• Taira Jo: はなれ瞽女おりん (The Blind Minstrel Orin)

10/1/17 (Sun), New National Theatre, Tokyo

The eclectic puppeteer Taira Jo is back with a series of three adult-oriented shows performed over three days. All the dramas highlight women, making for a theme of sorts, though that’s the only thing in common among them. Yesterday was Medea, a revival of the excellent production I saw some years back, and tomorrow is a piece by the aggressively avant-garde Terayama Shuji. Today’s sounded like a safer bet. This story was originally a 1974 play, which was novelized the following year and made into a film by Shinoda Masahiro in 1977 under the name “Ballad of Orin”, which I have not seen. Taira again played all the roles, helped by three hooded kurogo stagehands.

Orin, blind since the age of three, was part of a band of goze or traveling blind female musicians. When she is raped, she is expelled from the group for violating its vow of celibacy, making her an outcast singer (hanare goze, as per the Japanese title). After run-ins with various men to fend off her loneliness, she meets Heitaro, a mysterious drifter who makes wooden geta clogs. He becomes her constant companion but unusually does not want her sexually. He claims that he wants her to remain like a goddess to him and thus cannot violate her. Hopelessly in love, she finally learns to live with being his virtual sister and enjoys a blissfully happy life.

That isn’t bound to last, of course, this being a Japanese tale. When Heitaro is called away, Orin is raped (rather passively on her part, it must be said, suggesting a resignation as to her fate in life). Heitaro learns of this and, despite the pleas of Orin (who tries to take the blame), kills the rapist. When Heitaro is captured, we learn his secret: he had deserted the army and has been a fugitive from justice under an assumed name. Having caught up with him, the police choose to arrest him for murder instead to avoid making it public that there was a deserter in the ranks. Threatening to drag Orin down with him, they force him to admit to the murder. Heitaro manages to escape and, his hands bound behind him, throws himself into the sea. Orin cannot accept that he has gone and continues to travel in search of him.

The revelation that Heitaro was a deserter implies that his refusal to sleep with Orin was to avoid tainting her by association – in other words, it suggests that he truly loved her, wanting to keep her pure and avoid dragging her down with him. His suicide after his exposure was presumably for the same reason. The depth of his feeling is thus suggested rather than shown, but none less real for all that.

The problem for the show is that none of this has anything to do with Orin. Heitaro’s desertion came before they met, and nothing she did had any bearing on her fate in any way. Life simply happens to her; she is a poor victim of circumstance. Without the sense that she had any hand in the proceedings, this is just melodrama rather than true tragedy. We may feel sorry for her, but the show tells us nothing about her, ourselves or human life. That’s a far cry from the last two of Jo’s pieces that I saw, Medea and Hamlet. This is not atypical for Japanese drama, which often puts more emphasis on the inexorable, unknowable way of the world or society than on human action. This is simply Orin’s story and nothing beyond that.

Still, it is dramatically effective and comes in a creative and very handsome package as per Taira’s usual high standards. The single set was strewn with huge piles of paper strips, which became snow, ocean, cherry blossoms and more (also falling from above at times), complemented with various props like tables and wagon carts. The kurogo manipulated small screens adeptly to bring in/off props or set a new scene. Visually, the show was a constant delight.

Orin, the only major puppet here, was brought to life by Taira with great delicacy. She was better than many of the younger actresses I’ve seen on stage in Japan. Most of the other characters were presented as human-shaped metal stands or, as with Heitaro, portrayed by Taira himself. The interactions between the puppets, particularly the swift change of voices, were handled with great skill.

There were several uncomfortably long stretches of time with nothing happening on stage, presumably needed for costume changes. Those need to be worked out. The piece itself dragged in parts as well and perhaps could be tightened. Less forgivable were the numerous costume and prop fails, which Taira finessed to some extent but made the show seem under-rehearsed. Nevertheless, the overall concept and production worked wonderfully in puppet format.

After Euripides and Shakespeare, it was interesting to see Taira tackle a subject so Japanese in setting and sensibility, where the spoken is less important than the unspoken and logic or depth less important than sheer feeling. A production well worth seeing for its approach to the material and the superb handling of Orin.