Now I’d like to give you an update about what Unaiko is working on these days. Out of the entire group, Masao Anai was hit the hardest by your decision to abandon the drowning novel. Unlike me, he tends to take setbacks very much to heart.
When he first heard that you were coming back to Shikoku to finish writing the book, Masao was running around exclaiming, “At last! At last!” I’ve never seen him so excited, and even Unaiko stopped for a minute to laugh. Of course, we’re all aware that Masao is obsessed with the idea of dramatizing all your novels, so his childlike delight seemed entirely natural — as did his subsequent disappointment when the plan fell through.
Unaiko, on the other hand, is choosing to put a positive spin on things by focusing on the fact that you’ve finally been liberated from the drowning novel and can now move on. This seems a bit counterintuitive to me, but she seems to think that by being critical of you and your work she will somehow be able to entice you into further collaboration. (Reverse psychology, maybe?) In any event, I gather you’ve already heard about the Caveman Group’s program for teaching drama in secondary schools all over the prefecture, so you know that its current project is an adaptation of Natsume Soseki’s classic novel Kokoro. Unaiko and Masao lost no time in drafting a script, and they’ve already presented it at several schools. The early version was very well received, and the troupe has been inundated with requests and invitations from a number of additional schools.
But Unaiko isn’t someone who rests on her laurels after a handful of favorable reviews and just repeats the same performance over and over. No, she’s been busy tape-recording the students’ impressions of this special style of teaching and then giving careful consideration to their comments. For the dramatic reading of Kokoro, Unaiko is trying to make the piece evolve organically, one step at a time. And now, with Masao’s help, she’s attempting to distill the result of her preliminary labors into a finished work of art (or, more precisely, into a perpetually evolving work of art). All along, she’s been continually polishing the style and technique that emerged from the dog-tossing piece, and she’s been using the same lapidary process to enliven her drama classes as well. She has gotten the students at various schools to throw a great many symbolic “dogs.” At the moment, she’s busy compiling those responses, including a fair number of critical remarks, and synthesizing them into a revised script for the play.
The plan is for Unaiko and her colleagues to give a major public performance of Kokoro, showcasing their unique interactive approach, at the middle school’s cylinder-shaped auditorium, which will be converted into a theater for the occasion. (That rather daring structure has gotten a lot of criticism because it was very costly to build, and the middle school’s dwindling enrollment didn’t seem to warrant the investment.) They’re thinking that if the building could be given a catchy name like “theater in the round” and turned into an active cultural venue, it might revitalize the village. That’s why everyone is excited about this new idea.
But what does this have to do with you, up there in Tokyo? Well, I took the liberty of offering to ask whether you’d be willing to help Unaiko create the script for the upcoming play, which is something you could do without actually being here. (As you know, there was some tentative discussion about the possibility of your delivering a related lecture, but it isn’t going to happen, for obvious reasons.) At any rate, I’ll be very grateful if you would do this favor for me — or rather, for us.
You know, here in this tiny village I’ve been typecast for many years as the younger sister of an illustrious author and activist who has always been a lightning rod for all sorts of criticism. As a result of dealing with that sort of thing on a regular basis, I’ve had no choice but to evolve into a political animal myself!
4
I was already familiar with the Tossing the Dead Dogs project, but when I’m asked to commit to something I can’t help wanting to know exactly what is involved. That’s just the way I am. I was aware that the young members of the Caveman Group were working on turning Kokoro into a dramatic reading aimed at students, and I was happy to help, but I still had some questions.
For one thing, when it came time to actually mount a performance, I couldn’t see how they were going to turn Soseki’s subtle, understated novel into an interactive dramatic free-for-all. In Unaiko’s approach to drama, the spontaneous exchanges that can occur between the audience and the actors onstage become a major aspect of the production.
Granted, the so-called dead dogs that are her trademark props are just stuffed toys, but how would throwing them back and forth be integrated into a play about friendship, betrayal, existential malaise, and suicide? And in this instance (as opposed to the earlier performance piece, which was literally about dogs), what was the significance of the canine “corpses” supposed to be?
I tried to imagine various scenarios but I finally gave up and had Chikashi telephone Unaiko, on my behalf, to ask for additional details about how the Caveman Group was planning to pull this off. Unaiko replied (via Chikashi) that the practice script she was currently using was derived from recordings of comments by the students she had met through her dramatic presentations at various schools. Unaiko then proceeded to read some of the raw, unedited lines to Chikashi over the phone, saying she hoped I would share my thoughts about them.
Chikashi, who appeared to be enjoying her go-between role immensely, wrote those lines down and then showed them to me. She also filled me in on the origin story of the dog-tossing trope, including some details I hadn’t heard before.
It had begun accidentally, during the Caveman Group’s revival of a play dating back to the New Drama movement that had blossomed in Japan before the war. During the scene in question, a young wife played by Unaiko was sitting on a chair in a Western-style parlor holding a pet dog (represented by a stuffed animal) on her lap. The audience began heckling Unaiko’s character for some reason and, spurred on by the jeers and catcalls, she pretended to strangle the dog — acting up a storm and making the “murder” look very realistic. She tossed the “carcass” into the rowdy audience, whereupon the “dead dog” was immediately heaved back onto the stage.
Apparently it was a seminal moment in the evolution of Unaiko’s dramatic method, as she realized that while in reality most of the audience members were positively disposed toward her and her colleagues, in the context of the play those same spectators were clearly getting a tremendous kick out of razzing the actors on the stage. (As an aside, Chikashi mentioned having read somewhere about a psychiatric method called drama therapy, in which throwing stuffed animals is used to help patients work through various issues. Unaiko, it seemed, had serendipitously stumbled upon the same cathartic technique.)
The first, unscripted melee created a great deal of buzz, so in the next performance the bit with the stuffed dog was repeated, only this time with conscious intent. The dramatists added the confrontational give-and-take with the audience to the original script, and a rather staid prewar play was reinvented as Tossing the Dead Dogs. The interactive element turned out to be extremely popular, and it soon became the Caveman Group’s dramatic calling card.