The Ruins of Identity and History
Imagining Japan’s Postwar Ruins in Terayama’s Films
Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street (1971) and
Pastoral: To Die in the Countryside (1974)
Ruowen Xu 1301110624
MA Comparative Literature
June 2017
CONTENTS
Abstract……….………...………...………...…...…3
Introduction: The Collective Representation of the Ruins………...4
Chapter One: The Allegorical Ruins of Tokyo’s Postwar Landscape….8
1.1 Trapped in Dilapidation: The Allegorical Ruins of the Home and History
…….10
1.2 Performing the Strangers: the Illusional Ruins of the Violated Border
………..14
1.3 A Desire for Destruction: The Ruinophilic Gaze and the Erotic Act
………….19
Chapter Two: The Nostalgic Ruins of the Countryside and the Freedom
from History……….26
2.1 The Nostalgic Ruination of the Past
………29
2.2 The Dialectical Ruins and the Nostalgic Murder
………...33
2.3 The Transhistorical Freedom on the Abjected Ruins
………...38
Conclusion: Performing the Outcast………...45
Notes………47
ABSTRACT
In the two major films Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street (1971) and Pastoral: To Die
in the Countryside (1974) by the Japanese film director Terayama Shuji, inter-media
techniques are employed to fashion the ruins of the city and the countryside to represent the identity loss and the breakage of history in Japan’s postwar era. Embodying the decadence and destruction, the ruins in the films are expressive as seen as the process that indicates the dialectical dynamics, instead of being mere stagnant images. These dialectics of the ruins are presented through the inter-media visual devices and the intertwining narrative lines in the two films with conflicting representations, such as the nostalgic longing for the past and the claustrophobic feeling for history’s entrapment; the desire to destruct the metropolis of capitalism and the desperation of envisioning its dystopian future; the aestheticization of the ruins and the social critique of ruin making, and etc. As the two films feature respectively the urban and countryside ruins of postwar Japan, the images of the ruins are used to represent the decadence of home, the void of history, the obscurity of identity, the illusion for the borderlessness, the destruction of the memory, and the fantasy for the trans-historical freedom. In this thesis, I intend to elaborate on these dialectical representations of ruins in Terayama’s two films, and to reveal the ontological questions and social critiques rendered by the director in the cultural and political background of the 1960’s and 1970’s Japan.
INTRODUCTION
The Collective Representation of the Ruins
Recovered from the war ruins yet still shadowed by the Cold War nuclear threat, Japan in the 1960’s and 1970’s witnessed a mass transformation from the destruction to prosperity, from social stability to turmoil. It is also the period when the Tokyo Avant-Garde Movementi took
place with artists’ urges to interact art directly with reality. During this turbulent era of cultural and political clashes, breaking boundaries and violating regulations became the main theme of the provocative practice in both the political activism and the Avant-Garde art. This intense iconoclastic urge assumes the visual and literary presentation as the images of ruins in all field of art, implicating layers of metaphorical associations with the prewar history and the postwar identity, as well as with the destruction and the borderlessness. The imagination of ruins in the 60’s and 70’s also takes up the unique form of inter-media presentations, especially in the film industry. As a representative multi-artist, Terayama Shuji (1935-1983), the film and theater director, Tanka poet, playwright, novelist, photographer, and actor, integrates various media forms in his films to experiment with the inter-media narratives that are rich with the images of the ruins. Incorporating film making with theater, photography, poems, slide shows, musicals and documentary clips, Terayama synthesizes the imagination of ruins in almost all fields of artistic practice at the time. His film, particularly Throw Away
the Books, Rally on the Street (1971) and Pastoral: To Die in the Countryside (1974), which
were released right after the climax of the protest wave in 1968, could be seen as to epitomize the prevalent obsession of imagining the ruins in various art forms. The types of ruins displayed in his film are mainly presented in the dilapidated urban and rural landscape. I consider that these ruins are more than just stagnant images endowed with mere metaphorical connotations, but are themselves allegories that convey the narratives of historical decadence and the process of destruction. In these two films, Terayama shifts his focus from the urban ruins to the rural ruins, however, the images of the ruins still intertwine with his concern for the three main aspects: the void of history and belong, the destruction of the self and the collective, and the marginal on the border. The ruins are also dialectical in displaying the ambivalent feelings on the threshold of the turbulent 60’s and the mitigating 70’s. Unlike the rebuking tone articulated by other Japanese artists, Terayama approaches the ruins and the theme of destruction in an idiosyncratic way, expressing his ambivalence towards the
iconoclastic era and the plight situation experienced by Japanese postwar generation.
Therefore, I intend to elaborate on Terayama’s individual expressions of the collective imagination of the ruins and the destruction of the city as well as the isolation of the countryside, and to touch upon how he utilizes different inter-media devices to intertextualize his imagination of the ruins in these films with works of other contemporary artists. To give a thorough discussion of these aspects above, an outline of the types of ruins in the collective representation with explicit regard to their cultural and political background is necessary here.
As the cultural context, Tokyo Avant-Garde Movement was the product of Tokyo’s most rapid transformation from the war ruins to the global metropolis. As Japan recovered from the war ruins, the period of 60’s and 70’s witnessed Tokyo’s most profound urban transformation of the city landscape as well as the phenomenal growth of the economy, registering Tokyo as a global metropolis since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. However, it was also the period when the fiercest civil collision and vibrant social activities were staged on Tokyo’s streets. The constant protests against U.S-Japan treaty in the 60’s unfolded the civil discontent for government’s attempt to participate in the escalating cold war under the U.S. dominance. This social ambiance greatly encouraged artist participation in the public realm, providing a fertile land for the most audacious practice of the groundbreaking art experiments. Opposing to the prosperous image of the city, the hidden trauma of war together with the chaotic demonstration of civil protest are represented through ruinous and estranged figures in artworks, exhibiting the unavoidable theme of the underlying ruins of the old and the destruction of new—both impossible to shield away from the city’s glamorousness—in 60’s urban experience. These images of Tokyo ruins presented in the postwar Avant-Garde artworks are employed to question the oblivion of war-trauma under the city’s ostensible prosperity, so as to envision its re-destruction in the future war.
In this socio-political context, there are mainly two types of ruins mostly articulated in Japanese postwar art practice, representing the trauma of homelessness and the loss of belonging, and the breakage of history and the destruction of war. First, influenced by Japan’s earthquake culture, the collective conception of homelessness is deeply ingrained with the anxiety of the unpredictable catastrophe and the loss of home. The earthquake ruins underlie Japanese collective memory and the experience of the catastrophic destruction of the community and home. As the cityscape could be shaken into debris within even few seconds, this unpredictable condition has forged a collective consciousness in which the image of ruins and the sense of homelessness are inextricably bonded to each other. This connection is most
pronouncedly addressed by Japanese Nobel Laureate Kawabata Yasunari, and the linkage of the catastrophe ruins in the city and subjective rootlessness is rendered through his wandering in the ruins of Tokyo after the devastating Great Kantō Earthquake. “The place I long to go isn’t in Europe or America; it lies in the ruinous country in the East. Generally speaking, I’m the citizen of this ruinous country…Maybe because I grew up as a homeless orphan, I’ve never felt blasé of this bitter wandering” (Peng 230). In Kawabata's account, “the country of ruins” not only figuratively symbolizes Japan with its geographical characteristics, but also indicates the collective anxiety of homelessness shaped by its catastrophe culture. By the act of aimless wandering through the earthquake ruins, Kawabata's personal experience as an orphan overlaps with the collective sense of the home loss, uncovering ruins as in profound association with the exile and banishment in Japanese culture. In Terayama’s film, the sense of homelessness is presented by the protagonist’s roaming in the city and rural ruins, in between the dilemma of escaping from the reality and being marginalized by society. The second type of ruin visualizes the theme of destruction in both the wartime past and the dystopian future. Particularly foregrounded by the world shocking atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear ruins not only caused unimaginable trauma to the nation, but also marked the threshold of U.S.-Japan relation, which laid the foundation for the U.S. occupation for eight years and permeation through almost all aspects in Japanese society. Though the ruins of war were gradually removed from the city’s surface and the historical traumas materialized through the construction of monuments, however, the intangible existence of war ruins in the collective memory is impossible to obliterate. The invisible ruins haunt the nation as the unrecognizable specters from the past. Along with the radical outburst of dissent through the 60’s, a destructive impulse erupted against the great city labyrinth of Tokyo, and the artistic effort of re-visualizing war ruins reached a climax in the Avant-Garde art.ii This is also shown as the destructive impulse against in Terayama’s film. Moreover, the haunting ruins of history and the destruction of memory are presented in his later film as the bleak landscape of the countryside, marking a shift of Terayama’s concern from the urban destruction in the context of Cold War to the breakage of history itself.
Given the types of ruins in the collective presentation regarding Japan’s postwar cultural political background, I intend to elaborate on Terayama’s individual expressions of the ruins in his two films. According to the respective settings of the urban and rural space, my discussion will be separated into two chapters, each based on the close analysis of the inter-media techniques and the social-political context of the films. In the first chapter, the
images of the ruins in Terayama’s film Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street are interpreted as the representations of the loss of identity, the void of history, the desire for destruction, as well as the broken social borders. Mainly based on Benjamin’s notion of the “allegorical ruins”, I argue that Terayama pictures the ruins of Tokyo city in his film to demonstrate a broken down of the historical narrative which engenders the loss of identity among the postwar generations. In the second chapter, on Terayama’s next film Pastoral: To
Die in the Countryside, I will compare the depiction of the countryside ruins with the city
ruins to shed light on Terayama’s de-contextualization in his presentation of the ruins, upon which he contemplates on the mechanism of memory’s destructive effect on the past reality and the possibility to free oneself from history.
CHAPTER ONE
The Allegorical Ruins of Tokyo’s Postwar Landscape
Despite the rapid urbanization of Tokyo city during the 1960’s, the city is haunted with ruinous images of dilapidation, desolation and destruction in the expressions of the experimental and Avant-Garde art, forming a grotesque contrast with the city’s prosperity. These practices are often associated with the provocation waves of the Anti-Anpo movement, denouncing the authority’s inclination of involving in the Cold War, by envisioning a dystopian cityscape with the evocation of Japan’s wartime traumas. As a representative work of the counter-cultural claim and the inter-medial practice in the provocation era, the film
Throw Away the Books, Rally in the Street (『書を捨てよ町へ出よう』) directed by Terayama Shuji in 1971 is imbued with the ruinous images in the chaotic street demos and the decadent family life. Herein, the ruins of Tokyo city compose the major settings of the film’s multiple narrative streams from the beginning to the end.
As Terayama’s first full-length film (137 minutes), it was considered controversial even in a time of radical political protest and art practice. The narrative streams mainly revolve around the perspective of Eimei Kitamura, a young adult growing up in the shabby neighborhood of Tutsuka near Aragawa railway, located in northern Shinjuku, Tokyo. Having long lost his mother, the protagonist lives with his father who is a cowardly war criminal, now unemployed (and who’s also said to have snooped on and harassed women), a kleptomaniac grandmother and a sister with special obsession with her pet rabbit. Discontent with his family members’ abnormality and indifference for the decadent life, Eimei could restrain no more his contempt and rage for this ruinous life of triviality. As he seeks his future away from his family and neighborhood, Eimei aspires to join the local soccer team, but is only handed with the daily chores to serve in the team. Yet he still regards the soccer team leader—who is also said to be a political activist in the protest—as his role model, and hopes to become his similar. However, after his grandmother kills his sister’s rabbit to force her to interact with real life people, his sister somehow wanders into the soccer players’ changing room and becomes the target of the gang rape led by the team leader. Not able to save his sister from the disastrous assault, the protagonist is struck by disillusion, and ends up with individual affray on Shinjuku’s busiest street, finally taken away by the police.
intertwines both panoramic and fragmented narratives. It interweaves collective and individual experience as it documents the threshold moment between the turbulent 1960’s and the mitigating 1970’s. Through the individualization of the collective imagination of ruins and destruction, Terayama delivers his ambivalent feeling for the end of an era as it fluctuates between the nostalgic longing and destructive impulse, intoxication and desperation. The ambivalence is particularly intensified by his artistic manifestation of the images of the city ruins with both the fascination and loathing. Through the discussion of his reimagining the postwar urban ruins, this chapter will elaborate on the allegorical ruins in the Tokyo’s 1960’s with specific regard to the director’s inter-media experiment displayed in the film. Hence, I will first look into the ruin of the home pictured in the narrative line of Eimei’s family life. I’d point out that, as it represents the wreckage of home and history, the space of home ruin projects the collective loss of identity, since the historical reflection for the war time trauma and destruction have given place to the predominant postwar ideology of economic recovery. I will use Walter Benjamin’s view on the decadence, which, according to him, implies the temporal effect of destruction as a duration, wherein the ruin is allegorized to unveil the wrestle of nature and history. I argue that in Terayama’s film, the dialectics of the home ruin reify the struggle in Japan’s postwar context, indicating the dynamics of the nostalgic renderings for the blurred past and the claustrophobic feeling in the void of history. The analysis of the domestic ruins will then be followed by the discussion on the social ruins in the second part. Documented in the film’s narrative stream of the public dissent and demonstrations in 1960’s Tokyo, the scattered ruins and wastes on the street are employed to fabricate the space of marginality that is in resistance to the power center. With Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and Georg Simmel’s discussion on the strangers as the survivors on the border, I intend to examine the public ruins in the film as the violated border, given Terayama’s semi-documentary perspective in the narrative stream of social life. In the third part, the erotic acts in the film are considered in close relation to the ruinophilia for the urban ruinscape during the era. With Benjamin’s denotation of the dialectics of the replicating desire and the destructive impulse towards the metropolis, through the ruinophilic gaze, the images of city ruins are incessantly replicated and aestheticized by the hybrid of Terayama’s cross-media language. The desire for destruction, which is inherent to the ruinophilic gaze, is most explicitly featured in the erotic acts, as the destruction of the self and the pronouncement of the end of an era.
1.1 Trapped in Dilapidation: The Allegorical Ruins of the Home and History
The most radical presentation of the ruins in the film is within the space of home, through which a sense of rootlessness is intensely reiterated in the narrative. The home ruin is not only presented as the physical landscape of the urban environment, but is also articulated as a porous shelter for the individuals living in it. Representing the lower class’s living condition in postwar Tokyo, the ruins are also employed as a rhetoric device to raise the ontological question of surviving in the postwar dilapidation and to consider the collapse of the collective and individual identity. Moreover, the home ruins in the film feature as the destructed space of permanently lost identity and belonging. They imply the shattered narrative of the personal and national history that resists the possibility of restoration.
The images of home ruins in the film are mainly presented from the perspective of the household’s exterior and interior, unfolded through the narrative stream of Eimei’s family life. Portrayed as a young adult eager to run away from his ruinous neighborhood in the city belly of Shinjuku, the protagonist Eimei introduces his family at the beginning of the film with the static presentation of his family photo in a tone of disdain of the family’s self-abandonment. Then, the exterior of the household and the neighborhood are gradually revealed: the rotten wooden doorframe, the moldy façade with an advertisement poster sticking to it, the untidy yard, the train track in clusters of
overgrown weeds. In face of the environment, the camera shot grows shaky as Eimei rages forward on the railway track with implacable rage. The ruinous neighborhood appears to quake violently as if it’s shaken off while Eimei runs on the railway with his arms stretched like a plane taking off. (Figure 1.1)
Figure 1.1 The ruinous neighborhood in the camera shot from Eimei’s perspective as he rages along the track (Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street, 1971).
This setting of Eimei’s shabby neighborhood in the city belly of Shinjuku is of symbolic nature. As a newly constructed commercial district in the 1960’s, the construction of Shinjuku’s commercial center epitomizes Japan’s astonishing development in the postwar era. However, in stark contrast with Shinjuku’s fancy commercial area, the living
environment in the district’s city belly and its peripheral appears as the deplorable remnants of the depression and destruction from the war. They symbolize the margins that never shared the metropolis’ splendor, and the unrecovered demolition innate in the country’s prosperous development.
Analogous to the ruinous look of Eimei’s neighborhood, the interior of the house is depicted with the outworn, obsolete and decayed sundries, stressing the ruinous state of the family’s daily life. The small living room with barely any furniture, the broken and dirty windows, the rusted iron frame, and the indiscernible objects scattered in the yard are successively displayed. The interior is depicted as the scene of ruins without any living trace of the dweller’s presence, as if the family members are merely specters haunting the house. The narrative of the ruinous household is marked by the absence of the mother, which is particularly emphasized by the background rock music “Abandoning My Mother.” As is divulged at the beginning of the film, Eimei’s mother passed away many years ago, but her long-time absence evokes profound emotions in Eimei’s monologue, which is intertwined with the lyrics of the background rock song: “Ah, sinful mother,” “ignorant mother,” “deplorable mother,” “helpless and lonely mother,” “mother that never leaves home,” “fair and gentle mother…” This scene ends with the photo display of Terayama’s own mother in real life, individualizing the lament of homelessness in the poignancy and despair of the personal history. Whereas the home symbolizes one’s belonging, mother is intimately related to the origin of one’s life. Thus the mother’s absence in Eimei’s home evokes deep grief and intense emotion. Against the reiterated background of the household ruins, Eimei and the postwar generation are identified as orphans without any origin and belonging.
Apart from the musical episode lamenting the absent mother, the film amplifies the deplorable nature of the family with the technique of superimposing a green filter over the narrative stream of the family life. Celebrated as the alchemist of colors in the shooting, Terayama has showcased the prowess of tinting in many of his short experimental films. Other than the green filter, the rosy filter is used in the film for the fantasy and longing that detaches one from the banality of life. As Steven Ridgely points out, “green is coded to the family, then, and magenta typically to this fantasy of escaping it”(Ridegely 243). Conversely, the scene of social life is displayed with its actual color in slightly bluish tone, whereas the apparitions from memory and the past are revived in black and white. The employment of the mono-colored filters demarcates the multi-narrative streams in the film, depicting the almost schizophrenic worlds of the dream and the real life, the memory and the present reality.
As a common technique in Terayama’s many experimental short films, the precedent use of the mono-colored green filter is most characteristically presented in the 1964 experimental film Imprisonment. Typically for this technique, the green tint fashions a claustrophobic space with the symbol of the human-clock (depicted by the image of a man standing at the center of a clock drawn on the ground, with his shadow indicating the time), embodying the imprisonment of time and history to human existence (Figure 1.2). In this regard, the green tinting filter is adopted again by Terayama in the film Throw Away the
Books, Rally on Street, to extend and reify the claustrophobic experience from the ontological
perspective of the quotidian life that is conceived as a prison. Along with the green filter amplifying the suffocating ambiance, the director re-introduces the image of the clock. Here in his 1971 film, however, the human clock is replaced by the stopped clock on the wall, emphasizing once more the timelessness and oblivion represented by the dilapidated state of the interior ruin. The image of the rabbit cage, in turn, further represents the imprisonment in the spatial-temporal limbo that is both home and history.
Figure 1.2 The human-sundial in Terayama’s 1964 short film The Imprisonment.
In this sense, the domestic ruin in Tarayama’s film isn’t merely a fixed symbol. It is an allegory that gives expression for the philosophical concerns of the ruins of identity and historical origin. By the notion of the “allegorical ruins”, Benjamin renders that, as an allegory involves the narrative unfolded through time, the temporal element of ruination
evokes a dynamic process in the seemingly static moment of the ruins, emancipating its historical authenticity from the aesthetic regime (Pensky 70).As Benjamin interprets in The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, “The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which
is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (Benjamin 187). Benjamin acknowledges the ruins as the allegories that unfold the struggle of nature and history. As the wrestling of the opposing forces, the dialectics of history and nature addressed by Benjamin is revealed as the dynamics innate in the home ruin in Terayama’s film. To elaborate, as an enclosed space, the ruin of home in Terayama’s film is dialectical. On the one hand, it resists participating in the restoration that eliminates the authentic trace of history, whereas on the other hand, the fragments are themselves incapable of reviving the primordial appearance of the landscape which predates the destruction. Through the allegorical connotation, the home ruins not only denote the individual experience of being precipitated into the limbo of both the obscured origin and the vacuum of history, but also reveal the dilapidated condition of postwar personal identity in the country’s cultural reality. Thus, compared to the collective imagination of the home ruin as the embodiment of lost belongings, Terayama’s film unveils the dialectics of emancipation and imprisonment of history, by presenting the ruin of home as the allegorical limbo of the paradox experienced by the Japanese postwar generation. These ruins evoke both the nostalgia for the shattered past in the context of the rapid urban renewal, as well as the suffocating and claustrophobic effects of the collective amnesia of the wartime history. The ruins as the spatial allegory of the dismantled postwar identity and history are also inextricably bound up to the iconoclastic movements that unremittingly call the nation’s postwar paradigm into question. Whereas personal identity appears obscured by the repressed historical reflection in the period of economic growth, the irresistible influence and control from the U.S. in terms of culture, economics and politics entangle with the hybridity of Japanese postwar reality. Since the end of war in 1945, the resilient voices from the intellectuals to ordinary civilians have been in constant dissent against the nation’s compliant gesture towards the U.S’s influence, which to many, have been deviating Japan from the pacifist constitution and independency. Along with the narrative line of Eimei’s life that both allegorizes and philosophizes the ambivalent nature of the postwar identity, Terayama’s
employs the other narrative line on the public life to cast his focus on the ruins of these social movements. the narrative further demonstrates how personal identity is questioned and deliberately deconstructed through the counter-cultural wave in the 1960’s. The film visualizes the social borders as the iconoclastic ruins against the power center, performed by the “strangers” from the margin.
1.2 Performing the Strangers: the Illusional Ruins of the Violated Border
Analogous to the home ruins, the scattered ruins in the urban setting are exhibited through the intermedial and intertextual references throughout the film. In the narrative line that accounts for Eimei’s encounter with the public and the turbulent social life, the exhibition of the public ruins is carried out through the hybrid of various filming device: documentary footage, live-action shooting, real life record, and rock musical. These snippets dispersed throughout the narrative could hardly be distinguished as episodes of fictive setting or records of real life improvisation; they even barely assume any correlation to the major film plot. But the clips of street dissent constantly spur up emotional climax. They also serve to showcase the director’s virtuosity in employing the montage and collage of independent episodes, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, improvisation and rehearsal, the space of everyday life and theatrical stage. Elaborately orchestrated into the narrative, the ruins in the social space add to the setting of the protest performance and demonstrations. They serve as the frontier to break through social boundaries and norms, which is exemplified by the incendiary scenes, the demolished wall where young people take drugs, and the chaotic street protest of thongs of dissidents.
Picturing the social ruins through a mixture of narrative genres, Terayama investigates and problematizes the production of these ruins through his semi-documentary shoots, keeping a critical distance from the live scenes. In his reflection, to deviate from the fixed normality of everyday life and to stress their counter-cultural stances, the protestors identify themselves as “the strangers” of the city and “the marginals” against the center. However, these performances, though casting great impact on social orders and their rigid borders, are neither representative of the real marginal groups and their need, nor capable of opening up flexible space through the border. “Strangeness” remained an instant act as these ruins disappear, when the border sutures and social orders rebuilt and strengthened again. The real marginal, or the “native strangers” like Eimei, are doomed to suffer the disillusionment upon
the removal of these social ruins by authority. Therefore, I consider the visual images of the public ruins as representing the social ruins of the broken borders and norms during the iconoclastic period. I will examine Terayama’s filming techniques, to further elaborate how the ruins are shaped as the stage setting given the performative nature of the protest acts, which allude to Terayama’s critique of the protest’s effect on social reality.
In the narrative line of the social upheaval, the collective impulse of destroying the city order erupts and turns Shinjuku’s street into ruins and chaos: people with a huge mask burning on the street; the note written “you will soon be promoted officer of the Japan Self-Defense Force” is peed upon; cigarette boxes labeled with “Peace” are piled in flame (Figure 1.3); young people taking drugs on the litters by the demolished wall (Figure 1.4); a group of people with bizarre costumes rallying on the street; huge anarchist slogans and graffiti on the ground and walls of the city (Figure 1.5). With the semi-documentary shooting, the film records the accumulation and escalation of this destructive force, as the civil protest constantly escalates and reaches a climax in 1968 in Shinjuku riot. On October 21th, 1968, the student and citizen parade occupied Shinjuku Station and ended up in a confrontation with the police. The event was spontaneously organized by non-official social groups in response to the pacifist claim on the International Antiwar Day, ending up with the arrest and conviction of numerous participants. The event was later registered as “Shinjuku Riot”, not only marking the critical political turn, but also the historical dividing point of Japan’s postwar era. Tanaka Junji describes that as “a special date, October 21th interrupted the chronological flow of history, marking the threshold moment of the year zero in Japanese postwar era” (Tanaka 257). Owing to the authorities’ interference in 1968 and the Cold War escalation’s calming down, the protest wave mitigated and the social order was brought back to normality. Meanwhile, the iconoclastic ruins were removed from the public realm not leaving a single trace. In the same year of Shinjuku Riot, Terayama launched the shooting project of the film. The intense visual presentations of the ruins in the film are in ironic contrast with their disappearance in public in 1968, when the protests reached a climax and were witnessed to drop since then, inciting his rumination on the inheritance and the remnant by the end of the provocation era.
Figure 1. 3 (left) Burning the cigarette boxes of “Peace” (Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street, 1971). Fiugre 1.4 (right) Weed smokers by the ruins of the wall, with the text “Young People’s Guide to Drug” written on the ground (Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street, 1971).
Figure 1.5 The protest performance on the street (Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street, 1971). The question of the instantaneity of the ruins leads to the reflection on the performative nature of the protest. Judith Butler interprets the notion of “the performative”, as the repeated act to address one’s identity from the perspective of gender seen as a social construction where sexual identity is imposed by social norms. Furthermore, “performativity” is defined as an attribution to identity construction based on the formulated language and body gestures. A rehearsed utterance is often manipulated by the hegemonic social discourse to enhance the
demarcation of gender roles (Butler 3). Thus, performativity in Butler’s sense, can be conceived as the corporeal utterance choreographed to reinforce one’s identity in society. However in the film, performativity operates to achieve an opposite effect. The protestors employ it as the tactics to deconstruct their assigned social identities, as they disguise themselves as the vaguely defined group of “strangers”. As the dissent is often bound up with the strategy of self-estrangement against rules and regulation, it visualizes the border between the normal and abnormal through stirring shock and disturbance, thus identifying the performers with the “strangers” outside the normative frame.
In Simmel’s discussion, “the strangers” are a group of ambiguously defined people who wander around with an unstable identity. He writes:
“As a group member, rather, he is near and far at the same time, as is characteristic of elations founded only on generally human commonness… In the case of the person who is a stranger to the country, the city, the race, etc., however, this non-common element is once more nothing individual, but merely the strangeness of origin, which is or could be common to many strangers. For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness” (Simmel 143).
Marked with the indefinable identity of being common with the characteristics that are uncommon to the local communities, the “strangers” are often hard to be included in any category of social group other than assuming the ambiguous identity as “strangers”. Addressed in the protest performance, the ambiguous “strangeness” stresses an alienation from the communities based on authoritative recognition. For the performers, this alienation from the power center aligns them with the “countercultural collectivity”. Steven C. Ridgely in his book Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji, argues that the self-attribution of the countercultural identity “emphasizes the rebellion against a stagnant, conformist, dull, suffocating mainstream” (258). Ridgely also regards the film protagonist to belong to the countercultural collectivity represented by the by the protestors. Based on Ridgely’s observation, I argue that the performed “strangeness” is of essence for the belonging to the countercultural collectivity. Terayama, however, implies that there’s a substantial difference between the performed strangeness of the protesters, and the native strangeness of Eimei himself, for the former identity is only temporary, while the latter proves to be unalterable. This categorical difference explains the temporality of the social ruins,
which represent the broken borders, and their illusional nature for the real strangers of the city.
In the film, the performative nature of self-estrangement is most prominently presented in the street protest scene (Figure 1.5). In this scene, a bunch of young people are lying on the street in the commercial district, some are laughing, some are doodling on the ground, and others are rambling towards the passers on the sidewalk. One of them is even wearing a Nō mask of the traditional Japanese drama, which stands in a grotesque contrast to the rock background music. The group estranges themselves through their abnormal public demeanor as well as through their dress code (especially the mask) that conforms to none of the social groups of everyday life. This turns the street into an uncanny stage of insanity, at the same time producing ruins of vandalism and sabotage. Along with the background rock music, the dancing gang seems like a group of rock singers engaged in a musical street performance. As the passersby join the gang, they turn themselves into strangers outside the normative frame. This self-estrangement through physical appearance and behavior unveils the borders of individual behavior and public control, normality and deviance. At the same time it paralyzes the public order and has a damaging effect on the public utilities. By doing so, “the strangers” express their dissent against the disciplinary regulation imposed by the city infrastructures. The public ruins brought about by their destructive behaviors, metaphorize the broken borders.
Because of these acts of estranging the self and performing the strangers, the city space is simultaneously estranged into the stage of broken borders and public ruins. And again, in contrast to Ridgely’s point, I’d like to argue that in between the violent clash of the countercultural collectivity and the national community, the dual exclusions of the protagonist underline his non-belonging to the either community, revealing his identity as the real outsider. After the self-suturing of the once broken borderlines, groups of deviants are assimilated into the social norm. Unlike the dissident protesting on the street with various forms of self-estrangement, the protagonist has always been “the native stranger” without any sense of belonging. To elaborate, Eimei mentions with frustration at the beginning of the film that he is excluded from college and the further chance of education, but he also makes his every effort to join the soccer team, even though the only duty designated to him is cleaning. These traits already demonstrate his longing to enter the social institutions and that he has strived for the better future during the social turmoil. The iconoclastic ruins tempt him to dream about the existence of borderless possibilities. However, as the conflict mitigates and
the border ruins are repaired, he becomes overwhelmed by the realization that there is even less accessibility and mobility. Eimei becomes aggressive and tries in vain to break the reconstructed social border. In the end of the film, when the ruins are removed and social order reestablished, the sutured borders are visualized through the repainted driveway lines on Shinjuku’s commercial street. Eimei, however, still wanders with the outdated protest indignation, exposing himself to the reinforced public control (Figure 1.6).
Figure 1. 6 Eimei’s affray on the street (Throw Away the
Books, Rally on the Street, 1971).
Through the skeptical gaze of the semi-documentary shooting, Terayama questions the performative effect of strangeness as a form of dissent. The depiction of the emergence and
disappearance of the public ruins also allows him to show the limited temporality of the border breaking. The director’s social critique of the dissent acts could also be considered as his own dissent to the dominant wave of the leftist movement. Nonetheless, along with his reflection on the public ruins as the illusional borderlessness, Terayama explicitly exhibits his fascination for the city ruins in the time of chaos. Highly subjective, Terayama’s asthetization in the ruin gaze and the erotic scenes on the ruins speak for the collective artistic obsession with the ruins in the 60’s.
1.3 A Desire for Destruction: The Ruinophilic Gaze and the Erotic Act
As is discussed in the chapter above, the ruins are staged with the symbolic implication of border breaking in the dissent performance. Furthermore, apart from the political activism and iconoclastic enthusiasm, the destructive impulse manifested in the city ruin scenes deploys another facet, projecting the sensual aspect in the visual and corporeal desire for destruction. Visually, Terayama utilizes multiple devices to display an estranged landscape of the boisterous city life as the phantasmagoric graveyard. To that effect, he simulates the photographic style of the ruinous cityscape pictured by Moriyama Daido and other photographers. As the director’s subjective presentation of the urban ruinophilia, the ruin gaze conjures a world of specters with the analogy of the urban landscape with the tomb yard, representing the entanglement of the desire and death during the time of rapid urbanization. The desire for the ruins is also communicated by the erotic acts in the film. From the gaze to
the corporal engagement, the erotic tension is characterized by the destructive impulse against the city, the authority, and the self, which allegorically connotes the end of an era of the nation and the individual. Through the narrative, Terayama’s farewell to the liminal point of Tokyo city life on the threshold of 1960’s and 1970’s is uttered with a poignant eroticism. Indicating the visual obsession, the ruins are aestheticized as arts that merge with their urban settings. They bear the gaze of appreciation from their observers, and testify of “ruinophilia” for the state of fragmentation and the abandonment. Coined by Svetlana Boym, the term “ruinophilia” refers to the appreciation for the ruins that evoke the sensual pleasure in their beholders, so that “the fascination for ruins is not merely intellectual, but also sensual. Ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality” (Ruins of Modernity 58). Unlike the nostalgic-evoking ruins with historical vestige, the modern ruins of urban decay and scattered fragments in the film not only demonstrate the political stance against the authority as is discussed above. They also provoke the sensual exaltation of envisioning the destruction of the metropolis, indicating the eros in the ruin gaze that intimately associate with the dramatic reconstruction of the city landscape during the postwar era.iii
The ruinophilic presentation of the city ruins in the film is reminiscent of the dialectics of the destructive impulse addressed by Benjamin. As is elucidated by Pensky, “The modern metropolis bears, not surprisingly, a dialectical relation to this archaic image (of the labyrinth), both consciously renouncing it, indeed attacking it with a degree of violence (…) and yet at the same time unconsciously replicating the labyrinth in a variety of media” (Pensky “Memory, catastrophe, destruction” 209).According to Benjamin, the destructive impulse is unveiled via the imagination of the city labyrinth where individuals find themselves lost, disorientated and repressed in the compact urban environment. In the film’s context, emerged in the 1960’s, the commercial district of Shinjuku was regarded as a newly born urban mythology in Japan. With its skyscrapers vertically redefining Tokyo’s skyline, Shinjuku mystified the city layout with its labyrinth-like station located at its heart. Along with the booming consumerism and flourishing commercial industries, it fostered the red-light district and subcultural groups that greatly contributed to Shinjuku’s enigmatic existence. In addition to its glorified image, the condensed living space and the veridical growth of Shinjuku commercial district symbolize the myth of the postwar reconstruction of Japan of capitalism and social orders, which is based on the value exchange of commodity and currency on the city ruins of war and destruction directed by U.S-Japan collaboration. It is in this context that the Shinjuku labyrinth is imagined with the ambivalent feeling in 1960’s underground films,
which share a theme of the desperate life in the fanciful district and the hidden desires to disturb the social order.iv
Compared to other artists, Terayama’s presentation of Shinjuku as both the mythical labyrinth and the timeless graveyard marks a unique expression of the 1960’s collective ruinophilia in all fields of art practice. In the film, Terayama’s multi-media language allows to express the destructive desire against the city through the images of the hidden ruins of the city labyrinth. Distanced from the narrative streams of the family life and the social life, which are respectively colored in green and slight blue, the mythical city ruins bear analogy to the graveyard and the wasteland owing to the nightmarish black and white coloring, typical of the photographic style in the provoke era. These presentations of the 1960’s collective “Shinjuku ruinophila” is most notably displayed through Terayama’s inter-medial dialogues with the photographic works of Araki Nobuyoshi and Moriyama Daido (who were both established photographers and collaborate artists in the film’s production). It’s also noteworthy to mention that Terayama’s inter-medial dialogue with Moriyama Daido even extended to his posthumous republication of the 1966 novel Ah! Wasteland with Moriyama’s photos as illustrations. As early as the writing of Ah! Wasteland, Terayama already perceives Shinjuku as “the wasteland of neon lights”, as the dramatic transformation of the urban mirage evokes nihilism in the postwar generations, only to provide the feeling that they are merely ghosts haunting the ruins. These imageries echo Moriyama’s photographic expression, which emphasizes the estranged nature of the urban environment through the fragments, wastes, and eerie lighting in resemblance to the devastating and incendiary effect of the war ruins.
In the film, Moriyama’s photos are featured with the mono-colored overexposure. The stark contrast of black and white, the seemingly random distribution of the light and shadow along with the texture of coarse particles characterize the technique of deliberate abrasion and ruination of the surface of the urban landscape. Moriyama’s photographic narration of the artificial ruination is further deployed in Terayama’s simulation with the analogy to the graveyard, with the connotation of death and the dystopian imagination. Taking example from Moriyama’s photo of overlooking the cityscape through the window plane (Figure 1.7 right), Terayama employs the same perspective over the desolated graveyard (Figure 1.7 left). Following the scene of the panoramic city view of Shinjuku, the tombstones in the static scene assume the same modality with the clusters of skyscrapers, exhibiting a variation of the ruinophilic gaze over the urban ruins to produce an association with decadence and death.
Figure 1.7: The overlooking view of Moriyama’s photo (right) of the cityscape and Terayama’s shooting (left) of the desolated graveyard cramped with tombstones (Throw Away the Book, Rally on the Street, 1971). The two artists’ inter-medial expressions of ruin gaze are so harmonized in style that they become almost undistinguishable in the film. This practice manifests Terayama’s intention to imitate the static effect of the photograph, not only to blur the boundary of visual art forms but also to envision the city in the lifeless landscape of stillness, as death eventually devours the grandeur of the metropolis. The iteration of the images of death and city ruins is of dialectic nature. The destructive impulse is intensely presented against the metropolis, incorporating the revenge for the urban myth and the obsession to replicate and defamiliarize it through the inter-media dialogue of the ruinophilic gaze.
Since the ruinophilic gaze is already inherent to the desire of envisioning the urban destruction, the corporal engagement further eroticizes this impulse. A year prior to the release of the film, in the conversation with his contemporary writer Mishima Yukio, Terayama contends that eroticism serves as the counter-cultural emotion during the postwar era (“The Conversation of Terayama and Mishima Yukio” 23). This perception not only reveals the erotic expressions in the postwar arts as powerful dissents against the authority and institution, but also indicates the affective nature of the spontaneous outlet of the historic emotion. In the film, the scene depicting a young couple making love in a railway tunnel is one of the most powerful visual presentations of the era. Following the image of the inflamed U.S. national flag, the arch of the tunnel resembles the gate or the door, symbolizing the moment of threshold on this critical point of history (Figure 1.8). As a form of political critique, the love-making scene signifies the erotic dimension of the collaborative politics between U.S and Japan during the postwar era. It’s also interesting to observe that, the visual structure of the scene bears high resemblance to Ikeda Tatsuo's famous painting Sinking Hole (1955) (Figure 1.9), which portrays a collapsing tunnel and a railway track with a black hole
in it. Unaware of the danger, the Japanese soldier on one end of the tunnel is almost gliding down into the hole. His helmet is already falling. Featured with the style of the Soviet realism, Ikeda's painting is composed as an allegorical alarm for the war trap that will eventually draw the whole nation once again into the abyss of destruction. Although it has the identical structure with that of Ikeda, the image of the tunnel and the track in Terayama’s scene, are underlined with an immersion of erotic pleasure. Enveloped in the darkness of the tunnel and unaware of the danger, the passionate and inseparable lovers in the middle of the track could be run over by the train at any moment. However, the self-destructive pleasure symbolizes more than just the endangerment of political intimacy: it also renders the nuances of the irreversibility of historical disaster that foresee the present as the future ruins. The erotic gesture addresses the ambivalent feeling of being present at the threshold between passion and death, maintenance and destruction. The indulgence in the destructive imagination reflects on the futility and vulnerability of the “lost generation” in the face of the unpredictable future.
Figure 1.8: The love making scene in the tunnel (Throw
Away the Books, Rally on the Street, 1971).
Figure 1.9: Sink Hole by Ikeda Tatsuo, 1955.
Apart from the feeling of indulgence and vulnerability on the threshold of the era, the erotic act in the film assumes the symbolic meaning as the threshold of the individual’s life in the chaotic time. This theme is narrated by Eimei’s first sexual encounter with the prostitute introduced to him by the soccer team leader. Lying on his belly for the whole time, Eimei is depicted almost as a corpse, with the red robe of the hostess on the mattress resembling a pool of blood. The background music is a mixture of Eimei’s crying, folk songs, and the monk’s
chanting, the latter usually performed at the funeral to liberate the soul from the body (Figure 1.10). Eimei is pictured as a young man attending his own funeral, transgressing the threshold of life and death in the symbolic ritual. His experience proves to be disastrous as he escapes with unexplained reason. His farewell to the past is no less traumatic than experiencing another death. Hence in the film, this erotic gesture is displayed as a metaphor of experiencing destruction and death on the thres
hold of the time, synchronizing the
individual desire with the collective impulse of self-destruction.
Figure 1.10 The superimposing of layers of scenes of Eimei’s encounter (Throw Away the Book, Rally on the
Street, 1971).
Synthetizing Terayama’s expressions of and reflections on the destructive desire in the film, the scene represents the self-destruction on the threshold through the dazzling superimposition of various media forms, where the fragmented visual ruins of the human body and the environment intersect with each other, bringing together the ruinophilic gaze and the erotic act. It is also to be noted that, by way of equating the ruin gaze with the erotic act as expressions of the destructive impulse, the erotic act becomes infected by the historical melancholy of the ruinophilic gaze. It comes to evoke a collective nostalgia for the fast fading “youth” of the postwar generation as well as democratic Japan, which is perceived to be built on the vast destruction of war ruins.
Conceptualizing the life upon the postwar ruins as a collective perception, Terayama allegorizes the ruins to render the ontological question of living in the ruinous home that
confused by the breakage of history. He also highlights the climax of 1960’s social ruins with both the objective reportage from documentary clips, upon which he insert his social critique and political attitude by mixing it with theatrical settings. Apart from this social concern for the ruins, he captures the aesthetic rendition of the ruins through the prevalent ruin gaze. Yet his invention here isn’t merely confined to intertextual references to other artists’ works in his film. He presents the sensual motivation of the ruinophilic gaze as the dialectical desire for destruction, and more explicitly translates this desire to the erotic acts as the utterance for the end of the era. In the inter-medial presentations of both the family live and social life, the images of the ruins conjoin the multi-directioned narratives, which reflects Terayama’s exploration of the collective perception of the ruin culture in postwar Japan and its torturing effect on the rootless generation. More importantly, he relates this culture to the lack of recognition of the pre-war history. This theme is further reified by the images of the ruins of the countryside in Terayama’s next film Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974). Again, in
Pastoral, Terayama visualizes these philosophical concerns by way of using the inter-medial
techniques of synthesizing film shots with photos, theatrical performance, musicals and filters, and even his own poems. The fragments of media types and narrative lives are incorporated as a unity, to explore the question of how subjective memory produces ruins of the objective past.
CHAPTER TWO
The Nostalgic Ruins of the Countryside and the Freedom from History
Following Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street, the second full-length film directed by Terayama Shuji, Pastoral: To Die in the Country (『田園に死す』, den’en ni sisu, also known as Pastoral Hide and Seek) was released in 1974, winning Terayama a worldwide reputation after its oversea premiere at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. The film audaciously employs the surreal images and the story-in-story narrative to present the childhood memory and history as the fictive creations of one’s memory, and to question the possibility of de-historicizing one’s identity.
Pastoral: To Die in the Country, is a poetically composed elegy lamenting the ruination
of Japan’s prewar pastoral life. Being a multifaceted artist, Terayama produces the film based on his 1965 Tankav prose collection with the same title, giving visual expression to such
themes as children’s hide-and-seek, the mountain of grave tombs, the family shrine, the abandoned landscape, and etc. Voiced with Terayama’s own recitation of the texts, these poetic imageries are integrated into the film narrative with the Tanka lines imprinted on the moving scene of the lifeless mountain in the rural countryside. The trans-media device enables Terayama to bring forth the lyrics of nostalgia from the beginning of the film, and to later unfold his contemplation on the fictive nature of memory and history as the imagined past. However, the harmonious pastoral life indicated by the title is absent in the film. Despite the fact that the Japanese term “den’en” (田園, usually translated as “pastoral”) refers to the idealized life in the countryside in the pre-modern time, this nostalgic imagination of the harmonious life in the nature is presented as the isolation in the bleak landscape, with the ominous shadow of death and decadence enveloping the marginal village. This uncanny environment in turn beautifies the protagonist’s affection for his lover. Yet in the second narrative line, even the flicker of happiness is exposed as a lie. Composed with the story-in-story narrative, the film in the first part tells about the protagonist Shin’s teenage life with his mother at the foot of the isolated and mythical mountain of Aoyama, which is also the director’s hometown. Shin lost his father who was sent to war long ago and grows more and more rebellious against his controlling mother. He becomes obsessed with the beautiful neighbor who’s married to a wealthy man but secretly yearns to break away from the dominant family, and plans to elope with her away from the countryside by a train in the
midnight. Then, the narration of Shin’s happily ended idyllic life is suddenly interrupted by an interval. In the short interval part, the narrative is interrupted by the contemporary world where a director is watching his film in a small showing room. It transpires that what was shown as the first part was actually the footage of the director autobiographic film of this childhood. Awaiting edition, the preliminary version perturbs the director as “a pack of lies”, confronting him to the fact that the more effort he makes to objectify his memory and the images of the landscape, the more distorted they seems to appear. Disturbed by the intangible nature of the memory, the director plunges himself into the retrospection of his “pastoral” past, by entering the film himself. Through the symbolic act of “editing”, the director walks into his film as the second part begins. Here, he brings the idyllic world to the total subversion. The previous film edition is now revised in the dispersed ruins of the countryside. Along with the ruinous landscape, the characters are revealed to suffer ostracism, isolation, and death. To be liberated from the infinite revision and ruination of the past, the director ends up colluding with his boy-self to kill his mother. However, the killing fails and leads to the director’s reconciliation with the shattered past.
Instead of reflecting and reimaging the iconoclastic practice and social turmoil of Japan’s past decades, as was the case in Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street, Pastoral:
To Die in the Country demonstrates Terayama’s inclination to detach himself from the
political enthusiasm (which was still resonant in the 1970’s) expressed by his peer artists. This results in his alienation from the leftist artists in Tokyo’s experimental theatre groups at the period. Yet the film’s presentation of both the grotesque and nostalgia-evoking hometown could be regarded as a consistent theme developed from the former film. The home as the ruin is represented here as an isolated countryside, as the film unfolds an autobiographical narrative based on Terayama’s memory of his hometown in Aomori’s mountain area. The adoption of the narrative lines of the memory (the past, the dream) and the reality (the present) is also reminiscent of the multi-narratives in Throw Away the Books, Rally on the Street. However, the story-in-story narrative differs from the parallel structure of the former film. It unfolds Terayama’s attempt to plunge into the enclosed world of the past in search of an intertwinement (or the entire irrelevance of it) of the personal identity and history. This tendency by no means suggests the director’s break with his effort to reflect on the issues of reality. Instead, Terayama’s recreation of the marginalized world of the ruinous countryside represents the collective anxiety of reevaluating the prewar past and history. Terayama, however, adopts a sarcastic attitude and creates a parody of this retrospective effort.
Apart from the reflection on the ruins as metaphors of the fragmented modality of the home and history, and as an expression of the collective anxiety towards the past, the hometown ruins are brought in connection with the deserted natural landscape and the marginal lives in the countryside. The director’s focus on the marginal landscape and the peripheral social groups in this film echoes the representation of the “the native strangers” living on the borders of Tokyo in his former film. But in this film, the ruins of the countryside are further conceptualized as the allegorical space of the geographical, social and cultural marginality, as well as the topographic configuration of the haunting past. The ruins’ association with marginality offers a way to contest the hegemonic discourse of the grand narrative of history. This is achieved by staging the outdated prewar village life and the outcast characters in the surrealistic parody. Herein, Terayama contrives a way to reimagine the continuity of history, by mythologizing the domination of oblivion that surpasses history’s breakage. Moreover, the oblivion is not only shown as operated by memory, it's also represented from the perspective of the margin, that in the state of stagnancy, the marginal is forever left untouched by the transforming force of time. Therefore, this chapter intends to argue that, rather than implying a de-historicizing attempt, Terayama strives to examine how the manipulation of memory affects the historicity of the past and present, and how one wrestles and negotiates with the irreversible past. Besides that, the reflection of history is also presented through the marginal’s seeming irrelevance to the grand narrative of history. Thus, three main aspects of imagining the marginal ruins in the film come to our view. First, as the ruins and the ruination of the countryside are presented through the story-in-story structure, the dynamics of the dual narratives could be read as the vengeance of the present to the haunting past. I will start with Svetlana Boym’s theory of restorative and reflective form of nostalgia, as the clue to the film’s dual structure. Then, this theory will allow me to examine how the latter form of nostalgia seeks to deny (and take revenge on) the former through the ruination of the reimagined past and the allegorized “murder” of the past. Third, the ruins of the countryside are not merely displayed by the surrealistic images of the desolate yet mystic rural settings, but are also staged through the extravagant performance of the characters at the margin. These marginal figures, the prewar specters and phantasms, are imagined in the state of abjection by both the physical and conceptualized ruins. By invoking the notion of the abject (from Kristeva’s psychical abjection to Yael Nevaro’s abjected space), I’ll examine how, in Terayama’s film, the ruinous space of the circus on the margin of the countryside addresses the fantasy for freedom enabled by the abjected ruins.
2.1 The Nostalgic Ruination of the Past
The bifurcating narratives are employed to exhibit two different nostalgic retrospections of the director-protagonist's boyhood. The eulogized and mystified story (though with the ruinous details that foreshadow its fictive nature) delineated in the first half of the film is reversed in the second. I consider the relation of the two narratives in much relevance to Boym’s conception of the “restorative nostalgia” and the “reflective nostalgia”. Pointing out that the word “nostalgia” consists of both “nostos—return home, and algia—longing” (The
Future of Nostalgia XXXI). Boym argues that the two parts respectively emphasize the acts of
“returning” and “longing”. While the former expresses a self-claimed legitimacy to reconstruct the “authentic” history, the later tends to evoke the retrospective imagination by contemplating on the ruins.
The first category of nostalgics does not think of themselves as nostalgic, they believe that their project is about truth. … Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in complete reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time (The Future of Nostalgia 41).
According to Boym, the distinction between the restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia lies in their different methods of representing the past. The self-evidence of authenticity assumed by the restorative nostalgia generates the fetish to restore an aestheticized and purified past, while for the reflective nostalgia’s ruins and fragments (which are usually deemed to be “out of space”) speak best for themselves in representing the unrepresentable past. However, the dual narratives in the film are not rigidly demarcated to demonstrate the opposition of the two nostalgias. The first story is already conveyed with the reflective traces of the ruins, and the second half remains to “edit” the past through the denial of the former, indicating a more ambivalent perception of the nostalgia as the entanglement of both longing and hatred, renovation and ruination. What is more, either case of restorative or reflective nostalgia defined by Boym is assumed with a hegemonic retrospect from the present, whereas Terayama is more inclined to bring about dialogues between the past and present. This is most prominently embodied by the interactions of the two selves, which is a key device in examining the past-present relationship in the film (Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 The director’s conversation with his boy self in the second half of the film (Pastoral: To Die in the
Country, 1974).
Corresponding with the story-in-story narrative, the protagonist splits into two selves: the boy “I” and the director “I”. As the director’s autobiographical projection, as well as the observer and escaper from the past, the youth is featured wearing a typical prewar period school uniform and the traditional Kabuki makeup, which ostensibly underscore the theatrical feature of the figure. Through the director’s encounter and collusion with his fictive self, Terayama uncovers the elusive and fictive nature of personal memory and collective history, which seem to be forever subjected to the repetitive revision by one’s subjective memory. This main theme is not uncovered until the interval part, where through the dialogue with his alter-ego—a film critic—the director confides his anxiety for representing the past:
Director: At all extends, I’m feeling shackled using my childhood as the subject of the film. It feels like that I’m abusing it, both the experience and the landscape. The more I picture it, the vaguer it gets. When you begin to objectify yourself and the background, they turn out to be projected as cheap spectacles.
Critic: But this is the way to free yourself from childhood and its settings. Anyway, the past is but a fiction (translated by the author from Japanese).
