1 September 2006 Written by Andrew Eglinton Print This Post  Email This Post

I’m sitting in the front row of a small Tokyo theatre. The stage is only partially lit but I can see the contours of a children’s playground; there’s a see-saw, a climbing frame and sand on the ground to break one’s fall. I scrape the grit with my feet and wonder how far it reaches into the darkness of the auditorium. Can the people behind me feel it too? The benches are filling up quickly now and the show will begin in a few minutes time. My body feels compressed by the weight of those beside me; someone’s knee just pinned my lower back; I try turning to view the culprit, but I’m stuck, hemmed in wall-to-wall with complete strangers, and in this moment I feel like the most complete of strangers. I, a student, a theatre goer, a Westerner: a foreigner. For a while I toy with the curiosity of this feeling but the thought vanishes when against all odds, a tall man squeezes himself into the row letting off a chain of gasps down the line. Frantic glances are exchanged left to right, reserved yet venemous, each one seeking to blame the other for this predicament. The spectator must suffer for art just as much as the artist, art is pain, we cannot have it any other way unless we are fully prepared to consume it like we do chicken soup…in many cases it already is.

I rationalise the situation as part of the urban paradox: We flock like sheep through cityscapes; thousands congregating in empty Mecca’s called Shinjuku, Shibuya, Leicester Square, Times Square, Châtelet and on and on. There, as a group of fellow humans, each one as curious and lost as the next and yet we are desperate to uphold and protect the individual that was born to us from the city, because in the absence of space we only have ourselves, our bodies, our ‘personal/inner space’ so we make it a fortress. John Donne once wrote: No man is an island, entire of itself every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main […]” but in this hyper-urban age of loneliness, in this city of concrete and glass, and here on this stiff wooden bench I am beginning to disagree, although in theatre, perhaps there is still hope?

The stage is plunged into silent darkness. After a long pause, a sonorous melody played by a walking band clears the stale air and brings soft light to the stage. Into the light spring two girls in ivory wedding gowns, they chase each other across the stage, tripping and tumbling in the sand. I watch this ‘innocent’ child’s play perplexed by their appearance: girls in spirit but women in form. I recall an old conversation with a university professor who brought up the word ‘shoujyo’ (少女) to describe an isolated trend among young Japanese women today. Perhaps what I see before me are ‘shoujyo’. The dictionary translation is ‘little girl’ or ‘maiden’ but that conveys only half the meaning, the other half is steeped in sexual overtones, the type that are repressed by society and tremble at the fringes.

The child’s play continues but it is not long before a third girl enters the playground. She is the turning point, the intruder, the element of chaos, and the girls are fighting now, clawing and ripping at their ivory gowns. I notice a heightened sense of concentration from the audience around me, almost as if this is what they had been waiting for. In the academic world it is argued that ‘shoujyo’, as a social phenomenon amongst young Japanese women, is possibly the expression of an alternative female existence; one that opposes the age-old patriarchal rules. To me it seems like a denial of thought and the structured world. It is animalistic, spontaneous and emotional by nature and it feeds off primal instincts that have been banished for so long in the dungeons of male taboo. It is the modern day Mt Kithairon, although this time the Bacchae are not led by a male god.

This display of equivocal erotica descends further into the grotesque. More bodies join the romp; dressed in silky lingerie and high heels they contort in the sand like couples in a drunken tango; two of them are writhing at my feet, launching the occasional droplet of sweat or fake blood into the audience. I feel gripped by the violence now, I have forgotten the cramps and the wooden seats. The walls between my neighbours have dissolved and we are watching and breathing as one: as our collective eye is rapt by the abomination on stage, our collective lung is pumping life into the room. The thought of Conrad and Kurtz in the Congo suddenly spring to mind:

“In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him–all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination–you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

The frenzy is over and the walking band’s sweet melody returns; my senses regain composure and I am aware once again of the human body press squeezing me tight. I glance left and right but the reaction is calm, the energy is drained. In that short-lived moment I realise we had become human again. In the face of abomination we were not strangers or foreigners, we were human, every bit as perverse and fragile as you would expect.

My only hope as I walk down the long corridor towards the exit is that we can bring this humanity back to the city with us and that instead of experiencing it through abomination behind closed doors, maybe we can find it in life as it is.