I know that the name Shuji Terayama still comes from a very fortuitous chance. Because our house is just one road away from the city library, I go there every week to borrow and return books. One day, around the spring of 2018, while wandering around the Japanese literature area, I casually pulled a book from the shelf and cut my finger off the cover of the book next to it. The book may be a new library book, so not many people borrow it, and the paper cover is as sharp as when it first left the factory. I immediately felt that this was a book with me, so I borrowed it without any reading. And this book is Shuji Terayama's "Time Chronicles of the Air Girl". This was the first time I had borrowed a book because of physical pain (a scratched finger). And it turned out that my choice was worth it.
Photo by Wu Yong
Born on December 10, 1935 in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, he is a famous Japanese playwright, poet, waka songwriter, performer, critic, and film director of the last century. Representative of avant-garde drama.
Compared with Shuji Terayama's status as a writer, his director status may be more eye-catching, and his film and television masterpieces such as "Throw Away Books and Go to the Street" and "Pastoral Festival of the Dead" occupy an extremely important position in the Japanese independent film industry, and make him one of the core figures of the Japanese New Wave. At the same time, he is also an outstanding drama director and one of the most important promoters of Japanese avant-garde drama. However, due to the limited channels of communication, I have not yet watched any of Shuji Terayama's films, so the Shuji Terayama in my mind is more based on the image of a poet and essayist.
Shuji Terayama, a film prodigy who has created classic movies such as "Pastoral Festival of the Dead" and "Goodbye Box Boat", is also a well-known poet and writer, and is the inspiration for Japanese giants such as Shunji Iwai, Wen Yuanzi, Imatoshi, and Oshii Mori!
Opening the first page of "The Time Chronicle of the Air Woman" is an essay called "The Whistle". In the first paragraph of the article, it is written that Shuji Terayama's mother said to him, "You were born on a speeding train, so your place of birth is unknown. Of course, this statement from Shuji Terayama's mother must have been a joke from a practical point of view, because according to the sanitary conditions in Japan at that time, giving birth on a train was impossible. However, Shuji Terayama seemed to be so obsessed with this sentence that he preferred to force himself to believe that his birthplace was "on a speeding train" and felt that it was a legendary experience, so he always used to say to people, "My hometown is a Mercedes-Benz train." ”
Although the "speeding train" is not the hometown of Shuji Terayama in the practical sense, a person's nostalgia often does not come from a certain place, but from the people who live in this place, especially relatives. However, in Terayama's life, his parents, like the "speeding train", have been forced to "gallop" for the sake of life since his childhood, so that Terayama's nostalgia is far more fragmented than the usual sense of nostalgia. In terms of age, Shuji Terayama is a typical "post-war generation" (born in 1935). As a young Japanese who grew up in the war, Shuji Terayama faced a tragedy of the times when he was born. Thus, his nostalgia is both highly personal and universal among his contemporaries.
The scholar Ian Bruma wrote in the book The Mirror of Japan: Heroes and Evil Men in Japanese Culture: "Children will miss their childhood paradises for the rest of their lives (no doubt, the mood is mixed with repressed hatred. The longing for this Garden of Eden is an important aspect of Japanese culture, and it is both a collective memory and a personal sentiment. If we follow Bruma's explanation, we may understand that Shuji Terayama's nostalgia and the series of creations resulting from nostalgia are also a process of reconstructing the Garden of Eden.
Shuji Terayama's father was a criminal policeman who was often sent to work in various places, so much so that when he was born, his father was not around. Although his childhood with his father was short, Shuji Terayama's father always appeared in front of him in a drunken image, so that there was little communication between them, and a "whistle game" of guessing the train on the tracks was one of the few ways between them. Thus Shuji Terayama once wrote, "At that moment, I was connected with my father, not by love, but by the train that ran at night. ”
Shuji Terayama, "Who Doesn't Homesick"
Because the family was too poor, coupled with the untimely death of his father, Teyama Shuji's mother first sold flowers along the street and then went to work on the US military base in order to make a living, so that his relationship with his parents was always a crippled, love-hate relationship. And such a broken family relationship happened to arise under the tragedy of an era. At the age of ten, Shuji Terayama was personally attacked by an air raid in Aomori City and hid with his mother between charred corpses and stray bullets. The shadow of war and the broken family relationship caused irreparable trauma to Shuji Terayama's sensitive mind, while forcing him to find a spiritual outlet other than his family. In this way, Shuji Terayama found literature and found art forms such as "haiku" and "short songs" as the sustenance of his soul.
I often discuss with my friends who have just begun to contact literature and art that any act of reading and creating in art is actually a kind of healing in a sense, a kind of reconciliation with the self. The same is true of Shuji Terayama, who, when he picked up his pen to compose those poems, thought more not about becoming famous in art, but for some kind of expression, for the speeding train in his mind, perhaps related to his birthplace. He always mentions the train consciously or unconsciously in his poems, although he himself does not know where the train is coming from and where it is going. The whistle of this train, like some kind of local sound, grew on Shuji Terayama's body. I'm not an expert in psychoanalysis, so I can't explain why a joke from my mother can have such an impact on Shuji Terayama. Perhaps, such a fiction is related to some kind of heroic complex in Terayama Shuji's body. According to Ian Bruma in The Mirror of Japan: Heroes and Villains in Japanese Culture, in Japan "most of the heroes who are popular are wanderers, homeless outsiders, always going to the next place." The train mentioned by Shuji Terayama in connection with his "birth" may also be a projection of such a "wandering complex", and Shuji Terayama becomes a member of the "wanderer" he admires by inventing such a birth-that-wandering identity. But in any case, this train rooted in Shuji Terayama's consciousness has always accompanied Shuji Terayama throughout his creative career, like his muse, bringing him countless inspirations and at the same time being loved by his inspiration.
Shuji Terayama once wrote a few poems like this, "What kind of poet do you say/ can swim in the sea you write?" I think this may be a hint to Shuji Terayama's own creation, because he himself, as he writes in this poem, swims in "the sea he writes", and also reminisces in his own fictional "nostalgia", (the speeding train). In Shuji Terayama's work, both his essays and his poems are filled with his understanding of this "fictional nostalgia." And this realization is rooted in his own life experience and the sensitivity of his soul, and at the same time blessed by his unique artist temperament and creative talent, so that his "imaginary nostalgia" can continuously provide him with creative motivation and inspiration, and is not affected by the changes in life situation and leads to the decline of "nostalgia".
Sontag wrote in His Essay on the Poet, "The prose of a poet is primarily about being a poet. And to write such an autobiography, to write about how to become a poet, you need a myth about yourself. The described self is the poet's self, and the everyday self (and other egos) are often ruthlessly sacrificed as a result. Reading these essays by Shuji Terayama seems to me to be reading Sontag's "poet's prose." In an essayistic way, Shuji Terayama constructs the image of a flesh-and-blood poet who sees his nostalgia as "a speeding train"; his poetry is more like putting on a proper dress for such an image, so that it is not too naked, so that he can be a poet more dignified.
Perhaps Sontag's "myth of the self" is too "heartfelt" in the literary circles of the gods everywhere, but I think that even so, the construction of such a "myth about the self" still has its necessity and rationality. For from the point of view of art as a means of healing, for a sincere creator, this "myth about the self" is first and foremost based on a need for self-expression, a sincere outpouring, written to the creator himself, not to others. This is exactly what is called "rhetorical sincerity". Contrary to the "myths about the self" established by those who sell fame and reputation, the truly empathetic reader will not be fooled by them, because those are at best "idlings" in a language. Shuji Terayama's value also lies in this, that is, he uses a fictitious nostalgia to complete the "myth about the self" while also making this "myth" with a special kind of privacy, and this privacy is related to the softest part of Terayama Shuji's heart, which is reflected in the essay collection "Who Doesn't Miss Home" (one of the "Shuji Terayama Works" series, 2021 edition). The reason why Shuji Terayama's privacy is shared is that his emotional experiences have a universality in his contemporaries, and the "nostalgia" he reflects is also the "nostalgia" of their generation of Japanese youth who have lost their normal childhood life. Thus, his "nostalgia" is both personal and impersonal. All in all, Shuji Terayama chose the "speeding train" as a kind of nostalgia and resonated with it, and this nostalgia also chose him, choosing this person who had suffered a lot and was blessed by art at the same time. (Editor-in-charge: Sun Xiaoning)