Nureki Chimuo Archive

Rakka-san and I went to the City of Illusions together.

The phrase “City of Illusions” sounds rather trite, cliched, and unoriginal, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it.

“Today, I’m going to take you to a certain place for about four hours. When the four hours are up, I’ll take you home,” I said to Rakka-san in front of the Kabuki-za, which had just reopened to a bustling crowd following its lavish renovation.

“Four hours?” she replied, looking up at me.

She didn’t ask anything else.

For a moment she wore a puzzled expression, but it wasn’t one of anxiety.

Rakka-san and I were standing in line with the other audience members to get seats in the balcony.

Even though it was called “The City of Illusions,” I wasn’t picturing a kabuki stage.

A theater usher, holding a small counter, was counting the number of people in line.

“Will we be able to get in?” I asked the young man in the black suit.

“You can get in, but it’ll be standing room only. There are no more seats available,” the young man, who hadn’t yet adopted the air of someone who worked at this theater, replied simply, though somewhat brusquely.

It was a line of audience members waiting to see a single act of “Benten Musume Meo no Shiranami.” Kikugoro as Benten, Sadanji as Nango, and Kichiemon as Nihon Daemon. From the Hamamatsuya scene to the Namekawa Dobashi scene. Two thousand yen.

But I wasn’t standing in line to watch the play. I had absolutely no intention of watching it that day. I was just pretending to be a customer there to see a single act.

Going along with my whim, Rakka-san was silently standing in line with me.

We’d have to wait in line for over an hour yet to see the stage. At this hour, they should have been performing the first act of Kichigoro’s “Kumagai Jinya.” (By now, they’re probably around the second half of Midaroku’s entrance.)

If I had stayed in line, would she have intended to stand there silently with me? I wouldn’t know unless I asked her.

Actually, on that day we had already finished watching a fairly long movie. It was a somewhat tiring movie.

I had intended to take a break, which was why I’d joined the line of people waiting to catch the curtain call. So, after about ten minutes I left the line.

Next to the main entrance, there was an escalator leading down to the newly opened second basement level, so I got on it.

Along the way, souvenir shops hung with colorful lanterns, as if they were directly connected to the Kabuki-za lobby, lined the area, loudly calling out to customers.

“Wow, this place has really become lively. I’m surprised,” I exclaimed without thinking. Passing through the souvenir shops, I emerged at the Higashi-Ginza Station on the Metro.

From the ticket gates, I took another escalator down a few meters to the underground platform, transferred trains, and, taking Rakka-san with me, headed for the City of Illusions.

That day, I had been reading a detective novel for children, supposedly written by Seishi Yokomizo in 1928, and my mind had gone a little haywire.

It was a large, sturdy, thick book titled “Selected Detective Novels by Seishi Yokomizo,” priced at 3,200 yen and containing 570 pages. Because it was so heavy, I had put it in my backpack to read.

While reading the story “The Swirling Thick Fog” inside it, I, a circus enthusiast, started to lose my mind.

ago.

The year 1928 was two years before I was born. In other words, it was over eighty years

It was a time shortly after the transition from the Taisho to the Showa era, when social trends were still heavily influenced by the “Taisho Romanticism,” or rather, the “Taisho erotic-grotesque-nansensu” movement.

In the imaginations of children, the legends of the circus, filled with those eerie yet sweet hues, were still vividly alive.

It was an era when men and women, who had spent their lives watching the faces of those in power, finally gained a free vitality. At times, they smeared themselves with garish mud-like paint and danced out into the streets, exuding an air of decadence and eroticism.

The Showa Circus Troupe, as it was called, set up its big top within the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine in Kudan, which was bustling with the Soul-Summoning Festival.

There, boys and girls, some kidnapped, others sold into servitude, were being trained in their acts by a ringmaster called “One-Eyed Tiger,” dressed in a gaudy gold outfit as he lashed them with a long leather whip stained with the blood of countless victims.

On a night of fierce rain and wind, the boys and girls who escaped from the big top were caught as they descended the Kudan slope and were subjected to a terrifying punishment.

“The pitiful fugitives were stripped nearly naked and thrown onto the ground. The troupe leader, One-Eyed Tiger, stands there like a demon from hell. The leather whip lashes through the air with a whoosh. Each time, the fugitives let out screams like dying patients. Whether on their chests or backs, their bodies are covered in welts like earthworms. In places, the skin is torn and the flesh is split open like a pomegranate.

‘Hey, everyone!’ the master said, his blind eye gleaming white as he laughed with obvious pleasure.

‘This is the punishment for a fugitive. Watch closely.’”

From this point on, he recounts the story in an entertaining manner, occasionally interweaving a touch of nostalgia.

“Come to think of it, there used to be rumors about circus troupes like that,” he says. But when I was a child, it wasn’t a legend or a fictional story. There were stories that circus troupes would abduct boys and girls wherever they traveled and train them to be performers. We half-believed it.

Even Seishi Yokomizo, author of “The Village of Eight Graves,” wrote a serious novel about such traveling circus troupes aimed at young readers as early as 1928.

Fujio and Michio join hands and flee from the terrifying big top. The circus gangsters are hot on their heels.

The two boys fled for their lives, hiding deep within the alleys of the town. They heard a voice behind them.

“Hey, aren’t they in there?”

“That might be it. We could still see them just a moment ago, but now they’ve suddenly disappeared, haven’t they?” In the phantom town where Rakka-san and I got off the train, there was a small shop selling boiled beans. It was an old wooden building that also sold steamed sweet potatoes. The back was dark, and we couldn’t see a thing.

At that shop, I bought some boiled green peas. I remembered the taste of those salt-boiled peas very clearly.

A bag of red peas cost 120 yen.

A bag of black peas cost 100 yen.

Both were packed in bags made of old newspaper, not clear plastic bags.

The owner of the pea shop was a surly man in his fifties who looked like the ringmaster of a traveling circus.

I handed the bag of red peas to Rakka-san and put the bag of black peas into the backpack I was carrying.

“Oh, thank you.” Rakka-san said. We started walking again.

There was a used bookstore. Although the entrance was narrow, the interior was long and narrow. It was the kind of used bookstore that seemed to go on forever without ever reaching a dead end.

I bought two old magazines lined up at the storefront. Then we turned left at the intersection. I’d been to this town with Rakka-san several times before, and I knew that when night fell men in black suits would gather and stand on street corners.

Since I’m always with Rakka-san the men don’t hit on me, but if I were alone they’d definitely come up to me.

Next, we turned right and went deeper into the neighborhood. The scenery began to change. The buildings looked increasingly old. It was a corner where the low-eaved, soot-stained shops and bars stood in a haphazard row, and the air was thick and damp.

There was a narrow alley. After confirming the sign visible at the end of the alley, I stepped inside.

In Seishi Yokomizo’s time, it was written as “露地,” and I used to write it as “路次” myself, but now I write it as “路地.”16

I walked ahead and Rakka-san followed behind me. It was so narrow that the two of us couldn’t walk side by side. I thought to myself, “Aren’t we on some kind of amazing adventure right now?”

Perhaps those thugs from the circus troupe might chase us all the way to the end of this alley. I quickened my pace.

On the right side of the alley, doors that appeared to be back entrances to various buildings lined the street in a bleak row, while on the left, a tall, gray wall of rough concrete stretched on.

After proceeding about fifteen meters, the entrance to the building I was aiming for suddenly opened up before me, revealing a narrow lobby.

I stepped inside as if drawn in. Rakka-san followed close behind.

There was a reception desk. I peered inside but no one was there. It was deserted. On the wall right next to the desk, a dozen or so postcard-sized slides depicting the bedrooms in each room were lined up.

The lights were on in three or four of them. A lit room meant it was available. Below each slide was a sign indicating the rate per hour.

When I tapped the slide of a room on the fourth floor with my fingertip, the light went out.

I leaned closer to the counter once more and called out, but there was no sign of anyone inside. Based on my past experience, the person on the other side of the counter would usually hand me the room key.

But neither a person nor a key appeared. Instead, a thin strip of paper slid out from the bottom of the slide where the light had just gone out.

When I picked up the strip of paper, it read, “Welcome. Your room is No. 402. Please make yourself at home.”

16

This is the Japanese writings for “roji,” which means alley, as it has evolved.

I was surprised. In short, I could enter the room I wanted without ever seeing a person or exchanging a word.

After taking five or six steps back from the lobby, I found a small elevator.

I got off on the fourth floor and looked for my room. The light above the door to Room 402 was blinking on and off.

“This place feels just like it used to,” I muttered. The door was already open.

I was surprised again. When I opened the door, right in front of me, just a stone’s throw away, was an automatic room fee payment machine mounted on the wall. It was set up so that when I finished my business and left the room, I would insert money into the machine.

“I wonder what would happen if I didn’t put money in here when I leave?” I muttered.

“I guess the door wouldn’t open,” said Rakka-san.

“If I didn’t have any money, would I be locked inside this room? That’s scary,” I said.

“Would you mind spending just four more hours with me today?”

I remembered saying that to Rakka-san in front of the Kabuki-za. Of those four hours, one had already passed.

“They must have fled somewhere around here.”

The members of the circus troupe were still shouting somewhere.