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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Mourning the Dead though the Act of Walking

Co-created by playwright and director Shinichi Anasako and dancer and choreographer Pijin Neji, Stand by Me (Horikawa Oike Gallery) fuses contemporary theater with traditional noh theater and electronic music to explore views on life and death, a subject that has long interested both artists. The work, which this reviewer saw on October 19, is a noh-style journey of four dead characters seeking salvation in the afterlife. The slow movements of noh and the mechanical sounds of Tentenko’s electronic music conjure up a strange version of the hereafter that transcends both tradition and novelty.

Following the structure of a noh play, the work in particular seems to borrow the mugen genre. In mugen noh, a ghostlike protagonist (shite) retains memories of their life and is reincarnated as a figure who appears back in the world of the living, preoccupied by the things they could not accomplish in their lifetime. Borrowing the style of mugen noh, Stand by Me is the story of dead victims of a major earthquake that has taken place in a regional city who go in search of salvation. One of the dead is Kumi, who resolves to meet her older brother and sets out to do so, accompanied by the others. Along the way, they encounter a noh performer and Tentenko. The travelers learn from the performer about the distinctive style of slow walking in noh—a form of salvation for meeting the dead—as well as its etiquette, and then continue walking to where the brother is. After aimlessly wandering, the dead gain a sense of purpose—going to meet someone—which enables them to make slow but steady progress. Though the play unfolds in this way, I wish to focus rather on how the work, notwithstanding the nonrealistic setting of the afterlife, conveys a sense of reality, of a world contiguous with reality through its use of a distinctive stage space and the everyday exchanges that unfold between the dead. Along with examining the ambiguity of those boundaries, this review will discuss why the act of walking carried out by the dead characters is repeated and emphasized in the play.

I will begin by considering how the ambiguous boundaries are presented onstage. The Horikawa Oike Gallery venue features a large room that is long and deep, and with a door at the back of the acting area through which the audience enters. The seating is tiered and positioned to face the performance space.

While the audience are still taking their seats, chatting, or bustling around the venue, the performance suddenly begins. A female noh performer quietly enters, turns away from the audience, and then starts to walk solemnly toward the door that has been left open. Gradually noticing her movements, the audience slowly falls quiet and becomes transfixed by the highly refined gait of the noh actor in which that solemnity never breaks for even a second. The performer continues her slow walk until she leaves through the door, after which the four dead characters enter, at which point the door slams shut. This door seems to connect the two spaces of the stage and reality, or to function as an interface that is then cut off. The performers shuttle back and forth between the acting area and outside, blurring the boundary between the extraordinary theater space and the ordinary reality that exists outside the theater.

Most theater works present a fiction to an audience. Stand by Me is indeed a work of fiction, yet also at times makes death feel more real to the audience through its use of the stage space. This sequence of actions—the abrupt start to the performance, the actors entering and leaving the venue—conveys a sense that the temporality and space of our everyday lives are contiguous with the onstage world of the afterlife, populated by the dead. Japanese culture was once more accepting of death as something ordinary. In Japanese Views of Life and Death (1977), the philosopher Shuichi Kato notes the following.

In general, the Japanese attitude toward death is one of resigned acceptance, both emotionally in terms of the order of the cosmos and intellectually in terms of the order of nature. Behind this lies a culture that does not attach weight to separating death from everyday life; that is, to the cruel and dramatic extraordinariness of death.

Living in a country that has frequently suffered from natural disasters since long ago, not least earthquakes and typhoons, the Japanese did not treat death as something extraordinary. In Stand by Me, death is positioned as something universal. And yet, it seems to reject the “resigned acceptance” that Kato describes. At the blurred line between life and death are those left behind, the dead wandering regretfully there. Can we lump those figures together as “resigned”? The premise of the play is that the characters died in an earthquake and it attempts to portray their existence.

Given this setting, the act of walking carried out by dead notably from the start seems key to understanding the play. Indeed, walking is an action that features repeatedly throughout the play. The dead enter the gallery at the opening of the play, each mounting an incredibly slow-moving conveyor belt, on which they walk but never move forward. Their aimlessness is expressed plainly in the line that they all say: “We have no purpose—because we are already dead.” From how the dead remain at a standstill while trying to move forward, they seem to be resisting and not accepting their sudden demises through the act of walking. By resolving to visit her brother, Kumi comes to acknowledge death for the first time. After starting to confront her death, she begins advancing down the long path to her destination in a reincarnated form that allows her to travel in the world of the living. She crosses a river and goes up steep paths, a process that is shown by taking advantage of the long and deep dimensions of the stage. This all suggests that just as the Japanese word for “mourn” originally carried the meaning of “visit,” the first step toward salvation lies in going to visit where the dead are, and truly engaging with them.

Stand by Me shares a title with a 1986 film adaptation of a Stephen King novella. The basic premise of Anasako and Neji’s play follows the movie’s, but whereas the latter features four young boys who set off on adventure to find a dead body, the play flips this and has the dead go in search of the living (a friend who survived the earthquake). In both the film and play, the characters walk endlessly on a long journey until they finally arrive at their destination. In the film, one of the boys, Gordie, has lost his older brother, and joins the search for the body while grieving his sibling, with whom he was very close. Walking along the railroad track, the young boys eventually find the dead body, but the gruesome corpse reminds Gordie of his brother, and he is overcome with grief over the unfairness of his brother’s death. Their adventure at an end and having returned home, Gordie appears somehow ready to move on. For him, the search for the dead body was the process of dealing with his sibling’s death. That he was able to accomplish that was because he had friends with whom he could goof around and, at times, butt heads. As an adult, Gordie looks back on that trip and longs for those days of adolescence. This teaches him that the true purpose of something is not simply to reach where you are going; rather, the process of arriving is actually more important. In Anasako and Neji’s Stand by Me, Kumi’s companions worry about how she is unable to move on from death and encourage her to go meet her brother, and then together set off on that long journey. In Kumi’s becoming able to walk forward with the others and with purpose, we sense the hope of the dead.

Salvation is the process by which both those left behind and those who have died find hope and purpose to live again in their respective worlds. Stand by Me flattens the relationship between the dead (the actors) and the living (the audience), between the afterlife (the theater space) and the world of the living (reality), and blurs the boundaries between them. Initially just wandering around aimlessly, the dead eventually gain a sense of purpose, and start moving forward together, a process that asks the audience to consider the meaning of salvation through the act of walking. Everyone must face the inevitability of their and others’ deaths, and this play suggests we might be able one day to bridge the worlds of the dead and the living if we just keep on walking, and indeed shows us the importance of believing in that.

Mina Tamachi
Born in 2003 in Hyogo, Mina Tamachi is currently an undergraduate student majoring in aesthetics and art at Doshisha University.