Japan Forum Vol. 24, no. 4 (2012), 504-506.
A review of Bruce Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, xv + 293 pp.
Hijikata Tatsumi, globally one of the most influential Japanese artists of the last century (if not the most), occupies the center stage of this monograph. It is truly astonishing to see how an avant-garde dance Hijikata invented in the late 1950s and the 1960s in Tokyo has spread to all comers of the world, and is now known everywhere as butoh. There have been a few books on butoh in English but none has focused exclusively on this seemingly singular genius, Hijikata Tatsumi. This book, however, is not a critical biography. Although it contributes much to our understanding of the history of butoh, its main concern is interpretation—how to read Hijikata’s performances as well as his writings. Therein lies a fundamental problem for anyone who intends to study avant-garde art. What is the point of interpreting something that openly flaunts its anti-hermeneutic nature? How do we find any meaning in an art object that screams at us that it has no meaning?
The author, Bruce Baird, is well aware of this absurd situation as he begins the book with these words: ‘Butoh defies description’ (p. 1). Nevertheless, he earnestly engages in describing what Hijikata left for us in the next 218 pages of the book. Academically speaking, this is the most fruitful result of conscientious research on one of the most bizarre art forms on stage. Phenomenologically speaking, it simply lacks the power of a butoh performance that might change your life. But that is the fate of any academic work on the avant-garde. The difficulty that Baird must have encountered initially in this project goes beyond this fundamental absurdity of dealing with an avant-garde art. If the subject were avant-garde poetry, we would still have the poems intact before us to study. Unlike poems, dances disappear unless recorded. In this age of ubiquitous video cameras, it surprises us that so few moments of Hijikata’s dances were ever filmed. Baird, thus, needed to imaginatively reconstruct Hijikata’s early performances through bits and pieces of information scattered in reviews, notes and photos. Baird’s painstakingly careful reconstructions of Hijikata’s performances are to be highly valued.
The book mainly traces Hijikata’s major works, starting with Forbidden Colors (1959), through his influential Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body (1968), and culminating in his magnum opus Great Dance Mirror of Burnt Sacrifice—Performance to Commemorate the Second Unity of the School of the Dance of Utter Darkness—Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons (1972). In the penultimate chapter, Baird also analyzes Hijikata’s surrealist ‘memoir’ Ailing Terpsichore (1977-1978). Somehow inspired by Mishima Yukio’s novel of the same title, Hijikata’s ‘first work’ (p. 15) was staged on 24, May 1959. It was obviously designed to shock the audience. Baird quotes a description:
In this piece a young man (Yoshito Ôno) has sexual relations with a hen, after which another man (Tatsumi Hijikata) makes advances to him. There is no music. The images are striking: the young man smothers the animal between his thighs to symbolize the act. (p. 16)
Apparently many people in the audience walked out in disgust. Now, how do we handle something like this ‘academically’? Baird’s strategy is exemplary, though it may appear counter-intuitive. Our (hetero-normal, anti-pedophiliac) instinct may tell us to walk away. There is nothing to understand. It is simply, and singularly, weird and disgusting. And this effect might have been what Hijikata was intending. But Baird is patient. He contextualizes this performance within what was culturally and even politically happening in the ‘contentious era’ (p. 17) and convinces us that it could be read as a critique against the heteronormal society, or any custom and convention that binds our body in a certain way.
As we read on, we learn the fascinating history of Hijikata’s collaborations with other avant-gardists of Japan in the 1960s. In one of the ‘happenings’ in which Hijikata participated, the Dadaist Kazakura Shô branded his own chest with a hot iron hook. Hijikata apparently helped brand him again even after Kazakura fainted. Baird analyzes such avant-garde events in terms of ‘scandalous psyche-marking experiences’ (p. 66) or a search for ‘actuality (akuchuariti)’, which he believes was a key term circulating among the artists and intellectuals of the 1960s, including Mishima who wrote an essay ‘Crisis Dance’ for Hijikata.[1] Essentially, ‘actuality’ indicated a new reality disposed of all socially and culturally assigned meanings. We also learn that Hijikata was deeply indebted to some pivotal French writers, including Breton, Genet, Proust, and Artaud. Especially fruitful is Baird’s comparison of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Hijikata’s butoh. Baird sees that while Artaud seems to orient his theatre toward an absolute state of nonmeaning, Hijikata was ultimately concerned with ‘the possibility of communicating ideas with other people’ (p. 135). Herein lies the very raison d’etre of Baird’s book: understanding in the face of something that refuses our understanding. Baird proposes a number of counterarguments to the current conceptions of butoh. One of the trickiest conceptions of butoh is that it is uniquely Japanese and is about the Japanese body. In fact, Hijikata seems to have gone through his own ‘return to Japan’, so to speak, departing from his youthful fascination with things French and re-engaging with his home in Tohoku and with his childhood memory of his protective mother, who was often abused by his father. Yet, Baird, as his careful analysis of the event titled Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Rebellion of the Body shows, remains steadfast in not allowing such essentialism in assessing Hijikata’s legacy. I believe that one of the best arguments Baird makes in this book comes from his grasp of surrealism and its fundamental mechanism, which he sees present in Hijikata’s every work: juxtaposition of multiple and diverse realities and the resulting tension. This tension could be interpreted in terms of aesthetics, ethics,
social power structures, gender, sexuality, or one’s (national) identity. Now, because of this book, I am convinced that Hijikata must be one of the very best manifestations of surrealism in the world. Breton would be extremely proud of Hijikata and his legacy, including this book.
© 2012, Hosea Hirata
Tufts University