Theater of Cruelty (51 page)

After the 1923 earthquake, the famous park was a charred wasteland, the Twelve-Story Tower no more than a ruined stump, and the opera palaces were rubble. Only the Kannon temple survived. It was thought by some that the statue of a famous Kabuki actor striking a heroic pose had held off the approaching flames. (The temple did not survive the American bombs, however, and had to be reconstructed.) And yet, fleeting as its pleasures may have been, Asakusa could not stay down for long. The movie houses and opera halls were rebuilt, and the park, with its pickpockets, prostitutes, Kannon worshipers, dandies, and juvenile delinquents, sprang back to life. In 1929, the Casino Folies was opened, located on the second floor of an aquarium, next to an entomological museum, or Bug House, which had somehow survived the devastation of 1923.

The Casino Folies, named after the Folies Bergère in Paris, was not especially wild, although it was rumored—apparently without any basis in truth—that the dancing girls, sometimes in blond wigs, dropped their drawers on Friday evenings. But it spawned not only talented entertainers, some of whom later became movie stars, but great comedians too. The most famous was Enoken, who stars in Kurosawa’s 1945 film
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail
. Everything that was raffish and fresh about Asakusa between the wars was exemplified by the Casino Folies, a symbol of the Japanese jazz age of “modern boys” (
mobos
) and modern girls (
mogas
). The cultural slogan of the time was
ero, guro, nansensu
, “erotic, grotesque, nonsense.” Kawabata was one of the writers whose early work was infused by this spirit, and it was his book that made the Folies famous. He hung around Asakusa for three years, wandering the streets, talking to dancers and young gangsters, but mostly just walking and looking, and reported on what he saw in his extraordinary
modernist novel
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
, first published in 1930.
³

The novel is not so much about developing characters as about expressing a new sensibility, a new way of seeing and describing atmosphere: quick, fragmented cutting from one scene to another, like editing a film or assembling a collage, with a mixture of reportage, advertising slogans, lyrics from popular songs, fantasies, and historical anecdotes and legends. There is much
ero, guro, nansensu
there, related in the chatty tone of a congenial flaneur, telling stories about this place or that, and who did what where, while trolling the streets for new sensations. This fragmentary way of storytelling owes a great deal to European expressionism, or “Caligarism,” after the German movie
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
. However, as Edward Seidensticker, quoted in Donald Richie’s excellent foreword, points out, it also owes much to Edo period stories.

Kawabata himself professed to hate his early experiment in modernist fiction and quickly went on to develop a very different, more classical style, but he still made an important contribution to the Japanese Roaring Twenties. Besides the novel, he also wrote the film script for Kinugasa Teinosuke’s expressionist masterpiece,
A Page of Madness
(1926). One of the most remarkable things about
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
is that it was serialized in a mainstream newspaper,
Asahi Shimbun
, which is, as Richie says, as though
Ulysses
had been picked up by the London
Times
. This testifies to the high-mindedness of the Japanese press—almost unimaginable today—but also to the willingness of the Japanese public to accept avant-garde literature in a popular newspaper; it probably helped that the
avant-garde expressionism was mixed with accounts of Asakusa’s low life.

Mixing high and low is of course part of modernism. Like many artists in the 1920s, Kawabata was interested in detective fiction and Caligarism is often marked by a fascination with violent crime. The use of slang and the references to popular culture of the time must have made
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
extremely difficult to translate, and Alisa Freedman has done a superb job, even though the full flavor of the original can never be fully reproduced.

The narrator/flaneur introduces the reader to various characters, low-life types like Umekichi, who skins stray cats to sell their pelts; and his girlfriend Yumiko, who poisons an older lover on a riverboat by kissing him with arsenic; and Haruko, dressed in gold crepe; and Tangerine Oshin, “the heroine of every bad girl worth the name,” who had “done” 150 men by the time she was sixteen. These are the people who drift into the Scarlet Gang. But there are others, more of the
guro
than the
ero
variety: the man in the Asakusa fairground with a mouth in his belly, smoking through his stomach; or the female tramps who dress like men; or the children who clean public toilets because they love modern concrete. The narrator is only interested, he writes, in “lowly women.” The lowest kind of prostitutes are the teenagers, known as
gokaiya
, who sleep with ragpickers and bums. Tangerine Oshin was one of them.

In true modernist fashion, it is never clear to what extent these people are meant to be real, or pure figments of the narrator’s imagination. In fact, the narrator is the first to point out the fictional quality of his story. Artifice is the point. Yumiko, after disappearing from the story for a long stretch, returns near the end of the novel as a hair-oil seller. Selling oil, in Japanese, means fibbing, making up a story. Yumiko and the narrator discuss how the story should go on.
The writer compares his story to a boat, like the boat on which Yumiko entertained her lover before murdering him, meandering, without a plotted course. This is where traditional Japanese storytelling meets modernism. Both share this quality.

None of the characters in Kawabata’s novel has the depth of such modernist antiheroes as Franz Biberkopf in Alfred Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz
or Joyce’s Bloom. Compared to them Yumiko and the others are as flimsy as rice paper. It is in conveying atmosphere that Kawabata, like so many Japanese literary flaneurs, excels. Here is the first sentence of chapter four:

Or this, about a character the writer is thinking of including in his story:

Casual, quickly noted in passing, a little sexy, absurd:
ero, guro, nansensu
. This spirit was all but snuffed out by the late 1930s, when militarism suppressed everything frivolous and pleasurable. And then the bombs finished Asakusa off entirely. Materially at least. For once again, vitality would not be denied. Donald Richie, as a young American with the Allied occupation, met Kawabata in Asakusa in 1947. Neither spoke the other’s language. They climbed up the old Subway Tower building and surveyed the wreckage. Richie writes in his afterword:

Kawabata said nothing much at the time. Richie had no idea what the older man, dressed in a winter kimono, was thinking. Richie said “Yumiko,” and Kawabata smiled and pointed at the Sumida River.

Asakusa today is pretty much like the rest of Tokyo, dense, commercial, a jumble of neon-lit concrete buildings, with the neighborhood around the Kannon temple filled with nostalgic souvenir stores selling trinkets for the tourists. The old Sixth District still has some movie houses and the odd seedy strip joint, but the action has long moved on to the western suburbs of the city—Shinjuku, Shibuya, and
beyond. What happens there, in the twenty-first century, when so much culture takes place no longer in the streets but in the virtual reality of personal computers, is the subject of “Little Boy,” the exhibition of Japanese pop art currently at the Japan Society in New York.
⁴

The curator of “Little Boy” is Murakami Takashi, the most influential visual artist in Japan today. He is a painter of cartoon images both childlike and sinister, a highly successful designer (of Louis Vuitton bags, among other things), a maker of mildly pornographic dolls, an artistic entrepreneur, a theorist, and a guru, with a studio of protégés that is a cross between a traditional Japanese workshop and Andy Warhol’s Factory. His main idea is to reverse Warhol’s project of turning banal, mass-produced, commercial images into museum art. Murakami wants instead to make art out of advertising,
manga
—Japanese comic strips—animation films, computer games, etc., and push it back into the market-driven world of mass culture.

Trained as a painter of
Nihonga
, or modern Japanese-style figurative painting, and an expert on the classical Kano School of painting, which dominated Japanese art between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Murakami believes that Japanese art never distinguished high from low in the manner of European art. The West, he argues, established a hierarchy, which raised a barrier between high art and “subculture,” a barrier that Murakami believes never existed in Japan. To escape from the humiliating and sterile enterprise of copying
Western high art, Murakami and his followers wish to rediscover a truly Japanese tradition in the junky world of virtual “neo-pop.”

Since much of this theorizing comes in the manner of manifestoes, a certain exaggeration is perhaps to be expected. It is not true that traditional Japanese art was not subject to hierarchy. In fact there was a strong sense of high and low. Cultivated aristocrats who attended Noh performances would not have been seen dead in the baroque and raucous Kabuki theaters. The refined scroll and folding-screen paintings of the Kano School, mostly done in the Chinese literati style, were bought by upper-class samurai, most of whom would have treated woodblock prints of courtesans and merchants as the height of vulgarity.
⁵
Some rich merchants cultivated a taste for “high” art too, but they would have been regarded as snobs, just as samurai with a bent for low life would have been seen as dissolute (hence their need for disguise in the Yoshiwara quarter).

It is true, however, that even court painters of the Kano School made little distinction between decorative and fine art. And mastery of past styles, or the style of masters, was on the whole more highly prized in Japan than individual innovation. There have been great individualists and eccentrics in Japanese art, to be sure, but the Romantic European ideal of expressing the unique personality of the artist in wholly new ways was not always understood when Japan first encountered the Impressionists, and the effort to emulate that ideal has stymied many Japanese painters ever since. In this sense, perhaps, Murakami is indeed working in a Japanese tradition. His designs for Louis Vuitton bags and his acrylic paintings are all part of the same artistic vision.

Certain aspects of both Murakami’s own art and that of his
colleagues are immediately apparent. One is the infantile quality of much of the imagery: the wide-eyed little girls; the cute, furry animals; the winking, smiling mascots that one normally finds on candy boxes and in comic strips for children (which, by the way, are avidly consumed in Japan by adults too). The word, much used to describe young girls and their girlish tastes, is
kawaii
. The Hello Kitty doll is
kawaii
, as are little pussycats, or fluffy jumpers with Snoopy dogs.
Kawaii
denotes innocence, sweetness, a complete lack of cynicism or ill will.

In the “Little Boy” exhibition the remarkable thing about the childlike drawings of young girls by Kunikata Mahomi, or the computer-generated prints by Aoshima Chiho, or Ohshima Yuki’s plastic dolls of prepubescent girls, or Nara Yoshitomo’s paintings of wide-eyed children is that these supposedly
kawaii
images are actually not innocent at all, and sometimes are full of malice. When you look at them carefully, you notice a strain of sexual violence. Everything about Aoshima’s wide-eyed, nude girl lying on the branch of an apricot tree is
kawaii
, apart from the fact that she is tied up. In another picture by the same artist, cartoonish little girls are sinking into the earth in an apocalyptic-looking shower of meteors. Ohshima’s plastic dolls at first look like the cute little pendants on a nine-year-old’s school satchel; but on closer inspection they are objects of pedophile lust, half-naked children in suggestive poses. Murakami’s own painting in pink acrylic of a smoky death’s head with garlands of flowers in the eye sockets turns out to be a stylized version of the atomicbomb cloud.