Volume 3 | Issue 6 | Article ID 1862 | Jun 10, 2005 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Virtual Violence Ian Buruma Virtual Violence and miniature gardens, and its Senso temple dedicated to Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, By Ian Buruma were given over to all manner of entertainments: a Kabuki theater, jugglers, geisha houses, circus acts, photography booths, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa dancers, comic storytellers, performing by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the monkeys, bars, restaurants, and archery stalls Japanese by Alisa Freedman, with a foreword where young women were reputed to have and afterword by Donald Richie andoffered a variety of services. illustrations by Ota Saburo University of California Press, 231 pp., $50.00; Asakusa's wildest days are said to have been in $17.95 (paper) the 1910s, after the Russo-Japanese War, when Russian girls, performing gypsy numbers in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding dance revues, known as "operas," added an Subculture exotic tang to the Sixth District, where most of Catalog of the exhibition edited by Murakami the theaters were. The main attraction was to Takashi show off women's legs. Reviews featuring an exhibition at the Japan Society, New York, young women performing swordfights were April 8–July 24, 2005. designed for this purpose also. Some of the Japan Society/Yale University Press, 298 pp., opera houses actually provided the real thing. $60.00 An Italian named G.V. Rossi was brought over from London to stage operas at the grandly 1. named Imperial Theater, only to find a scarcity of singers. In his production of The Magic Asakusa, in 1929, had seen better days. Flute, the same singer had to play both Pamina Asakusa usually has. That is the elegiac charm and the Queen of the Night, with a stand-in on of this district in the east of Tokyo, flanking the hand when the two had to appear in the same Sumida River, the scene of the newly translated scene.[2] novel by Kawabata Yasunari, written in the late 1920s. Since the late seventeenth century, a The first movie houses in Japan also were in warren of streets just north of Asakusa, named Asakusa, as was Tokyo's first "skyscraper," the Yoshiwara, had been a licensed brothel area, Twelve-Story Tower, or Ryounkaku. Soon the whose denizens, ranging from famoussilent movies, accompanied by splendid courtesans to cheap prostitutes, catered to storytellers known as benshi, were even more townsmen, but also to samurai, who sometimes popular than music halls or theater, and found it necessary to disguise their identities Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Bow became the stars by wearing elaborate hats.[1] Asakusa itself of Asakusa. As is usually true of entertainment really came into its own as a hub of pleasure in districts, even the best of them, Asakusa was the 1840s. By the late nineteenth century the marked by an ephemeral quality, by a sense of grounds of Asakusa Park, with its lovely ponds the fleetingness of all pleasure, which was 1 3 | 6 | 0 APJ | JF perhaps part of its allure. But Asakusa, in the and modern girls (mogas). The cultural slogan twentieth century, really did live on the edge; of the time was ero, guro, nansensu, "erotic, the entire quarter was almost totally destroyed grotesque, nonsense." Kawabata Yasunari was twice: first in the Great Kanto Earthquake of one of the writers whose early work was 1923, which hit just as people were cooking infused by this spirit, and it was his book that their lunches, and incinerated the mostly made the Folies famous. He hung around wooden houses in a horrific firestorm; and Asakusa for three years, wandering the streets, again in the spring of 1945, when American talking to dancers and young gangsters, but B-29 bombers demolished much of the city and mostly just walking and looking, and reported all of Asakusa, causing the deaths of between on what he saw in his extraordinary modernist 60,000 and 70,000 people in a couple of nights. novel, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, first published in 1930. After the 1923 earthquake, the famous park was a charred wasteland, the Twelve-Story The novel is not so much about developing Tower no more than a ruined stump, and the characters as about expressing a new opera palaces were rubble. Only the Kannon sensibility, a new way of seeing and describing temple survived. It was thought by some that atmosphere: quick, fragmented, cutting from the statue of a famous Kabuki actor striking a one scene to another, like editing a film, or heroic pose had held off the approaching assembling a collage, with a mixture of flames. (The temple did not survive thereportage, advertising slogans, lyrics from American bombs, however, and had to be popular songs, fantasies, and historical reconstructed.) And yet, fleeting as itsanecdotes and legends. There is much ero, pleasures may have been, Asakusa could not guro, nansensu there, related in the chatty tone stay down for long. The movie houses and of a congenial flaneur, telling stories about this opera halls were rebuilt, and the park, with its place or that, and who did what where, while pickpockets, prostitutes, Kannon worshipers, trolling the streets for new sensations. This dandies, and juvenile delinquents, sprang back fragmentary way of storytelling owes a great to life. In 1929, the Casino Folies was opened, deal to European expressionism, or located on the second floor of an aquarium, "Caligarism," after the German movie The next to an entomological museum, or Bug Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. However, as Edward House, which had somehow survived the Seidensticker, quoted in Donald Richie's devastation of 1923. excellent foreword, points out, it also owes ------------------------------------------------------------------------ much to Edo period stories. The Casino Folies, named after the Folies Bergère in Paris, was not especially wild, Kawabata himself professed to hate his early although it was rumored— apparently without experiment in modernist fiction and quickly any basis in truth —that the dancing girls, went on to develop a very different, more sometimes in blond wigs, dropped theirclassical style, but he still made an important drawers on Friday evenings. But it spawned not contribution to the Japanese Roaring Twenties. only talented entertainers, some of whom later Besides the novel, he also wrote the film script became movie stars, but great comedians too. for Kinugasa Teinosuke's expressionist The most famous was Enoken, who appears in masterpiece, A Page of Madness (1926). One of Kurosawa's 1945 film They Who Step on the the most remarkable things about The Scarlet Tiger's Tail. Everything that was raffish and Gang of Asakusa is that it was serialized in a fresh about Asakusa between the wars was mainstream newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, exemplified by the Casino Folies, a symbol of which is, as Donald Richie says, as though the Japanese jazz age of "modern boys" (mobos) Ulysses had been picked up by the London 2 3 | 6 | 0 APJ | JF Times. This testifies to the high-mindedness of In fact, the narrator is the first to point out the the Japanese press—almost unthinkable in our fictional quality of his story. Artifice is the age of Murdoch—but also to the willingness of point. Yumiko, after disappearing from the the Japanese public to accept avant-garde story for a long stretch, returns near the end of literature in a popular newspaper; it probably the novel as a hair oil seller. Selling oil, in helped that the avant-garde expressionism was Japanese, means fibbing, making up a story. mixed with accounts of Asakusa's low life. Yumiko and the narrator discuss how the story should go on. The writer compares his story to ------------------------------------------------------------------------ a boat, like the boat on which Yumiko entertained her lover before murdering him, Mixing high and low is of course part of meandering, without a plotted course. This is modernism. Like many artists in the 1920s, where traditional Japanese storytelling meets Kawabata was interested in detective fiction modernism. Both share this quality. and Caligarism is often marked by a fascination with violent crime. The use of slang and the None of the characters in Kawabata's novel has references to popular culture of the time must the depth of such modernist antiheroes as have made The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa Franz Biberkopf in Alfred Döblin's Berlin extremely difficult to translate, and Alisa Alexanderplatz or Joyce's Bloom. Compared to Freedman has done an superb job, even though them Yumiko and the others are flimsy as rice the full flavor of the original can never be fully paper. It is in conveying atmosphere that reproduced. Kawabata, like so many Japanese literary flaneurs, excels. Here is the first sentence of The narrator/flaneur introduces the reader to Chapter Four: various characters, low-life types likeWhile she did her Spanish number (and I did Umekichi, who skins stray cats to sell their not make this up—this is a true story), I clearly pelts, and his girlfriend Yumiko, who poisons saw that the dancer on stage carried on her an older lover on a riverboat by kissing him biceps needle marks from a recent injection, with arsenic, and Haruko, dressed in gold though a small piece of adhesive tape had been crepe, and Tangerine Oshin, "the heroine of stuck on top. In the grounds of the Senso every bad girl worth the name," who had Temple at around two in the morning, sixteen "done" 150 men by the time she was sixteen. or seventeen wild dogs let out a terrific howl as These are the people who drift into the Scarlet they all rush after a single cat.