Nureki Chimuo Archive

The performance by the Bando Takejaku troupe at the Yotsugi Heiwa Theater, as noted in my tattered, sixty year old diary, was as follows:

The first week,

1. The Mountain Maiden 2. Shigure no Kotatsu 3. Maruhashi Chuya: The Chase

Act 2

1. Gonsaburo and Skueji 2. The King of Flowers at Hidaka River

That’s all that’s written.

In other words, the cast and other details are not recorded.

It’s literally just a memo.

It was the winter of 1946 (Showa 21), the year after the war ended, and I was sixteen.

In the last few entries, I’ve written my age as seventeen in this text, but it seems I was mistaken.

Counting it up, I was sixteen.

Why did I make such a mistake?

R-san, please tell me what to do.

It feels like a hassle to correct it now. I’m pretty sure I wrote it as seventeen quite a few times.

Part of me thinks, “Who cares about my age, give it a rest.”

This is all I wrote down and the penmanship is a bit messy.

At that time, my sixteen year old heart must have been far from calm.

I think I’d even lost the energy to jot down the cast list.

Maybe I’d just reached a point where I felt, “whatever.”

“The Mountain Maiden” and “Shigure no Kotatsu” and “Maruhashi Chuya” were plays already performed at both the Tsurukame and Shirahige theaters, and the cast was probably the same.

So, maybe that’s why I couldn’t bring myself to write it down.

Even though I was unsettled and had lost my inner peace at that time, as mentioned earlier, I concentrated my mind and watched “Shigure no Kotatsu” intently. And it left an indelible impression on my mind and body, one I will never forget for the rest of my life.

In the moat scene of “Maruhashi Chuya,” I wore a stuffed animal costume, became a dog, and interacted with the blind actor Takejaku’s Maruhashi Chuya. In the chase scene, I became one of the pursuers and was cut down two or three times.

Even without taking notes, I remember the cast for the second act, “Gonsaburo and Sukeju.”

It wasn’t Okamoto Kido’s “Gonsaburo and Sukeju,” but rather the storytelling version of “Ooka’s Judgement,” a script that wasn’t particularly highbrow, heavy on the comedic flavor.

Takejaku played Gonza, and his partner Sukeji was played, surprisingly, by the onnagata Fukunosuke.

This memory is absolutely correct.

The impression of Fukunosuke, whose selling point was his beauty, playing the role of a foolish third-rate character, a palanquin bearer living in a filthy, poor tenement, was intensely powerful to me.

Fukunosuke still did his best to paint the area under his nose blue, and played the dirty, comical role.

Watching him was painful and pitiful.

It was so pitifully sad it made my chest ache. It was a role an onnagata should never have played.

That’s why I remember it so well.

In contrast, in the next act, “Hidakagawa Irai Sakura,” Fukunosuke appeared as a tate-onnagata25, beautifully dressed as a princess, dancing the role of Kiyohime with graceful movements.

This act centers on Kiyohime, who, driven mad by her longing for the absent Anchin, transforms into a serpent. It is the play based on the legendary tale of Anchin and Kiyohime at Dojoji Temple.

The sorrow on the banks of the Hidaka River and the frenzied movements upon the waves are conveyed through the shosa (dance movements).

Shosa, or shosajutsu, refers to dance.

Fukunosuke, as expected, displayed a splendid, highly dignified doll-like dance.

However, while I could see Kiyohime’s movements of love-crazed agony and grief-stricken anguish on the riverbank, I could not see her leaping into the river, swimming, and dancing upon the waves.

Because at that moment, I was crawling beneath the wave curtain, lying sideways, moving the wave cloth with my entire body.

In other words, I had become the waves within the river.

The waves were not just made by me.

There was an actor named Taketsugu who, like me, lay sprawled on the stage, covered by the wave cloth.

I’d like to write a little about Taketsugu.

He was five or six years older than me, probably already over twenty, but since he had joined the troupe recently, I was technically his senior within the company.

A tate-onnagata means lead onnagata.

While submerged beneath the wave cloth, Taketsugu whispered, “Fukujiro-san, you must be hungry. Want something to eat?” and offered me his hand.

I reflexively reached out and took it, saying, “What?”

It was about a hundred brown, burnt rice grains.

I sniffed them. They smelled toasty. In other words, they were roasted rice.

Rice grains roasted in a pot or pan. A handful of food.

“Thank you,” I said, catching them in my palm and popping a few into my mouth. Slightly bitter, fragrant, and delicious.

“They’re good, Taketsugu-san,” I murmured my thanks in a low voice.

Hungry, I finished about a hundred grains of roasted rice in no time. It was so delicious I almost cried. I stuck out my tongue and licked my palm clean. Then Taketsugu gave me another hundred or so grains.

“Eat these, then drink some water later, and you’ll feel full.”

I still cannot forget the delicious taste of that roasted rice I put in my mouth under the wave-beaten shore.

Because I cannot forget it, I am writing this now.

The taste of that handful of hard, charred rice grains, warmed in Taketsugu’s palm.

Yes, I should write a little more about Taketsugu.

He joined the Takejaku troupe, aspiring to be an onnagata.

At first, he wanted to become Fukunosuke’s disciple, but Fukunosuke refused, saying his face and figure weren’t suited for female roles.

He also went to see the young onnagata, Onoe Otojo, but was turned down.

“Then come to us,” Master Takejaku offered him a helping hand. He immediately received the stage name Takeji. “I was so happy,” he told me.

With thick eyebrows, deep-set eyes, a large nose perched high on his face, and thick lips, both upper and lower, forming a crocodile mouth, even I could see Takegutsu had a face unsuited for onnagata.

He was about 150 centimeters tall. While being short is good for an onnagata, his shoulders were broad and sturdy.

But he was a born lover of theater, a good-natured person, and he threw himself passionately into every role.

He seemed to have trained somewhere, as he could deliver his lines clearly on stage.

“Fukujiro-san, Fukujiro-san,” he would say, treating me, his junior, with respect as his senior. Sometimes he would wash my underwear or mend holes in my socks with patches.

After performances at the Heiwa Theater in Yotsugi, I would sometimes become so exhausted and hungry that I could barely move, and going home became a painful ordeal.

The Keisei Bus departing from Ichikawa Station on the Keisei Line went through Konodai to Matsudo Station, and I rode it daily to commute to Yotsugi.

But late at night, that bus stopped running.

Walking from Keisei Konodai Station to my house took nearly an hour, partly because of a long uphill slope along the way.

Walking for an hour with my exhausted body was agonizing. Back then, halfway up that slope, called Ryodan-zaka, I once became unable to move and ended up lying down on the roadside.

Had I fallen asleep, I would have frozen to death.

When I complained about that agony to Taketsugu he said, “In times like that, you should stay at my place. It’s right near Kameari Station, less than a three-minute walk. Don’t be shy. Come on, come on.” He said this gently, and he would take me to the room he rented.

Taketsugu’s rented room was a small four-and-a-half mat space next to the entrance of a tiny house at the end of a narrow alley, reached by turning down it two or three times.

He offered me the only futon set he had.

He would slowly slip his feet in from the foot of the futon where I was sleeping, and we would lie down on the futon, our feet at opposite ends.

Taketsugu’s feet stretched out in front of my face.

“It’s okay. I washed my feet really well, so they don’t smell,” he said, chuckling to himself happily.

Had this been when nearly twenty different SM magazines were published monthly, I would have made this Taketsugu a beautiful young man, made myself a beautiful young man too, and written such a novel it would be dreamlike.

But in reality, nothing happened.

That was the extent of Taketsugu’s and my relationship.

And perhaps because it was only that much, I think, is why I still remember it like this forever.

Despite that terrifying face, the timid, gentle Taketsugu never had the courage to touch my body.

He never even held my hand.

The only time he held my hand was in the waves of the Hidaka River, when he said, “Fukujiro-san, here, eat this,” and placed a handful of roasted rice into my palm.

Ahh, I’ve gone off on a tangent again.

No matter how elegantly Takejaku and Fukunosuke performed “Shigure no Kotatsu,” or how hard the beautiful onnagata Fukunosuke tried playing the third-rate Sukeji, the audience remained sparse every single day.

Old patrons from the Honjo Kotobuki Theater days still made their way to the Tsurukame Theater, located about a thirty-minute ride from Ueno on the Joban Line, a three minute walk from Kameari Station.

But I think there were still very few customers who took the Keisei Line all the way to Yotsugi in Katsushika Ward, searching and searching to find us.

What’s more, around this time, the Keisei Line (though thinking back now, it probably wasn’t just the Keisei Line) didn’t run on schedule. For some reason, it was always stopped somewhere, running late.

Kataoka Tobei joked, “Ah, so this is what they mean when they say ‘no faithfulness in courtesans’.”

I don’t think the local patrons could relate to suddenly being shown “Shigure no Kotatsu.”

That’s probably why they performed the easily understandable comedy “Gonsaburo and Sukeji,” but with the audience sparse, laughter didn’t come.

In the narrow dressing room, like an eel’s bed, I remember Takejaku saying to Fukunosuke with a laugh, “For some reason, whenever we do this play, the troupe’s dissolution seems to draw nearer.”