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

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A Drama of Reluctance and Forgiveness

Where does hope lie after catastrophe? This is the question explored by Stand by Me with great consideration and ambivalence toward the dead. Created by Shinichi Anasako and Pijin Neji with music by Tentenko, Stand by Me subtly layers the onstage events with the disasters and conflicts currently happening around the world, blurs the binary opposition of life and death, and invites the audience to depart down a path toward reconciliation that comes after much vacillation.

The venue is a white cube gallery, an inorganic space inside Horikawa Oike Gallery. It is filled with several treadmills, a small table, and several chairs, plus a set of music equipment off to the side. The audience seating faces the gallery space, separated by a line of gold tape.

A noh performer enters, cutting through this lifeless space by walking in the characteristic sliding, shuffling style of noh, and then opens the play with a chant whose final line hints at the theme of the story: “For death is no respite.” Eventually, Tentenko arrives at the table of equipment and begins playing music, during which four characters appear. They all died on the day of an earthquake: Sarada and Fujikawa, who were goldfish kept as pets at a café; Machitani, murdered in the café on the day of the quake; and Kumi, who is searching for her dead brother. All step onto the treadmill and start to walk, at which point we enter the world in which these dead four wander, never able to rest.

The initial part of the performance ends, and the four begin to walk slowly across the whole gallery space from corner to corner as if to memorize its dimensions and contours with their bodies, all while narrating their everyday lives. Very loquaciously and rhythmically, they relate such trivial matters as their criticism of the attitude of the waiter at the café or an anecdote about Machitani’s best friend, Mae. As they talk, it is suggested that Machitani go visit Mae, and so she starts to walk through the devastation of the city to her friend’s house. Sarada and Fujikawa set out for a nearby river—the aforementioned gold tape—and enjoy a walk along it.

Having successfully tracked Mae down, Machitani goes to the café, where the others have also gathered, and tells them about her reunion. Mae survived the earthquake and is continuing to live at the same home as before, and showed no surprise at encountering Machitani as a ghost. This is because Mae has recently started doing noh and has acquired the ability to commune with the dead.

The four dead tell each other about the moment when they died. During the course of this, Machitani remembers what Mae said: that noh frequently features stories about chance encounters with the dead and the salvation of the soul. Machitani proposes that they create a noh play in order to save the soul of Kumi’s dead brother. The quartet head to a noh theater and ask the performer dancing there alone about making a play in which Kumi’s brother is the protagonist, known in noh as the shite. The noh performer is amused, asking them for some time to think over their question and promising to meet them again the next day. After an abrupt experience of noh, the four have a rambling conversation and then exit, each in a different gait, and the play ends.

As the précis above indicates, this is a portrait of a post-earthquake world, one in which things unfold throughout from the perspectives of the dead. It features neither survivors bouncing back after disaster and then working toward recovery, nor survivors mourning and grieving the dead. Rather, it is a story of the dead interacting with the dead, centering on the search for the salvation of their souls.

That being said, this does not mean that the play completely separates the living and the dead. In the play, life and death are not portrayed as simply binary opposites, but rather as entities that can coexist ambiguously. Accordingly, the line between the living and dead is constantly blurred, the audience unable to settle on either side.

What is noteworthy in this sense is that it remains unclear if Mae, a character who is completely absent from the play from start to finish, is actually alive or dead. In the scene when Machitani is telling Kumi about Mae at the café, for instance, Mae seems to possess Kumi and talk through her. This inverts the usual scenario in which a living person is possessed by a dead person’s spirit, leaving it unresolved whether or not Mae is alive.

The dead also behave as if they are alive. Kumi talks of her dead older brother like someone at a funeral recalling a story about the departed. She waxes nostalgic about the games of bingo they played when he was young, the curry and pancake he loved at the café. When Fujikawa crosses the river, she takes a deep breath and tries to move around and survive in the water.

It is not even apparent to the audience that these four characters are all dead until quite some time in the narrative. And even once the audience has learned this, because of the aforementioned scenes, a sense of unease always clings to the proceedings, whereby the audience is unable to determine if the characters truly are dead.

Moreover, not only the distinction between living and dead, the line separating human and nonhuman is also constantly unstable. Fujikawa and Sarada were previously goldfish when they were alive, something that is unexpectedly revealed halfway through the story, quietly catching the audience off guard. Life and death, human and nonhuman: throughout the work, these elements nestle side by side in an ambiguous balance.

This attempt to decenter a “living” perspective and transcend all manner of boundaries is particularly striking in the next scene, which forms the climax of the story. It depicts the four characters asking the noh performer about how they can make a noh play featuring Kumi’s brother as the shite. Over the course of their conversation, the proposed shite for the play is not only Kumi’s older sibling and the other characters who appear, but also everyone who has died in disaster, the victims and perpetrators of war, those who will die in the years to come, and those not yet born. To wit, they pronounce their concern for all the living and dead of the past, present, and future, regardless of their direct involvement in a disaster.

Hearing this proposal out of left field, the noh performer inadvertently laughs at the unrealistic idea. And yet, as Stand by Me suggests, it is merely for the convenience of the living that we distinguish between the dead in terms of their direct involvement in a particular set of circumstances and select which dead deserve salvation. The goal of this endeavor is to prompt the audience to think beyond the temporal and spatial scale of experiences limited to the living.

This back and forth about making a noh play makes evident the nature of Stand by Me. That is, it is not a work of entertainment focused exclusively on the living, but an attempt to explore ways to coexist with the dead and alien entities, and deliberately creates leeway for doing this.

The most prominent example of an alien entity in the play is the body of the noh performer. For most of Stand by Me, the performer moves around the gallery in that distinct shuffle-like walk or dances. The intervention of this slow body as something alien in the space brings about an onstage lag. Neither the actions of the other characters nor the constant music of Tentenko are fully synchronized with the pace of the noh. The content of the chanting follows the structure of the story and serves to narrate what is happening to the audience, and yet the tempo and the physicality of the performer remain alien.

One scene directly touches on this alien slowness. The four characters have asked the performer about making a noh play and then, as prompted, practiced the noh-style shuffle at the theater, and are about to leave. Machitani asks the performer, “Why is noh so slow?” To which, the performer tells her that it is because noh is something sacred for communicating with the dead.

But why does it need to be slow to relate to the dead? Because it stops and slows down the compulsive pace with which the living are obsessed, bringing about a time for being with the dead. That is similar, for instance, to how the noh novices, having experienced practicing the shuffling walk, later begin to walk in a strangely careful way. We might think of this body language that transforms the temporality and spatiality of the living, and creates the latitude to summon the alien, as hesitation.

Indeed, the characters in the play often literally hesitate or waver. When she goes to Mae’s home, Machitani hesitates and wavers over whether to enter the room. When there is a suggestion to make a noh play about her brother, Kumi hesitates, not immediately agreeing with the salvation of his soul. On two occasions in the play, Sarada is about to come back to life, but hesitates and ultimately refuses because he enjoys spending time with the other dead characters. In this way, a state of vacillation is incessant among the dead or between the living and the dead.

We know from repeated experience that survivors of a major disaster can waver over a great variety of things. Recalling or describing a disaster is always concomitant with reluctance and inner conflict, and the debates around post-disaster “reconstruction” also give rise to much vacillation. Such reluctance is necessary to ensure we don’t fall into the trap of not thinking in the face of calamity, but is more often than not drowned out by vociferous pronouncements, be they positive or negative.

In Anasako’s verbose dialogue, sluggish and rambling words layer up, sidestepping such vociferous snap decisions. As the interlocutor talks vaguely at times, the wavering of each speaker comes and goes, disrupting the senses of the living, used as they are to purposive conversation. Reluctance or hesitation is not merely stagnation but something that enables the coexistence of alienness within language, and consideration of those not in the here and now.

And these various mechanisms of vacillation set in motion the salvation of the soul that the characters seek. The confessions of crime that the dead make, for instance, and the forgiveness of those crimes reveal an aspect of this.

It is Kumi who confronts us with the reality that Machitani was killed in the café and it was Kumi’s brother who killed her, but Machitani forgives her. Far from a dramatic moment, forgiveness is granted quite matter-of-factly. Machitani reveals that she is the one who killed Fujikawa. Back when Fujikawa was kept in a tank in the café, she had a large tumor on her body. Seeing that tumor grow and grow, Machitani felt sorry for Fujikawa and mixed poison into her food. That crime too is forgiven by Fujikawa. While the outline of these incidents are sensational murders, Stand by Me never becomes a tale of revenge or condemnation.

These acts of forgiveness might well seem like the result of letting bygones be bygones following an experience of a catastrophe whose scale far exceeds that of individual crimes, and yet they are not. These exchanges evince not a nonchalance, but rather an attitude of wishing to listen carefully, to be with others. And it is here above all that hope for a gradual reconciliation takes root.

Toward the end of the play, the dead exit and the noh performer does likewise. The only one left is Sarada, who asks Tentenko to increase the volume of the music, before exiting through the door. The scene suggests Sarada’s resurrection. Tentenko walks on a treadmill, released from her musical role, and leaves the space with a look on relief on her face. And so the play ends with these visual and auditory representations of the salvation of the soul. What then remains is not the reassurance of a return to a former life, but the freshness of living a new life side by side with the gaze of alien others.

 

Satoshi Kariki
Born in 1991, Satoshi Kariki lives in Kyoto and earned a master’s degree from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Letters and Faculty of Letters. Alongside teaching English, he is a translator, especially for contemporary art exhibition catalogues, moving image works, and interviews. His recent major exhibition credits include Olafur Eliasson: A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows (Azabudai Hills Gallery, 2023) and Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei (Mori Art Museum, 2024).