SHUJI TERAYAMA or Terayama Shuji (Japanese name order). [Hoso-tan or A Tale of Smallpox, 1975] - wri

SHUJI TERAYAMA or Terayama Shuji (Japanese name order). [Hoso-tan or A Tale of Smallpox, 1975] - written in 1975 based on Antonin Artaud’s Conte de la Variole. “Once we’ve uttered a single word of dialogues, play-hell begins, and we cannot escape. There is no end. No play ever ends. Plays just change…[P]lay upon play is transformed into hell!…After the play…, after the lie, there’s no truth, only another lie. And everything I’ve just said is nothing but a pile of lies, too. That’s theatre. And that’s life." –Shuji Terayama, an excerpt from his book of theoretical plays & essays, Heretics (Jashumon, 1971, also known as Gate of the Heretics or Gate of Hell)— Shuji Terayama would’ve been an alchemist if he could. He was constantly metamorphosing, transforming, reinventing himself with multifarious identities: poet, playwright, filmmaker, photographer, novelist, lyricist, cultural critic, theatrical theorist, advocate, including spokesman for lonely teenage girls; as well as gambler, peeping Tom, anarchic destroyer of tradition, professional outcast with a very visible dark side: a self-proclaimed “yellow black”; a revolutionary terrorist of the imagination. His attitude seemed to be that the only real revolution was in the imagination. Whenever he would begin to glimpse results, whenever the gurgling alchemist’s brew began to precipitate into golden nuggets, something catastrophic would occur. The hell that was his chaotic, everyday life would reveal another, hidden hell; the beauty of carefully constructed fiction would transform into horrible reality; each new hell would metamorphose into another, and so on into infinity.  To Terayama, reality was a lie. Stability, solidity, and identity remained elusive goals. Even in death Terayama sought to transform imperfect, mutable reality into perfect, immutable art. On September 1, 1982, just 7 months before he died of a long standing illness—an illness that he portrays in Hoso-tan (A Tale of Smallpox) movie—he published a poem in the Asahi Shinbun: “On December 10, in tenth year of Showa, I was born, an imperfect corpse. Decades later, I will become a perfect corpse.” (Nagao, 1997, p. 290) Being obsessed with dissolving the borders between fiction and reality, Terayama’s life teemed with ambiguities and contradictions. Behind these self-contradictory masks, one finds a man of vigor, delicacy, soaring imagination, and unmatched theatricality. Often highly personal and idiosyncratic, yet his work reflects yearnings and fears by many of his countrymen. Among the most significant of these are several paradoxical images combining desire with revulsion. “When I was a child, everyone wore masks to the autumn festival. They became other people by wearing these masks. But there was never a mask suitable for me… I want to be disguised, I want to disappear, I want to change…” – Shuji Terayama, Heretics (Jashumon), 1971- [Note: Shuji Terayama, Heretics (Joshumon), 1971 translated by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, in Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s book Unspeakable Acts, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005] - [BG-UA] -- source link

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