Article

Shuji Terayama's artistic activities were diverse, starting with tanka poetry, haiku poetry, essays, critiques, novels, radio and TV dramas, plays, film directing, playwriting and directing, etc. His contemporaries were fascinated by his intellectual and logical sense, from fairy tales to underground and surrealism. In his youth, he read and reread books such as "Iezuru no Susume" and "Sho wo Dashi yo, Machi e Dashi yo. After that, he experienced Terayama's plays such as "Shinpokumaru" and "Audience Seat" in 1978, "Lemmings" and "Children's Hunting" in 1979, "Bluebeard's Castle" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in 1981. What was the shock? In a word, "What's true and what's false? There was no other way to describe it than to say that I was consumed by a whirlpool of thoughts that went in circles. Where did the play begin and when did it end in the midst of all the prearranged, coincidental lines and events? Where are the scripted events and where are the real ones? In the midst of this uncertainty between fiction and reality, I was at a loss as I made my way home. The culture shock infected his reality like a contagious disease, sinking into the depths of his consciousness for a few days to a few decades, or manifesting itself at a moment's notice. In other words, for Shuji Terayama, theater, unlike radio, television, or film, was an act of expression akin to a revolution, an allegory for the self-evident reality that both the events on stage and the chairs in which the audience sits are realities that exist in the same space and time, and that both the theatrical expression on stage and the everyday reality of the audience are human-made fictions. It was an allegory that both the events on the stage and the chairs of the audience exist in the same time and space.