“Tattooer” At Atelier Shunpusha: “Tattooer” Reworks Tanizaki’s Japanese Tale Of Desire And Power With Subtlety And Verve

Tattooer is a playful yet critical adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s (1886-1965) debut short story of 1910 by the same name. Adapted by Takuya Kaneshima and directed by Hogara Kawai in a production by Umeda Arts Theatre (Osaka/Tokyo), the play made its Japanese debut at the intimate Atelier Shunpusha in Tokyo from September 20-23. An English language version of the play, translated by Linda Hoaglund, will run at the Charing Cross Theatre London in October with the same mixed roots cast.

Tanizaki’s story centers on Seikichi, an irezumi tattoo artist and former Ukiyo-e master, who spends his life searching for the perfect woman to etch his soul into. The moment finally arrives when he meets the ideal canvas for his art, a young woman whose beauty and vulnerability draw him into a dark and sensual power play. He anaesthetises her and begins to paint her naked body. The story was Tanizaki’s first exploration of the themes of domination and submission, which would later become leitmotifs in his literary oeuvre.

In the first act of this stage adaptation, Seikichi appears as a young artist obsessed with finding a woman’s body as a canvas for his art. In act two, however, in a radical reversal of the original story, Seikichi is depicted as an old man who blinds himself in order to see true beauty. This act of self-mutilation, which is not in the original, nevertheless echoes another of Tanizaki’s well-known works, A Portrait of Shunkin (1933), in which a man blinds himself out of devotion to his blind and disfigured lover Shunkin. In both instances the negation of sight is an act of intimacy and revelation tied to the buddhist idea that  a deeper vision of beauty can be achieved in the mind’s eye, through meditation.

Another key element in this adaptation is the addition of two new female characters, divided into Kazuyo A (Mao Aono, who is also dramaturg and costume designer for the production), and Kazuyo B (Aki Nakagawa), as well as a traveller from England, known as ‘the customer’ (Nozomi de Lencquesaing) who wants to be tattooed the thousand-armed Kannon at all costs by Seikichi (Leo Ashizawa). The interrelationships among the four characters subvert not only the binary male-female masochism at play in the original story, but they also help keep the trope of an exotic Japan at bay. While Kazuyo A retains the role of femme fatale/muse found in the original, Kazuyo B as a caretaker and assistant of the ageing maestro, but also the so-called ‘machine and medium’ who actually inks the tattoos on Seikichi’s customers, stands in as an anti-muse.

Between the two acts, there is an interlude in which Ink-Brush artist Gaku Azuma performs a live body painting. Whereas in Tanizaki’s version, Seikichi paints the young woman’s body as she lays anaesthetised on his bed in an attempt to capture the essence of beauty. When she awakes, he is consumed by his creation, which is mirrored in the female spider he has etched on her skin – a spider that ultimately eats its male prey. In this new version, the muse is replaced by the male customer, a foreign traveller from Britain. Azuma not only functions as a double of Seikichi, but his real-time painting injects Tanizaki’s romanticism with a dose of concrete materiality.

While the first act dwells more on the aesthetics of body painting, the second act uses comedy to subvert the position of Seikichi as a master painter, and pokes fun at aspects of Tanizaki’s lauded literary world. The play is staged on a simple white circle, reminiscent of a sumo ring, on top of which the characters wrestle with words and humor.

Bold, insightful, and provocative, Tattooer brings Tanizaki’s tale of desire and power to life with critical distance. The adapation manages to both celebrate and interrogate Tanizaki’s literary snapshot of irezumi tattoo art, wrestling with the theme of domination, and challenging the binary of the male tattooer and female tattooed.

—-

“Tattooer” will run in English at the Charing Cross Theatre in London from 14-26 October. For tickets and information visit: https://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/theatre/tattooer