• 黒蜥蜴 (The Black Lizard)

1/27/18 (Sat), Tokyo

The latest rendering of Mishima’s overwrought, exceedingly talky but highly popular detective drama of 1962. I saw the traditional shingeki version ten years ago with the sleek villainess played by the legendary Miwa Akihiro, Mishima’s own choice for the film version (and supposed lover), and came out unsure whether I was seeing a serious rendering or a parody. This time was a new production by the celebrated British director David Leveaux, who, less tied to the old ways, would presumably be coming to the material with fresh eyes. I was also encouraged by good reviews by friends. The production was completely sold out throughout the run, but I managed to grab two day seats.

The play, based on an equally well known 1930s novel by mystery writer Edogawa Rampo, centers on a villainess nicknamed the Black Lizard who seeks to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy jeweler as ransom in order to gain a prized diamond. Ace detective Akechi Kogoro has been charged with protecting the girl. The various machinations as the two move to outwit each other drive the plot, but the real story becomes the charged feelings that they develop for each other along the way.

The Lizard is obsessed with the ephemeral nature of human beauty, seeing the body as a victim of the corrosion of heart and soul. She wants people to be like her beloved gems, soulless and forever beautiful. Her solution is to murder young people at the peak of their splendor and stuff them so that they never deteriorate, keeping them on display in her House of Horrors. She initially wants to use the girl to get the diamond, but ultimately decides to embalm her as well. After her interaction with the detective, though, she feels that he is the first man who truly understands her. Thus humanized, she gradually falls in love with him. Meanwhile, Akechi has his own theories about evil and crime and is attracted to the Lizard as the personification of those ideals. He thus falls for her as well, but only as the perfect criminal, a character type.

That conflict is the underlying theme of a densely plotted drama involving a Bond-like world of splendid mansions and underground lairs, disguises and deceptions, and endless talking. There are lizard slaves, talking sofas, dizzying plot twists and other distractions, and characters slip in and out of disguises – Lizard becomes a man, the detective a shopkeeper and ship worker, the daughter an impostor (and a doll early on) – making identity itself fluid. But what comes across most is the contrived dialogue. Lots of it. The words do far too much of the work here, including explanations (rather than dramatization) of plot points and long meaningless monologues that show off the actors in Kabuki-like fashion rather than advance the story or themes.

Here’s how the detective explains to the Lizard his idea of a criminal. Three women get roses and find an insect. The first screams and impulsively throws the flowers and insect into the fire; she is cruel by instinct. The second picks out the insect and throws only it into the fire; she has made “a careful distinction among the importance of an insect, roses and the moral framework of society” (using the published translation by Mark Oshima), which is rationally cruel. The third woman doesn’t want to kill either the flowers or insect, so instead “she goes around behind the man who sent her the flowers and, most tragically, shoves him into the fire”. Akechi concludes that she “actually has the least innate cruelty” of the three and thus “the qualifications to become a criminal”.

So what does all that mean? Beats me. (It doesn’t sound any more logical in Japanese.) This is basically Mishima enjoying the sound of his own voice.

The Lizard’s top slave tells her rapturously of his love for her: “I wiped my lips with your handkerchief and was completely in a daze.” She responds, “Actually that handkerchief was soaked with chloroform” – so much for romance. Is that supposed to be serious? Furthermore, she tells him she was going to stuff him for display in her museum, but he woke up and caused such a fuss that he was no longer beautiful to her. That in fact upsets him, as he desires to be the object of her admiration forever. He subsequently tries to get killed and stuffed by kidnapping the jeweler’s daughter, only to learn that he’s taken a look-alike decoy rather than the real thing. The guy can’t win. (The impostor daughter falls in love with him and wants to confess her identity, hoping to free him, but he demands that she remain in disguise so that he can be murdered and embalmed with her. It’s complicated.)

Leveaux eschews the old version of the show, which was all poses and aggressively unnatural in a neo-Kabuki or shinpa or shingeki way (I can’t always tell the difference). In opting for naturalistic acting, however, he is fighting the nature of the dialogue and the show’s structure. Whereas the original version uses elaborate and realistic sets, Leveaux uses a more abstract approach with actors pushing simple pieces in and out as needed, such as doors rolled in to represent rooms or turned around from front to back to show a shift from inside a room to outside. That is smooth and very well executed, but only serves to highlight the artificiality of the plot and characters and speech. That is, the show is more natural even as the physical setting is less so, and the twain never meets. Still, the physical production on its own terms was impressive. The display of the House of Horrors deftly avoided campiness by presenting the stuffed naked bodies behind a translucent panel rather than in the open. That added to the creepiness and mystery, a nice touch.

Nakatani Miki, very good back in the flawed Memories of Matsuko, again triumphed over the material with a memorable performance as the uber-cool Black Lizard, the embodiment of Mishima’s vision of soulless beauty. The role has most famously been played by two men, Miwa and Kabuki female-role specialist Bando Tamasaburo, which added another level of fantasy, especially when the character disguises herself as a man – i.e., a man playing a woman disguises himself/herself as a man. But Miwa’s performance, which I saw ten years ago, was all superficial poses, devolving into self-caricature (I walked out after the first two acts; I suspect Tamasaburo, one of the best Japanese actors on stage today, was better). Miki can’t entirely escape that given the material, but her poise and smart delivery made the character almost believable even in her loonier speeches. Inoue Yoshio also did well by his part as the detective of many disguises, and Songha (Shunkin) was excellent as always in the part of Lizard’s adoring follower Amamiya.

The ensemble was sadly plagued by the typical “acting” (i.e., overacting) in Japanese theater. The second act in the jeweler’s mansion, which features only the bit players, was nearly unbearable and doesn’t seem to have come from the same director. I was put off, for example, by the melodramatic way the kitchen chief’s betrayal was presented; we could have figured it out ourselves without the over-the-top signaling. I had hoped for more from Leveaux. This sort of acting may have worked in a full-on shingeki version, though that’s not how I remember it.

Mishima’s key theme of the transience of beauty was more convincingly portrayed in his Terrace of the Leper King and the stage adaptation of his novel Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion), both directed by Miyamoto Amon. This overly talky, overly stagy and overly plotted drama never lacks interest if only for the camp value, and the gothic ending was worth the wait. I’m surprised Tarentino hasn’t produced a version. Still, it is tiresome in the end other than as a vehicle for the main players, though they were fortunately well worth seeing. That said, I’m curious to see how this was handled in the more visual medium of film, especially in the second movie version, which featured Mishima himself in a bit role, by the always interesting Fukasaku Kinji (Battles Without Duty and Humanity).