Shun-kin

It isn’t often that a writer achieves national honors by writing about sexual deviancy, but such was the destiny of Jun’ichirô Tanizaki. In the middle of his prolific career in 1933, the iconoclastic Japanese writer produced two works: “A Portrait of Shunkin”, a film script imagining a life-long sado-masochistic relationship between a blind woman and her servant, and “In Praise of Shadows”, an essay on contrasting aesthetics in the West and Japan. His preoccupation with eroticism, in all its manifestations, as well as his stylistic novelties left a lasting mark on Japanese literature and society.

British director Simon McBurney begins his new show, “Shun-kin” with a narrator who similarly recalls the strong sensations he felt reading the text as a boy. Not surprisingly: the enigmatic Shun-kin, disfigured in her childhood and put into the care of Sasuke, a young apprentice to her family’s pharmacy, provides a fascinating psychological study and a thoroughly unconventional love story. What to make of it is explored by McBurney’s choice to pair the tale with Tanizaki’s essay: a challenge to examine the figurative shadow zones of the human psyche and, even in its socially vilified perversions, to find beauty there.

The second project to bring together McBurney, his company known as Complicité and Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theater, “Shun-kin” is a more complex showcase of the two troupes’ talents than the earlier “Elephant Vanishes” (2003). While Complicité’s flare for technological thrills and Tokyo’s neon brilliance disputed the spotlight in the older piece, based on three short stories by Muraki Hurakami, Tanizaki’s “Shun-kin” provides a meditative meeting of East and West, in its exploration of their dimly let intersections.

The show is an noteworthy demonstration of hybridity, both creative and intercultural. Complicité’s signature physical vocabulary and imaginative recuperating of everyday materials prove excellent companions to Japanese minimalism and traditional theater forms. The development of the title character Shun-kin from girl to womanhood is evoked with bunraku (the Japanese art of marionettes), but is achieved with such precision that it is easy to not notice when the doll changes places with an actress. The company also makes the most of the "sotoba", or offertory sticks placed on graves in Japan, with which the show begins: these are employed by the actors to evoke trees, steps, doors, rooms and musical instruments. Paper is similarly stretched to create kaleidoscopic projected images and nightingales taking flight, like origami birds. In a fitting touch, the story is narrated by Yoshi Oida, a longtime actor in Peter Brook’s theater laboratory in Paris, and his presence creates a living bridge between European and Japanese cultures.

Like the shadows Tanizaki praises for their closer approximation to the unknown, the fullness of the relationship between Shunkin and Sasuke remains a mystery, somewhere between passion, power, jealousy, self-hatred and even love. McBurney offers help again to unraveling it, imagining a contemporary framing device about an actress hired to read their story for Japanese radio and who decides, upon finishing her performance, to rekindle a relationship she had been ready to let go. By a multitude of nuances in the sepia-toned set, Judeo-Christian symbolism which equates light with beauty and goodness is challenged throughout by a Japanese connectedness with a spirituality and aesthetic manifested in silence and darkness.

McBurney and company(ies) have fashioned a rare piece of art, in the example of Shun-kin’s puppet: fragmented, multi-faceted and amazingly life-like, to shine a different quality of “light” on life itself.

To Nov. 23, Théâtre de la Ville, www.theatredelaville.com / www.festival-automne.com

Photo Credit: Tsukasa Aoka