this street theater performance comes in Terayama’s

introductory notes to the project: “For Jinriki-hikōki Soromon to fly, it will require ‘resistance’ more

than anything else. When George Cayley invented humankind’s first airplane he clarified a structure in

which flight did not depend on the wings creating upward thrust, but rather, where liftoff was achieved

using air resistance and directionality. The basis of aeronautics is that ‘when a bird flies its wings have

power sufficient to uphold a set weight using the resistance of air.’”³⁹By moving the project into the

streets, Terayama may have been attempting to give conceptual flight to the group involved in this play by

provoking resistance from either other bystanders or the police. The goal, as he describes it, was to begin

by creating a “one-square-meter, one-hour-long nation” through the theatrical interaction on the street

between one actor and one viewer. That limited, temporary polity would then extend to become a “two-

square-meter, two-hour-long nation,” then become a “four-square-meter, four-hour-long nation,” and

eventually conquer and fictionalize the entirety of Shinjuku.⁴⁰Jinriki hikōki Soromon performed the

theatrification and transformation of urban space. This notion, not of performing a theater of revolution

(kakumei no engeki, a slogan of Satō Makoto’s Theatre Center, or Black Tent, troupe), but rather of

making the revolution theatrical (kakumei no engeki-ka) and of theatricalizing the revolution already in

progress, is critical to making sense of the Tenjō Sajiki’s position at this time.⁴¹This is effectively an

assertation of the radical possibility of theatricalized revolution—precisely opposite of the points of

Robert Brustein, who bemoaned this trend in his 1971 Revolution as Theatre.⁴²

Reconsidered in terms of urban space, it is interesting that the Tenjō Sajiki, which had in 1969 set up a

base of operations in Shibuya with the establishment of the Tenjō Sajiki-kan (the troupe’s headquarters,

which consisted of a performance space in the basement, a café on the first floor, and office space on the

second), would have returned to Shinjuku for this performance. As Yoshimi Shun’ya outlines in his history

of the geographical movement of Tokyo’s primary entertainment district, the center of Tokyo’s energy had

historically moved from Asakusa to Ginza in the 1920s, from Ginza to Shinjuku around 1960, and then

from Shinjuku to Shibuya in the 1970s, by which time the Parco department store anchored the rising

consumer culture:

Parco provided an environment of fashion on Shibuya’s Park Avenue [Kōen-dōri]in which the leading

role would be performed by us [watashi]—the keyword here was “staging.” The key toward

understanding Parco’s spatial strategy, then, is to look at the way they made the entire town into one

giant theater, which required the creation of individual elements in the town that would establish the

situation of seeing and being seen, after which the value system of the participants had to be

expanded. As Parco’s founder, Masuda Tsūji, has said regarding the cluster of theaters on Park

Avenue, “We sought to pull the stage out into the audience, we wanted to make small theaters that let

customers feel that they were in the leading role,” but the same could be said of the entire district.⁴³

The opening of Shibuya’s Parco department store in 1973 contributed to the shift, as did the demise of

Shinjuku Station–based “folk guerilla” protests of the Vietnam War, but Terayama’s establishment of a

countercultural icon in Shibuya even before the 1970s began should not be overlooked. Masuda was a

close friend of underground theater leader Kara Jūrō, who did a performance on the Parco grounds as

they were being prepared for construction, and the theater on the top floor of the main Parco department

store in Shibuya has supported (or has been supported by) Miwa Akihiro’s solo performances and Tenjō

Sajiki plays since its opening.⁴⁴The reinvasion of Shinjuku with Jinriki hikōki Soromon was therefore

motion against the nascent flow of youth culture out of Shinjuku and toward Shibuya around 1970, and

might most effectively be understood as an effort to spread countercultural urban theatricalization across

the whole of western Tokyo. The reference to the Solomonic empire, rather than the former expansionist

Davidic one, may have hinted at the need to maintain countercultural territory already won by previous

exploits. This flow links well to the possible readings of Jinriki hikōki Soromon’s role within the film

version of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō: we could either take the presence of street theater in a film to be

an extension of the outdoor street theater project to the indoor theater, or the image of the play could be

seen as a conceptual portal from the enclosed cinema back out into the streets. Critical here is the

revisioning of urban space as itself performative, its nature shifts depending on how it is used, and once

reconceptualized as one big theater or cinema, the underground can burst out of its “little theaters”

(shōgekijō) and tents to reclaim entire urban areas.

Another notable aspect of the human-powered airplane scenes in Sho o suteyo machi e deyō is the

conspicuous use of color. The first of these scenes is tinted magenta and occurs when Eimei is running

away from his father near the opening of the main narrative of the film. This magenta tint contrasts with

the monochromatic green-tinted scenes in which Eimei introduces his family—this green tint will be used

to mark the family scenes throughout the film. Magenta is also the font color used for the title of the film,

printed against a green tinted image of an empty boxing ring (boxing being the future Eimei dreamed of

before he joined a gym and realized how much it hurt—as with Barikan from Aa, kōya). Green is coded to

the family, then, and magenta typically to this fantasy of escaping it. It is not until thirteen minutes into the

film that full color is used—a first for an ATG coproduction—saved here for the soccer team that Eimei

joins. Life in the Shinjuku streets, in restaurants, on the soccer field, and in the brothels and locker rooms:

all of this is polychromatic and vivid in parallel to the heteroglossia of the streets. Monochrome returns

after Eimei’s visit to the brothel in which he remembers playing doctor as a child. Here the tint is red in

the office and blue as the woman chases him outside. The magenta tint appears again with the series of

visual want ads, probably based on those in the back of magazines, and again in a brief shot of the empty

soccer field. The second image of the human-powered airplane is tinted magenta but over what appears to

be color stock—there are blues and reds clearly visible. Black and white monochrome is used again as

Eimei’s sister Setsuko walks in despair down the train tracks, ignoring the surrealistic image of Jennifer

Merin (an American who had joined the Tenjō Sajiki) running toward her flying a kite. The magenta tint is

used again during the homage to Takakura Ken in stills intercut into the song. Black-and-white

monochrome is used for the “fountain of youth” sequence of tales and the family portrait, but the magenta

tint returns for the final images of the human-powered airplane and the brothel images with Miwa—in

both cases again a magenta tint over color film. The “lizard in a Coke bottle” lines are delivered within

black-and-white monochrome with a magenta tint, which cuts directly to the magenta tinted image of

Eimei’s airplane burning to the ground.

In order to sort out the codification of tint colors in Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, it will be useful to

consider another experimental short film from 1974 that used tinting conspicuously. The multiprojection

16mm film, Seishōnen no tame no eiga nyūmon (The young people’s guide to film) is only three minutes

long but comprises some of Terayama’s most striking cinematic images.⁴⁵Three films are projected

simultaneously, each tinted one of the three primary colors for light. The image on the left is tinted green

and consists of a series of surrealist images—unlikely and provocative juxtapositions of random objects.

The center image is tinted blue and features an image of a naked young man (Morisaki Henriku again)

urinating directly onto the camera lens. The image on the right is tinted magenta and consists of a series of

personal, autobiographical images from Terayama’s life. Terayama’s choice of color implies that these

three mininarratives could combine into one full color production, which when understood against the

title—that is, an introduction to film—might suggest that the process of filmmaking could be thought of as

a combination of attacks against the cinematic apparatus, autobiography, and unexpected juxtapositions.

If this use of tinted images was codified to the color wheel in this “introductory” short film, then a

similar semiotic may operate in Sho o suteyo machi e deyō. The magenta tint is always used to represent

Eimei’s interior fantasies (whether good or bad), in contrast to the brief concrete memories marked red or

blue. Magenta is a mix of red and blue (in both light and pigment color mixing), and the suggestion here

may be that Eimei’s fantasies (magenta) result from a combination of past memories (red and blue). Even

the personal ads could represent Eimei’s interiority, since these are likely visualizations of text-based ads

from magazines processed through his imagination of faces to match the text. The centrality of this

exploration of Eimei’s interiority is signified by the magenta font used for the title, posing the possibility

of addressing Eimei’s interiority on film as a central problem. This problem is particularly clear in the

screenplay itself, where Eimei’s lines are all attributed to the first-person pronoun watashi. Eimei, then,

was playing “me,” as he had in the stage verité style of the play version Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, but

this time with a script. Rather than bringing himself further and further into the on-screen character, he

may have been expected to bring the on-screen character closer to himself. This refashioning of Eimei

using the film is addressed in the final scene of the film in which Eimei addresses the audience directly

again, as in the opening sequence:

When I hear the sound of the clapperboard, I start to talk. Lines someone else wrote, someone else’s

words. Once the camera’s rolling I have to call Mr. Saitō “father,” and as I repeat it over and over it

starts feeling real. Just when I start wondering if Mr. Saitō is my real father I hear, “Cut!” Then,

“Good, next is scene 103. Eimei, hurry up, here we go.” Then on to the next scene, the next lie . . . it

starts again. A lie within a lie. But in the tiny gap between cuts I get reflected into the cold, cold

February sky, trapped inside an illusion.⁴⁶

The creation of a new family in the course of the film is reinforced here by the use of a green tint over this

sequence, reserved until this point exclusively for Eimei’s biological family in the film. Here it is the

entire assembled cast (including Eimei’s on-screen “family”) tinted the familial green. Rather than the

audience suspending their disbelief and allowing the fictional characters on-screen to become real, Eimei

emphasizes the way that process operates on the production side of a film as well—that is, of actors

beginning to lose track of themselves as they transform into the characters they perform.

One important subtheme in the film remains—that of rape and prostitution—and we need to look

closely at it in order to understand the film’s engagement with institutionalism. Rape, in the abstract, can

stand in for sadism in its simplest form—eroticized violation, the conflation of sex and violence, and the

severance of a social contract and the onesided establishment of an authority structure. This symbolic

form of rape is one we see again and again in Wakamatsu Kōji’s films, for example, and is typically put

into a binary relationship with unforced nudity (e.g., on the roof of a building) representing liberation.

Prostitution, in contrast, could be seen as similar to Deleuze’s description of masochism—pleasure based

on the negotiation of a mutual contract between both parties. In neither case is sex itself the primary locus

of eroticism: the erotic of rape is in the entanglement of violation with sex, and the erotic of prostitution is

in the dynamic between sex and contract. Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, however, does not present rape and

prostitution in such simple terms. There are four scenes on the topic in the film: Eimei’s trip to the soccer

team’s prostitute, the gang rape of Setsuko, the brief scene with Setsuko and her classmates stripping off

the tops of their school uniforms while singing about becoming prostitutes, and Eimei’s daydream about

the transvestite brothel with Miwa. The first brothel trip fails partially because Eimei is there to impress

the team captain, who is also paying for the trip—had he negotiated the arrangement himself, it may have

turned out differently. Ōmi assumes that Eimei desires what he himself and the other team members

desired: that after being broken in by this woman, he would start to enjoy it. But Eimei’s desire is clearly

to escape, even to the desolate fields of the countryside if necessary.

The same logic drove the gang rape of Eimei’s sister Setsuko. The soccer players seem to have thought

that she was getting what she wanted—why else would she have wandered into the men’s locker room

and then all the way into the shower? She may, in fact, have been flirting with a player in the locker room

at the time. It seemed, for an instant at least, that she wanted the same thing as the men who would attack

her in the shower, something they would use to justify the action as ethical. Rape here, and perhaps more

generally, may expose a glitch in an ethical system institutionalized under the principle of reciprocity. A

man forcing a woman to have sex is likely treating her exactly as he would want her to treat him. The

problem with reciprocity is its solipsism—it does not require a contract with the other party impacted but

only the identification of the rights and desires of others with oneself. Such an ethical system would work

perfectly if all parties were perfectly homogeneous, and in fact, it requires the homogenization of needs

and desires in order to become ethical. Socially heterogeneous desire—whether based on gender

difference or, more conspicuously, with homosexuality—may be threatening foremost because it threatens

the universalist logic of reciprocity ethics. A truly social, rather than solipsistic, ethical system would

require the negotiation of relationships on a case-by-case basis, the tedium of which may be the greatest

force operating against it. The irony in the film is that Ōmi—who talks constantly of new social

relationships, Kommune 1 (the famous urban commune in West Berlin that signaled a split from the

German SDS), and free love—is the least likely to negotiate relationships at all. He is a classic hypocrite,

possibly representative of a broad sexual hypocrisy on the fringes of 1960s counterculture.

In contrast to the sadistic scenes, suddenly we find Setsuko and her classmates gleefully stripping off

their tops and singing about becoming prostitutes:

If I end up to be a call girl

Gonna get me a big bar of soap

And wash up all the men I like!

If I end up to be a call girl

Gonna leave my door open all the time

And let in the swallows from the sea⁴⁷

The song is visually linked to the previous scene in which Setsuko’s father tries to reendear himself to her

by offering her a new pet rabbit, but she refuses, saying, “I’m not a child anymore,” as she is making up

her face and demanding privacy—clear signs of coming of age. It is at that moment that he spots an old

photograph of her in her school uniform, an image that immediately precedes Setsuko and her friends

stripping off that same uniform. The juxtaposition of the father’s glimpse of his pubescent daughter in the

photo and her sexual awareness in the house reveals the stripping song to be a representation of the

father’s fear of his daughter gleefully skipping into sexuality—ironically idealistic compared to how her

initiation actually occurred. What becomes evident at this point is that all of the sexual experiences in the

film are plagued by slippages between the dominant party’s perception of the other’s experience and the

actual experience of that person. This is never more painfully clear than when Ōmi nonchalantly invites

himself to join Eimei and his sister at their table in an expensive restaurant that Eimei had splurged on

specifically to console Setsuko after the rape Ōmi had just supervised and participated in. These

juxtapositions foreground the disconnect between the fiction in the minds of these dominant men and the

realities of those they dominate—and open the possibility for a realization among viewers that the

problem at its core has to do with the absence of any form of genuine negotiation or even an awareness of

its need.

To push this further, by recognizing the dangers of representational sex itself—including rape as

sadism and prostitution as masochism—the film’s critique might come full circle, unwinding its own

representational mode. As Setsuko’s rape seems to parallel the violation her grandmother committed in

killing the rabbit she saw as blocking Setsuko’s social development, or as Eimei’s failure in the brothel

looks like another representation of his inadequacy on the soccer team, the rawness of those scenes and

true discomfort on the faces of these novice actors pulls that representational layer away and leaves us

looking at what seems (relative to the rest of the film) to be something very real. But our cognizance of the

profilmic moment, when these were real people actually naked in front of a camera rather than images on

the screen, must then ultimately conflict with the reality effect it produces. We are convinced by the

potency of the depiction within the film’s narrative and yet simultaneously aware of its necessarily

fictional and scripted nature. But even so, the nudity of the actors and the clarity of their physical

sensations pushes us all the way back to the moment of filming, making them human again. The

juxtaposition of Setsuko and Eimei immediately after the rape with a man carrying half a butchered pig

down the street is a powerful metaphor for the soccer team’s treatment of Setsuko, but it is also a

conspicuous reminder that this is a fiction film. This reverse dialectic proceeding from the film image

back to the moment of production—from shades of light reflected off the screen back to human actors—is

an unwinding of the representational apparatus of cinema with an important politics. If the same logic

could be applied to the use of rape as metaphor, then we might make the important step of

deinstitutionalizing the use of rape for symbolic purposes, a distancing of the act from its immediate

meaning that replicates the semiotic slippage necessary to justify rape itself. Terayama may have come

away from Sho o suteyo machi e deyō with the realization that there may be no responsible way to

critique the logic of rape within a realist mode—even one that makes the scene extremely uncomfortable

for the viewers and forces us to recognize and confront our own desire to simultaneously block out that

image and to see it more completely. Setsuko in the shower was the first and last scene in a Terayama film

of a man violating a woman. In the case of Eimei at the brothel, and in many of his later films, however,

we find woman sexually dominating and violating men, an inverted form of critique far more effective in

de-eroticizing rape.

The reverse dialectic, moving back from cinema’s illusion through the production process and to the

human actors behind the image, is a maneuver that challenges the notion that the medium of film itself

possesses any sort of political potential. Eimei, in his final musings at the end of the film, ponders the

ethereality of the medium:

Please turn on the lights. The film ends here, now it’s just my turn to talk. If you think about it, a film

can only exist within the darkness of a cinema. The world of the film ends the moment the lights come

on—it just disappears.

. . . Even the worlds of Polanski and Ōshima Nagisa and Antonioni, all of them disappear when

you turn on the lights. Think you could show a film on the side of a building during daylight?⁴⁸

This is partially a corrective to the notion that certain filming techniques or content constitute a

“political” film. Here we are reminded that politics is a set of power relations between people and that

the film can only mediate information and images about human power relations or the link between the

producers of the film and its audience. The film itself is not a political object. But this is also likely a

reference to a specific event that occurred in 1969 at the Sōgetsu Art Center where the Tenjō Sajiki had

debuted two years previously.

Sōgetsu hosted an experimental film festival planned for October 14 through 30, 1969, that would have

featured new noncommercial art films from around the world under the title “Film Art Festival 1969.”⁴⁹

However, around thirty members of a student movement faction opposed to the 1970 World’s Fair in

Osaka, a group called Banpaku Hakai Kyōtō-ha (The Expo destruction joint-struggle faction), disrupted

the festival on opening day. They charged the selection committee with collaboration with the expo

(Teshigahara Hiroshi and Matsumoto Toshio did shoot films for pavilions, but Teshigahara’s was

anticapitalist and Matsumoto’s was quasi-pornographic) and accused the inherited leadership system

(iemoto seido) of the Sōgetsu school with feudalistic patriarchy. Sōgetsu decided to cancel the entire

festival rather than risk involving the riot police. Matsumoto wrote an angry response to the intervention

arguing that the nature of film requires a space (ba) for it to be shown, and that until a better space was

formed, there was little use in destroying one of the few locations willing to do experimental film

screenings in Tokyo.⁵⁰Art and manga critic Ishiko Junzō countered Matsumoto’s argument, claiming that

the social standing of a cinema impacts the film itself.⁵¹Several years later, Kawanaka Nobuhiro, one of

the members of the group that raided Sōgetsu, wrote of the event and described the alternative venue that

they tried to set up—a tent in a nearby park that clearly would have struggled with the darkness problems

Eimei mentions.⁵²In 1977, Kawanaka and Tomiyama Katsue would launch the Image Forum in Yotsuya

(roughly halfway between Sōgetsu and the ATG’s Shinjuku Bunka). The Image Forum got its start,

however, as a monthly screening called the “Underground Cinematheque,” which screened films at a

number of sites around Shinjuku before eventually settling into the basement of Terayama’s Tenjō Sajiki-

kan for a period of over four years.⁵³Terayama’s name is now on one of the classrooms in the new Image

Forum building in Shibuya as a tribute to that origin.

The reference to this 1969 Sōgetsu event within Sho o suteyo machi e deyō, then, was probably

directed toward the difficulties Kawanaka’s group faced in screening films before they had a stable

cinema space. But the reference to Roman Polanski invokes the famous disturbance at the Cannes Film

Festival the previous year (1968) when Polanski joined François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and others

to shut down the entire event. Terayama’s reference to this moment links it to a global interrogation of the

institutionalization of cinema—a nexus of distribution, festivals, criticism, production, form, content,

style, and modes of viewership—literally bringing the discourse out of the cinema, out of the books, and

back into the streets. This film is ultimately a film against film itself; against the way it historically

replaced theater as a social entertainment and severed the human relation between actor and audience;

against the way it fits so comfortably in a consumer society; and against the way it relies on a huge

apparatus of cinema ownership, distribution networks, and upfront investment to begin production, a

nexus that so often overruns the people involved. And yet what better medium in which to make this point

than film itself? How fitting, then, that the film image itself derails at the end, splitting the image in half as

though the projector has broken down (Figure 4.7). Eimei closes with an expression of his gratitude to the

director, cinematographer, and other actors in the film, but then proclaims his hatred of film itself

—sayonara eiga! This film was ultimately not an effort to replace the institutions of cinema with

something else—a reinstitutionalization—but to untangle all of cinema’s mystification and get it back to

people with their embodiments and entanglements of fiction and reality—a deinstitutionalization—and to

move from there to renegotiate the contracts between actors and audience; between producers,

distributors, and consumers of cinema; and between people and their conceptualizations of what cinema is

and what it could be.

Figure 4.7. Eimei and the cast of Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the

Streets, 1971) as the image derails during the lines of his final monologue.

CHAPTER 5

The Impossibility of History

PAIRED WITH TERAYAMA’S WORK TO eroticize the present were texts that abject the past. Perhaps he

realized that the logical impossibility of history—of a return to a now absent past—was itself insufficient

to cause a shift toward a geographical orientation. Logic is often overwhelmed by the greater pressures of

desire. So if the present and the past compete for our affections, then Terayama may have attempted to tip

the scales not just by adding to synchrony’s appeal but also by intervening to make diachrony uglier.

Terayama treats the abject past most directly in a set of projects all titled Den’en ni shisu (Death in the

country), and this chapter will be a careful analysis of these texts.

The Den’en ni shisu tanka collection from 1965 and the 1974 feature-length ATG film are widely seen

as two of Terayama’s most important works, but he used the same title for two smaller projects done

earlier. One was the November 9, 1962, installment of the Iede no susume (In praise of running away

from home) essays in The Student Times, titled “Rikyō no susume: Den’en ni shisu” (In praise of leaving

your hometown: Death in the country). This concerns the pessimistic nostalgia for rural hometowns

contrasted with the energy of a letter from a runaway. The title seems, then, to refer to the fear of dying in

such a dismal place as one’s own hometown, making abject the diachronically tinged space expected to

embody one’s familial history.

A few weeks earlier than this newspaper publication, on October 22, 1962, Terayama’s thirty-minute

television drama version of Den’en ni shisu aired on Nihon Television. It opens with lines that hint at the

broader theme at play across all of these Den’en ni shisu projects: “The red flower blooms, hush-a-by,

hush-a-by, let me be twenty once more.”¹The lullaby here is clearly designed for the caretaker more than

the child, but what is striking here is this desire not for escape but for a return to a better past, perhaps a

time of greater vitality, but likely a time of freedom. Terayama brings us to these moments again and again

as if to ask why a desire essentially for freedom of movement—a geographical impulse—gets processed

through this historical metaphor. A shift from diachronic to synchronic orientation might explode this sort

of longing, so we are left to ask whether encapsulating desire within a diachronic framework functions to

justify maintenance of the status quo—that what we have been taught to want is stasis, and we naturalize

that desire by cutting off the possibility of geographical and synchronic motion.

These projects are important not only for their handling of issues of time, space, and abjection but also

for the relationship between the texts sharing the same name. Whereas in Terayama’s debut and the match-

strike poem we found him incorporating and reworking material from other poets, pop culture, and film,

the Den’en ni shisu series is a relatively closed and self-referential system in which Terayama repeatedly

uses a set of signifiers that become closely associated with an attempt to (impossibly) revisit his own past

growing up in rural Aomori. The system cannot be fully closed off from new information and historical

change, however, so not only is the narrating subject a different person than he was as a child but Aomori

has changed as well and has become mythologized both in his mind and in the popular imagination,

inevitably inflecting this attempt at exposing the impossibility of “history.”

An Impossible Japanese Avant-Garde

In an attack on the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition of avant-garde Japanese art during the early 1980s, art

historian Inaga Shigemi argues that the term “avant-garde” cannot be applied to any work of art identified

as Japanese. Any such designation, he claims, would violate either the spirit of the avant-garde (to

challenge dominant scales of value) or the nature of its content (historically something foreign to the

artist’s culture):

It is logically impossible to find an authentically avant-gardist position within Third World culture.

What causes this ambiguity? The notion of the avant-garde itself is based on a Eurocentric point of

view. Not by accident did the avant-garde come into its own during the colonial period. The

appropriation of the Other by a Western Europe hoping thereby to regenerate its own traditions

attains at this point its ultimate manifestation, and brings with it an inevitable identity crisis within

Western Europe itself. That which is considered traditional in a non-Western context becomes avant-

garde as it is integrated into a Western context. But this transplantation is a one-way dispossession.

For a non-Western culture, this represents a double alienation: non-Western culture provides the

Western avant-garde with an alibi but, in so doing, the non-Western avant-garde is uprooted, and is

capable of basing itself upon its own culture only through reference to the Western avant-garde.

From this indirect means, moreover, can only result an Eastern arrière-garde.²

While exposing the power dynamics behind European gallery and museum exhibitions of modern

Japanese art may require this deconstruction of the term “avant-garde,” Inaga may be relying on a

dangerous loosening of notions of universal and particular to make his point—a move that could end up

disenfranchising some legitimate forms of experimentalism in Japan. We may be tempted to imagine a

temporally and geographically specific avant-garde consisting of disgruntled European art academy

dropouts who “borrowed” African and Asian aesthetics in an Oedipal attack upon the values preached by

their former teachers. The inversion of a scale of values as technique, however, certainly has not been

limited by either time or geography. Any attempt to link a specific set of artists or artifacts with the

“spirit” of rebellious creativity would be tautological. To cede aesthetic inversion and injections of

foreign culture to a small group of French men is to efface similar antiestablishment projects going on

around the world at the same time. The most important feature of the historical interwar avant-garde was

its diffuse and decentered structure, in which some ideas may have transferred faster between Zurich and

Tokyo than others did between Paris and New York. The necessary reconceptualization here is to abandon

treatment of the avant-garde as specific to one time and one place—it is more accurate historically to

keep the term a generic descriptor from the start. This decentralized avant-garde would materialize in

different ways around the world depending on the nature of institutional art in its locality, confronting

dominant aesthetic scales within each of its particular cultural settings. As long as we maintain the

possibility of cultural difference, the avant-garde would necessarily texture itself differently within

different cultural groups, which may be decreasingly consonant with national or ethnic boundaries.

What space, then, is left for experimentalism in Japan? Inaga’s descriptive analysis skips one possible

manifestation of avant-gardism within Japanese art, namely, the inflection of premodern foreign and native

content within traditional forms in which the standardized scale of values has been inverted. The resulting

product could serve to challenge standard domestic aesthetics as well as the logic of the Eurocentrist

version of the avant-garde Inaga posits as inherent in the concept. We must keep in mind that by the

postwar period the cultural and aesthetic traditions often taken to represent Japan (noh, kabuki, etc.) were

at least as exotic to young Japanese as to non-Japanese—making such traditions functionally foreign even

to those most geographically proximate to them. John Cage’s engagement with Zen Buddhism and

Terayama’s use of kabuki-style makeup on stage are actually structurally identical: both hinge on tension

between a culturally distant form and an awareness of a very different present. While we might be

tempted to argue that any adoption or importation of European methodology would necessarily reinforce

off-balance power relations, such a claim is underwritten by an assumption that the techniques of

experimentalism provisionally termed “avant-gardism” are somehow an essentially European property, a

myth that Japanese experimental art, as well as this study, should serve to debunk.

This method of inversion is precisely what Terayama Shūji seems to have used in his third poetry

collection, Den’en ni shisu (Death in the country, 1965). This set of tanka was preceded by the television

drama and newspaper essay of the same title from 1962, all three of which would be followed by

Terayama’s second ATG feature-length film, also called Den’en ni shisu (1974).³The source material for

the poetry ranges from Tōhoku regional customs to generalized Japanese myths to non-Japanese folklore

and traditions. This material is then presented not just in the 31-syllable form of tanka but also in longer

free-verse pieces labeled classical genres of chōka (long poem) and sōshi (storybook), gradually moving

away from short-form poetry toward longer pieces in prose.⁴By the end of this so-called tanka collection,

we find things such as a warped King Midas tale in which everything a certain man touches grows long

body hair. This is flippant pastiche, but when such a narrative is written in classical Japanese despite its

clearly postwar setting—the man lives in an apāto (apartment)—we are reminded of the link between the

genbun-itchi movement to vernacularize fiction and the ideological politics of identifying modernization

with Westernization.⁵Terayama could be reverting to premodern language for little other than playful

style, but it might be hasty to overlook other possibilities. The presence of these short vignettes within a

collection labeled “tanka” is an overt challenge to genre boundaries. By then reworking his own text into

a film, Terayama has taken on notions of influence and expanded the attack on content and genre to include

medium as well. The sum total of his Den’en ni shisu project, then, becomes a location for a rigorous

reexamination of the physical and discursive structures that constitute notions of media, genre, and content

of poetry and film. The following will be an attempt to trace out Terayama’s engagement with these

structures through several recurrent motifs and then to speculate about why he may have chosen to

experiment in the way he did. Where Inaga questions the possibility of a Japanese avant-gardism,

Terayama seems to use the techniques Inaga describes to question the nature of genre and medium and

ultimately the limits of history and fiction in this Den’en ni shisu cross-media, cross-genre project.

Horror Poetry

Inaga was particularly frustrated with the way that traditional Japanese forms are categorized as “avant-

garde” once they leave Japan: “One the one hand, one cannot automatically consider haikai avant-garde

simply because haikai poets inspired Western imagists. On the other, one would obviously be overly

selective to see Japanese avant-garde poets as coming exclusively from among dadaists and Japanese

surrealists. Rather than attempting to draw a line of demarcation between the avant-garde and the non-

avant-garde, our interest lies in questioning the very possibility of doing so.”⁶Den’en ni shisu may be

one of these strange cases that fits both the traditional model and the avant-gardist criteria, but simply

debunking the term because of this conflict would deprive us of a useful framework for examining

Terayama’s method. In fact, we ought to expect avant-garde aesthetics to overlap in some way with

canonized practice in order to first establish a connection before moving into critique. Consider

Terayama’s systematic attack on the traditional content of Chinese lyric poetry as passed on to Japan: the

flowers, birds, wind, and moon (ka-chō-fū-getsu) are never the poignant lyrical reminders of natural

beauty or our ephemeral human existence but are, for Terayama, rather the subjects and objects of horror.

We find him decapitating flowers, for example:

noko no atsuki ha o mote waga hikishi yo no himawari tsui ni kubi nashi

That night I severed it with feverish saw teeth—a sunflower suddenly headless⁷

The birds in the collection are shrikes, sparrows, and crows—portenders of death. But what ends up

conspicuous about this inverted use of canonical poetic imagery is how few of the poems bother to attack

the traditional lexicon. In exchange for classic content, Terayama begins building a parallel set of

powerful signifiers. In this set we find things like wall clocks, butsudan (Buddhist altars for the home),

the knifelike horizon, hell, hometowns, artificial eyes and limbs, murky water, and images of mothers.

This new set of signifiers frees Terayama to develop associations from scratch and to manipulate them

separately from the traditional signification of loaded words from the canon. It is important to recognize

that in terms of the power of the image, however, he is choosing to relinquish the potential of long-

standing associations. The aesthetic of increasingly refined and delicate allusion is exchanged for the

perhaps more risky game of confrontation and fissure.

At the core of the aesthetics Terayama creates with this new lexicon is the abject pleasure of

recognizing horror in everyday life. Again and again we encounter retrofitted explanations of brutality

behind something that would have normally seemed completely peaceful:

mabikareshi yue ni isshō kesseki suru gakkō jigoku no otōto no isu

A nipped bud, he will be absent for life—my little brother’s empty chair in school hell⁸

Conceiving of an empty chair as being reserved for a brother lost to infanticide leaves us with several

options for interpretation: an adult discovers his or her brother had been “nipped” and overwrites the

image onto memories of childhood, a schoolchild makes the realization in real-time, or something uncanny

about the chair itself suggests such a history. This technique of making horror out of a stationary object is

seen again in the next section of the collection:

imada kubi tsurazarishi nawa tabanerare haigo no kabe ni furubitsutsu ari

Rope that has yet to strangle anyone hangs in a bundle aging on the wall behind him⁹

Shifting horror from kinetic to potential sources of power may be at the root of Terayama’s project here,

and as such, it seems to be a valid case of his application of the inversion aesthetic of avant-gardism. That

is, by identifying the aesthetic of horror as one that imagines active cruelty for cruelty’s sake and then

reversing that scale into a still and silent form of brutality waiting to happen, he has managed to double

the horror effect: we are horrified by both the image itself and by the notion that our theory of horror had

been incomplete (and is thereby incapable of protecting us with its predictions).

The problem with identifying this manipulation of the lexicon as an avant-garde technique is that major

figures from the tradition (from Fuji-wara no Teika to Masaoka Shiki) have repeatedly called for exactly

that practice. So the energy avant-gardism stands to gain by confronting tradition is in danger of being

deflated by falling within the requisites of the tradition itself. This problem with poetic tradition and

rebellion is echoed by the literary critic Isoda Kōichi’s take on Terayama’s relationship with his

hometown: “The feeling that ‘there is no one in my hometown who will reject me certainly becomes, to

the youth who wants to establish a notion of selfhood by using the restrictions of his hometown as a

springboard, a paradoxical inconvenience.”¹⁰It may be a stretch to claim that “hometown” operates as a

metaphor for the poetic tradition throughout Den’en ni shisu, but it is interesting to note that they seem to

be structured in the same way. A potentially more direct reference to the gravitational pull of tradition

may be the repeated reference to family lineage:

kurayami no ware ni kakei o tōnakare tsukemono taru no naka no bōrei

Don’t ask me about my lineage here in the dark—spirits of the dead inside a pickle jar¹¹

rōfu hitori oyogi-owarishi aki no umi ni ware no kakei no abura ukishiya

My aged father finished his swim alone in the autumn sea—up floats the grease of our lineage¹²

Both family and poetic lineage are in the realm of horror and abjection here—it is almost as though

Terayama shifts his poetic diction away from the standard allusions for fear of the ghosts that it might stir

up. But it must be noted that the horror of these images is very clearly not only based in the past or on

family but also specifically on the horror of diachrony as represented by “lineage.” This is the familial

past conceived as a set of birthrights, obligations, and genetic predispositions to disease.

The tanka tradition has encouraged—even demanded—periodic updates of the linguistic content of

poetry. But if we look more closely at the expansion in terms of parts of speech, we find that the growth is

almost always in new nouns. So we find Masaoka Shiki campaigning for the use of foreign words in tanka

in order to revitalize the form that he claimed had nearly run through all available permutations of the

traditional poetic vocabulary: “Any word which can express beauty is a proper word for tanka; there are

no other tanka words. Whether Chinese or Western, all words that can be used literarily may be

considered to belong to the vocabulary of the tanka.”¹³If Terayama had recognized this pattern, then he

may have chosen to confront the modern tanka institution by adding verbs instead of nouns. This tendency

may not be quite as striking in his work as horror images, but considered in context, it could be the closest

to a purely avant-garde move in the realm of content. Many of these poems use verbs of buying and

selling. The first poem of the collection begins this pattern:

daiku-machi tera-machi kome-machi hotoke-machi rōbo kau machi arazuya tsubame yo

Carpenter Town, Temple Town, Rice Town, Buddha Town, The Town for Buying Old Mothers—

Dear sparrow, are there not such places?¹⁴

This “Town for Buying Old Mothers” is likely a play on Obasuteyama, a real mountain in northern

Nagano prefecture, the subject of Fukazawa Shichirō’s 1956 novella Narayama bushikō (The ballad of

Narayama), and originally a reference to the practice of killing the elderly to save food for the young. We

should not be surprised to see Terayama tapping into the cruel tragedy, but it is the commercializing

predicate that holds the true power of this line—if there is a town for buying used mothers then someone

is also selling them. Like the doubling function of inert horror, here the commercial reference serves both

to point toward the economic origin of the brutality and to debase the genre of expression, which despite

all its transitions has never made economics its theme (other than the grief of poverty, perhaps, with

Ishikawa Takuboku’s work, but Terayama pushes this further). He maintains this doubled power

throughout by limiting that which is bought and sold to putatively nonmaterial symbols of family, lineage,

and identity:

hito ni uru jiden o motanu otokora ni odenya jigoku no onibi ga moyuru

The mirage of an oden noodle shop hell smolders for the men without autobiographies to sell¹⁵

hito no furusato kaisokonetaru otoko kite furugiya no mae tōrisugitari

A man came by who bought out another’s hometown and passed right by the secondhand clothes

shop¹⁶

It may be necessary to acknowledge here that Terayama could be referring to the very real problem of

real estate developers exploiting rural areas, but he is also tapping into a more general discomfort with

the perceived shift from the marketing of material goods to the service of purchasable identity. This could

be read as either regret at the expansion of markets to this level of intrusiveness or relief over our

collective disillusionment with the notion that trade was ever anything more pure. More important than

speculating about which side Terayama stood on is the recognition that he has framed a timely dilemma in

its most extreme form for us to ponder: either pay the market price for the material representations of

“hometown” (land) and “lineage” (housed in the household shrine) or abandon those commercialized

concepts and start fresh (run away from mother and home).

Linked Verse and Narrative

Challenges to the intuitive border between poetry and fiction generally seem to occur on two fronts: one

side attacks the notion that literary form separates prose from poetry and another deconstructs the

presence of narrative as central to the difference. The work on the first front is most obviously carried out

by free verse and prose poetry; but the issue of narrative tends to be more slippery. It may not be difficult

to produce examples of prose fiction with convoluted or disjointed narratives, but examples of tanka

collections that develop narrative would yield a shorter list. Tanka collections are typically organized

into sets of poems on particular topics, but there is a good chance that Terayama may have borrowed

concepts from the separate tradition of linked verse (renga), a cultural formation that includes stricter

rules against the production of linear narrative flow between poems.¹⁷

Looking at Den’en ni shisu as a whole, however, it is quickly evident that this tanka collection is not

all tanka—it progresses from the thirty-one-syllable poems at the beginning to narrative-based

imaginative prose at the end. Roughly the first half of the collection is tanka (with the two chōka used to

divide the tanka into three parts), and the second half consists of short prose narratives in the sōshi form

(the genre of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book). The shift appears abrupt at first, but the insertion of tanka into

most of the first set of sōshi marks that section as transitional—the full purge of short-form verse does not

occur until the last section of the text. This shift occurs in parallel to a progression in the section headings

from references to childhood toward images of leaving home, again associating emancipation from poetic

traditions with abandonment of hometown and mother. It is important to note, however, that although the

sōshi at the end of Den’en ni shisu are written in prose and are labeled as a genre widely considered part

of prose fiction, taken collectively the parts do not form a coherent whole. Rather, they operate as

individual units surrounding a common theme and as such function more like lines of linked verse than as

chapters in a unified fictional narrative. The implication, then, may be either that poetics can function

within narrative prose or that such attempts at prose by a “poet” will never fully be free of the rhythms

and structures of verse. Isoda’s claim that antimony is central to Terayama’s project becomes evident

again here: “Although we might consider the antimony surrounding an adolescent conception of

‘hometown’ to be a universal phenomenon among the Japanese, Terayama’s true originality is in pushing

this universal sensation to its absolute limit and in defining with new language the fantastic self-

reproduction of ‘hometown’ which occurs at the moment of abandonment.”¹⁸If a parallel relationship to

the poetic tradition holds, then we could similarly claim that Terayama’s abandonment of tanka within

Den’en ni shisu brought about a proliferation of notions of what that abandoned tradition actually was. In

effect, he would have defined the object of opposition only after the separation from that object took

place.

There are moments within the earlier tanka sections where Terayama has developed narrative

continuity on a more subtle level. The first two tanka of the third section, “Komoriuta” (Lullabies), mark a

shift from purely associative linkage toward syntactic flow between the poems:

yobu tabi ni hirogaru kumo o osoreiki jinsei izen no hi no yaneura ni

Each time I called out I was frightened of the spreading clouds—the day before my life began there

behind the roof

kakurenbo no oni tokarezaru mama oite dare o sagashi ni kuru mura matsuri

The seeker in a game of hide-and-seek is never freed, left to grow old—who will he come looking

for at the village festival?¹⁹

The link between the two poems is generated by a kakekotoba (pivot word), of sorts, at the end of the

first poem: “yaneura ni” acts as the direction the clouds move in the first poem, but also as the location of

the seeker in the second. By shifting the location of the pivot from the standard middle to the end of the

poem, Terayama has exploited the function of the traditional device to create narrative continuity between

two poems—a clear violation of renga rules. Only when this pair is read as a single semantic unit does

the beginning of the first poem make sense—“yobu,” in this context, refers to the seeker’s call to the

hiders, “mō ii kai?” (Ready yet?), as used in the game of hide-and-seek in the second poem.

A third technique Terayama has used to develop narrative is to gradually piece together plots with

periodic reference to the same overdetermined objects. Isoda points out the butsudan and the wall clock

images as examples of this “new language” Terayama used to represent a shift in notions of “hometown”:

“Although butsudan and wall-clocks have now become little more than objects with nostalgic flavor, to

previous generations they were internal to the familial community and were objects possessing a deep-

seated reality.”²⁰Isoda’s connection of these objects to this shift in the meaning of “hometown” may have

been generated by individual references to them in separate poems—in almost each case the object is

being bought or sold, which may be enough to signify the shift from meaningful object to replaceable

commodity. But it is more likely that Isoda based his reading on an understanding pieced together from the

collective whole of these references. If that collective understanding were cumulative rather than just

repetitive, then his interpretive stance would be one piecing together a narrative instead of one observing

atomized images. In other words, if our reading strategy assumes that each occurrence of “wall clock”

refers to the same object, then we have already been reading for narrative, violating the rules of renga

ourselves via the logic of our reading strategy. Consider the following three references to wall clocks:

uri ni yuku hashiradokei ga fui ni naru yokodaki ni shite kareno yuku toki

Setting off to sell the wall clock, it suddenly strikes the hour—I carry it under my arm and go into a

desolate field

uragawa ni hissori to ke no haete imu hashiradokei no sopurano no hato

Hair will be growing silently on its back—the wall clock’s soprano pigeon

shi no hi yori sakasa ni toki o kizami tsutsu tsui ni ima ni wa itaranu tokei

Measuring off time backward from the day of one’s death—the clock which has stopped before

reaching this very moment²¹

Distilling the poems, we find a few consistent facts: the clock is going to be sold, it is somehow organic

by its link to a human life, and it marks time backward. The organic association developed in the second

tanka fits well with Isoda’s notion that the object may have been conceived of as much more tightly bound

to the family by older generations. The clock, then, might be connected to family cohesion, a notion

genuine to some and illusory to others. This association of the clock to life—either literally connected to

mother’s life or figuratively linked to the illusory life of a naturally cohesive family unit—is further

established by the third poem in which the clock has just finished counting down that lifetime. We may be

tempted to see the narrative developing chronologically: someone tries to sell the clock, it chimes again

in the field, then grows hair and chimes once more in the voice of a pigeon, and then finally stops.

But it may be more plausible, actually, that the narrative is developing in a reverse chronology parallel

to the reversed time-orientation of the clock itself. Under that framework we learn the most basic

information about the clock in the last poem: that it works opposite to the conventional arrow of time and

that it is uncannily connected to someone’s life. Then the organic link is furthered in the second poem with

this strange image of hair growing on the back of the clock. A partial explanation for that growth is that the

poem sits at the end of the Midas-like tale mentioned previously, but it might be more satisfying to note

the possibility that the hair growth occurs postmortem—precisely the type of biological trivia Terayama

seems to have reveled in. In this context, the chronology of the clock continuing to grow hair in the second

poem after its death in the third begins to make sense, especially given the use of the future progressive

tense to describe the hair growth (“will [still] be growing” rather than “will grow”). But this interpretive

schema stumbles on the ringing of the clock, both in the second and in the first poem. If the reverse

chronology is to hold, the last rings of the clock ought to come before it stops working in the third poem.

That is, unless this clock image is intended to resonate with the practice of obasute (disposing of old

women), a practice marked by the gap between a socially scheduled and natural lifespan. During such a

gap, the clock could ring even after it had stopped keeping time just as grandmother might speak even

after her time is up (seventy years) and she is being carried up a mountain to be left for dead. We might

then consider Terayama’s inversion of the direction of narrative in Den’en ni shisu to be consistent with

the inversion of standards associated with avant-gardist technique. But the result presents a paradox: in

the process of this attack on the poetic traditions, the poetics have expanded to engulf “fiction” in terms of

both form and narrative.

Translating Tanka into Celluloid

The film version of Den’en ni shisu was released in December 1974, nine years after the publication of

the poetry collection. Using the same title for this narrative feature film poses several questions: How has

the content of the poems been represented on-screen? Has Terayama exploited the features of the medium

of film with techniques similar to those used in his poetry? Has he attempted to transfer aesthetic

principles across media? Viewing the film, it is quickly apparent that much of the poetry collection has

been abandoned, many new elements have been added, and the images and poems that are carried over

have been significantly rearranged. Such dramatic departure begs questions regarding the elements or

principles consistent across both works. In an essay on the film version of Den’en ni shisu, art critic

Hariu Ichirō attempts to describe the aesthetic operative across many of Terayama’s projects:

Typically, images and photographs serve as the base for a commanding view of several objects as

well as the space that surrounds them, which is to say that they occupy a comprehensive position.

Words, in contrast, constitute only a partial essence of an individual object and, as Saussure has

claimed, communicate according to a linear sequence. As such they are not able to form a complete

narrative unless several narratives are woven together. However, in Terayama’s works these two

elements are continually confused in a characteristic form. In his tanka, an image swollen with

intense emotion is suddenly interrupted and collides with yet another intense image that has

transcended time or space. Alternatively, two images are freely displaced. In his theater,

stereotypical images doused in folk psychology along with words soaked with emotion, such as

delirious nonsense or magical spells, are pulled together into an assemblage. As the established

meanings are eviscerated the audience is assaulted with violence like bullets. In his films, and

particularly in this film, after differentiating the links between images from the flow of the dialogue

into a strict duality, the dialogue hints at desires hidden behind the discourse (the statements) and the

images unfold psychoanalytically toward the root of desire. Furthermore, when both are linked up in

order to construct a plot the scene changes, an uncanny image emerges, and the flow breaks off

completely.²²

By this account, it would seem that the entire project seeks to undermine not only genre and

communication but also the very nature of the most basic units of those concepts: images and words. In

this way, the film itself could trace out a process in which at each moment that it recognizes itself

coalescing into a familiar form, a comprehensible narrative, or even anything realistic it abandons its

course and starts again on a new tack.²³This sort of take on the film works on a microlevel to explain the

texture of the disjointed progression between scenes, but when viewed as a whole, a narrative still makes

its way through to the audience: a boy attempts to escape his domineering mother by eloping with his

neighbor’s wife, she jilts him, and he proceeds onward alone. This narrative is then revealed to be a film

in a film by a director struggling to retell his past; this director eventually encounters the former version

of himself directly, and finally the two of them conspire, but ultimately fail, to murder their mother. We

could claim, then, that the film ultimately failed to be nonnarrative, or that our hardwired drive to find (or

produce) a narrative overrode Terayama’s plan.

Alternatively, we could recognize that what appears to be a straightforward attack on narrative and

genre might be a misinterpretation of the technique being used. If this film is an experiment in transferring

poetry to celluloid, then many of the tactics of tanka may be controlling the shape of the film. Such an

experimental technique may, in fact, have been used here in order to critique notions of genre, narrative,

and medium, but to overlook the method behind that critique oversimplifies Terayama’s application of

tanka aesthetics to the medium of film. The following analysis will examine direct representation of tanka

in the film, elements of the film likely influenced by tanka aesthetics, and parallels in the way narrative is

developed in both media.

The film uses 13 out of the 102 tanka found in the poetry collection. Most of them are quoted verbatim,

but some have been reworked slightly. They generally appear in pairs, first displayed on-screen, and then

read aloud by Terayama himself. The first two poems from the collection are the first pair on-screen, but

after that the order breaks down. A closer look at the beginning of the film demonstrates the initial

suggestion of a method for transferring tanka to film:

1. The “Carpenter Town” tanka appears on-screen (as text).

daiku-machi tera-machi kome-machi hotoke-machi rōba kau machi arazuya tsubame yo

Carpenter Town, Temple Town, Rice Town, Buddha Town, The Town for Buying Old Mothers—

Oh, sparrow, are there not such places?²⁴

2. The same poem recited aloud (i.e., the sound of the text).

3. The pattern is repeated with the second poem (text, then sound of text).

atarashiki butsudan kai ni yukishi mama yukue fumei no otōto to tori

He went out to buy a new butsudan and never came back—my missing brother and a bird²⁵

4. A blank screen appears with crows cawing (i.e., sound of the text’s image).

5. A still image appears of children playing hide-and-seek (image of a third tanka).

6. Motion begins with diegetic sound (i.e., synthesis of image and sound).

In this first two-minute sequence, Terayama presents us with a condensed text-to-film evolution. This is,

in effect, a tour of the technologies that were synthesized to produce this film: poem to theater to radio to

photograph to motion picture. It would be dangerous to claim that Terayama is attempting to trace out the

history of the medium, however; it is more likely that he is just dealing separately, and thereby

conspicuously, with the constitutive elements of this particular sequence. As Garrett Stewart claims in his

book on the relationship between film and photography, photographs on-screen and stop-motion images

within a film serve to bring to consciousness the materiality of the film strip itself:

The film medium owes a more immediate—rather than just historical and mechanical—debt to the

photograph than we can ever (quite) see on-screen.

. . . The photogrammatic undertext of screen narrative may be (more or less implicitly) alluded to

on-screen by “quoted” photos. Alternatively, this undertext may be obtruded in multiple duplicates on

the strip in the form of the so-called stop-action image. This is the rapid fabrication of stasis that

isolates a single visual moment, artificially lifted from the narrative space, and sets it apart from the

real motion that invisibly spins it past in the form of separate (and now anomalously redoubled)

imprints.²⁶

Stewart wants to move film stills away from their diachronic referent (the photograph) toward their

synchronic one (the film strip). The repeated presence of photographs in the film fit nicely with Stewart’s

comments on film as repetition of the static death image, since the people in those photos—dead relatives,

mothers to be killed—are associated with death throughout this work. As the film periodically returns to

bare tanka onscreen, the audience is brought back to these basic constitutive elements, from which the film

continually rebuilds itself from scratch.

One element of the translation of this tanka collection from text to screen appears to be a linking of

tanka with photographs and prose with moving images. The tanka collection moved from short-form

poems into prose narrative, and within the film we find a similar juxtaposition of stills or photographs

with images flowing smoothly (at least between the cuts). What is not clear is whether the visual cognates

of tanka are photographs or single shots of moving images—Terayama’s tanka were known for their

narrativity, but we might argue that a single photographic image possesses narrative as well. It may be

useful to consider a referent of the film’s title in this regard. Den’en ni shisu is striking in its use of the

classical form of the verb “to die,” but another important modern text appeared with that same word in its

title. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was first translated into Japanese in 1939 as Venisu ni shisu.²⁷

There are almost no similar plot elements in the two texts, but there is a parallel in form: Mann dotted his

prose with lines written in Homeric hexameter, much like Terayama’s sōshi and this narrative film

contain tanka.²⁸Both authors weave classical poetic formations into otherwise modern texts, framing their

immediate questions of aging and memory within the more gradual shifts of language over time.

The breaks in the flow of the film’s narrative cited by Hariu may have more to do with the use of tanka

aesthetics than he gives credit. His theory works well to explain why certain scenes may end when they

do—at the moment that image and sound combine into something realistic and plotlike—but it neglects to

theorize the juxtapositional schema at work between those individual scenes. At first glance, it may

appear that there is little at all linking the scenes together—that the acting principle might be avoidance of

linkage. This follows, as discussed previously, the conventional rules of linked verse that banned the

continual treatment of the same subject matter. But that same tradition also encouraged poets to make some

sort of associative link between poems, even as the main topic was varied, and on close examination of

the film the same practice can be observed. In the opening sequence examined previously, the two tanka

and the hide-and-seek segment do not form a coherent narrative. But by mentioning a sparrow in the first

poem, a bird in the second, followed by the cawing of crows, images of dark birds associated with death

appear immediately before the hide-and-seek game conspicuously placed in a cemetery. This practice

continues throughout the film, as Terayama systematically utilizes features of the medium of film to link

different scenes. Red tinted ponds and red suns link across scenes to red flowers. Discussions of escape

by train carry through to itinerant circus scenes with the sound of a train whistle in the background.

Within individual scenes there is often a montage of images inserted that are loosely connected by

theme to the primary narrative. Immediately following the hide-and-seek sequence is a series of four

images and one tanka. Terayama’s screenplay calls for the following list of images:

• Dirt floor of a dark house. From a gap in the doorway sunlight shines in.

• Photo of mother in her younger days. A thread ties the torn pieces together.

• Photo of two war-dead, a thread ties the torn pieces together.

• Photo of a young girl with a bob haircut, crumbled and torn.

Above that a waka is superimposed and read aloud.

hodokarete shōjo no kami o musubareshi sōgi no hana no hana kotoba kana

Funeral flowers bound into a young girl’s hair loosen and fall—oh, flower-words of funeral

flowers!

• A single red flower dropped into a river and flowing away.²⁹

The terse phrasing and intense imagery of these descriptions makes them physically resemble tanka in

form and the links between them are tanka-like in their nonnarrative, but thematically clustered, content.

Links back to the hide-and-seek image are formed with the young girl in the fourth image and one in the

tanka. As mentioned previously, the photographs connect to the still image that begins the hide-and-seek

sequence, as well as to the butsudan in the second tanka of the film’s opening, since they would likely be

found in the family shrine to ancestors. Stewart’s claim that photographs signify death is quite literal in the

Japanese cultural context, where photographs of dead ancestors are often placed inside the butsudan

itself. The image of the single red flower that ends the montage series carries over into the following

scene in which a boy pushes a cart carrying a dead (or perhaps scheduled to die) woman up Mt. Osore.

The scene concludes with the following tanka:

naki haha no makka na kushi o ume ni yuku Osorezan ni wa kaze fuku bakari

Going to bury my dead mother’s bright red comb—the wind on Mt. Osore blows and blows³⁰

The pretitle sequence of the film concludes with this fourth poem. The red comb links back to the red

flower and the references to the girl’s hair. The “dead mother” connects to the photo of a mother, the

cemetery, the crows, and the butsudan.

If, however, this film is linked to the poetry collection as much by method as by content, then we

should expect Terayama to use some of the same techniques to develop a recognizable narrative in spite

of its apparent attempts to prevent plot from ever forming. The red comb image from the fourth tanka of

the film serves as an interesting case for this sort of analysis. A few minutes after the tanka appears on-

screen, the seventh scene opens with an image of the red comb: “Boy peering into the house from outside

the kitchen window. Inside a cup placed on the shelf above the sink, mother’s comb has been left to soak

in water. Mother’s hair, entangled in the comb, swims around in the water as if alive.”³¹The comb is

positioned in the extreme foreground and mother in the extreme background in this shot, which allows a

shift in focal distance to move the viewer’s attention from the hair-entangled comb to the mother without

any camera movement—such a technique associates the two even more closely than might have been

possible with montage (Figure 5.1). By this early point in the film, the comb has already been associated

with death and the mother and has been treated as something uncannily organic—the same treatment of the

wall clock in the tanka collection. The comb appears a third time in the tenth scene, this time in the lyrics

of a song:

Figure 5.1. A shot of the protagonist’s mother that draws its focus back with the same framing to link

her to a red comb in the foreground near the beginning of Den’en ni shisu (Death in the country, 1974).

Dusk falls, a temple bell rings

My dead child’s red comb³²

This song is sung as background music to a scene in which the boy climbs Mt. Osore to contact his dead

father through a medium to confess that he plans to leave his mother and run away from home. The

background imagery consists of red skies, then a red moon on a dark sky, and a chrysanthemum dyed red.

This imbrication of red images leads the comb to signify more than just the memory of a dead relative.

The fourth occurrence of the red comb is in a montage sequence in the twenty-ninth scene that is described

in the screenplay in the following way:

• Scarecrow wearing a girl’s school uniform drenched in blood.

• Close-up of Ushi singing.

• “This Family in Mourning” sign on the back door of a poor farmer’s house.

• A girl just raped passed out on a tatami floor, legs spread, flowing blood.

• Blood flowing between the teeth of a comb.

• Bleak-looking Mt. Osore.

• A straw doll nailed to the wall of a dirt-floored room.

• Clouds moving over Mt. Osore.

• Ushi singing on top of a rafter in the barn.

• Flying flock of crows.

• Blood dripping onto the paper mourning sign.

• A Jizō statue on Mt. Osore.

• Blood seeping through and spreading across white cloth.

• A Jizō statue on Mt. Osore.³³

Here, the origin of the comb’s color is finally disclosed as well as a partial explanation for why it seems

to operate as the locus of so much abjection. By staining the comb in rape blood, this late in the film,

Terayama has again used his technique of retrofitting horror onto seemingly everyday objects. Like the

empty chair, the horror of the red comb is latent in its history, revealed only after we have become

accustomed to it.

After making reference to the red comb in an on-screen tanka (text), a brief shot (image), a song

(sound), and a montage (image plus meaning by juxtaposition), Terayama finally injects it into the

narrative proper. In the thirty-fourth scene, Kachō, the married neighbor woman whom the boy plans to

run away with, relates her memories of the war and postwar years:

Mother said she didn’t want to sell. The money collector with the black comb came by everyday

advising her to sell the land; she went half-crazy, saying that it would be against her husband’s

wishes, that she couldn’t let go of the land until he came back. But she soon died. Then it was

decided that the land would change hands and I was brought to live with relatives in the next village.

I woke quietly in the middle of the night and buried my dead mother’s bright red comb in the wintry

field that we had been forced to sell.

. . . At night that buried bright red comb sang a song: “Give back my fields / Give back my land /

Give back my mask from the festival when I was fifteen and left this black hair entwined in the comb

/ Give back my whistle / Give back my frown.”

. . . In my dreams I often returned to that field. Each time I dug around in it and wherever I dug

there was a bright red comb. Out of that field in the middle of town I found a hundred, maybe two

hundred of my mother’s bright red combs; bright red combs dyed in blood. Then all of the combs said

to me in unison, “I wasn’t born a woman,” “I wasn’t meant to be anyone’s mother.”³⁴

Here the narrative hinted at in the previous montage is made explicit while the uncanniness of the comb is

maintained and even extended. In much the same way as the wall clock narrative developed in the tanka

collection, this narrative seems to end with its beginning—that is, the most basic facts surrounding the

comb are saved for the last reference to it, at which point we are left to retroactively fit the pieces

together to make sense of its earlier appearances. Backward time (into history) catalyzes horror.

This information about the origin of the comb’s color was not hinted at anywhere in the tanka

collection, in which bright red combs appear several times. The implication, then, to an audience familiar

with both versions of Den’en ni shisu would be that the revealed horror of the blood-stained comb would

stretch back through the film and then leap back between media and nine years of time to the tanka

collection. Such linkage binds these two versions together as a single project and helps to make sense of

the use of the same title for such seemingly different works. The standard direction of influence has been

inverted. But the red comb can be traced back even further. The previous scene describing the red combs

buried in the field is a reworking of part of the very first version of Den’en ni shisu, the television drama

from 1962. The basic plot of the film version—a boy’s jilted elopement to Tokyo with a married woman

from rural Aomori—is sketched out first in this television version. The boy here is named Tsutomu and he

plans to elope with Miki, who admits to him that she has just killed her husband:

MIKI: I didn’t at all intend to kill him. And I . . . he was miserable, too, I think. Trying for his whole

life to protect the field he inherited from his parents.

TSUTOMU: . . .

MIKI: His dead mother’s red comb was buried in that field he was trying to protect. He always used

to say, “Gather up the town for a game of hana ichi-monme.”

TSUTOMU: . . .

MIKI: I’m not sure why, but he sang it.

TSUTOMU: So why did you kill him?

MIKI: When I got back last night he was picking through the carrot seeds.³⁵

The associations being drawn here are between infanticide (mabiki is the euphemism, referring to

“weeding out” the weaker seedlings as is done with carrots, or nipping buds of chrysanthemums to

enlarge one flower) and murdering someone for it and between the stewardship of this red comb (itself

representative of the dead mother) and this children’s game, hana ichi-monme, in which members of

opposing teams are pulled out one at a time until one side completely absorbs the other.³⁶The image

suggests the comb, buried in fields weeded out to strengthen the crop, may have been stained in the blood

of children weeded out of families too poor to support them. This link of the red comb to rural poverty is

the direction literature scholar Kuritsubo Yoshiki takes in his analysis of the Den’en ni shisu film and

poetry collection: “The ‘red comb’ is the ‘red comb’ of the ‘winter night’s field’ which will almost

certainly be pillaged, and it is the blood-spirit of the proletariat class. We can view this as Terayama

Shūji scrupulously putting historical events he saw or heard about into the background as he executed his

‘matricide.’ And, to push further, they must be acknowledged as a symbolism only possible by imbricating

postwar history [sengoshi] with personal history [jibunshi].”³⁷Making sense of horrific children’s songs

and lullabies was at the center of the Den’en ni shisu project. Between the release of the tanka and film

versions, Terayama explained his understanding of the purpose of lullabies in another television project

called Komoriuta yurai (The origin of lullabies, 1967):

Lullabies and nannies have certainly become rare over time. Yet, the sorrowful songs sung by these

women—themselves sacrifices to quasi-feudal family-ism [han-hōkenteki kazoku-shugi]—did not

take the form of lullabies, but rather shifted into another form deep within the hearts of the live-in

clerks, factory girls, maids, nannies, waitresses, and prostitutes who sang them.

Lullabies are songs about the philosophy of anonymous women. The song sung by a nanny on Mt.

Tenjin as she pinches the behind of another’s baby and the one sung by a mother pouring affection on

her own lying in a cradle are ultimately the same. These are songs of blood that flows deeper than the

rivers.

These are songs for the women, they are not at all for the children. But one could say that these

women only came to know love once they had songs for themselves and became independent.³⁸

The bloodiness of these songs, as well as that of the red comb, is matched here by the gruesomeness of

blood-based familial associations—both by actual blood links and the nannies who stand in by proxy.

Earlier in the same drama, the character Shino, head of his village’s “Modernity Study Group,” discovers

a comb buried under a conspicuously healthy camellia blossoming in the garden of Momo, a woman

accused by the other villagers of killing her sixteen-year-old son Shinsaku:

My, what a big camellia. Tall, slightly hunched, with a sturdy base, looks just like Shinsaku!

(Begins digging with his bare hands. Something hard is entangled in the roots of the flower—

realizes that it is Momo’s comb)

Hmmm, a comb.

(Pulls it out and looks closely)

It’s Momo’s comb. Must be some kind of a curse to keep Shinsaku monopolized for herself.³⁹

The bright red camellia blossom feeds off of the buried comb and it is later suggested that the flower

blooms brightly because Shinsaku himself is buried beneath it—invoking Kajii Motojirō’s famous image

of the beauty of cherry blossoms resulting from corpses buried below the trees. Shino digs up the camellia

to replant it across the river, stopping as he crosses to toss the comb into the water—severing the tie

between mother and son as well as linking by imagery the practice of mabiki with mizuko (lit., “water

child”), the euphemism for both miscarriage and abortion. The bloody folk practices associated with

backwardness and an impoverished past have not ended in this narrative—they carry on into modernity.

Terayama’s use of this red comb image stretches across at least four texts between 1962 and 1974 in

slight inflections, but it is always found buried in the soil and is always either red or linked otherwise to

the blood of murder and rape. This seems a deeply poetic and symbolic, almost mythical, image, but there

is a concrete, historical referent for it. The source is almost undoubtedly a set of red lacquered combs

unearthed in an archeological dig near Terayama’s hometown of Misawa. The Korekawa site near

Hachinohe was first explored starting in 1920 by Izumiyama Iwajirō and his brother-in-law Izumiyama

Ayajirō and is thought to represent Tōhoku’s late Jōmon culture of approximately three thousand years in

the past. The site was made a national historical dig in 1957, and then in 1962 (the same year as the first

version of Den’en ni shisu), over six hundred items were designated important cultural properties (jūyō

bunkazai) by the Japanese government. The red combs were among the most notable objects because they

demonstrated an advanced lacquering technique and an aesthetic consciousness within what was

otherwise believed to be a primitive preagricultural society.⁴⁰

Terayama’s narrative-based recreations of the history of his poetically buried red combs parallel, in

some ways, the attempts of archeologists to describe the origins and uses of these historically buried red

combs—both are by nature imaginative projects. But these combs also symbolized a broader association

between Aomori and Tōhoku, in general, with the ancient Jōmon period. In 1962, the same year as the

designation of these combs as treasures of the nation and the television broadcast of the first version of

Den’en ni shisu, the painter and sculptor Okamoto Tarō toured Aomori and Yamagata to collect

information for his “rediscovery of Japan” project, which focused on Jōmon figures and Okinawan folk

art. That year, in many ways, saw the concretizing of an association between ancient Japan and the

Tōhoku region, marking it as a site for research and sightseeing that it had not been before.⁴¹Okamoto’s

hand in Expo 70 in Osaka, with its one-liners on Japan’s regions among the summaries of nations,

corporations, and religions, likely further branded Aomori and Tōhoku, as did the Discover Japan

campaign designed by Dentsū for Japan Railways immediately following the expo, which encouraged

domestic travel to rural areas.⁴²

Part of this transformation of Aomori into a tourist destination was the visualization of “Aomori” as its

shape on a map. Aomori geography is distinctive, with two peninsulas, the Shimokita on the east and the

Tsugaru on the west, both jutting north toward Hokkaidō (Figure 5.2). In notes written in preparation for

the film version of Den’en ni shisu, Terayama writes of the axlike shape of the Shimokita peninsula being

well suited to such a murderous region: “Looking at a map you’d immediately see that Aomori consists of

the Shimokita Peninsula on the right, which is shaped like an ax raised to strike, and the Tsugaru Peninsula

on the left that is like a head just about to be chopped off. The Tsugaru Kaikyō (straits) are the splatter of

blood on the forehead after the blow—the form symbolizes the prefecture in our country with the most

murders among kin.”⁴³The appearance of the ax in both the tanka collection and the film likely traces to

the shape of the region Terayama was attempting to document through memory (the afterword to the tanka

collection proclaims it to be a set of “recollections”).⁴⁴The decapitated sunflower image from the poem

mentioned earlier in this chapter could then be linked to the shape of the Shimokita peninsula with three

others that mention axes:

Figure 5.2. Map of Aomori prefecture showing the hatchet-shaped Shimokita peninsula to the east,

home to Osore-zan (Mt. Fear), which Terayama visualizes as having just decapitated the Tsugaru

region to the west. Image from Fuzanbō Henshūbu, Saishin Nihon chizu (Tokyo: Fuzanbō, 1916).

rōboku no nōten sakite kishi ono o kakumau gotoku idakineru beshi

Just back from splitting open the forehead of an aged tree—probably cuddle up with that ax in bed,

harboring it like a criminal⁴⁵

This image appears in the film as well. The husband of the woman who plans to elope with the boy pulls

away her covers as she sleeps and is shocked to find a sickle by her side (Figure 5.3). Immediately

following the previous poem in the tanka collection is another on axes:

chūko no ono kai ni yuku haha no tame chōshi wa manabiori hōigaku

Goes out to buy a used ax, for the benefit of mother—the eldest son is studying forensic medicine⁴⁶

Studying forensics so as to not leave a trace of the matricide he will commit with the ax: this image, too,

appears in the film. Near the end, the filmmaker prepares to kill his mother in order to liberate the

younger version of himself to escape from her. They both agreed that killing her is the only solution, so he

prepares a rope to bind her with and carries a sickle (a visual match with the one in the neighbor

woman’s bed) into the house, only to lose his nerve and dutifully join her for dinner. A third poem in the

collection also recalls the decapitated sunflower:

kyū-jinushi kaeritaru ato himawari wa ono no ichigeki matsu hodo no ki

After the former landlord returns home the sunflowers turn—as though waiting for the ax’s blow—

yellow⁴⁷

This incessant return to the ax image—creating a literary topos deriving from the geographical (but just as

fictional) link of the peninsula to the ax—parallels Terayama’s constant return to the buried red comb.

Both generate a neomythology for Aomori, not only rejuvenating the notion of regional literature but also

parodying any concrete, determinative link between the content of that literature and the geography of the

region. Most important for Terayama was the transformation within popular consciousness of the region

of his childhood (his family moved often, but always within Aomori prefecture) toward a new set of

images and meanings he did not grow up with. Nostalgia was faced with knowledge that a return home

was now literally impossible—the Aomori he knew no longer existed, and bizarrely, it had with time

come to represent not something more modern but something far older than before. The arrow of time, like

the clock in the poems, seemed to point the wrong way.

There is a strange glitch in the very beginning of the film version of Den’en ni shisu that engages

another case of Aomori’s transformation while Terayama was away. The first tanka printed on-screen—

Carpenter Town, Temple Town, Rice Town (discussed previously)—is read aloud out of order.⁴⁸The

second two “towns,” Temple Town and Rice Town, are reversed when read despite being printed on-

screen in the original format. A glitch like this confronts a subtitler, for example, with a strange, almost

Derridian dilemma: which should be privileged—written or spoken language? While this may have

simply been an error, it would not be unlike Terayama to inject his work with this sort of willful slippage,

and for it to punctuate, subtly, some sort of larger issue.

Figure 5.3. The neighbor in Den’en ni shisu (Death in the country, 1974) discovers a sickle under his

wife’s bedcovers.

The Carpenter Town poem seems to speak abstractly about imagined villages in some idyllic fantasy,

but they turn out to be actual districts in the center of Aomori City where Terayama spent his high school

days. Aomori’s downtown underwent redistricting, however, in 1968, which also involved renaming

areas of the city. Traditional districts dating back to the Edo period, including Daiku-machi (Carpenter

Town), Tera-machi (Temple Town), and Kome-machi (Rice Town) were split up and given bland new

“modern” names such as Shinmachi (New Town), Chūōmachi (Central Town), and Honmachi (Main

Town).⁴⁹The question the poem poses, then—“Oh sparrow, are there not such towns?”—would have

been accurately answered in the affirmative in 1965, at the time of the tanka collection’s publication, but

in the negative in 1974, when the poem reappeared (marked with the glitch) on film. The time gap

between the texts had fictionalized the rhetorical question—a statement of fact at its initial appearance but

either a fictional statement or a historically embedded quotation after 1968. The twisting of the truth status

of a static statement by the flow of history is invoked here by this twist in the poem.

It was this type of time gap, or slippage in time, that had opened the film and earned it its title for

foreign release—Pastoral Hide-and-Seek (or Cache-cache pastoral at Cannes). The young girl covers

her eyes as her friends hide behind gravestones in a cemetery. She calls out to them, “Can I look yet?”

(mō ii kai?), and they respond, “Not yet” (mada da yo). She calls again, “Can I look yet?” and this time

they respond, “Go ahead” (mō ii yo), but they emerge from behind the graves as fully grown adults, the

men in various uniforms, the women holding babies. The image comes from the tanka version of Den’en

ni shisu—“The seeker in a game of hide-and-seek is never freed, left to grow old”—but the critical

addition is this instantaneous and differential slippage in time. Time occurred at different speeds for these

children, but we cannot be sure whether it had stood still for just one or been accelerated for the rest. The

perspective here is identified with the young girl, but we distrust it, and are then forced to recognize the

relativity of the experience of time. There is also an inversion here of typical commentary on differential

development—slower development is associated with youth here whereas advanced, faster development

is linked to not only adulthood and responsibility but also death. This link is further developed in an

image later in the film in which a group of schoolchildren in uniform cross a bridge but then return across

the same bridge in the same uniforms in their old age (Figure 5.4). This sort of time slip may be a

metaphor for the larger project at work here: Terayama representing memories of his childhood in

Aomori. He needs to slip back thirty years to wartime Japan to recreate these images, memories he

recognizes to have already become irrecoverable through distortion—“All individual memories are

metaphors, events from foreign countries.”⁵⁰

The combination of time’s relativity and time slippage comes up again midway through the film when it

breaks out of the narrative and the director of the first half discusses his problems representing the past

with a critic. The critic gives the director a puzzle to ponder: “If you rode a time machine back several

hundred years and killed your great-great-great-grandmother, would you cease to exist in the present?”⁵¹

This puzzle is called the grandmother paradox (or the grandfather paradox), and represents the standard

logical critique of the possibility of time travel that Einstein’s relativity equations seemed to suggest as

possible.⁵²For the narrative of Den’en ni shisu this reference serves two purposes: the first is to link the

process of retelling even the most accessible, personal histories to the process, and likely impossibility,

of time travel; and the second is to modernize our conception of historical time using Einstein’s thesis of

the space–time continuum. The closing image of the film finally makes sense when understood in these

terms. When the director gives up on killing his mother and sits down to eat with her, we assume the

setting must still be Aomori. The inside of the house as he enters has the same hearth and the same wall

clock as it did when he was a boy, and his mother is still cleaning the same butsudan. But after they sit

down to eat, the wall behind them suddenly falls to the ground, leaving them in the middle of a public

square in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo with characters from the film walking by among the crowds as the

credits roll. So the time slippage that opened the film (child to adult) is paired with a space slippage to

finish it (Aomori to Tokyo), and the two are bridged by this self-reflexive intermezzo’s reference to the

space–time nexus of relativity theory (Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.4. “Schoolchildren” on their way back from a field trip in Den’en ni shisu (Death in the

country, 1974). Child actors in the same uniforms had walked across this bridge just moments before

this shot.

Figure 5.5. The walls of the world of his childhood to which the protagonist attempted to return fall at

the end of Den’en ni shisu (Death in the country, 1974), revealing their location in the Shinjuku district

of Tokyo.

Telling this history is impossible on film because the memories turn circuslike and even the landscape

changes the moment it is selected for filming. This is a point made in the intermezzo by the director

speaking to the critic: “I sit down to write, but the instant I objectify something—even myself or the

landscape—they all turn vaudeville on me with everyone in thick makeup.”⁵³Awazu Kiyoshi, the graphic

designer who did the artistic design for the film, worked with Terayama on this problem during the

process of location hunting in Aomori:

Say you’re location hunting for a film production. The landscape [fūkei] that you see out the window

of the train or a car is somewhat vague, but it’s as though a scene from the film has already been shot

within that landscape. In the same way that a window in a house can be like the frame of a painting,

the camera also plays a framing role. It’s not exactly like contemplating a single picture, but the

landscape that changes from one to the next in the window is similar to watching a film or

television. The instant someone says, “How about here?” that location becomes a privatized image

of the filmmaker . . . the landscape ceases to be something you look at and becomes something you

show.⁵⁴

The landscape is only inscribed as natural or representative, beautiful or bleak, after its selection—it

does not exist until that selection. This denaturalization of landscape was part of Terayama’s stated

attempt to “get beyond the landscape theories [fūkeiron] of the past,” which he claimed, “historically

have tended to emerge without fail after a setback for the antiestablishment movement.”⁵⁵One goal of the

film was to explore the possibility of composing and editing landscape itself—exaggerating the impact of

the artist on scenery chosen as a subject. This was particularly clear in the absurd, eclectic props added

to a scene late in the film when the director is playing a game of shōji with the younger version of himself

(Figure 5.6). They sit on tatami mats in the middle of a harvested rice paddy in a visual match to the final

scene of dinner with mother. In the background, a young boy gets a haircut to the left, and Tora-san (from

the popular film series) walks along the footpath near a giant book of matches (out of which will later

emerge three women). There is no interaction between these layers of depth, which are visually

reinforced by the row of utility poles fading toward a vanishing point perfectly centered in the frame. The

teleology of this conspicuous single-point perspective is further paralleled by a discussion of fate

between the director and the younger version of himself:

BOY: I’m thinking of going to a merchant marine academy when I grow up.

ME: You’re too late. I went to a liberal arts university.

BOY: But maybe it would work to do it over.

ME: Impossible. Your turn.⁵⁶

The director asks about a Turgenev novel he stole in middle school, but it turns out to be when he was a

year older than the boy, to which the boy responds that he will buck his fate the following year and not

steal the book (but we sense that his reaction against his fate may be just as deterministic as his fate

itself). The director responds by saying, “I know everything about you, but you know nothing about me”—

a concise critique of the problem of differential development in which the fate of the late bloomers is not

only out of their control but also already known (and so predictable and exploitable) by their forebears.⁵⁷

The director speaks from the position of privileged knowledge about the future of the boy, meaning that

their orientations toward time are opposite. This is reflected subtly in a comment ostensibly about the

shōji game: “Move it left. Right to you. What’s right to you is left to me.”⁵⁸They are mirrored images of

each other, but it is a one-way mirror—a one-way dispossession of knowledge of the future of the boy,

which will always be the past of the older director.

This confrontation with fate and determinism may have been the central problem of the Den’en ni

shisu project. Awazu comments on the problem of deterministic causality in his conversation on

landscape: “The causality between landscape and things is random. Randomness occurs once two

causalities intersect, we usually call it an ‘encounter’ or a ‘chance operation,’ but newlandscapes appear

that have never existed before, and existing landscapes are destroyed. I think the only part humans see are

the causalities—they are the most visible and they’re the part we try to see.”⁵⁹This stance allows for the

likelihood of materialism, but a materialism that is not predictable or fated. And if the modern, cohesive,

subjective interiority is partially constructed in contradistinction to a similarly cohesive, but objective,

exteriority in the form of landscape, then disrupting the stability of that notion of the external could help

the internal into a new subjectivity. “Human beings will never be free until they can liberate themselves

from their own memories,” says the film critic during the intermezzo.⁶⁰By denaturalizing both landscape

and memory and exposing them as subjective constructs, Terayama opens the possibility of emancipation

through self-fictionalization, that is, of self-determination within personal history itself. Thus the interior

of a home and a barbershop placed in the landscape without houses or buildings is a breaking down of

those borders between inside and out. This image pairs, then, with the image early in the film of Mt.

Osore under the tatami mat in the house. Both were intended (according to Terayama’s notes) to make a

“labyrinth of interior and exterior”: “The ‘home’ is dissembled, and its interior (furnishings, family,

supplies) are placed at random in the field, while simultaneously the exterior (Mt. Osore, forests, rivers)

is dragged inside of the ‘home.’”⁶¹History, in parallel, is attacked as fluid and malleable—the director

tells the younger version of himself, “There is no past which cannot be fixed.”⁶²Landscape is unnatural

here, and history is fictional.

Figure 5.6. The filmmaker challenges the boyhood version of himself to a game of shōgi within a

landscape design by Awazu Kiyoshi near the conclusion of Den’en ni shisu (Death in the country,

1974).

But this is an inversion, not a complete dissolution of reality. History is made fictional—open to

manipulation and unbound by truth—but fiction is in turn bound and closed off to subjective control at the

end of Den’en ni shisu. The director intends to kill his mother to liberate both himself from the present

and the younger version of himself—not risking his own existence directly, since he would be killing her

after his own birth, but altering history in a way that would certainly impact the present. But in the end he

is not capable of killing her even though he recognizes that the murder would be within the fictional realm

of film: “I could start everything over. Not just my mother but even I am nothing more than an actor in one

little story I made up by myself. And this is just a film. Who am I if I can’t even kill one little mother!?”⁶³

This stalemate in the narrative destroys the world of Aomori, the relationship with the mother, and the

son’s dutiful “return” to her, and the walls of this world literally come crashing down, revealing their

rural home to be a construct. Outside that “fictional” world of the past are the members of the circus, now

seen as enmeshed in the fabric of the city, welcoming the filmmaker back to his theater troupe, to his city,

and to the present tense.

This delimitation of fiction’s imaginative range coupled with the categorization of history as subjective

within the thematics of this project parallels patterns in its form. The iterative form of reworking of the

television and tanka collection versions of Den’en ni shisu into this film finds its imaginative core not in

leaps into new territory but in the reworking of former work in a new medium and in the cutting up and

reediting of memories and poems from the past. We see a commitment to collage techniques in this project

similar to Terayama’s own debut, but here he borrows the base material from himself—perhaps rather

than cross-pollination here we find self-pollination. The incessant return to a stock set of images

generates a lexicon of Terayama’s own, the reshuffling of which might be conceived as attempts to speak

in a fully individuated language. Translations of the tanka, then, onto the screen directly, into individual

images or stretched into narratives, might best be understood as an experiment in modulating the length of

the semantic unit translated: full narratives, single images, clusters of words used to describe an image, or

individual sounds. The length of the cut and the editorial decisions regarding arrangement are the loci of

creativity here. And yet the outcome is so far removed from the source that as readers of these versions of

Den’en ni shisu we may be forced to acknowledge that repetition itself is impossible—that events,

artifacts, and people are bound in a web of space–time such that the circumstances that created the context

for meaning can never be reproduced.

CONCLUSION

“Japanese” Counterculture

IHAVE FORESTALLED DIRECTLY ADDRESSING JAPANESE counter-culture until this conclusion, partly to avoid

the snare of conceiving a global, and explicitly antinationalist, movement through the category of the

nation. Yet the category of “Japanese” counterculture still needs to be tackled because that was the frame

within which Terayama’s work was often received (and appraised) once it left Japan. It is not at all a

stretch to claim that Terayama’s projects became Japanese only once they left Japan—whereas within

Japan they often seemed foreign. This foreignness could be certified by an award from a European

festival, for example, and then reintroduced to Japan as international clout. So we find a pattern of

movement from international into Japanese characterizing much of Terayama’s work after about 1970.

Still, this is not to deny the existence of a domestic countercultural discourse in Japan that spoke in

Japanese to an audience mostly in Japan, which was particularly concerned with the response of the

Japanese government and the people of Japan to the situation of the late 1950s into the mid-1970s. There

are enough domestic referents within that discourse (among the many references to foreign or international

issues) that Japan’s national borders, to the extent that they coincide with its linguistic borders, do mark

the maximum range of the assumed audience of that conversation. But those borders are never what is

meant by “Japan,” even in the domestic discourse about the nation—the name of the nation always

embodies a struggle over the meaning of history, a privileging of certain facets of culture, and efforts to

control the future of the collective. I will sketch out, very briefly, some contours of this domestic

discourse on counterculture before moving on to the slightly thornier issue of “Japanese” counterculture

abroad.

Japan had a hippie movement, but it is reported to have been limited in scope—communes on small

islands, a return to farming, the creation of a rice-growing and filmmaking collective in Yamagata by the

radical documentary filmmaker Ogawa Shinsuke during the 1970s—but the ideas were very much in the

air and alive in the media. Japan’s own homegrown hippies, the fūten-zoku (“idler-tribe”), made news by

lounging outside of Japan’s busiest train station, Shinjuku, wearing oddball sunglasses and sedated on

their drug of choice (possibly their only option): sleeping pills.¹The popularization of the term traces to a

manga called Fūten by Nagashima Shinji that was serialized in the magazine COM starting in the spring

of 1967. Nagashima explains at the end of the first installment that the main characters of his manga are

less Nagahima Hinji—Nagashima’s alter ego, with plays on “spare time” (hima) and “poverty” (hin)—

than the group of “fūten” friends he made over the previous years, including poets who do not write and

jazz musicians who do not play.²Terayama comments on a group of about a dozen fūten who formed an

ashram in Nagano where they built huts and grew vegetables:

Looking at the fūten-zoku laying around on the greenhouse outside of Shinjuku station, I can’t help

thinking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I read as a kid. Tom Sawyer was a

square from a bourgeois family, but Huckleberry Finn was hip. Huck was lazy and coarse, wore rags,

and slept in a sugar barrel, but he was an idealist. The Shinjuku fūten have more ideals than they can

manage—they talk of love, freedom, liberation from their chains. And with the clear blue sky for a

roof, and the air for their furnishings, they dream of the return of a primordial society, when people

could live as human beings. This group of fūten who have created their “bums’ ashram” in the village

of Kōdo in Nagano, which even includes the beat poet Gary Snyder, have surely outdone the Shinjuku

fūten in the loftiness of their ideals.

Yet, in dreaming of “human-ness” in the form of a return of primordial society, these young people

who have chosen the fūten route seem to be reading from the book of life backwards. Me, I like pop

music, the hustle and bustle of the city, the gossip rags and two-bit newspapers. I can’t help loving

the people who like deceiving people and being deceived themselves, the ones who focus all their

energy on one side of a philosophical debate (even knowing that it’s all relative in the end), or who

gamble sometimes and lose, or get drunk on cheap hooch, or the ones who spend their time worrying

and fretting about their lives. This love of dropping out is not going to be possible in every era.³

The critique here is not so much of separatism as it is of the ashram’s assumptions about human history—

this urge toward regressing to an idealized past was very much at odds with Terayama’s notion of the

synchronic time orientation of counterculture and its commitment to expanding the sensation of being in

the present tense. Terayama was critical of the Japanese fūten, yet it was the common Japanese sleeping

pill Broverin that Terayama would bring with him to Amsterdam to offer, as soup, to the audience of his

1972 play Ahen sensō (Opium War), perhaps giving the Dutch cannabis scene a sample of Tokyo-style

hippiedom.⁴

It may be useful to think of Japanese counterculture as a set of particular spaces in Tokyo: the Sōgetsu

Art Center as it moved from an emphasis on the family business of flower arranging toward support for

collaborative experimentation, film, and debates on the role of art in culture; the Art Theater Guild’s

Shinjuku Bunka Art Theater cinema and the smaller Sasori-za (Scorpio) stage in the basement; and the

nearby Fūgetsudō cafe, a hangout for student radicals, poets, and hipsters. Counterculture might be what

happened in those spaces and under Kara Jūrō’s red tent, Satō Makoto’s black tent, or wherever

Terayama’s Tenjō Sajiki was performing. Counterculture as a space might be inscribed directly on the

body in this period, both in terms of the sexual revolution, as well as in terms of the starkly visible in the

development of “ankoku butō” (The dance of utter darkness) with Hijikata Tatsumi or in the “privileged-

flesh” performance theory of Kara Jūrō. Counterculture might be in graphic design in this period, as

figures like Yokoo Tadanori, Awazu Kiyoshi, and Uno Akira not only create a visual style for

counterculture but also launch a journal to theorize the field of design called Dezain hihyō (The Design

Review) in November 1966 that runs for four years, offering a way to periodize the heart of the era of

counterculture and particularly its visual turn.

The significance of counterculture may not have been the radical newness of the ideas so much as the

threat of their rapid massification. The term “underground,” then, may be a misnomer, or at least

anachronistic, since the core of the movement coincides with motion out of hiding and into public view.

The nonchalance that marked this moment—in the presentation of nudity, of homosexuality, of anarchistic

social organization, of loud music, and of the general disregard for state power as an authority—signals a

minor subculture with momentum, moving toward becoming the representative ethos of a generation.

Politically, the rise of the New Left in Japan—in a broad nexus of protest against the situation of the

cold war, administrative policy at the universities, the extension of contracts keeping U.S. military bases

in Japan, the Vietnam War, technocracy, and the bureaucratization of society—was simultaneous with the

student movements in Europe and North America. If we look at journal publishing, we find 1959 to have

been a key year. The weekly news magazine Asahi jānaru, which would become emblematic of radical

students by the late 1960s, was launched in March 1959 with a lead article on the state of intercontinental

ballistic missiles, which had unified the world under an umbrella of potential annihilation and trapped

Japan between the cold war powers. This stance of monitoring the cold war is clear in the set of

dispatches that open each issue: a page each for Washington, London, and Moscow, a rotating fourth page

for somewhere else (Bonn, Bangkok, Cairo), then Tokyo and Osaka. Two days after the first issue of

Asahi jānaru would arrive the first issue of the manga weekly Shōnen magajin, filled with action comics

(gekiga) but also peppered with news articles as well as anecdotes and political commentary in the

margins of the stories. By 1970 the manga run alongside Ashita no Jō, for example, included a historical

account of Kennedy’s career and a series depicting the horrors of the Vietnam War. This pair of weekly

magazines became emblematic of the late 1960s Zenkyōtō student radicals—“The Journal in their right

hand, Magazine in their left”—but it is important to note that this pair had been available and was read by

young, politicized intellectuals for the entire decade of the 1960s.⁵

The Japanese magazines most closely associated with the 1960s student movement arrived on the

market several months before the launch of the emblematic English-language New Left publications. The

United Kingdom’s iconic New Left Review, the product of a merger between New Reasoner and

Universities and Left Review, would publish their first issue in January–February 1960. A few months

earlier, in the fall of 1959, the first issue of Studies on the Left would be published in Madison,

Wisconsin, with greetings from earlier journals like Dissent (founded in 1954) and from the soon-to-

launch New Left Review. Although the international flow of information was often unbalanced (pouring

into Japan but often only trickling out), the space these groups were carving out between the old loyalties

to the Comintern and the liberal, pluralist critique of the cold war, along with their emphasis on university

students as a political force, was common across them all. The roots of each of these publications could

be traced deeper into the 1950s (at least), but the point is that the transition to magazines emphasizing the

student-led New Left occurred simultaneously in Japan and elsewhere—this was not the product of

imitation.

The sociologist C. Wright Mills’s “Letter to the New Left,” published first in New Left Review in 1960

and reprinted in Studies on the Left, critiques both the liberal “end-of-ideology” ideology and the Soviet

Union’s whitewashed “socialist realism” before offering a definition of the Right as pro–status quo and

the Left position as a humanist and secular, morally guided set of criticisms, demands, theories, and

programs that “connect up cultural with political criticism.”⁶This might sound too ambiguous to be

effective, but there is a power in the flexibility Mills proposes here, as there would be in the Port Huron

Statement’s call for “participatory democracy” and in Terayama’s cultural critique, so often

misinterpreted as apolitical. Mills closes his letter by rebutting inevitable attacks on the New Left as a

“moral upsurge,” or the issues as too ambiguous, or the movement as “utopian,” with “Tell it to the

students of Japan. Tell it to the Negro sit-ins. Tell it to the Cuban Revolutionaries. Tell it to the people of

the Hungry-nation bloc.”⁷Japan, here, signals an international solidarity not yet achieved and a

synchronic perspective that sees connections between Third World emancipation movements, civil rights,

and student insurrection across the advanced industrial nations. The unfortunate reality is that these

internationally minded beginnings of the New Left seem to have given way in scholarship on the era to a

nation-bound conception of counterculture as fundamentally American—a pattern with the same contours

as Terayama’s shift from being understood first as international and only later as “Japanese.”

It may be a stretch to proclaim counterculture a fully global phenomenon, and it is particularly

hubristic to pair this sort of proclamation with a study of a figure from the counterculture of an always

overdetermined “Japan.” The cohort that Japan has historically functioned to internationalize would

otherwise have been Euro-American, so this is, strictly speaking, a phenomenon among the advanced

industrial economies (something the sociologists all point out). Japan’s position within that group as an

economic power goes unquestioned, and yet the emergence of cultural phenomena that parallel (and

reject) economic power in Japan is often presented as an unexpected event or somehow imitative—and

this accusation occurs at least as much within Japan as from outside. But if these “advanced economies”

are synonymous with the nations that fought in World War II, we might also note the way many of the

border-crossing alliances that characterized counterculture were bridges across the former Axis–Allies

divide: John and Yoko bridging the United Kingdom and Japan. Deleuze and Guattari bridging France and

Italy. The Sozialistische Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

bridging West Germany and the United States (perhaps mostly in spirit and by accident of acronym). Gary

Snyder and the “bum ashram” fūten bridging the United States and Japan. British musician Julian Cope

claims to have been “sustained” by krautrock in the years before punk, and his books—Krautrocksampler

and Japrocksampler—are tellingly not on 1960s and 1970s American or British rock but rather that of

West Germany and Japan.⁸

It may still be worth maintaining “global counterculture” as a framework, however, for the simple

reason that those in the counterculture used this sort of “Whole Earth” paradigm to conceive themselves

as citizens of the world, or as “Earthlings,” to use Jim Haynes’s preferred term. That the project was

incomplete and that many of the borders crossed were on the same old cosmopolitan routes should not

limit the scope of counterculture’s aspirations. There is certainly more work to be done. Similarly, if it is

possible for Japanese studies to enter a dialogue on the global in which Japan is recognized as an active,

contributing participant rather than always as a marker of otherness—the contrasting case study, or the

boundary that tests the range of a phenomenon—then we will have made some progress. It is as incumbent

on Japanese studies to refuse a privileged position in the globalization discourse as it is for fields

aspiring to be global, like visual culture, to avoid tokenizing the cultural products of Japan.

It is important to keep Terayama’s contribution to a theory of counterculture within the realm of tactics

and that this be a set of useful tools rather than a type of analysis that would prescribe a certain course of

action. Terayama was consistent in calling for action rather than enaction (kōi, not jissen), particularly in

the arts.⁹The poems themselves needed to perform an action, to cause something to happen, instead of

documenting the past or being put to work in the service of a theory. The flexibility opened up by allowing

for a disconnect between theory and practice, between words and action, is a useful kind of abstractness

in Terayama’s mind. He pushes this to the point of actively encouraging hypocrisy in certain instances,

arguing that those who calcify their political position are destined for nothing other than the pointlessness

of martyrdom (which functions only for the individual martyr, never for the cause).¹⁰

What ultimately is at stake, then, in an analysis of Terayama Shūji and counterculture? Something

beyond just another dead “carpe diem” poet, one hopes. Terayama’s work suggests an important cluster of

proposals. A set of lateral-motion tactics for instigating an effective oppositional engagement with the

times. A suggestion that we stand to see a great deal more by getting beyond the hegemony of diachronic

time orientation to start focusing on synchrony and the present tense. A call for indeterminacy as the

flexibility we need for an antiestablishment movement to survive over the long term and for the

destabilization of meaning as a way to rein-vigorate a discourse. But if any of Terayama’s proposals are

to be answered, perhaps the most important will be to do our half of the job as readers to complete the

author’s text and to do that with as much creative engagement as we assume the author (or authors) to have

offered to us—to push our readings as far as they can go. I often felt as I wrote these chapters that I may

have taken the analysis too far, that I overreached and overread, wandering into indefensible territory. But

now I wonder if the opposite is the case—if taking a reading beyond the rational limit or past the range of

possibility of authorial intent is precisely the task we are charged with, and so I am left wondering if this

book did not go nearly far enough.

Acknowledgments

IAM GRATEFUL TO THE FOLLOWING mentors, informants, classmates, and colleagues for their generous

guidance, shared memories, and advice. Kathryn Sparling, my undergraduate advisor at Carleton College,

helped to start me down this path by supporting my proposal to translate Terayama’s 1960 debut play as

part of a senior thesis project; she then spent countless hours with me line editing my translation until it

was accurate. John Treat, my graduate advisor (first at the University of Washington and later at Yale),

saw this project through from beginning to end, pushing me to return to Terayama for my dissertation at a

time when my interests were getting too broad. Chiba Shunji, my advisor at Waseda University in Tokyo

for a combined five years of research, has steered me toward Japanese literary theorists and writers I

would never have found on my own. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, whose dissertation taught me who

Terayama was, graciously made the introductions I needed to arrange my first affiliation at Waseda—I am

grateful for her steady encouragement. My research in Tokyo was supported by grants from the Japanese

Ministry of Education (1996–98), Fulbright–Institute of International Education (2002–4), and Fulbright-

Hays (2008–9)—I am indebted to these organizations for giving me the time and freedom to complete the

research needed to write this book. Edward Kamens generously helped with an early version of what

would become chapter 5. Chris Hill’s demand for precision helped me rein it in somewhat when things

started spinning out of control. Jeff Brophy, archivist at the International Boxing Hall of Fame, kindly

mailed me copies of newspaper clippings on Terayama’s friend, “Fighting” Harada, the only Japanese

boxer enshrined in Canastota. Ozzie Rodriguez, Kaori Fujiyabu, and Ellen Stewart of LaMama

Experimental Theatre Club in New York integrated me into their 2002 retrospective of Terayama and

Higashi Yutaka’s LaMama plays. Jennifer Merin recounted her adventure to Tokyo to join Terayama’s

troupe, including her shock when given a stack of pictures of Japanese men to choose from after she asked

where she would be staying (responses to a personal ad they took on her behalf). Ritsaert ten Cate,

director of the Mickery Workshop in Amsterdam, generously opened his art studio to me for an interview

and made two particularly important comments on Terayama (whose troupe performed regularly at his

theater through the 1970s): first, that looking to surrealism to understand Terayama “is a red herring; he

was primarily interested in manipulation,” and second, that “if you ever wanted a response to television,

it was a Terayama show.” On ten Cate’s recommendation, I contacted Renate Klett in Berlin, who shared

her recollections of seeing Terayama’s troupe at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Hiroko Govaers, Terayama’s

film agent in Paris, shared her collection with me over several days and introduced me to Jim Haynes, an

old friend of Terayama’s, and Nicolas Bataille, Eugene Ionesco’s stage director who spent several years

in Tokyo in the late 1960s and early 1970s where he saw many of Terayama’s plays. Kujō Kyōko,

Terayama’s ex-wife and producer for the troupe, brought me along to several performances and shared

materials from her scrapbooks that helped especially with the Rikiishi Tōru funeral section of chapter 3.

Hisao Mitsuko, producer for the troupe Tokyo Kid Brothers, shared a number of memories of time spent

with Terayama, who she claims was actually rather shy. Sasame Hiroyuki, of Poster Hari’s Company,

helped me pin down dates using his incredible poster collection. Awazu Ken recalled translating for the

American performances of Directions to Servants and introduced me to his father, the graphic designer

Awazu Kiyoshi, who shared memories of his many collaborations with Terayama. Sasaki Shōichirō, the

radio and TV documentary director from TV Man Union and Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), told me about

his collaboration with Terayama on the important stereo radio drama “Comet Ikeya.” Kuwabara Shigeo,

chief editor at Kamarusha, shared memories of the first stereo radio broadcasts in Japan during the 1950s

(before FM), when you had to borrow a neighbor’s radio to set up a two-receiver apparatus, one set to

NHK 1, the other to NHK 2, to hear a half-hour stereo program. Members of my dissertation cohort—Jon

Abel, Deborah Shamoon, Charles Exley, Ryan Holmberg, Mariko Schimmel, Allison Alexy, and Gavin

Whitelaw—provided helpful suggestions and comic relief as this project took shape. I am grateful to my

fellow organizers of the 2007–8 “Audio Culture in the Visual Era” Mellon Workshop at the University of

Wisconsin–Madison—Nicole Huang, Michele Hilmes, Lee Blasius, Casey Lee, and Jill Casid—for

creating a forum to think through issues in sound studies, the relation between the visual and the audio,

aural, and oral, and the possibility of historicizing and culturalizing listening. My colleagues in the

Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Center for East Asian Studies, and in Japanese

studies across UW–Madison have been wonderfully supportive. Thanks to Jason Weidemann, the

manuscript readers, and University of Minnesota Press for advancing these ideas to print. I am grateful to

my parents and sister for steady support over these years. Susan Ridgely has been my primary interlocutor

since we met. This book is dedicated to her.

Notes

Introduction

1. Renate Klett, telephone interview, Berlin, July 2002.

2. Terayama writes about Jim Haynes in “Rondonkko nara dare demo Jimu Hēnzu o shitte iru,” in

Yōroppa reinen (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbun Sha, 1970), 119–34.

3. Terayama recounts his visit to Algren in “Neon no kōya: Shikago,” in Chika sōzōryoku:

Hyōronshū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971), 91–107.

4. Terayama’s conversation with Michel Foucault is reprinted in several books, most recently in

Terayama Shūji, ’70s Terayama Shūji (Tokyo: Sekai Shoin, 2004), 25–40. The dialogue was first

published in the April 1976 issue of the journal Jōkyō.

5. J. Milton Yinger, “Contraculture and Subculture,” American Sociological Review 25, no. 2

(October 1960): 629. Yinger will later move toward seeing the culture–counterculture dialectic as the

core force driving social change in “Countercultures and Social Change,” American Sociological Review

42, no. 6 (December 1977), 833–53, and later expand those ideas to find this same dynamic in nearly all

elements of life and across centuries of history in his book Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a

World Turned Upside Down (New York: Free Press, 1982).

6. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), 355, 522. Yinger, following

up on Parsons’s footnote, traces Lasswell’s use of “counter-mores” back as far as 1935 (in World Politics

and Personal Insecurity [New York: McGraw-Hill], 64) before dismissing as analytically unclear

Lasswell’s fairly apt description of “culture patterns which appeal mainly to the id” as seen in

“revolutionists, prostitutes, prisoners, obscene and subversive talk.” Yinger, “Contraculture and

Subculture,” 629n10.

7. Theodore Roszak, “The Counter Culture: Part I—Youth and the Great Refusal,” The Nation 206,

no. 13 (March 25, 1968): 400–407; “The Counter Culture: Part II—Politics of the Nervous System,” The

Nation 206, no. 14 (April 1, 1968): 439–43; “Counter Culture: Part III—Capsules of Salvation,” The

Nation 206, no. 15 (April 8, 1968): 466–71; “Counter Culture: Part IV—The Future as Community,” The

Nation 206, no. 16 (April 15, 1968): 497–503.

8. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1969), 5–22.

9. Takahashi Akira, “Amerika no shin-sayoku to wa nani ka: Tenkanki ni okeru chishikijin,” Sekai

254 (January 1967): 106–7. Takahashi is engaging Ronald Aronson’s “The Movement and its Critics,”

Studies on the Left 6, no. 1 (January–February 1966): 3–19 here directly, using Aronson’s term “counter-

style” to describe the antihierarchy position taken by the bulk of the New Left organizers.

10. Terayama Shūji, Sengoshi (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1965), 71–87.

11. Ibid., 77–78.

12. This film was shot in 1962 but not edited or publicly screened until 1969. The date listed in the

title sequence, 1964, has been repudiated by Hagiwara Sakumi, who is credited with editing the film in

1969. Nakajima Takashi, ed., Terayama Shūji: Seishōjo no tame no eiga-nyūmon (Tokyo: Dagereo

Shuppan, 1993), 120.

13. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent 4, no. 3

(Summer 1957): 278. The first Japanese translation (by Ōhashi Kichinosuke) of “The White Negro” was

available by February 1960 in the journal Mita bungaku. This version would be included in an anthology

compiled by Saeki Shōichi and published in 1961 on the topic of “new literature,” which included a

chapter on the United Kingdom’s “Angry Young Men” (another interest of Terayama’s). Terayama quotes

from Mailer’s essay in his critique of postwar poetry, Sengoshi, mentioned previously. Terayama

playfully refers to himself as a jazz-obsessed “Yellow Negro” in “Ierō niguro datta koro,” in Ōgon jidai:

Terayama Shūji hyōronshū (Tokyo: Kyūgei Shuppan, 1978), 260–62.

14. Yomota Inuhiko, Haisukūru 1968 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2004), 128.

15. The early biographical information is primarily drawn from Ogawa Tarō’s Terayama Shūji, sono

shirazaru seishun: Uta no genryū o sagutte (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1997), the result of a thorough

series of interviews Ogawa conducted with Terayama’s family and acquaintances to fact-check the details

of Terayama’s two dubiously autobiographical works, Keshigomu, which was first serialized in Yomiuri

shinbun between November 10, 1976, and December 3, 1976, and was later reprinted in Ōgon jidai,

cited previously, and Tareka kokyō o omowazaru, first serialized in the journal Shinpyō between July

1967 and April 1968 and later published as a book in 1968 by Haga Shoten (Tokyo). I have cross-

referenced as many of these details as possible with other sources, such as Takatori Ei’s recent Terayama

Shūji: Kageki naru shissō (Tokyo: Chūsekisha, 2008), and the time lines and publication lists in books

like Terayama Henriku, ed., Terayama Shūji engeki bijutsukan (Tokyo: Paruko Shuppan, 2008); and

Terayama Shūji, Terayama Shūji zen shiikaku (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1986). I have been more cautious

about the biographical details in books like Kuritsubo Yoshiki, ed., Terayama Shūji, vol. 56 in the series

Shinchō Nihon bungaku arubamu (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1993), because it relies so heavily on biographical

detail from Terayama’s own “autobiographies,” which were demonstrated to be embellished in some

places and incorrect in others by later work like Ogawa’s.

16. Tanikawa Shuntarō, “‘Watakushi-sei’ no hinin,” in Terayama Shūji no sekai, ed. Fūba no Kai

(Tokyo: Jōkyō Shuppan, 1993), 11. This was originally a presentation given in December 1992 within a

series of ten presentations set up by Ogawa Tarō and the Fūba no Kai (The Nonchalant Society), a group

of devotees of Terayama’s work, particularly his tanka poetry. Tanikawa confesses that he and the other

members of his poetry circle, Kai (Oar), survived during the 1950s and early 1960s by writing dramas for

commercial radio.

17. The newspaper serialization, titled “Narayama nijūshi-kō” (Twenty-four thoughts on Narayama)

is a play on Fukazawa Shichirō’s 1956 story “Narayama bushikō” (The ballad of Narayama), made

famous by Kinoshita Keisuke’s 1958 film version. This initial set was expanded and published as a

paperback in April 1963. See Terayama Shūji, Gendai no seishunron: Kazoku-tachi, kedamono-tachi

(Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1963).

18. This novel shares its title with the Japanese translation of Eugene O’Neill’s 1933 play Ah,

Wilderness! but the connection between the two seems to go no further.

19. “Hankōteki kijin o atsumeta Terayama Shūji-shi no jikken-seikatsu,” Heibon panchi 4, no.

21(May 29, 1967): 38.

20. Takatori, Kageki naru shissō, 201–2.

21. Terayama Hatsu, Haha no hotaru: Terayama Shūji no iru fūkei (Tokyo: Shin-shokan, 1985), 9.

22. Terayama Shūji, “Jijoden rashiku naku: Tareka kokyō o omowazaru,” Shinpyō 14, no. 7 (July

1967): 144. This caveat appears near the beginning of the first installment of this serialization, a clear

warning about the unreliability of the narrator.

23. The one earlier reference to a 1935 birth year came as a side note in the biographical sketch at the

end of a poetry collection from the For Ladies series called Sayonara no shiro (Tokyo: Shinshokan,

1966), 176: “A Short Terayama Shūji Dictionary: Born January 10, 1936 (according to public records,

but he was actually born on December 10, 1935). His star is the Centaur, and his sign is Sagittarius.” This

aside, almost whispered into the ear of his reader, combined with a horse-racing fan’s sudden move into a

zodiac sign with a half-man, half-horse icon, has led some critics (Sugiyama Seijū, for example) to

question the legitimacy of Terayama’s claim.

24. Ogawa suspects a letter may have arrived in the mid-1960s from Terayama’s maternal grandfather,

Sakamoto Shigetarō (who ran the Kabuki-za cinema in Aomori), explaining the history of the cinema as

well as Hatsu’s complex childhood. If such a letter was in fact sent to Shūji at that time, it may also have

included information about the two birthdays. Alternatively, he could have simply asked his mother

around the same time. In any case, Terayama would have been collecting information about his past in

preparation for publishing “Tareka kokyō” starting in mid-1967.

1. Poetic Kleptomania and Pseudo-Lyricism

1. Akimoto Fujio, “Tanka to haiku no aida,” Tanka 2, no. 5 (May 1955): 22.

2. Terayama Shūji, “Tōsaku,” Hōseki 15, no. 1 (January 1960): 192–94.

3. Terayama Shūji, “Tōsaku-byō,” Gendaishi 8, no. 9 (September 1961): 16.

4. Terayama, “Tōsaku-byō,” 17.

5. Terayama Shūji, “Ryōjū-on,” Tanka kenkyū 13, no. 4 (April 1956): 24. This first appearance was

in Terayama’s fourth published tanka sequence. It was reprinted in his first book, Ware ni gogatsu o

[Give me May] (1957), in a section called “Sokoku sōshitsu” [Loss of my homeland]—probably a nod to

Nakajō Fumiko’s set of tanka, “Chibusa sōshitsu” [Loss of my breasts], for which she won Tanka

kenkyū’s prize half a year before Terayama would win it. His first formal tanka collection, Sora ni wa

hon [A book up in the sky] (1958), contained the same “Sokoku sōshitsu” section, so the poem was

reprinted here, too. His second tanka collection, Chi to mugi [Blood and wheat] (1962), also includes the

poem, this time in a section called “Waga toki, sono hajimari” [My time and its beginning]. Three of

Terayama’s first four poetry collections, then, all contain this poem. It also serves as an epigraph to the

first chapter of his only full-length novel, Aa, kōya [Ah, wilderness] (1966).

6. Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)

compares well. The linguistic slippage around both “country” and kuni is similar, but the difference in

usage may also inflect the relationship of kuni to both “nation” and “city.” Kuni may map better to the

slippage around the American usage of “state,” since both can signify either a geographical unit that

makes up the nation or the collective of those units, the national government itself.

7. Terayama Shūji, Terayama Shūji haiku zenshū (Tokyo: Anzudō, 1999), 28. This collection cites

the poem’s original publication as being in the coterie journal Aoi mori 3, no. 11 (August 1953).

8. Tomizawa Kakio, Teihon Tomizawa Kakio kushū (Tokyo: Teihon Tomizawa Kakio Kushū

Hakkōkai, 1965), 39. The poem was first published in Kikan 7, no. 2 (February 1940).

9. Ibid., 18. The poem was first published as part of a collection called Ten no ōkami (Todashi,

Saitama prefecture: Ten no Ōkami Kankōkai, 1941). Nagao Saburō points out the similarity in Kyokō

jigoku: Terayama Shūji (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997), 102.

10. Ishikawa Takuboku, “Ichiaku no suna,” in Gendai Nihon bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō,

1972), 26: 219. Line breaks are included here following Takuboku’s characteristic three-line format for

his tanka.

11. Nagao, Kyokō jigoku, 78.

12. Ibid.

13. Dialogue is quoted from Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Howard Koch, Kasaburanka (Tokyo:

Magazine House, 1994), 224–30.

14. It is unclear whether the songs were subtitled during the first screenings. The songs are not

subtitled in copies of the film circulating now, but the contest of patriotisms is clear enough in the scene.

15. Sugiyama recalls his first assignment upon entering Nihon Tanka Sha, the company that owns

Tanka kenkyū, to be memorizing the family trees of masters and their students posted on the wall of the

editing division. See his Terayama Shūji: Yūgi no hito (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000), 36.

16. Nakai Hideo, Teihon: Kokui no tankashi (Tokyo: Waizu Shuppan, 1993; Tokyo: Ushio Shuppan,

1971), 11. Citations are to the Waizu Shuppan edition.

17. See Nakai’s “Nijūdai ni tsuite” in his Kokui no tankashi, 11–13. Originally published in Nihon

tanka, another monthly published by Nihon Tanka Sha, in August 1949.

18. Sugiyama, Yūgi no hito, 37.

19. Terayama Shūji, “Hi no chūkei,” Tanka kenkyū 11, no. 11 (November 1954): 118.

20. Terayama Shūji, “Chehofu-sai,” Tanka kenkyū 11, no. 11 (November 1954): 7.

21. Ōno Nobuo, Yamashita Mutsu, and Maekawa Samio, “Kadan no hankyō: Dainikai gojūshu nyūsen

sakuhin,” Tanka kenkyū 11, no. 12 (December 1954): 122–23.

22. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 7, 9.

23. Shino Hiroshi’s three-volume history of modern tanka is the best survey of the phenomenon. The

entire second volume traces “The Avant-Garde Tanka Era.” See Shino Hiroshi, Gendai tankashi, 3 vols.

(Tokyo: Tanka Kenkyū Sha, 1983–94).

24. Kuwabara Takeo, “Daini geijutsu: Gendai haiku ni tsuite,” in Kuwabara Takeo zenshū (Tokyo:

Asahi Shinbun Sha, 1969), 5:13–29. It was originally published in Sekai 9 (September 1946).

25. Kusamoto Kenkichi, “Aru ‘jūdai’: Tanka haiku ni okeru junsuisei no mondai,” Haiku kenkyū 12,

no. 2 (February 1955): 33.

26. Wakatsuki Akira, “Haiku to tanka no aida,” Haiku kenkyū 12, no. 2 (February 1955): 25.

27. Saitō Shōji, “Sōzō to sōi: Yori konponteki na kanten kara,” Tanka kenkyū 12, no. 1 (January

1955): 44.

28. Ibid.

29. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 10.

30. Hishikawa Yoshio, “Nani ga owarō to shite iru ka, nani ga hajimarō to shite iru ka,” Tanka

kenkyū 12, no. 1 (January 1955): 36.

31. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 8.

32. Nakamura Kusatao, “Bokyōkō,” in Nakamura Kusatao zenshū (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1989),

3:192. The poem is dated 1954 and was published as part of a collection in 1956.

33. Teika is clearest on this point in his preface to Eiga taigai: “In composing a new poem by taking

an old one, using as many as three lines out of the five is using far too many, for there would be no effect

of novelty. However, it is permissible to use two lines and three or four syllables of a third.” Fujiwara

Teika, Fujiwara Teika’s Superior Poems of Our Time: A Thirteenth-Century Poetic Treatise and

Sequence, trans. Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1967), 44n10.

34. Nakamura Kusatao, “Hi no shima,” in Nakamura Kusatao zenshū, 1:42. The poem is dated 1937

and was published as part of a collection in 1939.

35. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 7.

36. Saitō Sanki, Saitō Sanki zenkushū (Tokyo: Chūsekisha, 2001), 152. This haiku was first

published in Tenrō 7, no. 4–5 (April–May 1954).

37. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 6.

38. Saitō, Saitō Sanki zenkushū, 117. This poem was first published in Tenrō 4, no. 3 (March 1951).

39. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 9.

40. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 22.

41. Edward Kamens, “Waking the Dead: Fujiwara no Teika’s Sotoba kuyō Poems,” Journal of

Japanese Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 379–406.

42. Nakamura Kusatao in particular seems to have been a poetic hero to Terayama. After several

years heading the literature club at his high school, Terayama contributed an essay on Kusatao’s work to a

volume of commemorative writings for his graduating class, which was published several months before

his tanka debut. See Terayama Shūji, “Ringo no tame ni hiraita mado: Gendai no kikō nōto,” in Seitokai

shi: Shōwa nijū-hachi nendo, ed. Aomori Kenritsu Aomori Kōtō Gakkō Seitokai (Aomori: Kenritsu

Aomori Kōtō Gakkō, 1954), 29–34.

43. Asanuma Keiji, Utsuroi to tawamure: Teika o yomu (Tokyo: Ozawa Shoten, 1978), 130–31. The

notion of words in a mirror (or perhaps a “looking glass”) is one the literary critic Miura Masashi will

use again later in his essay on Terayama’s use of appropriation, his relationship with words (i.e., they

come before ideas, even before the idea of the self), and his transition from haiku to tanka. Miura

Masashi, “Kagami no naka no kotoba,” in Terayama Shūji: Kagami no naka no kotoba (Tokyo:

Shinshokan, 1992), 17–64.

44. Terayama Shūji, Terayama Shūji haiku zenshū, 27. Kamens argues that the time span between

Teika’s poems and their honka may not be as great as it seems, since the classic poems were in constant

circulation during Teika’s time: “The chronological span across which Teika reaches for reference may

be sizable, but as suggested above, Teika is not really reaching all that far, if we recognize that the poems

he chooses to build on as foundations were readily accessible in the matrix of potential points of

reference, already kinetically charged by prior use and in active circulation, and therefore susceptible to

temporary seizure and deployment in the construction of new referential schemes as this one.” Kamens,

“Waking the Dead,” 396.

45. Okamoto Tarō, “Gabunshū avangyarudo,” in Okamoto Tarō chosakushū (Tokyo: Kōdansha,

1979), 1:373.

46. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 7.

47. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Premature Burial,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

(London: Penguin, 1982), 258.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 262.

51. Ibid., 263.

52. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 8.

53. Tsubota Jōji, “Mahō,” in Tsubota Jōji zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1977), 7:149. Originally

published in Akai tori 9, no. 1 (January 1935). My thanks to Professor Chiba Shunji of Waseda University

for pointing out the reference to Tsubota’s story in Terayama’s poem.

54. Ibid., 149.

55. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 6.

56. Terayama admitted fabricating the quotation in a letter to theater critic Dōmoto Masaki. See

Ogawa Tarō, Terayama Shūji, sono shirazaru seishun: Uta no genryū o sagutte (Tokyo: San’ichi

Shobō, 1997), 98–100.

57. Premodern waka may not have been read as lyrical, but since its renewal by Masaoka Shiki, and

especially after Takuboku, reading modern tanka as genuine expressions of emotion from the poet seems

to have become normative.

58. The Signet Classic edition includes the following caveat by the translator, Lloyd C. Parks: “Most

of the epigraphs in The Red and the Black are imaginary, and so are their ascriptions. They serve chiefly

to supply a thematic gloss for each chapter.” Stendhal, The Red and The Black (New York: Signet

Classic, 1970), 11.

59. While I realize that notions of “authenticity” have been so completely deconstructed now that we

risk seeming naïve by not bracketing the term, I use it mostly without irony in the next section in order to

follow Terayama’s argument that faithfulness to a fictionalized version of oneself is “honest.”

60. This essay is available from Haiku kenkyū 12, no. 2 (February 1955): 39.

61. Nakai Hideo, “Kaisetsu,” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1972),

189.

62. Terayama, “Hi no chūkei,” 118–19. He refers here to Gérard de Nerval (pen-name of Gérard

Labrunie), a French author in the forefront of nineteenth century romanticism.

63. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” 6.

64. Nakai Hideo, Terayama Shūji, Kitamura Mitsuyoshi, Ōzawa Kiyotsugu, Nagai Kiyūko, Ishikawa

Fujiko, “Asu o hiraku uta: Kizu no nai wakasa no tame ni,” Tanka kenkyū 12, no. 1 (January 1955): 73–

74.

65. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “A Future for the Novel,” in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. by

Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 18. The essay was originally published in 1956.

Terayama makes direct reference to Robbe-Grillet in an essay published in 1962: “I think that what these

so-called anti-roman writers like Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor were after was rebellion against the

inclination of everything to move toward poetry.” See “Kōi to sono hokori: minato no gendaishi to

Action-poem no mondai,” in Chi to mugi (Tokyo: Shiratama Shobō, 1962), 106.

66. André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 37.

67. Terayama, “Hi no chūkei,” 119.

68. Kishigami Daisaku, Kishigami Daisaku zenshū (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1980), 13.

69. Terayama Shūji, “Keshigomu,” in Ōgon jidai: Terayama Shūji hyōronshū (Tokyo: Kyūgei

Shuppan, 1978), 267–70.

70. Kishigami Daisaku, “Terayama Shūji ron,” in Kishigami Daisaku zenshū (Tokyo: Shichōsha,

1980), 160.

71. Kishigami Daisaku, “Boku no tame no nōto,” in Kishigami Daisaku zenshū, 303–4.

72. Terayama Shūji, “Buta—1960,” Bungakukai 14, no. 8 (August 1960): 113–14.

73. Terayama Shūji, “Jūkyū-sai no burūsu: Atogaki,” Shinario 16, no. 8 (August 1960): 106.

74. Terayama Henriku, ed., “Nenpu,” in Terayama Shūji kinenkan (Tokyo: Terayama World, 2000),

1:109.

75. Nuhikun, the Tenjō Sajiki’s version of Swift’s Directions to Servants, operates on this theme. On

a small wooden model used to choreograph the performance in Amsterdam, Terayama wrote a simple

slogan for the play: “The world awaits the absence of all masters.” The model is in the archives of

DasArts, a performing arts institute in Amsterdam.

2. Radio Drama in the Age of Television

1. Nagai Jun, “Ōdio no ayumi,” in Ōdio 50-nenshi, ed. Nihon Ōdio Kyōkai (Tokyo: Nihon Ōdio

Kyōkai, 1986), 23.

2. Ibid., 20–21.

3. See Nishizawa Minoru’s Rajio dorama no ōgon jidai (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha), 2002.

Although written in 2002, Nishizawa, a radio drama scenarist, carries his history only through 1964,

citing the years from 1925 through 1965 as the era of the radio drama, with the twenty years after the war

being its “most lively period” (hyakka sōmei no jidai). The most tangible marker of the end of the era

was less the advent of television than the demolition in 1965 of the “Broadcasting Hall” (Hōsō Kaikan)

in Uchisaiwaichō, which had been the headquarters for NHK’s radio production since 1926. Fellow

scenarist Ima Harube assembled a group to gather rubble from the site in commemoration of its cultural

importance.

4. Rudolph Arnheim, “In Praise of Blindness,” in Radio: The Art of Sound (London: Faber & Faber,

1936), 133–203.

5. Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Nicholas

Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), 28.

6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Epoch of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. H. H. Gerth

and Don Martindale, Studies on the Left 1, no. 2 (Winter 1960): 31. This early English version comes via

Pierre Klossowski’s 1936 French translation but was adjusted after feedback from Adorno and review of

the German. A translation of Benjamin’s 1936 essay by Takagi Hisao and Takahara Kōhei (from the

original German) was published in 1965 by Kinokuniya Shoten.

7. Yamada Taichi, afterword to Jiono, tobanakatta otoko: Terayama Shūji dorama shinario shū, by

Terayama Shūji, ed. Yamada Taichi (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1994), 275–76.

8. Moriyasu Toshihisa, “Fukuoka sōdō tenmatsuki: Rajio dorama ‘Otonagari,’” in Barokku no Nihon

(Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2003), 113.

9. Ueda Bin’s posthumous poetry collection Bokuyōshin (Tokyo: Kanao Bunendō, 1920) is another

possible source for the title of the teen haiku journal, but titling his first radio drama Giono suggests an

awareness of the French writer.

10. Terayama Shūji, “Jiono, tobanakatta otoko,” 24.

11. Ibid., 26–31.

12. Ibid., 32.

13. Terayama Shūji, “Keshigomu,” in Sakka no jiden, 40: Terayama Shūji, ed. Kuritsubo Yoshiki

(Tokyo: Nihon Zusho Sentā, 1995), 174. The chronology is wrong for this to be the actual derivation of

the idea for the plot, since Nakamura Ichirō aired in February 1959, two months before the imperial

wedding. The reversal of logic (gyakusetsu) he writes of in this “autobiography” may be less a reversal

of the incident seen on television than a reversal of the time relationship between it and his radio drama.

14. Oiwake Hideko, “Hatsu no idō TV chūkei to tōseki shōnen: Kōtaishi seikon,” in 60-nen Anpo,

Miike tōsō: Ishihara Yūjirō no jidai, 1957–1960, ed. Nishii Kazuo (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2000),

98.

15. Ibid., 98.

16. Terayama, “Keshigomu,” 173.

17. Terayama Shūji, “Nakamura Ichirō,” in Jiono, tobanakatta otoko, 9.

18. Ibid., 10.

19. Ibid., 13.

20. This was one year after Nakamura Ichirō, during which time Terayama had also begun a

serialized radio drama collaboration with Tanikawa Shuntarō called Oshaberi danchi (Chatty apartment

building) and released, in December 1959, another radio drama called Kanoke-jima (Caja de Muertos

Island), the “coffin island” that served as the model for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Scripts for both are in Jiono, tobanakatta otoko, 79–90, 237–69.

21. These first screenings at Sōgetsu were followed by a month at the Sasori-za under Shinjuku Bunka

(October 1970) and then two more weeks in January 1971 in the basement of the Tenjō Sajiki-kan, which

functioned as Terayama’s office, café, and rehearsal space in Shibuya. See Moriyasu Toshihisa, “Gekiga

to akumu: Eiga ‘Tomato kechappu kōtei,’” in Barokku no Nihon (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2003), 131.

22. The script for this radio drama is reprinted as “A Forgotten Interlude” in Ronald A. Knox, Essays

in Satire (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930), 279–87.

23. Terayama Shūji, “Otona-gari,” Tanka 7, no. 5 (May 1960): 155.

24. Moriyasu Toshihisa, “Fukuoka sōdō tenmatsuki,” in Barokku no Nihon, 116–23.

25. “Kodomo ga kakumei o okoshita: Hōsōgeki ‘Otona-gari’ no tōjita hamon,” Shūkan bunshun,

April 18, 1960, 67–69.

26. Terayama Shūji, “Sakuhin nōto: Otona-gari,” in Terayama Shūji no gikyoku (Tokyo: Shichōsha,

1984), 4:403.

27. Moriyasu, “Fukuoka sōdō tenmatsuki,” 115.

28. Terayama, “Otona-gari,” 152–53.

29. Ibid., 153.

30. Ibid., 156.

31. Moriyasu, “Fukuoka sōdō tenmatsuki,” 125.

32. Takatori Ei, Terayama Shūji: Kageki naru shissō (Tokyo: Heibonsha Shin-sho, 2006), 20–21.

33. Minami Yōichirō, Soromon-tō tanken (Tokyo: Kaiseisha, 1941), 1.

34. Ikeda Nobumasa, Hittorā (Tokyo: Kaiseisha, 1941), 2–3. This book is conspicuously left out of

the biographical timeline in his volume of Shōnen shōsetsu taikei (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1988), 6:547–

53.

35. Terayama Shūji, “Ningen jikkenshitsu,” Bungakukai 14, no. 12 (December 1960): 95–96.

Publishing on right-wing youth in December 1960 in this way must have invoked, and was likely a

response to, the televised stabbing to death of Asanuma Inejirō, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, on

October 12, 1960. Ōe Kenzaburō would respond to this incident with his short stories “Sevuntiin”

(Seventeen) and “Seiji-shōnen shisu” (A political youth dies) in the January and February 1961 issues of

the same literary journal Terayama published in, which would mark him for attack by right-wing groups.

Terayama’s essay is released the same month as Fukazawa Shichirō’s infamous short story “Furyū-

mutan,” (The story of a dream of courtly elegance), with its episode of decapitating the Japanese emperor,

which would spark an attack on the publisher in his home, killing a maid and sending Fukazawa into

hiding.

36. My translation of these intertitles and the voiceovers from the film is available in Review of

Japanese Culture and Society 17 (2005): 89–97.

37. Moriyasu notes that the 1.3 million yen was taken from royalties Terayama had earned from

writing the lyrics for a hit pop song called “Toki ni wa haha no nai ko no yō ni” (Sometimes, like a

motherless child), sung by Carmen Maki. “Gekiga to akumu,” in Barokku no Nihon, 140.

38. Stereo television would come much later, but earlier in Japan than anywhere else. Experiments

began in September and October of 1978 and quickly spread to all the domestic networks. See Tomura

Eiko and Nishino Yasushi, Terebi media no sekai (Tokyo: Surugadai Shuppansha, 1999), 223.

39. See Sasaki’s account of working with Terayama on this project in Sasaki Shōichirō, Tsukuru to iu

koto (Tokyo: JICC Shuppankyoku, 1982), 72–79. Kometto Ikeya was the third collaboration between

Sasaki and Terayama (after the prize-winning 1965 Ohayō India [Good morning, India] and early 1966

Nijussai [Twenty years old], which starred a young Yoshinaga Sayuri), as well as Sasaki’s final piece for

radio before he moved to producing for television.

40. This was Ikeya’s first comet discovery, but he would go on to spot several more over the next

forty years. He is now a legend among stargazers. See “Japan’s Famous Kaoru Ikeya Bags Another One,”

Stella 174 (April 2002): 1.

41. Terayama Shūji, “Kometto Ikeya,” Terayama Shūji no gikyoku (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1983), 1:227.

42. Sound in motion through the sound field would not require conditioning to be experienced as

stereo. But does this more material stereo experience bolster or hinder the conditioned experience of

hearing voices centered between the speakers? It could negate that coaching by seeming more positioned

relative to the unmoving voice. Does pure stereo sound, then, require motion? The scenes in Kometto

Ikeya are often bridged by sound in conspicuous motion (e.g., trains, demos, street sounds with voices

crossing left and right), which may reassert the stereo space but risks making the dialogue sound even

flatter and more monaural than without the juxtaposition.

43. Kuwabara Shigeo, in discussion with the author, Tokyo, February 17, 2004.

44. An exhibition of the rittai hōsō technology at an audio fair earlier that month, December 5 through

7, had been very popular. Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, ed., NHK nenkan 6: April 1952-March 1953 (Tokyo:

Yumani Shobō, 1999), 27–28.

45. Ibid.

46. NHK claims that this was the world’s first regularly scheduled stereo radio program. Nihon Hōsō

Kyōkai, ed., NHK nenkan 8: April 1954-March 1955 (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 1999), 131.

47. Nagai, “Ōdio no ayumi,” 21.

48. The Prix Italia is an international contest for radio and television programs that was founded in

1949—it is essentially the Cannes for broadcast media. Terayama won the top award for radio dramas in

1964 with Yamanba, an amalgamation of the Bluebeard myth and the quasi-mythical practice of obasute,

sending the elderly of a village to die in the mountains to reduce the number of mouths to feed. A Japanese

radio drama had won once at the Prix Italia before Terayama’s awards with a version of Inoue Yasushi’s

Hi no yama (Mountain of fire) in 1962 (also a stereo production). Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, ed., NHK nenkan

’63 (Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, 1963), 139.

49. “Terayama Shūji no kūsōgeki: Itaria-shō no sanka-sakuhin,” Yomiuri shin-bun August 31, 1966,

7. The radio programming listings on the same page show the drama scheduled from 9:15 to 10:00 P.M.

50. “NHK no ni-sakuhin ni ‘Itaria-shō’: Kokusai hōsō konkūru,” Yomiuri shin-bun September 27,

1966, 14; and “Rajio shūhyō: Sukēru ōkii hōsōgeki, ‘Kometto Ikeya,’” Yomiuri shinbun October 8, 1966,

10. The radio programming listings on October 2 show the AM two-channel broadcast of Kometto Ikeya

scheduled from 10:15 to 11:00 P.M. The installation of stereo FM broadcasting equipment throughout the

country was completed in November 1963. Broadcasting began in Tokyo that December, and in Osaka

and Nagoya in February 1964. See Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, ed., NHK nenkan ’67 (Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō

Kyōkai, 1967), 139, 555.

51. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 232.

52. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 33.

53. Ibid., 25, 26.

54. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 230.

55. Terayama Shūji, “Yamanba,” in Jiono, tobanakatta otoko, 124.

56. Terayama Shūji, “Mōjin shokan,” in Terayama Shūji no gikyoku (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1986),

6:64.

57. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 231.

58. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, in The Loeb Classical Library: Cicero, trans. J. E. King

(London: William Heinemann, 1927), 18:51, 53. There is a related invocation of Terayama’s fellow

Tōhoku poet Miyazawa Kenji earlier in the drama when the blind narrator speaks of the stars being

people’s eyes: “I’m blind, so mine are both shining up in the sky. The twin stars are my eyes.” “Kometto

Ikeya,” 244. The reference is to Miyazawa’s “Futago no hoshi” (1918), a short fairy tale about the

adventures of twin stars during the day (when they are free to move around). See Miyazawa Kenji, Kōhon

Miyazawa Kenji zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1973), 7:19–37. Miyazawa would later use the stars’

names from that story (“Chunse” and “Pōse”) in a short public letter written to mourn the untimely

departure of his younger sister’s soul in 1922. See Kōhon Miyazawa Kenji zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma

Shobō, 1974), 11:319–21. The star becomes the missing human soul in Miyazawa’s writings, whereas

Terayama’s script and Cicero’s piece imply that it is the missing human soul that has become the new star.

59. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 230.

60. It may be helpful to consider her narrating position in regard to either Kamei Hideo’s discussion

of “non-person narration” (muninshō) in Kansei no henkaku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983) or the beat poet

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s notion of “fourth-person singular” as the disembodied voice of the poet, one

which creates, rather than represents, poetic consciousness.

61. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 231.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 236.

64. Sasaki Shōichirō, in discussion with the author, Tokyo, June 16, 2004.

65. Nishii Kazuo, ed., Kōdō seichō, Biitoruzu no jidai: 1961–1967 (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha,

2000), 84–85.

66. “Taiheiyō o koeru sho no TV denpa,” Asahi shinbun, November 20, 1963, 1.

67. “Kenedi ansatsu to Nichi-Bei TV chūkei,” in Kōdō-seichō, Biitoruzu no jidai: 1961–1967, ed.

Nishii Kazuo (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2000), 84.

68. “Terestā kichi,” Mainichi shinbun, January 1, 1963, 1.

69. Tanikawa Shuntarō, “Ningen no ie,” Mainichi shinbun, January 1, 1963, 1.

70. Asahi shinbun, January 1, 1963, 34.

71. “Gorin mezashi kensetsu isogu,” Asahi shinbun, January 6, 1963, 13.

72. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 246–47.

73. See Kazuo Kinoshita, “27P/Crommelin: Past, Present, and Future Orbits,” Gary W. Kronk’s

Cometography, http://cometography.com/pcomets/027p.html (accessed September 18, 2010).

74. Moriyasu Torihisa, “Terayama Shūji ni okeru mōsha no shisen,” Shōwa bungaku kenkyū 40

(March 2000): 97.

75. Tomura and Nishino, Terebi media no sekai, 177.

76. Denis Diderot, “The Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See,” in Diderot’s Early

Philosophical Works, ed. Margaret Jourdain (1749; New York: AMS Press, 1973), 109.

77. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 237–38. The radio drama includes some lines not in the script, so I

have transcribed them from the compact disc release (which was the longest edit of the drama). See

“Kometto Ikeya” in Terayama Shūji no rajio dorama: CD senshū (Tokyo: Nikkan Supōtsu Shinbunsha,

1993). This “touching the stars” image invokes Le Petit Prince, which is referred to directly in the text by

the blind narrator.

78. See Shirley Wajda, “A Room with a Viewer: The Parlor Stereoscope, Comic Stereographs, and

the Psychic Role of Play in Victorian America,” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, ed.

Kathryn Grover (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 112–38.

79. Sasaki Shōichirō, in discussion with the author, Tokyo, June 16, 2004. Sasaki and the staff ignored

the standard flourishes of a stereo radio drama, such as recording a door opening and closing at one side

of the space, then footsteps moving toward the center—the gimmicks of the genre had become restrictive,

so they worked to push stereo in directions it had not been before (forward and back, up and down).

80. Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, ed., “Rittai-hōsō kotohajime,” in Zoku hōsō yawa: Zadankai ni yoru

hōsōshi (Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 1970), 264.

81. Terayama, “Kometto Ikeya,” 246.

3. Boxing—Stuttering—Graffiti

1. See Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994), 4.

2. Terayama Shūji, Jūkyūsai no burūsu (Tokyo: Shinshokan, 1980), 7. Although this screenplay was

never made into a film, it was published in the August 1960 edition of Shinario magazine.

3. While not a title bout, the death of collegiate boxer Charlie Mohr in April 1960 led to the end of

the University of Wisconsin boxing team and to the National Collegiate Athletic Association dropping its

sponsorship of college boxing later that year. It may be this death of a university athlete that should be

credited with fueling the boxing-ban and death-in-the-ring discourse, although Norman Mailer will later

credit the live television broadcast. Deadliness was certainly not new to boxing in the 1960s. Nat

Fleischer, the former editor of Ring Magazine, tallied around 450 boxing deaths between 1900 and 1962

—and a rate of around ten deaths per year during the 1950s—with blood clots in the brain accounting for

three quarters of the deaths in New York over a thirty-year period. Amateurs faired no better than

professionals, with twelve pros and ten amateurs dying in 1953 worldwide. See Robert L. Teague, “Many

Fatalities Listed for Boxing,” New York Times, April 3, 1962, reprinted in Gene Brown, ed., The New

York Times Encyclopedia of Sports, Volume 7: Boxing (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 144.

4. “Igaku de wa yogen dekinu: Kyanberu jiken no kyōkun,” Asahi shinbun, May 27, 1961, 11.

5. “Bokushingu wa ‘satsujin kyōgi’ ka: Ijō na hankyō yonda Paretto jiken,” Shūkan asahi, April 13,

1962, 104–6.

6. “Bokushingu no kikendo,” Asahi jānaru, April 15, 1962, 48. When the American Medical

Association recommended banning the sport in 1984, it acknowledged these statistics but condemned the

sport for making damaging an opponent’s brain an objective. See Ira R. Casson, “Brain Damage in

Modern Boxers,” Journal of the American Medical Association 251, no. 20 (1984): 2663–67.

7. Norman Mailer, “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” Esquire 57, no. 2 (February 1963): 116.

8. Ibid.

9. “Sugao: Terayama Shūji-shi,” Asahi jānaru, December 6, 1964, 85.

10. The Harada–Jofre rematch in May 1966 ranked highest at number 5 (63.7 percent viewership),

and the other bouts ranked 8, 12, 21, 22, and 24. The most-watched programs above Harada’s rematch

were the 1963 New Year’s Eve singing contest (Kōhaku uta-kassen) (81.4 percent), the 1964 Japan–

USSR women’s volleyball Olympic final (66.8 percent), the 2002 Japan–Russia World Cup soccer match

(66.1 percent), and the 1963 World Wrestling Association (WWA) professional wrestling title match

between The Destroyer and Rikidōzan (64.0 percent). See Video Research Ltd., “Zenkyoku kōshichōritsu

bangumi 50,” http://www.videor.co.jp/data/ratedata/all50.htm (accessed September 18, 2010).

11. See Harada’s autobiography: Harada Masahiko, Boku Faitingu Harada desu (Tokyo: Hinode

Shuppan, 1984).

12. Terayama Shūji, “Bokushingu o miru,” Asahi jānaru, July 10, 1965, 33.

13. Terayama Shūji, Terayama Shūji zenkashū (Tokyo: Chūsekisha, 1982), 43. This collection is

analyzed in greater depth in chapter 5.

14. Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning (New York: Avon Publishing, 1948), 181. Terayama and

Algren began writing to each other in the early 1960s. Algren spent two weeks in Tokyo with Terayama in

December 1968 on his way to Saigon (as a reporter). Algren comments briefly on the Tokyo stopover in a

piece called “No Cumshaw, No Rickshaw” in The Last Carousel (1973; Seven Stories Press, 1997):

125–30.

15. Harada Masahiko, “Jofure datte ningen: Dōryoku sureba kateru to omotta,” in Kyūkyoku no eikō,

ed. Ikeda Tetsuo (Tokyo: Bēsubōru Magajin Sha, 2000), 8.

16. I am using this term “reality effect” somewhat more broadly than Barthes does in the essay in

which he coined the term. His comments are mainly limited to elements in a narrative that seem

superfluous but, for that reason, generate the reality of the text by not serving as communicative signs for

the reader. See “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill

and Wang, 1986), 141–48.

17. Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre, An Illustrated History of Boxing, 6th ed. (New York: Citadel

Press, 2001), 63–70.

18. Fuji TV, which broadcast all of “Fighting” Harada’s title matches, only started color broadcasts in

1967, well into Harada’s career.

19. See Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty” in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991): 76–

77. I will engage more extensively with Deleuze’s work on sadism and masochism in chapter 4. In Roland

Barthes’s essay on professional wrestling, he specifically denies this sadism—“It is not true that

wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle”—but then goes on to admit that “the

crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment.” See Barthes’s “The

World of Wrestling,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 24–25.

Wrestling is the opposite of sadism, in his account, because its sadism is conspicuously faked, meant to be

a representation of commitment to the greater contract binding heroes to uphold laws of justice, which

require the violation of lesser rules.

20. Terayama Shūji, “Kaneda Morio to iu na no bokusā,” Taiyō 4, no. 1 (December 1965), 141.

21. Barikan (“hair clippers”) is the nickname used to refer to him throughout the text, since he is an

itinerant barber—the word itself derives from “Bariquand et Marre,” a brand of French hair clippers.

Barikan’s real name is Futaki Kenji.

22. Terayama Shūji, Aa, kōya (Kawade Bunko: Tokyo, 1993), 87. The emphasis in the original is

boldface.

23. Ibid., 89.

24. Ibid., 207.

25. It was published in German as . . . Vor meinen Augen . . . eine Wildnis . . . (Frankfurt am Main: S.

Fischer, 1971). The translator was Manfred Hubricht, who had previously translated Kometto Ikeya and

who later helped arrange for Terayama’s theater troupe to perform at a festival in Frankfurt in 1969. The

French translation by Alain Colas and Yuriko Kaneda was Devant mes yeux le desert . . . (Paris:

Calmann-Lévy, 1973). Parco rereleased the original Japanese novel in 2005, intercut with Moriyama

Daidō’s grainy photographs of Shinjuku and Kabukichō.

26. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 335. This was not the first linking of boxing and modern musical forms

within the realm of postwar fiction in Japan. Mishima Yukio wrote a radio drama in 1954 called

“Bokushingu” (Boxing), which he later described as something he designed according to the

compositional method of “musique concrète” (see Mishima Yukio, “‘Bokushingu’ ni tsuite,” Mishima

Yukio zenshū, vol. 22 [Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1975]) and which, like Aa, kōya, includes a boxer’s girlfriend

named Yoshiko. Ishihara Shintarō would win the Akutagawa Prize the following year, in 1955, with a

boxing-themed short story called “Taiyō no kisetsu” (Season of the sun), which led to a string of “sun

tribe” (taiyōzoku) films starring his younger brother Yūjirō, including one in which Yūjirō plays a jazz

drummer—Arashi o yobu otoko (The man who causes storms, 1957). The pairing of boxing and jazz,

then, may have been almost normative by the time Terayama wrote his novel in the mid-1960s.

27. Terayama Shūji and Takemitsu Tōru, “Hizuke no aru hyōgen e,” in Take-mitsu Tōru no sekai, ed.

Saitō Shinji and Takemitsu Maki (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1997), 239. The interview was first published in the

monthly Yuriika in January 1976.

28. Terayama Shūji, “Bokushingu: Nikutairon no adoribu,” Shisō no kagaku no. 24 (March 1964):

72–76. The essay is more Terayama ad-libbing his thoughts on physicality than a careful thesis on the

improvisational nature of the sport, but the link is there.

29. Terayama, “Chehofu-sai,” Tanka kenkyū 11, no. 11 (November 1954): 9. “Barracks” is a difficult

term here because it referred to both military barracks and the military-like temporary shelters that much

of the population lived in during the immediate postwar period.

30. Terayama Shūji, “Keshigomu,” in Sakka no jiden 40: Terayama Shūji, ed. Kuritsubo Yoshiki

(Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1995), 169–71.

31. Terayama Shūji, “Kōi to sono hokori: Minato no gendaishi to action-poem no mondai,” in Chi to

mugi (Tokyo: Shiratama Shobō, 1962), 101.

32. Uno Akira, in discussion with the author, Tokyo, January 17, 2004.

33. Terayama and Takemitsu, “Hizuke no aru hyōgen e,” 242.

34. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 96. Terayama would later rework this theme of the suicide machine into a

mock suicide manual called Seishōnen no tame no jisatsu nyūmon [The young person’s guide to suicide]

(Tokyo: Doyō Bijutsu Sha, 1979). The manual demands so much preparation for a proper suicide—

construct an original suicide machine, write a formal suicide note, check for adequate motivation, choose

the perfect location, apply for a suicide license—that a suicidal reader who made it all the way through

the text would probably have already reconsidered, which was likely Terayama’s goal. Suicide machines

also show up in an “epic poem” Terayama wrote in 1970 called Jigokuhen (The inferno). See Terayama

Shūji, Jigokuhen (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1983), 15–20.

35. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 96–97.

36. The word is too formal and archaic to be used to mean “suicide” in Terayama’s novel (he uses

jisatsu), but the juxtaposition of the ideas of taking possession of one’s fate and suicide is conspicuous

here.

37. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 180.

38. Ibid., 52.

39. Ibid., 14.

40. Terayama Shūji, “Sho o suteyo machi e deyō,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario (Tokyo: Firumu

Āto Sha, 1993), 1:214.

41. Takemitsu Tōru, “Kitsuon sengen: Domori no manifesuto,” in Takemitsu Tōru chosakushū, ed.

Tanikawa Shuntarō and Funayama Takashi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000), 1:69. This piece was originally

published in the fourth issue of SAC (July 1960), the monthly publication of the Sōgetsu Art Center, which

extended beyond ikebana in the 1960s to host avant-garde events in many formats.

42. Takemitsu, “Kitsuon sengen,” 70.

43. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 111. Barikan’s loneliness in the ring and his sensation of being “millions of

light-years away” was likely a nod to Terayama’s friend and fellow poet Tanikawa Shūntarō, who

debuted in 1952 with a collection called Nijūoku-kōnen no kodoku [Two billion light-years of

loneliness] (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1952).

44. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 122.

45. Ibid., 111.

46. Ibid., 36–37.

47. Ibid., 153.

48. Ibid., 19.

49. Ibid., 167.

50. This celebration of “challenging one’s star” could be taken as still more reason for suspicion

regarding Terayama’s sudden shift to Sagittarius in 1966, around the same time this passage was first

published.

51. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 253–54.

52. Ibid., 271.

53. Ibid., 232. The connection of Miyagi to the rest of the narrative is conspicuously stretched,

willfully mocking the convention dictating that all characters appearing in a novel be part of a gradually

revealed web of interconnectivity: “To add a bit of novel-esque causality here let’s have One-Eye, who

opened the gym in Kabukichō, be the brother-in-law of Miyagi Taichi” (24).

54. Terayama Shūji, Bōryoku toshite no gengo: Shiron made jisoku 100-kiro (Tokyo: Shichōsha,

1983), 9.

55. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 199, 268.

56. Ibid., 82, 291.

57. Terayama, Bōryoku toshite no gengo, 155. This is obviously the inverse of other trends in graffiti

writing, that is, toward conspicuous stylizations of the writer’s nickname. See Susan Stewart’s analysis on

this form of signature writing in her Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 206–33.

58. Terayama, Bōryoku toshite no gengo, 180.

59. Terayama, Aa, kōya, 324.

60. Ibid., 327.

61. Ibid., 296.

62. Terayama Shūji, “Dare ga Rikiishi o koroshita ka,” in Ashita no Jō no daihimitsu: Yabuki Jō to

sono jidai, ed. Takatori Ei (Tokyo: Shōbunkan, 1993), 147. Originally published in the Nihon dokusho

shinbun on February 16, 1970.

63. Terayama, “Rikiishi,” 147.

64. “Kimyō na o-sōshiki,” Mainichi shinbun, March 21, 1970.

65. Hisao Mitsuko, in discussion with the author, Tokyo, April 3, 2004.

66. “Rikiishi o naze koroshita: Hen na sōshiki ni nekkyō no 700 nin,” Tōkyō chūnichi shinbun, March

25, 1970.

67. Takatori, Ashita no Jō no dai-himitsu, 153.

4. Deinstitutionalizing Theater and Film

1. Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 40–42,

76–79. The original essay, “Le froid et le cruel,” was published in 1967, the same year that Terayama’s

play Kegawa no Marii was first performed.

2. The play was performed twice between June 3 and 4, 1969, for a festival called Experimenta 3 at

Theater am Turm (TAT). Posters advertised the title of the play to be La Marie Vison, the French chanson

from which Marie got her name and a song featured in the play, which was the title used in foreign

performances of the play as well as a subtitle for the Japanese version. But the title used in the German

reviews of the play, articles in Theater Heute for example, used Marie im Pelz, following Manfred

Hubricht’s translation of the script. See Hans Schwab-Felisch, “Fernost-Aggression,” Theater Heute 10,

no. 12 (December 1969): 10.

3. Terayama must only have heard about or read a description of the play. It does not seem to have

been translated until 1982. See Satō Tomoko’s translation in Shimura Masao, ed., Beikoku goshikku

sakuhinshū (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 1982).

4. Arthur Kopit, “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad,” in

Three Plays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 31.

5. Ibid., 61–62.

6. Ibid., 77.

7. Terayama Shūji, Gendai no seishunron: Kazoku-tachi, kedamono-tachi (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō,

1963), 20. Terayama extends this description for the release of this text as a paperback in the early 1970s,

adding (falsely) that in Kopit’s play the boy is kept busy chasing butterflies around the Havana hotel

room. This is a detail from Terayama’s Kegawa no Marii not seen in Kopit. A reader of Terayama’s

paperback familiar with Terayama’s play would be led to believe that it was even more indebted to Kopit

that it actually was, perhaps another moment of false “kleptomaniac” plagiarism willfully cultivated. See

Terayama Shūji, Iede no susume (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1972), 13–14.

8. Terayama, Iede, 73.

9. Deleuze, “Coldness,” 20.

10. Ibid., 77.

11. I use “transvestism” rather than “transgender” here in following Miwa Akihiro, who speaks of the

time when he started wearing women’s clothes rather than the time he reconceived himself to be a woman

(it is noteworthy that he changes his family name but maintains his clearly male given name “Akihiro”).

Yet if Marie is struggling to alter the “furs” of her own male skin in the play, then it may be useful to this

as a play about the way transgender undermines the male–female binary social institution.

12. Terayama Shūji, “Kegawa no Marii,” in Terayama Shūji no gikyoku (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1983),

1:127–28.

13. Erving Goffman, “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” in Asylums: Essays on the Social

Situation of Mental Patients and other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 5–6.

14. Ibid., 6.

15. Ibid., 12.

16. The Sexual Revolution was released in Japanese in December 1969, after Terayama’s play, but

the ideas were certainly part of counterculture discourse much earlier. Reich published the first German

edition in 1936, which was released in English in 1945. Terayama summarizes Reich’s principles in a

roundtable transcription called “Seiyokuron: Sekkusu reborūshon,” in Terayama Shūji, Byakuya tōron

(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1970), 9–40.

17. See Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), especially 6–7 regarding rape and pedophilia, 20 for

fascism, and 34–39 on the problems of compulsory marriage. The entire second half of the book treats the

early successes and later failings of the Soviet Union’s attempt to revolutionize sexuality.

18. Terayama, “Kegawa,” 155–56. Nicolas Bataille, who met Terayama in Tokyo in 1967 while there

to direct Ionesco’s plays (as he had done in Paris since the first performances and as he continued to do

until is death in 2008), directed a translated version of Kegawa in Paris. Bataille reports that audiences

were often deeply disturbed by the subtle cruelty in the play. Nicolas Bataille, in discussion with the

author, Paris, July 20, 2002.

19. Terayama, “Kegawa,” 134.

20. Terayama Shūji, “Rekishi,” in Bungei bekkan: Nagayama Norio, ed. Abe Harumasa (Tokyo:

Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1998), 133. The essay originally appeared in Terayama’s Kōfukuron (Theory of

happiness) essays serialized in the journal Shisō no kagaku starting in January 1968, which were

released as a book by Chikuma Shobō in 1969. This critique of Nagayama also appears in a piece

Terayama wrote for the Mainichi shinbun on April 14, 1969, that makes this same point. Terayama would

revisit Nagayama’s shooting spree in a short story published in December 1976 (in the magazine Gendai

no me) called “Nagayama Norio no hanzai” (The crime of Nagayama Norio), which would spark a long

response from Nagayama himself, his “Han-Terayama Shūji ron” (Against Terayama Shūji), published in

August 1977 (also in Gendai no me).

21. Hariu Ichirō, “Terayama Shūji ron,” in Hariu Ichirō hyōron 1: Geijutsu no hanran (Tokyo:

Tabata Shoten, 1969), 63. Originally published in the monthly Eiga geijutsu in June 1969.

22. Kujō Kyōko, interview with Kuwabara Shigeo, Tokyo, February 17, 2004.

23. Mori Kōta’s Kawa: Ano uragiri ga omoku (The River: Betrayal runs deep) was on at ATG

during the Shinjuku Bunka premier of Kegawa no Marii, which ran from September 1 through 7, 1967.

The troupe did an encore performance about a month later, from October 12 through 14, which would

have followed the 1950 talkie version of Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. The year 1967 was an

important one for ATG and Japanese cinema. Ōshima’s feature-length film of the manga by Shirato

Sanpei, Ninja bugeichō (Ninja arts manual), was screened in February and ATG’s first trial

coproduction, Imamura Shōhei’s Ningen jōhatsu (A Man Vanishes), opened in July. Kegawa no Marii

was not, however, the Tenjō Sajiki’s first performance at Shinjuku Bunka—they did an encore

performance of their first play, Aomori-ken no semushi otoko, at Shinjuku Bunka from May 13 through 15

after the April performances at Sōgetsu Hall.

24. Ōshima Nagisa and Matsumoto Toshio had a particularly interesting debate on collaboration in the

wake of Matsumoto’s participation (alongside Yokoo Tadanori, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Abe Kōbō, and

others) in experimental film for a pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka. Ōshima attacked Matsumoto for

hypocritically denouncing formalistic conservatism while offering his support to the existing form of film

and profit distribution. Matsumoto retorted with the claim that too much political film maintained a core

structure inherited from that which it opposed with only its surface content. Both were making

coproductions with the ATG, however, apparently without any collaborationist consciousness. See

Ōshima Nagisa, “Matsumoto Toshio: Shura to shutai,” Eiga hihyō 2, no. 11 (November 1971): 35; and

Matsumoto Toshio, Eiga no henkaku: Geijutsuteki rajikarizumu to wa nani ka (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō,

1972): 265–66.

25. Terayama Shūji, Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Tokyo: Haga Shoten, 1971).

26. Terayama Shūji, “Sakuhin nōto: Sho o suteyo machi e deyō,” in Terayama Shūji no gikyoku

(Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1984), 3:326–28.

27. Terayama Shūji, “Dokumentaru rebyū: Sho o suteyo machi e deyō,” Terayama Shūji no gikyoku

(Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1984), 3:15.

28. Hubert Niogret, “Shuji Terayama,” Positif 148 (March 1973): 44–50.

29. This resonates somewhat with the opening scene of Ōshima’s Tōkyō sensō sengo hiwa (The battle

of Tokyo, 1970) in which the voice-over on a handheld camera’s image scolds, “You should have brought

it back this morning,” suggesting a renegade filmmaker and jarring the audience with camera motion. The

camera following Eimei down the railroad tracks in the early scenes of the film uses a similar effect, and

it would not be unlike Terayama to reference Ōshima’s work in a combination of homage and parody. See

Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998), 96–99.

30. Terayama Shūji, “Sho o suteyo machi e deyō,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario (Tokyo: Firumu

Āto Sha, 1993), 1:189.

31. See, for example, Terayama’s comments in his dialogue with the designer Awazu Kiyoshi, “Fūkei

o tsukurikaeru tanoshimi,” in Dezain junyū (Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu, 1982), 202–10.

32. There are several options for translating “Rōra.” It is listed in Film Index International as

“Rolla,” and ships from the Image Forum in Tokyo with that spelling. The theater scholar Shimizu

Yoshikazu, in his recent Terayama Shūji: Kaigai firumu dorama (Tokyo: Bunka Shobō Hakubunsha,

2007), suggests that the title of Terayama’s film probably comes from Alfred de Musset’s 1833 poem

“Rolla,” citing that this poem is mentioned in Poesies by Comte de Lautreamont, an author we know

Terayama read (at least his Maldoror). The content of Musset’s poem, about a man who has spent his last

remaining money on a prostitute who falls asleep on him, is somewhat difficult to link to the film (unless

the film likewise fails to deliver its sexual promise). Another possible source for “Rolla” (if that is

correct) is Rolla France, one of the stars of René Clair’s 1931 film À nous la liberté, a comic jailbreak

(and a possible example of deinstitutionalization). I long thought the title might come from “Lola,” the

Kinks song about a well-disguised transvestite picking up an unsuspecting man in a bar, fitting as it does

with the gender games of so many Terayama projects from this era. One also finds “Roller” in places like

Joshua McDermott’s master’s thesis, “Terayama Shuji and The Emperor Tomato Ketchup: The Children’s

Revolution of 1970” (University of Hawai’i, 2005), but without explanation. A strong case can be made

for “Laura,” however, as a reference to the unconsummated affair between Laura and Alec in the 1945

film Brief Encounter. Lines of dialogue between Laura (Rōra) and Alec (Arekku) are quoted in an

exchange of letters between Terayama and Yamada Taichi reprinted in Terayama’s Hadashi no koiuta

(Tokyo: Shishokan, 1967), 66. Yamada quotes the lines and notes that he also saw the script on

Terayama’s bookshelf. Terayama’s experimental short film may be a representation of the consummation

of the “forbidden romance” between actress and audience in literally allowing the viewer into the film.

Brief Encounter may have been on Terayama’s mind in 1974 if he had heard that Sophia Lauren, an

actress he liked, was in the process of shooting her remake.

33. See the interview on this topic in the first issue of Image Forum’s monthly: “Sukurēn no uragawa

de eizō o kiita,” Imeiji fōramu 1, no. 1 (November 1980): 8–18.

34. Terayama, “Sho o suteyo machi e deyō,” 189. The published script includes a line not in the film:

“Hold hands. Try up the skirt, and if things go right, all the way into the panties.” Eimei may have just left

it out, but it may not have been dropped for being too scandalous. The skirt comment genders the audience

members, or at least the target of their actions. With the skirt left out of Eimei’s suggestion in the final cut

of the film, it could more interestingly apply to men or women targeting either men or women.

35. Ibid., 189–90.

36. Ibid., 233.

37. See Terayama’s report of this trip, including descriptions of kibbutz, in Yōroppa reinen (Tokyo:

Mainichi Shinbun Sha, 1970), 189–201.

38. Minami Yōichirō, Soromon-tō tanken (Tokyo: Kaiseisha, 1941), 157–62.

39. Terayama, “Jinriki hikōki,” 7.

40. Terayama Shūji, “‘Ichi mētā shihō ichijikan kokka’ no tatoi,” in Zōki kōkan josetsu (Tokyo:

Farao Kaikaku, 1992), 138–40.

41. The full line in notes to the script is “What’s the point of doing revolutionary theatre? We should

be using theatre to find interconnections between our illusions; we should theatricalize every kind of

revolution.” Terayama Shūji, “Jashūmon,” in Terayama Shūji no gikyoku (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1986),

6:126. This note is labeled a January 1972 addition to the script of this play.

42. See Robert Brustein, Revolution as Theatre: Notes on the New Radical Style (New York:

Liveright, 1971). Terayama was well-connected enough with the New York underground theater scene by

1970 to have direct knowledge of this book, so there is a chance that by advocating “dramatized

revolution” he was directly targeting Brustein’s position (and therefore somewhat less in conflict with

Satoh’s of “theater of the revolution”). My thanks to David Goodman for suggesting consideration of

Brustein.

43. Yoshimi Shun’ya, Toshi no doramaturugii: Tōkyō, sakariba no shakaishi (Tokyo: Kōbundō,

1987), 299. For a detailed history of the founding of Parco within its larger Seibu–Saison context, see

Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the Seibu–Saison Enterprises

in Twentieth-Century Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University,

1994).

44. Sasame Hiroyuki, in discussion with the author, Tokyo, June 11, 2004. Tenjō Sajiki’s two Bartok

opera remakes, Chūgoku no fushigi na yakunin (The miraculous Mandarin, 1977) and Aohigekō no shiro

(Duke Bluebeard’s castle, 1979), the tribute series of Tenjō Sajiki plays the year after Terayama’s death,

and occasional revival performances of Kegawa no Marii (with Miwa as Marie) have all been

performed at Parco’s theater.

45. Terayama is spoofing the BBC’s television series A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,

which was released in Japan as Seishōnen no tame no kangengaku nyūmon. He uses this template a

number of times such as in his 1979 book, Seishonen no tame no jisatsu nyūmon (The young person’s

guide to suicide), or elsewhere in the film Sho o suteyo machi e deyō where a girl is learning to smoke

marijuana with the phrase “The young person’s guide to drugs” (Seishōnen no tame no mayaku-nyūmon)

written in chalk on the street in front of her.

46. Terayama, “Sho o suteyo,” 235.

47. Ibid., 228–29.

48. Ibid., 235.

49. Articles on this event from various sources are collected in a volume on the Sōgetsu Art Center

during the 1960s called Kagayake 60 nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku, ed. “Sōgetsu Āto Sentā

no kiroku” Kankō Iinkai (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 2002).

50. Matsumoto Toshio, “‘Eiga’ ni totte ima nani ga hitsuyō ka: ‘Ba’ wa akuma-demo baitai,” in

Kagayake 60 nendai, 402–3. Originally published on November 17, 1969, in Shūkan dokushojin.

51. Ishiko Junzō, “Ba wa baitai dewa nai,” in Kagayake 60 nendai, 403–4. Originally published in

the January 1970 issue of the magazine SD.

52. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, “Puraibēto sukuriin: Sen-kyūhyaku nanajūnen to sono fukin no nōto,” in

Kagayake 60 nendai, 404. Originally published in his book, Eiga: Nichijō no jikken (Tokyo: Firumu Āto

Sha, 1975).

53. Kawanaka Nobuhiro, “Yonen sankagetsu no taizai,” Imēji fōramu 36 (September 1983): 52–54.

5. The Impossibility of History

1. Terayama Shūji, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Jiono, tobanakatta otoko: Terayama Shūji dorama

shinario shū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1994), 107.

2. Inaga Shigemi, “The Impossible Avant-Garde in Japan,” trans. Margaret J. Flynn, Comparative

and General Literature 41 (1993): 69. The article was first published in French as “L’impossible avant-

garde au Japon” in Connaissance et réciprocité, ed. Alain Le Pichon (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium:

Presses universitaires de Louvain, 1988): 197–208.

3. The film was released in France under the title Cache-cache pastoral (Pastoral hide-and-seek).

4. Terayama uses the term “waka” rather than tanka in his screenplay for the film, giving them a

medieval flavor. The sōshi here are plays on two twelfth-century emaki (narrative picture scrolls): the

Yamai no sōshi (Diseases scroll) and Gaki no sōshi (Scroll of hungry ghosts).

5. The opening line, “Chikagoro otoko arikeri,” is a direct play on the standard opening line to

chapters of Ise monogatari, which typically begin with “Mukashi otoko arikeri.” Terayama’s use of

apāto here within classical Japanese text invokes the effect of the word “hotel” (hoteru) in the opening

lines of Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime” (The dancing girl, 1890).

6. Inaga, “The Impossible Avant-Garde,” 68.

7. Terayama Shūji, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunko,

1992), 121.

8. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū, 116.

9. Ibid., 117.

10. Isoda Kōichi, “Kokyō no niritsu haihan,” Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 21, no. 1

(1976): 36.

11. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū, 116.

12. Ibid., 126.

13. Janine Beichman, Masaoka Shiki (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 87. Beichman is quoting

from Shiki’s “Nana-tabi utayomi ni atauru sho” (Letters to a tanka poet #7), dated February 28, 1898.

14. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū, 115.

15. Ibid., 125.

16. Ibid.

17. Terayama announced in an early essay following his debut that the first of his four compositional

methods for tanka was to write them as “modern renga.” See Terayama Shūji, “Romii no daiben,” Haiku

kenkyū 12, no. 2 (February 1955): 41.

18. Isoda, “Kokyō,” 36.

19. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū, 124.

20. Isoda, “Kokyō,” 37.

21. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū, 116, 139, 143.

22. Hariu Ichirō, “Den’en ni shisu,” Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 21, no. 1 (1976):

152.

23. This strategy resonates with descriptions of the organizational structure of student groups during

the Zenkyōtō (“All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees”—a collection of groups that sought to unify

factions of student political groups and independents for direct action between 1968 and 1969)

movement’s occupation of university campuses. According to Kuroko Kazuo, literary scholar and former

radical who has written about fiction from the period, leaders and hierarchy would inevitably emerge

within the groups, especially during fights for territory behind the barricades, but that hierarchy would

then be disassembled, by force if necessary, after each mission was complete. Kuroko Kazuo, in

discussion with the author, Seattle, spring 2000.

24. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 1993),

1:115. “Old mother” is glossed with the reading rōba here, rather than the standard rōbo, possibly as a

dialect-variant from the Tōhoku region.

25. Ibid.

26. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1999), 4, 9.

27. This was Saneyoshi Hanao’s translation (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939).

28. See Clayton Koelb’s translation of Death in Venice (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 25n6, 34n1,

36n5, 41n2–3.

29. Terayama Shūji, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario, 1:239.

30. Ibid., 240

31. Ibid., 241.

32. Ibid., 244.

33. Ibid., 256.

34. Ibid., 260–61.

35. Terayama Shūji, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Jiono, tobanakatta otoko, 113.

36. Hana ichi-monme (One bunch of flowers) is a children’s game in which two groups win or lose

members with rounds of rock-paper-scissors and is played while singing a song that starts with the line

“Gather up the town for a game of hana ichi-monme.”

37. Kuritsubo Yoshiki, “Terayama Shūji—Tankateki-eizō, eizōteki-tanka: Kashū oyobi eiga Den’en

ni shisu ni tsuite,” in Terayama Shūji ron (Tokyo: Sunagoya Shobō, 2003), 152.

38. Terayama Shūji, “Komoriuta yurai,” in Terayama Shūji no gikyoku (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1983),

2:234–35.

39. Ibid.

40. See Hachinohe-shi Hakubutsukan, ed., Hachinohe-shi Jōmon Gakushūkan, Korekawa Kōkokan,

Rekishi Minzoku Shiryōkan: Tenji annai (Hachinohe: Hachinohe-shi Hakubutsukan, 1995), i, 2, 28; and

Hosaka Saburō, ed., Korekawa iseki shutsudo ibutsu hōkokusho (Hachinohe: Hachinohe-shi Kyōiku

Iinkai, 1972), 85–86.

41. Kusumoto Aki, ed., “Okamoto Tarō satsuei ryokō, shuzai nenpyō,” Tarō Museum,

http://www.taromuseum.jp (accessed December 17, 2004).

42. See Marilyn Ivy’s Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29–65.

43. Terayama Shūji, “Sakuhin nōto: Den’en ni shisu,” Terayama Shūji no gikyoku (Tokyo:

Shichōsha, 1986), 6:360.

44. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji seishun kashū, 158.

45. Ibid., 117.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 122.

48. Moriyasu Toshihisa makes note of this discrepancy in a footnote to his essay on the film version of

Den’en ni shisu but does not attempt to theorize it. See his “Terayama Shūji no eiga Den’en ni shisu: Sei

to han to no montāju,” Utsunomiya Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu kiyō 46, no. 1 (1996): 32.

49. “Daiku-machi,” “Tera-machi,” and “Kome-machi,” in Aomori-ken, vol. 2 of “Kadokawa Nihon

chimei daijiten” Hensan-iinkai, Kadokawa Nihon chimei daijiten (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1985), 520,

609–10, 382–83.

50. Terayama, “Sakuhin nōto: Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji no gikyoku, 6:357.

51. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario, 1:255.

52. The grandfather paradox traces to Hugo Gernsback, the original publisher of Amazing Stories and

a major figure in promoting serious discourse regarding the propositions of Wells’s The Time Machine.

Gernsback published the following puzzle in an editorial called “The Question of Time-Traveling,” part

of the December 1929 issue of his Science Wonder Stories: “Suppose I can travel back into time, let me

say 200 years; and I visit the homestead of my great great great grandfather, and am able to take part in the

life of his time. I am thus enabled to shoot him, while he is still a young man and as yet unmarried. From

this it will be noted that I could have prevented my own birth; because the line of propagation would have

ceased right there. Consequently, it would seem that the idea of time traveling into a past where the time

traveler can freely participate in activities of a former age becomes an absurdity. The editor wishes to

receive letters from our readers on this point; the best of which will be published in a special section.”

This was reprinted in Paul Nahin, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science

Fiction (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1993), 172.

53. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario, 1:254.

54. Awazu Kiyoshi and Terayama Shūji, “Fūkei no tsukuri-kaeru tanoshimi,” in Awazu Kiyoshi,

Dezain junyū (Tokyo: Gendai Kaikakushitsu, 1982), 203.

55. Ibid., 202.

56. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario, 1:267–68.

57. Ibid., 268.

58. It is likely that the political nuance of this line was also intended. See Oguma Eiji’s history of

post–World War II Rightist tendencies within the Japanese Left and Leftist tendencies within the Japanese

Right in “Minshu” to “aikoku”: Sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2002).

Terayama links politics with shōji elsewhere as well: “I started thinking about the way the knight moves.

It dawned on me that it’s a very postwar sort of motion. After taking two steps forward it turns either right

or left for one more step. Whether you choose right or left depends on your situation in the game. Such an

essential problem as ‘right or left’ is not an ideological problem in shōji, it’s no more than a reaction to

the opponent’s move, giving it an interesting and almost Machiavellian feel. The knight can never make

three steps of foreward progress.” Terayama Shūji, “Tareka kokyō o omowazaru,” in Sakka no jiden 40:

Terayama Shūji, ed. Kuritsubo Yoshiki (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1995), 90.

59. Awazu and Terayama, “Fūkei,” 205–6.

60. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario, 1:254.

61. Terayama, “Sakuhin nōto: Den’en ni shisu,” 364.

62. Terayama, “Den’en ni shisu,” in Terayama Shūji zen shinario, 1:269.

63. Ibid., 273.

Conclusion

1. This is at least how the fūten-zoku are described in “Shinjuku fūten konchūki: Negura mo shokuji

mo sono hi no kaze ni makase—fūzoku rupo,” Shūkan Asahi, August 8, 1967, 22–27. See also Yamada

Kaiya, Ai amu hippii: Nihon no hippii mūvumento ’60-’90 (Tokyo: Daisan Shokan, 1990).

2. Nagashima Shinji, Fūten (Tokyo: Mandarake Shuppanbu, 2008), 27.

3. Terayama Shūji, “Ushiro kara yomu hon,” Asahi jānaru, October 8, 1967, 84.

4. I analyzed this play in more detail in “Terayama in Amsterdam and the Internationalization of

Experimental Theatre,” in Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance, ed. David Jortner, Keiko

McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006), 109–21.

5. Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 32.

6. C. Wright Mills, “On the New Left,” Studies on the Left 1, no. 4 (Winter 1961): 63–65.

7. Ibid., 67, 72.

8. Julian Cope, Japrocksampler (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 9. This survey includes a chapter on

the music and sound designer for Terayama’s troupe, J. A. Seazer. See also Cope’s Krautrocksampler

(Wiltshire, United Kingdom: Head Heritage, 1995).

9. Terayama Shūji, “Kōi to sono hokori: Minato no gendaishi to Action-poem no mondai,”

Gendaishi 7, no. 9 (September 1960): 100, 107.

10. See, for instance, Terayama Shūji, “Akkan-shigan,” in Gendai no seishunron: Kazoku-tachi,

kedamono-tachi (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1963), 89–93.

Index

Aa, kōya (Ah, wilderness; novel), xxi, 78–79, 81–92, 129

Abe Kōbō, xi, 35, 109

abjection, 139–40, 144–45, 159

Adult Hunting (radio drama). See Otona-gari

agnosticism, xvi–xvii, xxiii

Ah, Wilderness (novel). See Aa, kōya

Akahata (Red flag; newspaper), 29–30, 40

Akimoto Fujio, xx, 1

Algren, Nelson, viii, xxi, 75, 201n14

Ali, Muhammad, 73, 78

anarchism, xvii, 33–34, 110, 177

Anderson, Benedict, 55

Anpo (Nichi-Bei Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku). See U.S.-Japan Security Treaty

antiestablishment, xiv, 94, 113, 141, 170, 181

Aomori-ken no semushi otoko (The hunchback of Aomori prefecture; play), 108

Arnheim, Rudolph, 36

Art Theater Guild (ATG), 49, 109, 111, 114, 121, 122, 124, 129, 135, 139, 142, 177, 206n23, 207n24

Asahi jānaru (magazine), xiii, 72, 178

Asanuma Inejirō, 196n35

Asanuma Keiji, 21

Ashita no Jō (Tomorrow’s Jō; manga), xxiv, 92–96

audio culture, 37

autonomism, xiv, 44, 81, 180

avant-garde art, 140–43

avant-garde tanka, 1, 14, 19–20, 145, 191n23

Awazu Kiyoshi, viii, 169–70, 171, 177

Barricades, Broadcasting the (radio drama), 42

Barthes, Roland, 201n16, 201n19

Bataille, Nicolas, 206n18

Bazin, André, 30

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 42, 209n45

beat generation, vii, xi, 1, 49, 176, 199n60

Beheiren, 110

Benjamin, Walter, 37, 195n6

Bey, Hakim, xi

borrowing from the original poem. See honkadori

Bōryoku toshite no gengo (Language as violence; essay collection), 89

Brustein, Robert, 127

Buñuel, Luis, 75

Bürger, Peter, 19

Cage, John, 109, 142

Caged Prisoner (film). See Kanshū

Carné, Marcel, xxi, 110–11

Carpenter Town poem, 146, 153, 165–66

Casablanca (film), xxiii, 6–11

Cate, Ritsaert ten, viii

Cayley, George, 127

“Chehofu-sai” (Chekhov festival; set of poems), xxiv, 12–27

Chiba Tetsuya, 92

Cicero, 57

Comet Ikeya (radio drama). See Kometto Ikeya

Cope, Julian, 180

counterculture: autonomist reading of, xiv

as a bridge between hippies and the New Left, xii

as a bridge between WWII enemies, 180

definition of English term, xi–xiii

development of the Japanese term, xiii

as global, vii, ix

and indeterminacy, xiv, xvi–xvii, 181

as interventionist, x, xi, 180

in Japan, 175–77

and lateral motion, xiv–xv, 181

as primitivist, 176

as rhizomatic, ix

as set of spaces, 177

as a style, x

as synchronic orientation in time, xiv, xv–xvi, 181

as tactical, x, 180

Crommelin Comet, 62

cultural studies, x–xi

Dali, Savador, 75

Death in the Country (television drama, poetry collection, and film). See Den’en ni shisu

death in the ring, 70–75, 91–97, 200n3

Deleuze, Gilles, xxv, 77, 99–100, 103–4, 131, 180

Den’en ni shisu (Death in the country): essay version, 139

film version, xxv, 139–40, 151–73

tanka collection version, xxv, 74, 139–40, 142–51, 164–65, 167

television drama version, xxv, 139, 160–61

versions together as a system, 139–40, 142–43

Dezain hihyō (The Design Review), 177

diachronic orientation in time, xv–xvi, 18, 22, 97, 100, 104, 126, 139–40, 145, 154, 181

Diderot, Denis, 64–65, 111

Discover Japan campaign, 163

disposing of old women. See obasute Duchamp, Marcel, 19

Dylan, Bob, 71

Ellison, Ralph, 90

Emperor Tomato Ketchup (film). See Tomato Kechappu Kōtei

Eraser (autobiography). See Keshigomu

Everyone Longs for Home (autobiography). See Tareka kokyō o omowazaru

Expo 70 (1970 World’s Fair in Osaka), 135, 163, 207n24

Fat Girl of Ōyama’s Crime, The (play). See Ōyama debuko no hanzai

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 199n60

fiction: as benign, 45; in boxing, 69–70, 78

and cinema, 120, 131, 134, 137

as a literary lie, 23, 25

vs. lyricism, 34

as magic, 25

in relation to the news, 46–47

vs. poetry, 147–51

“of possibility,” 27–30

and quotation, 25–26

and radio, 40–41, 51

and reality, 96, 108

and theater, 107

and urban space, 125, 127–29. See also self-fictionalization

“Fighting” Harada Masahiko, 73–74, 75–76

Foucault, Michel, viii

Fūgetsudō cafe, 177

Fujiwara no Teika, 17, 20, 145, 191n33, 192n44

Fukuzawa Shichirō, 146, 189n17, 196n35

Fukuzawa Yukichi, xxi, 5, 102

funeral for Rikiishi Tōru, 94–96

fūten-zoku (idler-tribe), 176–77

gambling, 70, 71, 76, 87, 96

Gekkō kamen (Moonbeam mask; television program), 40

geographical orientation. See synchronic orientation in time

Gide, André, 116

Ginsberg, Allen, 1

Giono, Jean, 37

Giono, the man who didn’t fly (radio drama). See Jiono, tobanakatta otoko

globalization, ix–x, 62, 175, 180

Godard, Jean-Luc, 41, 136

Goffman, Erving, 105–6

Gossipy Apartment Building, The (radio drama). See Oshaberi danchi

Gramsci, Antonio, 101

haiku, 1–2, 15–19

han-taisei undō (antiestablishment movement). See antiestablishment

Harada Masahiko. See “Fighting” Harada Masahiko

Hariu Ichirō, 108, 151–52, 155

Haynes, Jim, viii, xxii

Hebdige, Dick, x–xi

hide-and-seek, 149, 153, 155–56, 167

Higashi Yutaka, 94, 109

hijacking, 96

Hijikata Tatsumi, 177

Hishikawa Yoshio, 16

history: and abjection, 139–40, 145

as diachronic time, xv–xvi

equation with truth, xvii

impossibility of, xxvi, 172–73

as “illusionary causality,” 33

malleability of, xxii–xxiii

as reality, 23

Hitler, 48–49, 77

honkadori (borrowing from the original poem), 20–22, 31, 192n44

horror poetry, 143–47

Hubricht, Manfred, 202n25, 205n2

“Human Laboratory” (short story). See “Ningen-jikkenshitsu”

human-powered airplane, 121–29

human sundial, xvi, xvii

Hunchback of Aomori Prefecture, The (play). See Aomori-ken no semushi otoko

Ibuse Masuji, 122

idler-tribe. See fūten-zoku

Iede no susume (In praise of running away from home; essay collection), xxi, 102, 115, 139, 205n7

Ikeda Nobumasa. See Minami Yōichirō

Ikeya Kaoru, 51, 54, 60–61, 63, 64–65, 67

Image Forum, 135–36

imagined communities, xvi, 55

immanent opposition, x–xi

Inaga Shigemi, 140–43

indeterminacy, xiv, xxvi, 57–58, 181

intellectual property, 26

Ishihara Shintarō, 39, 202n26

Ishikawa Takuboku, 1, 6, 21, 146

Ishiko Junzō, 135

Isoda Kōichi, 145, 148, 149

jazz, vii, xxi, xxv, 49, 70, 79–81, 82, 96, 114, 176, 188n13, 202n26

Jinriki hikōki Soromon (Solomon: The human-powered airplane; play), 123–29

Jiono, tobanakatta otoko (Giono, the man who didn’t fly; radio drama), 37–38

Jūkyūsai no burūsu (The nineteen-year-old blues; screenplay), 70–71

Kajii Motojirō, 162

kakekotoba (pivot word), 22, 54, 149

Kamei Hideo, 199n60

Kamens, Edward, 20, 192n44

Kanshū (Caged prisoner; film), xvi, xvii

Kara Jūrō, x, 110, 128, 177

kauntākaruchā (counterculture), xiii

Kawakita Kiyomasa, 50

Kawanaka Nobuhiro, 135–36

Kegawa no Marii (Marie in furs; play), xxv, 100–11, 205n2

Kennedy, John F., 60–61, 126, 178

Keshigomu (Eraser; autobiography), 188n15

Kishigami Daisaku, 31–32, 115

Kitazono Katsue, xx

Klett, Renate, viii

Knox, Ronald, 42

Kobayashi Akira, 6

Kopit, Arthur, 101

Kometto Ikeya (Comet Ikeya; radio drama), xxiv, 51–67

Kommune 1, 132

Komoriuta yurai (The origin of lullabies; television script), 161–62

Korekawa archeological site, 162–63

Kuritsubo Yoshiki, 161

Kuroko Kazuo, 211n23

Kusamoto Kenkichi, 15

Kusatao. See Nakamura Kusatao

Kuwabara Takeo, 14

La Marie-Vison (play). See Kegawa no Marii

Lang, Jack, viii

Language as Violence (essay collection). See Bōryoku toshite no gengo

Lasswell, Harold (on “countermores”), xii, 187n6

lateral motion, xiv–xv, 2, 181

Laura (film). See Rōra

Letter on the Blind (play by Terayama). See Mōjin shokan

Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (essay by Diderot), 64

linked verse (renga), 147–51, 211n17

“Literary Kleptomania” (Tōsaku-byō; short story), 3

localization (of counterculture), ix–x

mabiki (weeding out), 144, 160, 162

Mailer, Norman, 72, 80, 91

Maki, Carmen, 197n37

Mann, Thomas, 155

Marcuse, Herbert, xii, xiv, 82

Marie in Furs (play). See Kegawa no Marii

Masaoka Shiki, 1, 145, 146

masochism, xxv, 49, 72, 75, 77, 91, 99–100, 103–4, 112, 131–33

match-strike poem, 3–11, 31, 122

Matsumoto Toshio, 135, 207n24

Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 89

Merin, Jennifer, 129

Mills, C. Wright, 179

Minami Yōichirō, 47–48, 126–27

Mishima Yukio, 99, 202n26

Miura Masashi, 192n43

Miwa Akihiro, 100, 112, 113, 128, 205n11

Miyazawa Kenji, 198n58

Mōjin shokan (Letter on the blind; play), 56, 65

Moonbeam Mask. See Gekkō kamen

Morisaki Henriku, 119, 130

Moriyama Daidō, viii, 202n25

Moriyasu Toshihisa, 63

Mt. Osore, 50, 156, 158–59, 164, 172

Nagao Saburō, 5–6

Nagashima Shinji, 176

Nagayama Norio, 108

Nakai Hideo, 12–14, 28

Nakajō Fumiko, 13, 190n5

Nakamura Ichirō (radio drama), 37–41

Nakamura Kusatao, 16–18, 192n42

neolyricism, 30–31

neorealism, 30–31

Nerval, Gérard de (Gérard Labrunie), 29

New Left, xii, xiii, 34, 178–79, 187n9

New Left Review, 178–79

NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), 35, 52–53, 64, 66, 194n3

Nineteen-Year-Old Blues (screenplay). See Jūkyūsai no burūsu

“Ningen-jikkenshitsu” (Human laboratory; short story), 48–49

ninety-degree turn: and aerodynamics, xv, 127

and mainstream culture, xiv–xv

Nitōjo: Kage no eiga (The two-headed woman: A shadow film), 120

Oates, Joyce Carol, 69

obasute (disposing of old women), 146, 151, 197n48

Ōe Kenzaburō, 99, 196n35

Ogawa Shinsuke, 175

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (play), 101–2, 104–6

Okai Takashi, 14

Okamoto Tarō, 22, 163

Okino Ryō, 66–67

Olympics, Tokyo (1964), 60–62

Origin of Lullabies, The (television script). See Komoriuta yurai

Orikuchi Shinobu, 12

Oshaberi danchi (The gossipy apartment building; radio drama), xx

Ōshima Nagisa, 35, 109, 113, 135, 206n23, 207n24, 207n29

Osorezan. See Mt. Osore

Otona-gari (Adult hunting; radio drama), 41–51

Ōyama debuko no hanzai (The fat girl of Ōyama’s crime; play), 109

Parco department store, 128, 209n44

Paret, Benny, 71–73, 91

Parsons, Talcott (on “counterculture”), xii

pivot word. See kakekotoba

plagiarism, 2–3

“Plagiarism” (Tōsaku; short story), 2–3

pleasure machine, 50, 51

Poe, Edgar Allan, 22–23, 83

Port Huron Statement, 179

Praise of Running Away From Home, In (essay collection). See Iede no susume

Prix Italia, 51, 53, 197n48

professional wrestling, 76–77, 201n10

prostitution, 106, 112, 113, 119, 131–33, 161, 187n6, 208n32

pseudo-lyricism, 30.

radio drama: and blindness, 36

brief description of selected dramas by Terayama, 50

FM broadcast, 53, 198n50

and poets, xx

in stereo, xxiv, 51–54. See also Barricades, Broadcasting the; Jiono, tobanakatta otoko; Kometto

Ikeya; Nakamura Ichirō; Oshaberi danchi; Otona-gari

rape, 43, 106, 112, 131–34, 158–59, 162

reality effect, xviii, xxiv, 23, 29–30, 69, 75–78, 86, 91, 110, 134, 201n16

Red and the Black, The (Le rouge et le noir; novel), 1, 25–26, 193n58

Red Army Faction, 96

red comb image, 156–63

Red Flag (newspaper). See Akahata

Reich, Wilhelm, 105–6

renga. See linked verse

rhetorical play: in Poe’s “Premature Burial,” 22–23

in Terayama’s “Chehofu-sai,” 25–26

in Terayama’s Otona-gari, 46

rhizomatic structure, ix, 117

Rikidōzan, 76–77, 201n10

rittai hōsō (three-dimensional broadcasting), 52–53

RKB (Radio Kyūshū Broadcasting), 37, 39, 44

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 30, 193n65

Rocky (film), 75

Rogoff, Irit, 37

“Romii no daiben” (Romy’s proxy; essay), 27–28

Rōra (Laura; film), 119–20

Roszak, Theodore (on “The Counter Culture”), xii–xiii

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, Ritter von, 99

sadism, xxv, 72, 75, 77, 91, 99–100, 103–4, 111, 112, 131–33, 201n19

Saitō Mokichi, 12

Saitō Sanki, 18

Saitō Shōji, 15

Sanki. See Saitō Sanki

Sasaki Shōichirō, 51, 66

Sasori-za theater, 177, 196n21

Satō Makoto, 122, 127, 177

Sawatari Hajime, 50

Seishōnen no tame no eiga nyūmon (The young people’s guide to film; film), 130

self-determination, 70, 83–84, 106, 172

self-fictionalization, xviii, xxii–xxiii, 30, 32, 34

sensation of presence, 69–70, 78, 84, 177

Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, 99

Shimizu Yoshikazu, 207n32

Shinjuku Bunka Art Theater (cinema), 109–10, 124, 177, 206n23

Shinoda Masahiro, 35

Shinpan (The trial; film), 120

Shōnen magajin (weekly manga), 92, 94–95, 114, 178

Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets): book version, 114–15

film version, 85, 89–90, 100, 111–37

play version, 115–16; title, 116–17

Snyder, Gary, 1, 176, 180

Sōgetsu Art Center, 41, 108–9, 135–36, 177, 203n41

Sorel, Georges, 89

Spanish Civil War, 33

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 1, 25–26, 193n58

stereo technology: positioning the narrator within, 51–53, 57–59

in radio, xxiv, 51–54, 65–67, 197n42

on records, 35

on television, 197n38

in visual forms, 65–66

Stewart, Ellen, viii, xxi

Stewart, Garrett, 154, 156

“stone-thrower boy,” 39

Studies on the Left, 178–79

stuttering, 84–87

subculture, x, xii

Suehiro-tei, 109

Sugiyama Seijū, 12, 189n23, 191n15

suicide, 83–84, 91, 203n34

synchronic orientation in time, ix, xiv, xv–xvi, xxvi, 18, 22, 38, 97, 100, 104, 119, 120, 126, 139–40, 154,

177, 179, 181

taikō-bunka (opposition-culture), xiii

taikō shisei (counter-stance), xiii

Takahashi Akira, xiii–xiv

Takakura Ken, 124, 129

Takamori Asao, 92

Takemitsu Tōru, 80, 85–86

Takuboku. See Ishikawa Takuboku

Tamiya Takamaro, 96

Tanikawa Shuntarō, xx, 35, 61, 109, 188n16, 195n20, 203n43

Tareka kokyō o omowazaru (Everyone longs for home; autobiography), xxii, 188n15

technocracy, xii, xvi–xvii, xxiii, 94, 178

Teika. See Fujiwara no Teika

television, vii, xi, xiii, xx, xxiv, 35–37, 40–41, 47, 51, 53, 60–62, 63–64, 72, 73, 76–77, 139, 142, 160–

62, 197n38, 201n10

Telstar communications satellite, 60–62

temporary autonomous zone, xi

Tenjō Sajiki (theater troupe): early plays, 108–10

origin of the name, xxi–xxii, 110–11

Tenjō Sajiki-kan (building), 127, 196n21

Terayama Shūji: biography of, xviii–xxiii

birth date problem, xxii–xxiii, 189n23, 204n50

debut, 2, 12–16

Teshigahara Hiroshi, 108–9, 135

“three-dimensional broadcasting.” See rittai hōsō

Throw Out Your Books, Let’s Hit the Streets (book, play, and film). See Sho o suteyo machi e deyō

Tokyo Kid Brothers, 94–95

Tomato Kechappu Kōtei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup; film), 41, 43, 45, 48–51

Tomioka Taeko, xi

Tomiyama Katsue, 135

Tomizawa Kakio, 5–6

Tomorrow’s Jō (manga). See Ashita no Jō

“Tōsaku” (Plagiarism; short story), 2–3

“Tōsaku-byō” (Literary kleptomania; short story), 3

transgender, 100, 205n11

transistor radio, 35

transvestism, 104, 205n11

Trial, The (film). See Shinpan

truth value, xi, xxii, 23–26, 41, 46, 64–65, 69

Tsubota Jōji, 24

Tsukamoto Kunio, 14

Tsukiji Little Theater, xxii

Two-Headed Woman: A Shadow Film, The (film). See Nitōjo: Kage no eiga

underground arts, vii, viii, xi, xxi, 110, 122, 128–29, 135, 177, 209n42

universal and particular, 52–54, 60, 141

Uno Akira, viii, 81, 177

U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, xx, 31–32, 43, 44–45, 50, 117

Venus in Furs (novella), 99–100

Vietnam War, x, xxv, 85, 99, 110, 117, 128, 178

violence, 88–89, 99

visual culture, xi, 37, 180

Vou (poetry circle), xx

Wakamatsu Kōji, 99, 131

Wakatsuki Akira, 15

Yamada Taichi, 6

Yamazaki Masamitsu, 63

Yinger, J. Milton (on “contraculture”), xi–xii

Yodo-gō hijacking incident, 96

Yokoo Tadanori, viii, 109, 114–15, 177

Yomota Inuhiko, xviii

Yoshida Kijū (Yoshida Yoshishige), 35

Yoshimi Shun’ya, 127–28

Yoshimoto Takaaki, 14, 32

Young People’s Guide to Film, The (film). See Seishōnen no tame no eiga nyūmon

Zainichi Koreans, 77–78, 121–22

Zen, ix

Zenkyōtō student radicals, 50, 178, 211n23

STEVEN C. RIDGELY is assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.