Iwa ni Hana

A scene from the theatre play "Ashi no Kago" (葦ノ籠) in 2008.

I just learned about a Japanese theatre troupe with the sort of angsty decadent beauty that I always go ga-ga about. They are called Kokushokukitan Katarinaha [黒色綺譚カタリナ派], and you can find out more from their official website here: http://www.kokusyoku.com/

There is a catchphrase on their homepage which I think summarizes the kind of beauty which is preoccupied with death and destruction that the theatre troupe embodies. (I call that hakai no bi [破壊の美] and have written about it here before.) The catchphrase goes like this:

飛ぶ鳥水面に波紋の残さずして死ねるか

(Can a flying bird die without leaving a trace on the water surface?)

I think you might get a feel of their aesthetic sense if know what the kind of original plays they produce are like. For example, the play Ashi no Kago [葦ノ籠] dated 2008 goes something like this:

The other day, a man lost his wife and child in an early afternoon of heavy rain. Stupefied, he mistakes a young male prostitute and his grandmother whom he met while wandering on the river bed at the outskirts of town for his wife and child. The young male prostitute and his grandmother were glad to play up to his illusion, but reality eventually intrudes upon this pseudo-family…

“If I only closed my eyes, this would be the perfect family…”

The play "Ame wo kowanu hito" (雨を乞わぬ人) dated 2010.

Another play, Ame wo kowanu hito [雨を乞わぬ人] – which will be shown in theatre next week – goes something like this:

The story is set in an isolated village where it is believed that “when the miko weeps, the village would be destroyed by heavy rain.” Motoko, a female college student visiting this village which is the home of her lover’s family, meets the beautiful miko which is imprisoned in the warehouse by the Tenji family, who derive their power over the village by controlling the miko. Because the miko is not allowed to weep, there are extraordinary, decadent feasts held every night in the warehouse to keep her happy. When the shocked Motoko tries to escape with the miko, the miko merely laughs saying that there is nothing she is dissatisfied with in the life of luxury she leads in the warehouse. And so a strange and conflicted friendship springs up between the two young women.

In any case, I have posted some more posters towards the end of this post. If you know Japanese cinema well, you would probably sense by instinct in those posters the vibe of … Suzuki Seijun [鈴木清順].

A sepia screenshot of a scene from the Taishō Trilogy directed by Suzuki Seijun.

A word on the films of Suzuki Seijun

I have seen some films directed by Suzuki Seijun – beginning with his most well-known Taishō Trilogy which includes:

i) Zigeunerweisen / ツィゴイネルワイゼ (1980)

ii) Kagero-za / 陽炎座 (1981)

iii) Yumeji / 夢二 (1991)

I even saw an obscure TV title he made called “春桜 ジャパネスク” (1983) which was about a man and a woman traveling together and losing their minds over the beauty of the sakura blossom. And just because it was original made for TV does not mean that it was more easily understandable than his feature films. To tell you the truth, I do not think I ever understood a minute of any of his films, and yet for some reason I kept coming back for more.

I guess the approach I eventually settled down with is that his films are not really meant to be “made sense of”; instead, they are more meant to be simply “seen”. That is to say, what you come away with is likely to be neither a coherent story nor a coherent idea behind the story; instead, you are likely to come away with random visual images that just stick to your memory for some reason. Take the scene (from Kagero-za, if I remember correctly) in which a woman descends a flight of stairs while the petals of the flowers she carries are blown away by the wind.

That was just classic.

Anyway, as mentioned above, here are more posters of the plays of Kokushokukitan Katarinaha.

If this is not the Suzuki Seijun vibe, then I would not know what to call it. If they are able to combine the visual aesthetics of Suzuki Seijun with the rigors of story plot and ideas on the level of – say – Henrik Ibsen (who is said to take two years to write a play and edit it ruthlessly draft after draft so that no line is ever there without a reason), I think I will just die out of the pleasure of watching it.

I want to see these plays.