Synchronicity: Miwa, Mishima, Ranpo
May. 7th, 2017 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joezuNote: Japanese names are in Western order: given name first, followed by family name.
A couple of years ago, while watching NHK's New Year's Eve musical extravaganza Kōhaku Uta Gassen (literally, Red and White Song Battle), I saw a performance by Akihiro Miwa, who sang the self-penned Yoitomake No Uta (roughly translated, Song of Laborers). The song is about a boy who is bullied at school for being the son of a poor laborer, but keeps attending and studying hard so the efforts of his mother, who works her fingers to the bone to support the family, will not be in vain. I was enthralled by Miwa's impassioned performance, and looked him up. Miwa is sort of the Quentin Crisp of Japan. He was born in 1935, a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and is a singer, drag performer, author, and actor.
More recently, I saw him in Black Lizard, a 1968 film in which he played a woman (as opposed to playing a man in drag) who was a jewel thief and femme fatale. The original story was written in 1934 by Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), then adapted for the stage by Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), one of Japan's leading authors. Mishima was a friend and possibly lover of Miwa and made a cameo appearance in Black Lizard.
It was around this time that Mr. Biscornu let me borrow Confessions of a Mask by Mishima. It mentions performer Tenkatsu Shōkyokusai who, from what little I can find about her on the internet, embodied a genre known as ero guro nansensu, or “erotic grotesque nonsense”. In the West, the term is often applied to gory porn, but in Japan, the emphasis is on the bizarre, the grotesque, the unnatural, and the macabre.
Synchronicity at work.
And a few months earlier, I had purchased a book in Little Tokyo entitled Writing The Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, by Jeffrey Angles. I flipped through it briefly before putting it on my to-be-read stack. After learning about Ranpo through Black Lizard, I thought his name sounded familiar, and sure enough, I looked in the book and found that it focuses on the writings of Ranpo, Kaita Murayama (1896-1919), and Taruho Inagaki (1900-1977). I've only read the introduction so far, but it devotes a few pages to discussing ero guro nansensu, and Mishima is also mentioned.
Finally, I'm currently watching Blind Beast, a 1969 film based on a 1931 Ranpo novel. There are no subtitles and my Japanese is not very strong so it's slow going for me, but I'm enjoying it so far!
A couple of years ago, while watching NHK's New Year's Eve musical extravaganza Kōhaku Uta Gassen (literally, Red and White Song Battle), I saw a performance by Akihiro Miwa, who sang the self-penned Yoitomake No Uta (roughly translated, Song of Laborers). The song is about a boy who is bullied at school for being the son of a poor laborer, but keeps attending and studying hard so the efforts of his mother, who works her fingers to the bone to support the family, will not be in vain. I was enthralled by Miwa's impassioned performance, and looked him up. Miwa is sort of the Quentin Crisp of Japan. He was born in 1935, a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and is a singer, drag performer, author, and actor.
More recently, I saw him in Black Lizard, a 1968 film in which he played a woman (as opposed to playing a man in drag) who was a jewel thief and femme fatale. The original story was written in 1934 by Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), then adapted for the stage by Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), one of Japan's leading authors. Mishima was a friend and possibly lover of Miwa and made a cameo appearance in Black Lizard.
It was around this time that Mr. Biscornu let me borrow Confessions of a Mask by Mishima. It mentions performer Tenkatsu Shōkyokusai who, from what little I can find about her on the internet, embodied a genre known as ero guro nansensu, or “erotic grotesque nonsense”. In the West, the term is often applied to gory porn, but in Japan, the emphasis is on the bizarre, the grotesque, the unnatural, and the macabre.
Synchronicity at work.
And a few months earlier, I had purchased a book in Little Tokyo entitled Writing The Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, by Jeffrey Angles. I flipped through it briefly before putting it on my to-be-read stack. After learning about Ranpo through Black Lizard, I thought his name sounded familiar, and sure enough, I looked in the book and found that it focuses on the writings of Ranpo, Kaita Murayama (1896-1919), and Taruho Inagaki (1900-1977). I've only read the introduction so far, but it devotes a few pages to discussing ero guro nansensu, and Mishima is also mentioned.
Finally, I'm currently watching Blind Beast, a 1969 film based on a 1931 Ranpo novel. There are no subtitles and my Japanese is not very strong so it's slow going for me, but I'm enjoying it so far!
