Women warriors, let us go
Off to face our latest foe.
Into battle we will soar
Strong and brave forevermore.
All together, here we go
We shall vanquish every foe!
The women join in, singing along, and they begin to dance as well. Hoisting their primitive armaments—’bamboo spears, pointed sticks, and the like — the village women shuffle around until they’re in a perfectly regimented formation. Then the group goes marching off to battle, led by Meisuke II and his mother.
The screenplay doesn’t show what happens to Meisuke’s mother and her son following the successful uprising. (According to legend, they were set upon by a gang of masterless samurai who raped Meisuke’s mother after they had thrown her young son into a hole in the ground and stoned him to death.) Instead, in the filmed version, we’re back on the platform at the Saya, and the ghost of Meisuke’s mother is sitting there relating the tale of the victorious uprising. She tells us that the country is in the throes of a major reconstruction, and the adversary who was vanquished in the second uprising wasn’t the despotic clan, but rather some troops sent from Tokyo by the administrator in charge of the area. While the triumphant insurrectionists were raising a flag of victory over their base camp at Okawara, the government administrator committed suicide in shame and the interlopers slunk away with their tails between their legs.
As the majestic voice of Meisuke’s mother seems to take flight, the camera is borne along with it, pulling up into a crane-shot panorama of the stunning scenery of the Saya and beyond. The entire mountain is ablaze with colorful autumn leaves. We see Meisuke’s mother leading a horse with Meisuke II riding astride, and we watch as they ascend a steep, narrow path into the forest, occasionally emerging from behind the trees and then vanishing once more, but we never see the depraved samurai who are lying in wait to ambush them. After a moment the theme music — one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas — kicks in, and then over the music we hear the voice of a woman wailing “Aah, aah” in agony and anguish. The background music grows ever louder, and then the words “THE END” appear on the screen.
I gave Unaiko a quick synopsis of this sequence over the phone. Then later, after I’d sent her a copy of the shooting script, she read the whole thing from beginning to end, and this is what she said to me during our next phone convo:
“When Sakura’s wailing voice suddenly rends the air in the final scene, I found it intensely sad. I also think, without a doubt, that her heartfelt cry represents the misery and suffering of all the women who have been raped on an unbroken continuum from the time of Meisuke’s mother until today. I mean, you have to keep in mind that the film was made to give expression to Sakura’s own traumatic memories of being sexually abused as a young girl. So why do I feel compelled to turn it into another ‘dog-tossing’ play? I think it’s because I identify so strongly with this story on a personal level, and I want to dramatize its terrible, timeless realities openly and honestly, with my own body, rather than merely suggesting the hideous acts of violence by the faraway sound of someone keening offstage.”
While Unaiko was speaking, I just listened in silence. I felt somehow as if she had abandoned me as a collaborator and was going off by herself to explore some private, uncharted realm. For some reason I thought about how, after the uprising had been won, Meisuke’s mother and her son split off from their female followers and headed into the forest, on their way back to the village. Since the feudal structure had been abolished, a great many young samurai had banded together in gangs of freelance thugs, and they were hiding out between the former castle town and a high mountain pass, lying in wait to cause whatever violent mischief they could. At that moment I felt as disenfranchised as those young outlaws, but Unaiko didn’t seem to notice.
“Look, I can see that it would have been inappropriate to show a graphic rape as the ending of a movie with this kind of soft, elegiac tone,” she continued. “But even so, the denouement of the tragedy, in the original stage version produced here after the war, was the scene where Meisuke’s mother sat onstage and told that dreadful story as a recitative, right? I’m sure you’ve heard about how, after the war ended, Mr. Choko’s mother and grandmother made a nice pile of money by selling their stock of paperbush bark on the black market. (The bark was no longer being used to make paper currency, but it was still in demand for making paper, which was one of many scarce commodities in those postwar days.) Anyway, they used some of their profits to stage a play at the little playhouse in the valley, and apparently every time the battle cry was invoked the audience went nuts and joined in, and the interactive chanting seems to have enabled the postwar women from around here to feel a visceral connection with their ancestors who had taken part in the uprising some eighty years earlier. Of course, this was during a period when all the menfolk were struggling to come to terms with the mortifying fact that Japan had lost the war.
“In the same spirit, let’s hope it will cheer Mr. Choko up to work with us as we try to dramatize the connection between ourselves, as modern-day women, and the brave women who carried out the uprising,” Unaiko said before we hung up. “I’d love it if we could give one last chance at creative fulfillment to the aging author who’s still tormenting himself after all these years, asleep and awake, because he wasn’t able to save his father from drowning!”
5
Clearly, Ricchan’s journal entries had been composed in the conscious knowledge that they would eventually be read by Unaiko and by me. Even so, I found them quite illuminating. One day I took Unaiko aside to talk about this, and she happened to mention that she was trying to respect Asa’s request not to pressure me into becoming involved in a new undertaking until I was ready. By then, though, I didn’t see any way (or, really, any reason) to refuse.
When the young troupe members heard I was on board with Unaiko’s project, they were gratifyingly happy. What struck me as remarkable was that they (Suke & Kaku, in particular) didn’t want me to simply take the original screenplay and adapt it into a stage play. Using Ricchan’s fieldwork as a jumping-off point, they wanted to see Unaiko’s personal vision brought to life, thus transforming the filmscript into an entirely new play. The rehearsal space had overflowed from the great room into the dining room as well, and that area became the main forum for discussing the project.
My initial participation consisted primarily of recalling details from my own script for the long-ago movie — scenes that hadn’t made the final cut. Ironically, the desire to share those very details with the world had been a large part of my original motivation for agreeing to participate in Sakura’s film.