FEATURE: Shuji Terayama's Notes from the Japanese Underground
FEATURE: Shuji Terayama's Notes from the Japanese Underground
The revolutionary cinema of 'Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets' and 'Pastoral: To Die in the Country'
There is a seemingly ordinary patch of urban street about a five-minute walk from Shibuya Station in Tokyo... You wouldn’t know from the way it looks now, but a genius of the Japanese Avant-Garde once operated a theater upon this very spot in a building that looked like a cross between a circus and a surrealist art sculpture. Now, decades later after the old building was demolished, it has transformed into a family restaurant from the “Jonathan’s” franchise chain.
Do any of the staff or patrons inside know that, from 1969 to 1976, this place was where Shuji Terayama’s Tenjo Saijiki famed theater once stood? Would they care? Should they care?
Despite being one of the leading figures of the Japanese Avant-Garde, Shuji Terayama’s best short films and features have never gotten a commercial release in the West outside of screenings at museums and festival screenings. Terayama, who is celebrated and studied by academics, remains largely known to cult film fans. Which is too bad since Terayama made mind-bending movies with surrealist abandon akin to Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
I would rank two of Terayama’s films, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) and Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) among the greatest Japanese movies ever made, full of ruminations on time, memory, and calls for rebellion. They offer viewers a chance to take a time machine back to a wild era in the Japanese underground art scene when subculture was in full flower… before the dark times… before the free drink refills at the family restaurant.
Shuji Terayama was born in 1935 and was raised in the northern countryside of Aomori prefecture. He began attracting notice as a poet while still in high school and attended Waseda University in Tokyo where he composed verse in the traditional style of Japanese poetry known as tanka. Soon, Terayama became a hugely prolific writer, not only of poems but also novels, essays, magazine columns, and plays. Terayama plugged into the new youth culture percolating in Tokyo during the late sixties and early seventies; the marginal realm of radical student protestors, runaway futen kids who hung out in the Shinjuku area, sexual outlaws, glue sniffers, and just plain freaks.
Some of these people joined Terayama’s theatrical troupe – the Tenjo Saijiki – and starred in a series of plays and experimental films that Terayama wrote and directed.
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets was originally a volume of essays, and then a play before it became the basis for Terayama’s first feature in 1971. The contents differ from version to version, but the theme of “youth in revolt” and the title remain the same across all media.
“What are you doing there? Hanging around a movie theater isn’t going to make anything happen. The screen’s completely blank…” That’s the main character, Eimei, talking to us as the film begins.
Eimei, a young dude living in the now-scrubbed away slums of Shinjuku with his family of lowlives, including his grandmother (a pickpocket), father (a former war criminal), and his sister (who prefers playing with her pet rabbit to men). Eimei wants to fly away from the dirty boulevard and imagines himself fleeing the scene on a human-powered airplane. But mostly he just bums around the city, running around aimlessly on train tracks or hanging out in a state of semi-disgust with his sports jock friend and his soccer team.
There’s not much of a story or narrative drive to Throw Away Your Books. Instead, the film freewheelingly associates like sketch comedy through a series of surreal vignettes. An American flag is burned, drag queen Akihio Miwa shows up in a bath, Eimei loses his virginity, something really bad happens to his sister’s rabbit. The propulsive rock music of J.A. Seazer, a key Terayama collaborator in the theater and on screen, helps connect the many disparate parts together. The result is a work of “angry young man” cinema that foreshadows Quadrophenia (1979) and Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), that cuts deep.
Terayama shows us the state of disaffected youth after the failure of the sixties revolutionary dream. Belief in the family and the social institutions have all been torn down… now what? The city is an open book, and Terayama wants people to scribble their names and lives in the margins, but a kind of inertia in the day-to-day grind has taken over. Eimei is stuck in the slums and can’t get his airplane off the ground.
Like the yuppies in the USA, some kids from this era would join the establishment and enjoy the fruits of Japan’s Bubble Economy. Others would try to keep the underground dream alive, preserving it just beneath mass culture (JA Seazer and several other Terayama alumni would later work on the Revolutionary Girl Utena anime series). Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets remains a wakeup call to anyone wasting their life away in a movie theater. Do something. Do anything. Fast. The lights are changing.
Terayama’s next film, 1974’s Pastoral: To Die in the Country looks back darkly on the past, presenting a fictionalized account of Terayama’s youth in Aomori Prefecture. While Throw Away Your Books was in the mode of one of Terayama’s “city plays,” Pastoral is dominated by nature, with much of the film unfolding in the desolate volcanic valley of Mt. Osore, which looks like the surface of a hellish alien planet.
It is here that a 15-year-old boy lives alone with his clinging, overbearing mother in a village where it seems that time has stopped, and old superstitions prevail. The boy is in the grips of his burgeoning sexuality and (like Eimei in Throw Away Your Books) wants to run away someplace else. He finds a willing accomplice in the form of a beautiful woman stuck in an unhappy marriage. The pair plans to elope, and just as the drama kicks into high gear… the film runs out of the projector. We find ourselves in a screening room in modern Tokyo. What we have been watching is a work in progress by a Terayama-like director who is making a movie about his past.
Time begins to fracture. Memories spring to life. The filmmaker finds his 15-year-old younger self waiting for him on his doorstep, and together they journey back to the badlands of the past to resolve the conflicts between himself and his mother once and for all.
While Throw Away Your Books had a realist style punctuated by surrealist outbursts, To Die in the Country is heavily stylized and filled with symbolic images that have the unsettling power of tarot cards. Old women clad in black stalk the landscape like oversized crows. A circus populated with grotesques like a fat lady and a strong man has set up camp on the edge of town. A haunting score by J. A. Seazer, filled with wordless chanting, adds to the thick atmosphere of menace and mystery. Be warned: it’s the kind of film that can shake you up and dislodge things loose in the subconscious.
Like Fellini’s Roma (1972) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s autobiographical The Dance of Reality (2013), Terayama tries to restage his past to reshape it, using cinema as a form of psychotherapy. But To Die in the Country is also something more than personal as it takes aim at ancient Buddhist traditions and the old social structure of village life – both of which still hold influence on Japan today. Pastoral feels like a late work from a master filmmaker, an attempt to sum up a life of dreams and lived experience. In truth, it was only Terayama’s second feature.
Sadly, less than a decade later in 1983, Shuji Terayama died of kidney disease at the age of 47. New productions of his plays and reprintings of his books have continued ever since in Japan. Still, I can’t get over it: his old theater is now a family restaurant, but you don’t have to dig in the dirt to find the Japanese underground anymore. Even if there is no Criterion Collection or Arrow Video box containing Shuji Terayama’s best films, as of this writing, both Throw Away Your Books and Pastoral: To Die in the Country are both up on Archive.org and YouTube with English subtitles. Watch them, freak out, and forever rally in the streets.
