Shūji Terayama
1935 - 1983Shūji Terayama (December 10, 1935 – May 4, 1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. According to many critics and supporters, he was one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan. He was born December 10, 1935, the only son of Hachiro and Hatsu Terayama in Hirosaki city in the northern Japanese prefecture of Aomori. His father died at the end of Pacific War in Indonesia in September 1945. At the age of nine, his mother moved to Kyūshū to work at an American military base while he himself went to live with relatives in the city of Misawa, also in Aomori. At this same time, Terayama lived through the Aomori air raids that killed more than 30,000 people.
Terayama entered Aomori Prefectural Aomori High School in 1951, and in 1954 went to prestigious Waseda University's Faculty of Education to study Japanese language and literature. However, he soon dropped out because he fell ill with nephrotic syndrome. He received his education through working in bars in Shinjuku. His oeuvre includes a number of essays claiming that more can be learned about life through boxing and horse racing than by attending school and studying hard. Accordingly, he was one of the central figures of the "runaway" movement in Japan in the late 1960s, as depicted in his book, play, and film "Throw Away Your Books, Run into the Streets!
In 1967, Terayama formed the Tenjō Sajiki theater troupe, whose name comes from the Japanese translation of the 1945 Marcel Carné film "Les Enfants du Paradis", so can be translated as "children of heaven", however its correct translation is "Ceiling Gallery" and has a meaning similar to the English expression "Peanut Gallery". The troupe was dedicated to the avant-garde and staged a number of controversial plays tackling social issues from an iconoclastic perspective. Some major plays include "Bluebeard", "Yes", and "The Crime of Fatso Oyama", among others. Also involved with the theater were artists Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo, who designed many of the advertisement posters for the group. Musically, he worked closely with experimental composer J.A. Seazer and folk musician Kan Mikami.
He was also involved in poetry and at 18 was the second winner of the Tanka Studies Award.
Terayama experimented with ‘city plays’, a fantastical satire of civic life.
Also in 1967, Terayama started an experimental cinema and gallery called 'Universal Gravitation,' which is in fact still in existence at Misawa as a resource center. The Terayama Shūji Memorial Hall, which has a large collection of his plays, novels, poetry, photography and a great number of his personal effects and relics from his theatre productions, can also be found in Misawa. In 1976, he was a member of the jury at the 26th Berlin International Film Festival.
Terayama published almost 200 literary works, and over 20 short and full-length films.
He was married to Tenjō Sajiki co-founder Kyōko Kujō, but they later divorced, although they continued to work together until Terayama's death on May 4, 1983 from cirrhosis of the liver.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Shūji Terayama, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets
Shūji Terayama
Hideaki Sasaki, Masahiro Saito
Conditions have been better for the nameless protagonist: his grandmother is a shoplifter and his war criminal father and sister have an unhealthy, intimate relationship with the family rabbit.
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets
Farewell to the Ark
Shūji Terayama
Tsutomu Yamazaki, Mayumi Ogawa
A surreal, isolated village sees its inhabitants gradually leave behind their mutual traditions and superstitions as they leave for the city. Among them are two cousins who love each other and who get into a quarrel with other villagers.
Farewell to the Ark
草迷宮
Shūji Terayama
Hiroshi Mikami, Takeshi Wakamatsu
Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.
Grass Labyrinth
ビデオ・レター
Shuntaro Tanikawa, Shūji Terayama
Shūji Terayama, Shuntaro Tanikawa
This remarkable compilation follows an exchange of video letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama's death. It can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and inter-laid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.
Video Letter
ボクサー
Shūji Terayama
Bunta Sugawara, Kentarô Shimizu
In the midst of a match, a successful boxer - Hayato, has had enough of the sport. He lets himself get knocked, quits boxing, leaving his wife and start living alone with his mangy dog. One day a young mediocre boxer knocks at the door and wants to be Hayato's apprentice.
Boxer
疱瘡譚
Shūji Terayama
Keiko Niitaka, Yoko Ran
The smallpox virus has created its own unique atmosphere in Terayama’s film where the skin of a bandaged adolescent and the surface of the filmic image are subjected to a bizarre ‘disturbance’ as snails cross the screen and nails are hammered into the skull of the ailing patient. Illness in this film is as much a psychic entity as a physical one and manifests itself in an array of theatrical tableaux from grotesque women rigorously brushing their teeth to a snooker game where the players in white face makeup behave like automata. A Tale of Smallpox uses a medical theme to chart the traumatic dream life of Terayama’s times, evincing deep-rooted concerns in the Japanese national psyche that hark back to the upheaval of Meiji modernisation and the devastation of World War Two.
Smallpox Tale
非行少女ヨーコ
Yasuo Furuhata
Mako Midori, Hayato Tani
Easily bored, but still innocent and naive countryside girl (Mako Midori) discovers partying in Tokyo is a ton of fun. Yakuza-to-be (Ichiro Araki) is an acquaintance who tries to rape her, and the typically bland but very-good-here (Hayato Tani) the first boyfriend. Director Yasuo Furuhata (his first picture) lets his camera roll in trendy clubs amongst partying youngsters in a way that could've been out of 60s England or a Nikkatsu film if it wasn't shadowed by dated 60s Toei conservatism.The resulting film is a bit confused, either a rebellious youth tale chained by moral concerns, or something conceived as a morality tale trying to break free from its chains.
Pretty Devil Yoko
書見機
Shūji Terayama
Momo Yaguchi, Takeshi Wakamatsu
In this Borgesian satire on knowledge and technology, bibliophilic desire leads to the construction of a pedal-powered reading machine. Resembling a combination of gymnastic contraption, printing press and early cinematic apparatus, the machine’s purpose remains ambiguous. And like this machine, Terayama’s film connects his work in poetry, motion picture and graphic design by weaving together printed and projected, still and moving images.
The Reading Machine
