The following review was selected for publication as part of the Performing Arts Criticism Project 2024.

Production Information
Shinichi Ansako × Pijin Neji with Tentenko, Stand by Me
Performed: October 18–20, 2024

——————————————————————-

Stand by Me Review: From the Aquarium of an Inverted World

The backdrop is a white semicircle against a baby pink sky and ground. Four men and women stand with flowers in their hands, surrounded by illustration-style renderings of houses. At their feet spreads out a puddle, reflecting the houses. Instead of their figures, though, in the center of the puddle are the words “Stand by Me,” shown in Japanese upside down and back to front.

When I saw the publicity image for Stand by Me at Kyoto Experiment 2024, I wondered why the words in the water were not inverted as an actual reflection would be. An inverted title would be extremely difficult to read, so it makes sense if this decision was taken for the expedience of the flyer design. But would that alone result in an image like this? Why does it disturb me so? After staring at the image for a while, it came to me: it’s not the words per se, but rather because the figures have crossed over into an inverted world.

Co-directed by playwright and director Shinichi Anasako, who heads the theater company blue egonaku, and dancer and choreographer Pijin Neji, Stand by Me is a strikingly unusual crossover of three disciplines: contemporary theater, noh, and electronic music. Based on a script by Anasako and given the overall structure of a contemporary drama play, it features the Kongo School noh performer Haruna Tanaka as a figure who moves the play along, providing explanations of the background to the narrative in the form of chant, and presenting noh-style dance and chanting onstage at various points. In the second half, she talks to the four main actors and instructs them in the ways of noh. The electronic musician Tentenko is also onstage, overseeing the sound and playing music as a kind of proxy for the atmosphere of the world, and occasionally speaks to one of the characters, Sarada, telling him she plays music to “create vibrations, which in turn create air. It’s the opposite of how it works in the living world.” Tentenko also gives Sarada important information about life and death from another dimension.

The story involves four men and women—Kumi, Machitani, Fujikawa, and Sarada—who supposedly died in a major disaster, and now travel together in the afterlife while talking about their pasts and their current feelings, and searching for Kumi’s missing older brother. Eventually, they meet the noh performer played by Tanaka, and then come to request something of noh. Given its tempo and dialogue style that is so utterly different from a contemporary play, the noh format feels very incongruous within the narrative, but the crucial point of intersection is the traditional performing art’s purpose—the salvation of the soul. The journey of the four as they wander in the afterlife, an inverted world that nonetheless looks almost the same as reality, seems to parallel the structure of a noh play.

The core element driving the story is the crime that Kumi’s brother committed before he died and the mystery of his absence. Kumi’s brother worked at a café and probably died in the earthquake, but also knowingly killed a customer prior to his death. Over the course of the journey they take in search of him in the afterlife, it is revealed how the four were related before they died as well as the truth behind who was victim and who was perpetrator. Though seemingly unrelated to the incident, Machitani, Fujikawa, and Sarada were actually all at the café, as becomes apparent around halfway through the play. In fact, Fujikawa and Sarada were not even people but goldfish kept in the aquarium at the café. Caught up in the incident, Machitani was shoved and hit the fish tank, spilling water from it as she went crashing to the floor. Of the fish that fell out, only Sarada was saved and is now hovering between life and death. Tentenko tells this just to Sarada, who far from being happy, is upset and hesitant. “I shouldn’t be the only one to come back to life,” he says.

Continuing on their journey, Machitani makes a suggestion based on something said by Mae, a friend who survived the quake. Mae tells Machitani that they are able to talk because she had started to learn noh. In the traditional performing art, dead people come to see the performer. Machitani proposes that they make a noh play about Kumi’s older brother as a way of prompting his spirit to visit. Also functioning as salvation for Kumi, surely wracked by guilt over the crime that her brother committed, the suggestion suddenly brings the significance of noh in Stand by Me into sharp focus.

Ahead of the performance, Anasako and Neji appeared on a radio show and revealed that they had given their work about life and death the structure of a noh play. From here, I would like to attempt a reading of Stand by Me through the framework of noh.

First of all, the plots of noh plays frequently involve summoning the souls of the dead and then guiding them to speak so that they can attain enlightenment. This is probably what Kumi and the others are referring to when they describe the basis of noh as the salvation of the soul. And it is probably why Machitani comes up with the idea of making a new noh play with Kumi’s brother as the shite (protagonist) and, more macroscopically, why the characters are themselves arguably serving as shite in Stand by Me.

Next, I would like to discuss Tentenko and Tanaka, who both exude a striking presence among the actors. In the play, Tanaka is named Watashi (literally meaning I, me, or myself) and her role corresponds to the ai facilitator in noh. The style of movement in noh differs from modern drama, suggesting another realm of existence, and Tanaka’s body language thus serves to bridge the world of the play and reality. In the second half of the play, Tanaka has a dual role, functioning also as a waki (the performer in noh who complements the shite), talking to the four characters and drawing out their wishes. Tentenko is somewhat different, serving a role more akin to the kyogen performer in noh. The interludes where Tentenko converses with Sarada are comic, eliciting laughter from the audience, and it is possible to imagine Tentenko as belonging to reality—that is, the same world as the audience—since she is evidently talking in her own voice. Telling Sarada that he can come back to life, Tentenko acts like a transcendent being as she stands onstage, creating various sounds like wind or piano melodies until the very end. Curiously, the denouement reveals her role to be that of a waki who symbolizes time. And this is why we can regard Tentenko’s role as dual in the play.

A noh play centers on the protagonist who is dead (the shite) and the supporting character (the waki) who is living, with the characters literally crossing between life and the afterlife, and the scenes inviting the audience to enter a mysterious world that may or may not be a dream. In Stand by Me, the interactions between an actor playing someone in the afterlife and two figures who half-belong to the world of the living are clearly underpinned by the structure of noh. This was the significance of boldly integrating noh into a contemporary theater work. Furthermore, we can ask a simple question: Does the play actually depict the salvation of the soul that is the purpose of noh?

At the end of the story, the four characters ask Tanaka to devise a new noh play in which the dead is the shite and “time,” which is so closely intertwined with death, is the waki. They start learning how a noh play proceeds in the manner of a trial class, and then leave via what is effectively a version of the kiridoguchi doorway in noh. After this, the relationship between the goldfish Fujikawa and Machitani, who was a regular at the café and fed the fish, is completely undermined by Machitani’s repentant confession that she had put poison in the fish food. Up until this point, the pair had conversed very naturally and seemed closer than Kumi, making the shock of this revelation all the greater.

At this point, Fujikawa and Machitani are walking side by side, gradually leaning on each other and, thus precariously balanced, moving toward the center of the stage until finally collapsing onto the floor. Crawling in pain, Machitani leaves the stage, followed by Fujikawa, likewise crawling as if going after her. Kumi is left behind and then exits on her own, but what of her brother? The play ends without us ever finding out.

The ineffability of the human mind. The complicated nature of being with others. The ending poses serious questions about these issues. What led Kumi’s brother to murder? Machitani’s transgression. In a major disaster, such matters of psychology lie hidden beneath the cold facts of victim numbers, and never become clear. Even if people grow close, spend time together, see the same things, and develop a trusting relationship, we can never fully understand one another. And that is the essence of solitude.

Indeed, the shite in noh, wearing as they do a mask and appearing onstage as a figure from another world, also hide the performer who is behind the character. And it is surely the expression of the soul that bears immeasurable subtleties and conflicts of feeling that is the quintessence of that performing art. In noh, the actor passes through the mirror room and then through to another world. Is there any difference between the living and the dead in this wandering through a mirror image of reality, a world seemingly so similar and yet so utterly different?

Kumi’s brother remains absent until the very end, and it is never decisively shown whether he achieves salvation. On the other hand, it would not have worked had the characters found him. His existence is, after all, connected to all existence as the inversion of the individual. This is suggested by how the four characters meet Tanaka and ask her to create a noh play with Kumi’s brother as the shite, followed by the highly abstract jump of then making the shite everything from the past to the future and Tentenko the waki called “time.” Time always accompanies us, living as we do essentially in solitude. For those wandering between life and death, between this world (where time exists) and the afterlife (where time is absent), to find salvation in the workings of the world of the living, a world that unfolds within the flow of time, is more prayer than conviction. When we think of the past and gaze into the future, we nonetheless find something that is no longer there or something we will later encounter.

Machitani, Fujikawa, and Kumi having left the stage, and having herself been asked to create a new play, Tanaka dances alone in the noh theater, but quite unlike her previously confident performance, she inclines her head in doubt and seems uncertain how to proceed in creating the noh. And then she leaves the stage, though not in her customary shuffle, but walking normally, as if possessed by something. Against a backdrop of intermingling prayer, expectation, and despair, only Sarada remains and finally accepts his rebirth, opening the door and walking out by himself, cherishing in his heart the presence of Fujikawa and the others who shared his journey in the afterlife. Beyond the door through which he leaves stands the entrance to the venue building like the vanishing point of the audience’s perspective, the hustle and bustle of the street behind the glass—the present—hectically flowing by. As the audience watching that world, we alone are left behind in the inverted world of the play, trapped inside an aquarium.

Fumika Kagami
Born in Gifu Prefecture, Fumika Kagami graduated with a degree in anthropology from Nanzan University. She is currently a student at Jodo Fukugoh Writing School. She mainly writes art reviews.