Nureki Chimuo Archive

As I mentioned in my previous post, about 70 percent of the materials I wrote in the past are currently being preserved at the Sex Industry Museum.

If I include even small sidebars and articles, the total number of pieces I’ve written likely reaches as many as a thousand.

(After all, I’ve been writing for over fifty years.)

Thanks to the sincere devotion of Director Nakahara Rutsu, that 70%, which has been published in magazines and books, is carefully displayed with meticulous attention and sincere effort, ensuring it is accessible to anyone who wishes to read it.

I cannot thank her enough for this. It feels as though even weeds growing by the roadside acquire some kind of value as the years go by.

It is truly a blessing.

The Sex Industry Museum stands as a witness to the majority of my achievements, the fact that a worthless person like me has barely managed to survive.

Director Nakahara occasionally offers me words of praise, but I still cling to the belief that there can be no value in anything I’ve written and cannot shake this deep-seated sense of inferiority.

Then she raises her willow-like eyebrows and encourages me, even showing a hint of anger, saying “It’s okay, it has its own solid value!”

And every time I summon up my courage.

No, I’ve already written about this several times, so I’ll stop here.

My old novel, one that would never be displayed on the shelves of the Sex Industry Museum and that even my devoted reader, Mr. Otaguro, would likely overlook, actually popped out today from a paper bag in the corner of the closet while I was searching for other materials.

It suddenly popped out of a paper bag in the corner of the closet while I was doing that.

It is a fourteen page story titled “The Anniversary of My Kiss with Taeko Sakai,” which I wrote eight years ago under the pen name Toyokazu Iida for a fanzine.

Though brief, it is a piece I hold dear.

The fanzine in which it was published has been lost somewhere, and all that remained in my possession was a copy of the original manuscript.

I would like to take this opportunity to include it in this collection, “Talking Theater.”

Huh… so a man named Nureki Chimuo writes stories like this, too?

You’re probably thinking, “Just how lewd is this guy?” Some of you might be exasperated and give a wry smile. But there is no mistake in my writing. The Anniversary of My Kiss with Taeko Sakai

If you walk along Kasuga Street from Ueno-Hirokoji toward Hongo, you’ll find a small dining spot called “Tsutakichi” on a side street near Yushima Tenjin Shrine.

A rokyoku performance was being held in a tatami room of about 24 mats on the second floor of that restaurant, and it was there that I first met Taeko Sakai. That was last summer.

Taeko was the accompanist on the shamisen for an 80 year old rokyoku singer named Tomon Juro. Though she looked to be in her late twenties, or, even if she were a bit older, perhaps just a year or two over though, she was a shamisen player with a rich, resonant tone full of emotion.

From her petite, slender frame, an indescribably, almost terrifying passion seemed to burst forth.

I don’t know much about the shamisen, but I was deeply moved. After the performance, during the after-party in the second-floor tatami room, I placed a small gift in her hand.

I often go to the theater to watch plays, and I drop by a rakugo or kodan venue on my walks, but I rarely go to places where rokyoku is performed. However, if invited, I’ll even make my way to a small restaurant in Yushima that I’ve never been to before, so I don’t dislike it.

To be honest, as I was preparing the gift money to give to Taeko before the after-party, I had a premonition that I might end up meeting this shamisen player alone someday. Of course, there is a basis for this premonition, but I’ll omit the details here as it would take too long to explain. To dream of being alone with her just because I gave her a gift, without any real basis for it, would make me nothing more than a lecherous old man. No, I suppose there’s no helping it if I’m called a lecherous old man. I am a man who will turn seventy-two this year.

While I had the expectation that we might meet, I also felt that I would likely never have another chance to see her. A rokyoku accompanist, that is, a shamisen player, rarely shows her face in front of the audience. She is, so to speak, a performer in the shadows. Naturally, the premonition that I would never see her again was stronger. In this world, almost everything is a once in a lifetime encounter.

However, the fantasy of talking about the art of a performance alone with a young female performer is enjoyable. The fantasy alone is enough to bring me joy. I have a longing for the world of the arts. My desire for sex has not waned either. The 5000 yen gift I gave her was payment for this fantasy.

The way I’m writing this might make it seem, from the setting to the characters to the situations, as if it were a novel set in the Taisho era or the early Showa era. In fact, I thought the same thing myself, and as I was writing, I found it so funny that I ended up laughing to myself. However, this is unmistakably a modern-day story.

Even in today’s world, where even elementary school students have phones with pictures, photos, and text, and everyone and their dog is glued to their computers, a world like this still exists. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say that it hasn’t disappeared yet.

About a year had passed since that encounter with Taeko, and on Saturday, May 11 of this year, 2002 (come to think of it, the cherry blossoms bloomed unusually early this year, and the Golden Week holiday stretch lasted as long as ten days in some places), I accepted an invitation from a young rakugo performer named Takinogawa Koyata and went once again to a rakugo performance held on the second floor of “Tsutakichi,” behind the Yushima Tenjin Shrine.

Here, I’d like to share a little about myself. As a hobby, I occasionally write scripts for performers at traditional comedy theaters. I call it a hobby because I do this kind of work for free. That’s how I’ve come to know the performers, and they sometimes invite me to their shows. And before I knew it, they started calling me Sensei, the teacher who writes their scripts.

That day, the piece Koyota performed was a new sentimental story I had written, so naturally, I had to go and listen.

The headliner was Baikatei Enji, a veteran born in the Taisho era. However, Taeko Sakai appeared as the shamisen accompanist for Enshi, the oldest performer on stage. It was a

surprise. It must be recognized within the industry that, though Taeko is young, her skills are undeniable.

That evening, I was sitting on a cushion in the audience, in the second row from the front, toward the left side of the stage. I happened to sit there because it was empty, but from this position, with the ballad singer in the middle, I found myself facing the shamisen player.

I wondered if Taeko remembered my face. I figured she probably didn’t.

I was the customer who, a year ago, had suddenly handed her an envelope containing a gift, exchanged a word or two of appreciation, and then simply vanished. I never write my address on the gift envelope.

I simply write “To Taeko Sakai,” and add a small line next to it saying, “That was a splendid performance of ‘O-Satsuma.’ I was very impressed,” and note “Meguro, Iida” in the lower left corner.

“O-Satsuma” is a unique melody used in Nagauta. It is rarely performed on the shamisen in Rakugo.

I hadn’t seen her since that day. It was only natural that she would have forgotten my face.

But she remembered me. I knew it immediately from the way she stared at me while holding her shamisen on the stage’s right side and gripping the plectrum in her right hand. With eyes that were strong and intense, yet somehow moist and lustrous, she was clearly sending some

kind of emotion to my heart. Without thinking, I found myself nodding, as if to say, “Yes, I understand.”

She began to play the shamisen, and Enji began to sing. It was “The White Thread of the Waterfall,” based on the original story by Izumi Kyoka. Enji’s vocal inflections were delivered in a rich, weathered voice befitting his age, narrating this Meiji-era tale of tragic love with the artistry of a master, while Taeko’s shamisen shone with a youthful, resonant tone.

The sound during the “Sawari” section echoed throughout the twenty-four tatami mat room, like the sobs of the ill-fated female performer, Shiraito of the Waterfall. Even to my untrained ear, it was clear that she had improved over the course of the year.

Occasionally, she played with a trembling, almost trance-like, exquisite rhythm and melody, and in that moment, her petite body glowed, radiating an intense eroticism.

I was overcome by an impulse to rush onto the stage, push her down, and take her.

I write this knowing I’ll be laughed at as a conceited man, but her passionate performance felt as though she were aware of me and playing just for my ears. She was seducing me with sound.

There were thirty people in the audience that night, but it seemed to me that half of the enthusiastic applause at the end was directed at the accompanying shamisen.

At the after party that night, I gave Taeko another gift when she approached me. Then, I whispered, “If you don’t have anything else to do, have a drink with me tonight.”

She nodded with her eyes. She would definitely come with me. I was confident of it.

An hour later, Taeko and I were at Ryukodo, a recently popular Chinese a la carte restaurant located on a backstreet off Ueno Hirokoji. The lighting was deliberately dimmed, giving it the feel of a cave.

I sat down next to Taeko. On stage, she naturally wore a kimono and obi, but in private, she was dressed in a blouse and pants. I sat to her left. The stools at this restaurant, which catered to young people, were designed so that when two people sat side by side, their bodies would press close together. We drank Chinese liquor together, and I took her left wrist and said:

“What delicate hands you have. Do you really hold and play that huge shamisen with hands this slender?”

Her fingers were so supple and slender that one might think they lacked bones. As I stroked each finger as if caressing them, “It’s amazing that such powerful, emotionally charged sounds can come from these slender fingers.”

I marveled once again. It was a genuine feeling. She offered no resistance at all. She simply let me do as I pleased.

I wrapped my right arm around her right shoulder and checked the thickness of her right arm by feeling the flesh on her shoulder.

“You hardly have any muscle at all. It’s amazing you can produce sound with this.” I said the same thing again. I couldn’t help but say it. I then used my right hand to check the flesh of her thighs. Over her black panties, of course. I pressed down with my fingers and caressed her left and right thighs as if kneading them.

She didn’t try to escape. She brought her knees together slightly and pressed them firmly against my right knee.

I knew of the loneliness in her heart. Over the past year, bits and pieces of her personal circumstances had gradually reached my ears. It wasn’t that I’d actively sought them out, but when you’re writing scripts for young performers, such rumors naturally come to your attention. To me, each and every rumor seemed to be connected to her artistic talent.

She was married. Her husband, they said, was a man of poor character who didn’t work.

“He’s a terrible man, that guy. Half of Taeko’s misfortune is that man’s fault,” a young man in the know told me. And this isn’t a rumor. It’s something I’ve known from the start, having seen it with my own eyes. She has a bad left leg. In other words, she limps. It wasn’t particularly noticeable, but if you paid close attention, there was a distinct quirk in her gait. For a woman, this was a source of deep insecurity. I thought that this sense of inferiority was likely the driving force behind her shamisen playing.

It’s not just that her technique is superb. Her tone is imbued with a fiery spirit that borders on resentment. The first time I heard her, I was shaken to the core and utterly captivated by the eerie, dark resonance of passion lurking beneath the shamisen’s brilliant melody.

It wasn’t just the sound of the shamisen. That dark passion gushed forth from her entire body, radiating light and captivating me with its intense eroticism.

Inside the cave, while drinking Chinese liquor, Taeko and I talked. Taeko said she wanted to perform rakugo herself. She said she wanted to do not just the shamisen, but the storytelling as well. She said she had written the script for it herself and that it was already finished.

From the way she spoke, I realized this woman knew quite a bit about me. She was an enigmatic figure, but she must have heard from someone that I was a writer who penned scripts. Just as rumors about her had reached my ears, various rumors had reached hers as well. And in fact, I had factored that into my plan. This was precisely what confirmed my hunch that if I invited her, she would surely come along.

“I want to tell the story of a woman who falls in love with a man, becomes utterly obsessed with him, and chases after him to the very end, no matter what,” she said.

“Are you going to perform it as a singer-songwriter? That’s going to be tough.”

She explained that she would play the shamisen herself while simultaneously handling both the narration and the singing. It is a performance style that only a highly skilled artist could pull off.

“But you see, Sensei, now that I’ve taken the plunge into the world of rokyoku, if I don’t go all the way, I won’t be able to convey my feelings,” Taeko said. The expression “to convey my feelings” delighted me.

I asked her a few questions about the script she had written. She gave quick, intelligent answers. Realizing she was quite the literary young woman, I was moved. (Could such an intellectual woman really exist in the world of Naniwabushi, a genre often looked down upon as a representative of vulgar popular entertainment that peddles sentimentality and duty?)

She was well-versed in both domestic and foreign literature, having even read novels by Latin American authors. There was a sharp insight in every word she spoke, and she possessed a unique critical acumen that wasn’t merely borrowed, which delighted me once again.

At some point, when the conversation turned to sex between men and women, a bold yet witty expression, typical of a married woman, came out of her mouth.

She and I burst out laughing. The moment was ripe. I grabbed her small head with one hand, turned her face toward mine, and kissed her.

When I sucked hard, I smelled the scent of a shamisen. A shamisen couldn’t possibly have a scent, nor could it possibly emanate from a woman’s mouth, yet I sensed the scent of a shamisen. Or perhaps it was the scent of the shamisen’s skin. At that moment, her tongue slipped into my mouth. It was a delicate, tiny tongue. Inside my mouth, that piece of flesh swelled into a firm mass. I sucked as hard as I could, and her tongue swelled even hotter.

“It’s suffocating, I can’t breathe,” she said, shaking her head.

This happened on the night of Saturday, May 11, 2002. It was the anniversary of my first kiss with Taeko Sakai. As we left “Tsutakichi,” the venue for the Rakugo performance, I thought to myself, “Let’s just stick to kissing tonight. Let’s keep it to just kissing and see how things go

from there.” So that night, it was just a kiss. That was my calculation as a man, but she, too, must have had her own calculations in mind when she accepted my invitation. I know very well that women like this are actually the most dangerous. After all, I am a man who has lived for seventy two years.

（二〇〇二年五月十二日） (May 12, 2002)