The Question of the Other: Kara Juro and Letters from Sagawa

Volume 5 | Issue 12 | Article ID 2592 | Dec 01, 2007 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Question of the Other: Kara Juro and Letters from Sagawa Mark Morris The Question of the Other: Kara Juro and look at the literary field of the early 1980s. Letters from Sagawa A third and related matter, which the very Mark Morris strangeness of Letters from Sagawa might help to comprehend, has to do with a certain sense This essay proposes looking back at a story of strangeness itself. The print and online which is one of the most unusual winners of media have, not so long ago, reported on Japan’s best-known literary award, thesomething called “The Paris Syndrome” which Akutagawa Prize. Kara Juro’sLetters from seems to affect young Japanese visitors to and Sagawa (Sagawa-kun kara no tegami) first short-term residents of Paris. Veteran BBC appeared in November 1982 in the journal Paris correspondent Caroline Wyatt has Bungei; it was announced co-winner of the 88th recounted, via other reports in the French Akutagawa Prize in January 1983, andpress and Reuters, that a ‘dozen or so Japanese subsequently reprinted that March in the tourists a year have to be repatriated from the official prize-confirmation section of the quality French capital, after falling prey to what’s monthly which hosts the award, Bungei Shunju. become known as “Paris syndrome”. This is Kara’s publisher Kawade Shobo Shinsha had what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when already published a slim single-volume version they discover that Parisians can be rude or that the preceding January. the city does not meet their expectations’ (Wyatt 2006). I want however briefly to I want to go back to Letters from Sagawa for consider a rather more serious, historically several reasons. One is that the author, Kara shaped sense of estrangement and alienation Juro, has had something of a come-back in experienced by Japanese and other visitors to recent years, not that he had ever really gone the West from East Asia since early in the way. For example, his short story "Glass twentieth century. This is a kind of alienation, a Messenger" ("Garasu no tsukai") was adapted sense of aporia (psychical, intellectual or by him into the screenplay of the 2005 film of ideological blockage) or dysphoria (psychical, the same title, a film directed by the zainichi existential malaise) before the lived fact of Korean director Kim Sujin, and Kara himself one’s otherness, often experienced most plays one of the lead roles in it. Kara is not well acutely on the level of language. In language, known outside Japan, so I will try to supply or in language thwarted, may reside a painful some basic information about this colourful, disaggregation of identity, which formulations contrary person. about a Paris syndrome inevitably threaten to trivialize. A second reason has to do with the cultural atmospherics of the earlier story. It seems to be Kara Juro, the Japanese literary field of the closely, if eccentrically, linked to political and 1980s, estrangement in and by language — cultural themes of Japan in the 1980s which these are complex topics that can only be might be worth revisiting from the distance of sketched out all too briefly. It is their several decades. This will also involve a cursory conjuncture within Kara’s Letters from Sagawa, 1 5 | 12 | 0 APJ | JF the conditions of the story’s production and the as worthy of description as an “incident” debates surrounding this intractable text, (jiken): Shinjuku Nishi-Guchi Koen Jiken.[1] which provide the focus of this essay. Kara Juro Kara is perhaps best known as one of the key figures of Japan’s “underground” –angura – theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in Tokyo in 1940 and graduated from Meiji University with a degree in theatre arts in 1963. That same year he helped found a drama troupe that would become one of the most colourful participants in the underground/avant-garde movement during these volatile decades: the Situation Theatre Troupe (Gekidan Jokyo Gekijo). The energy of his Situation Theatre at times spilled out onto the Tokyo streets from its signature Red Tent, leading to confrontations with Tokyo city Posters made by Angura bureaucrats, the police, and even his artistic ally and competitor Terayama Shuji (Goodman As noted above, Kara has been involved in film 1988: 227-82). as well as drama. His film career goes back to Consider, for example, “The Shinjuku West-Exit the end of the 1960s and roles in Oshima Park Incident” of 1969. By the beginning of Nagisa’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku that year, having been forced out of its dorobo nikki 1968) and Matsumoto Yoshio’s temporary home at the Hanazono Shrine due to Pandemonium (Shura 1971). His most recent the criticisms of shrine officials and local re-engagement with cinema has come in two business people, and having been banned by films directed by Kim Sujin, mentioned above, the Tokyo municipal government fromhimself formerly an actor in the Situation performing anywhere else in the city, the Theatre Troupe: Wagering the Night (Yoru o Situation Theatre turned to direct action. Kara kakete 1999) and Glass Messenger (Gurasu no and his comrades responded by setting up their tsukai 2005). The arts in general, and the Red Tent in a small park near Shinjuku Station. avant-garde theatre in particular, have shown a As they proceeded with a performance, several greater openness to outsiders, to others, than hundred riot police kidotai( ) – a familiar many social and cultural institutions in Japan. presence in the Tokyo streets of the time – This is especially the case with surrounded the tent. Afterwards Kara, his zainichi/resident Korean artists. Kara’s working female lead and partner Ri Reisen, and three life has been bound up with an alternative other members of the troupe were arrested. cultural sphere supportive of zainichi artists This example of bravado, a bringing together of such as his ex-partner, and co-founder of the art and political action typical of angura Situation Theatre, Ri Reisen (I Yeo-Seon), theatre, earned Kara and his troupe their own character actor Rokudaira Naomasa and actor- niche in the popular social history of the time, director Kim Sujin, one of the most significant since the 3 January 1969 event wascontemporary figures in the considerable immediately classified by the Japanese media zainichi artistic community. 2 5 | 12 | 0 APJ | JF Kara Juro is the stage name of the man born Paris police had arrested a man identified as a Otsuru Yoshihide. There have been a number of Japanese student in front of his residence in the famous artistic “Juro’s.” One whose career has Sixteenth Arrondissement. He was held under suggestive parallels with Kara’s was Hayashida suspicion of having brutally murdered a young Juro (1900-67), best-known for his role in the Dutch woman, like himself a student enrolled at postwar revival of Kamigata manzai (comic the Centre Censier of the University of Paris. dialogues associated with western Japan). Police had earlier been attempting to trace a ‘Kara’ is written with the character otherwise suspicious-looking young Asian male who had read as To, as in the To – in Chinese, Tang – jettisoned two suitcases by a pond in the Bois Dynasty. But the noun kara has meanings only de Boulogne. The suitcases were discovered to loosely tied to any specific history orcontain human remains. Police had had little geography, general connotations of the foreign, difficulty locating the cab driver who had exotic, the other. Kara Juro is a name which unwittingly helped suspect Sagawa Issei carry signals in the man a kind of playfulthe cases from his flat and take them to the extroversion that one might not expect from nearby park (Le Monde 17/6/81:15).[3] News of the bearer of the elegant Japanese moniker he the arrest reached Japan in time for evening was born with.[2] I will return to Kara and his newscasts the following day, and was then cultural sphere’s zainichi connections at the picked up by the major dailies on the end of the essay, if only to indicate the seventeenth. Following standard journalistic exceptional nature of Letters from Sagawa and practice, the suspect Sagawa Issei was at first its postmodern, rather 1980s-specific nervous only know as “A” in the Japanese media, playfulness about, if not downright rejection of, although from its first reports Le Monde and alterity. other European media referred to both Sagawa and his victim, René Hartvelt, by name. The One other Kara is the writer of prose fiction. first, and what would prove to be one of the This is the Kara focussed on below. During his longest articles devoted to the “Sagawa jiken” years of acting, agitating and directing, he by a broadsheet newspaper, was headed: “In gained a reputation as a first-rate writer of Paris, Female Student Dismembered” (“Pari de funny, fantastic and often macabre short jogakusei barabara”: Asahi 17/6/81: M 23). The stories. One collection of tales won the Izumi article accompanying the header maintained a Kyoka Prize for fantasy-genre fiction in 1978 sober tone, but the header itself suggested the (The Starfish, The Sprite [Hitode, Kappa]). Ten lurid imagery which would accompany volumes of stories had appeared by 1982, discussion of this “incident” on its way to before he had won the Akutagawa Prize. Kara’s literary recasting.[4] Letters from Sagawa may not be much more fantastic or macabre than some of his other According to his own thinly fictionalized tales, but it did take on a curious life of its own, account written well after the crime, Sagawa both in its creation and its reception.

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