Crazy Women and the Men They Ensnare

The first play I saw by Takeshi Kawamura was back in 2000. Hamlet Clone played in the Asahi Square A in Tokyo. I found this piece disorienting and incomprehensible -- like Hamlet Machine on acid. High school girls writhing around, a guy on a bicycle spouting off an unending monologue, and the director himself, perched on a high throne (I kid you not) in the middle of the audience, speaking text into a mic, like the voice of God. I had never seen such an explicit (blatant and shameless) display of artist ego weaved into the structure of a play. So when I watched his most recent offering AOI/KOMACHI on DVD I was surprised to find how accessible it was - and yet it retained the fascination, eroticism and grotesqueness of his aesthetic.

He had taken two classic noh plays and adapted them for contemporary theater. The original Aoi no Ue is a revenge story; Hikaru's lover Lady Aoi has fallen ill with a mysterious sickness. Turns out, the spirit of Hikaru's former (spurned) lover Rokujo has made Aoi sick. Kawamura sets his AOI in the salon of a karisuma biyoshi [charisma beautician] - apparently a real trend in Japan where coiffures themselves are elevated to the status of celebrity. Hikaru, the hairstylist (who has made hair not only his profession but his sexual obsession), has a young long-haired lover, Aoi, who, of late, has been prone to "seizures" and the like, and consequently has been in and out of a hospital. He suspects that the hair of his ex-lover Rokujo (who happens to be the wife of his primary patron, who also used him as a boy-toy) is at the root of this curse. Rokujo shows up and tries to implicate inextricable linked through sordid past - he helped her murder her husband and destroy the evidence (with sulfuric acid). Somehow, through re-living this event, Hikaru is able to release Aoi from the vengeful curse of Rokujo, though not without a price -- Aoi's jet-black hair (Hikaru's treasure) is completely shorn off. [Tamaki Kemmotsu, who played Aoi, told me she shaved her head just for this tour, FYI, you know who I'm talking to]. Each character seems to have his own version of reality which don't quite intersect with each other, leaving the audience in a strange space between fantasies, past and present. The story and acting style are extremely heightened and melodramatic, bordering on camp, but never quite taking the plunge.

KOMACHI is essentially a monologue; a down-and-out film director's mysterious journey through a strange dilapidated town where he discovers an abandoned movie house that screens forgotten films from the WWII era (many of them war propaganda, pro-Nazi), all starring the legendary actress Komachi, who has since disappeared from the film industry, some 40 years ago. The movie theater turns out to be inhabited (or haunted) by an aged couple, the woman (played by the butoh legend Akira Kasai) claiming to be Komachi. The film director, despite his fervent efforts to extricate himself, is sucked into the cycle of destructive love: any man who falls in love with the ageless beauty of Komachi is destined to die. In this case, the film maker seems doomed to wander endlessly in search of that "sweet primeval darkness," a precious essence of Japan that was lost in the war and through the process of forced democratization.

I feel weird writing about these plays when I am completely unbiased, having translated both of them into English and obsessively refining the subtitles for its tour here. But having had the privilege of seeing the show four times, I just wanted to express (mainly for myself to remember later) how thrilling and satisfying it is when theater works. There is nothing else like it, truly. Not that the production was totally mind-blowing or life-changing -- but they were both surprising and exciting, and the cumulative experience of watching them back to back, was a meditation on the ineffable nature of reality and the course of history. This is where Kawamura pulled strongly on noh theater: themes pertaining to the collapse of linear time, the co-existence of the flesh and spirit (and in many cases the spirit, brimming with earthly desire/attachment, living beyond the life of the body), and transformation of space all evoked the kind of excruciating mystique of noh, but presented in a much more palatable way (for a pop-audience). The film-maker's journey in KOMACHI held a magnetic fascination for me, all the way through to the last few scenes in which the aging Komachi exploded in a fiery dance that ended in her strangling the film-maker to death with unraveled film reels. I do wonder if the plays worked on the American audience on more than just a novelty entertainment level -- particularly AOI, which didn't quite land for me, either. But Kawamura insisted that these two pieces have to be performed back-to-back, with AOI first.

** On a side note: I feel like prominent modes and contemporary traditions of story-telling are making me more and more misogynist. I am much more compelled by male writers, and male protagonists. The female characters in AOI/KOMACHI are extreme antagonists with (self-)destructive traits/flaws. Which are fine and fun and all, but these days I feel more and more disturbed that there are no adult female characters that resonate with me -- if there is a play/film with an adult female protagonist, they always inevitably seem to revolve around romance (lack of, search for, loss of). Or they're totally crazy. I can't think of a story with an adult female protagonist that has really compelled me. I mean I loved Spirited Away and Pan's Labyrinth, but both of those were prepubescent girls --- It's like some kind of universally agreement that the only adventure a woman can have must take place prior to sexual awakening. I think about my favorite films and novels: all male protagonists. Is this my problem with my choices in books/films? Why do I feel this is such a void -- or rather, is this feeling justified, or have I become so misogynistic that I cannot relate to adult female protagonists? And do not cite Bridget Jones' Diary or I will smack you.