Let us begin. A few months ago, I started to shape my ideas of discussion on Ko Murobushi. Many people may already be familiar with the original source of the three concepts of the “kyotai (imaginary body),” the “dead body,” and the “outside.” The “imaginary body” is a concept from “SHIREI” that was written by Yutaka Haniya. The “dead body” comes from Hijikata’s words: “A dead body standing upright between life and death.”

As for the “outside,” this would be from Ko. In the few years during which Ko tried to organize his project under the name “One Thousand and One Nights of the <Outside>,” I realized that in order to consider the genealogy of Butoh, it is important to think about how these three concepts–the imaginary body, the dead body, and the outside–are related.The “imaginary body” is the basic concept in “SHIREI” by Yutaka Haniya and becomes the point of discussion in the novel; moreover, after World War II this word came to be used under many different meanings. Young literary enthusiasts as well as literary critics were attracted to these words and its concept.

So if anything, it is quite the important, basic concept of Japanese literature after World War II. The reason why I thought to put the word “imaginary body” into the entirety of this research is because, when I saw Takao Kawaguchi’s dance called “About Kazuo Ohno”, I realized that we could explain Kazuo Ohno’s dance with the words “imaginary body.” Because Kawaguchi’s body was very different from Kazuo Ohno’s body, it was not an “imaginary body.” So with this basic idea that Kazuo Ohno’s body could be an “imaginary body,” I started to look into how the three words “imaginary body,” “dead body,” and “outside” are related.

Translating “kyotai (imaginary body)” into English is very difficult. Normally, we translate “kyotai” to “imaginary body” because the Chinese character in “kyotai” is the same as the character in the word for “imaginary number,” but I feel that this is not exactly correct. I believe “non-substantial body” would be a better translation than “imaginary body.”It may be better to think of it as a body without substance. No, rather, perhaps not substantial means non-gravity. It may be good to think of it as without gravity.In other words, in a world with gravity, birds fly, way up high. Birds fly on an Earth that has gravity. This means that in normal dance, dancers turn and jump because there is gravity. Dancers turn against gravity and jump, jumping higher than that, and I had thought that there was a certain charm in dance there.

But in the case of Kazuo Ohno, he did not fly against gravity. There is no gravity. The concept of how human beings can move in a place without gravity, that is the basic concept of the non-substantial body.  I do not know how much Kazuo Ohno recognized this concept of the absence of substance and gravity, and I do not know whether he had met Yutaka Haniya and was attracted by this concept for a certain time or not.  I have heard that the two had met, and in short, this may have been how Kazuo Ohno thought of Haniya’s concept of the “non-substantial body” and his Butoh to be connected.

In the process of this research, recently I found out something along the lines that Ko Murobushi did not think highly of Kazuo Ohno’s dance. I think this is an extremely intriguing opinion. In terms of the “dead body,” it has gravity; in the end, it is not a “kyotai,” not a “non-substantial body.”A “dead body standing between life and death” can exist in a world with gravity. To think about the “dead body,” we have to think about gravity including its relation to the ground. From this point, I’d like to consider what Yutaka Haniya says in his novel “SHIREI.”Yutaka Haniya launched the literary coterie magazine “Modern Literature” just after World War II, and started his serialization “Shirei” in this coterie magazine. First, I imagined the following. Yutaka Haniya used the words “non-substantial body” as the basic concept in his serialized novel. There was an empty hole after the war. The Japanese military who carried out the war, and who killed many people in various places, suffered utter defeat. There came an empty hole in history. It was in this empty hole in history that Yutaka Haniya wrote “SHIREI” as a discussion on Japanese culture.

That was the first thing I imagined, and from there I assumed the situation was the same for Butoh dancers who started to dance after World War II. I thought that perhaps the so-called “empty hole” after the war existed, and that many people were feeling the “non-substantial body” and the  “dead body” as a state of body.

Then, I thought about what the root of Ko Murobushi’s idea of rephrasing them to the “outside” was, despite the fact that many kinds of Butoh had appeared. Of course, it is clear that Ko was stimulated by Michel Foucault’s “The Thought of Outside,” but I started to realize that this was not the point in question.
A performance of his that I was very attracted by relatively recently was his improvisation at “Dance Hakushu,” though I am not sure if it had a title or not. It was performed in a big hole outside that had been dug for incineration purposes, and the hole was dug deep into the ground. It was into this square hole that he jumps and continues to try crawling up from the hole again and again.

At last he succeeds in crawling up from the hole, only to fall into the hole again.  I happened to chat with him after the performance; though I am not a Butoh critic, I thought I had to say something as a theatre critic in that kind of an occasion. And I told him, “Your dance is an alien dance.” I actually said the words “alien dance” to Ko in an early period, “alien” meaning “body of the outside.”
The “body of the outside” is quite a complex concept, including when we consider our own body and where the “body of the outside” is. When I read Yutaka Haniya’s  “SHIREI” again for this research, I saw that his “kyotai (non-substantial body)” means “body of the outside.”

In our everyday lives, for example, if a fly comes and stops somewhere, we watch it closely to see what it does. There is a scene in “SHIREI” where he could swat the fly or leave it, but watching the behavior of the fly becomes quite interesting so he ends up watching it for a while.Just as this character in “SHIREI” watches the fly’s behavior and thinks while watching its movements, at the same time, there may be something that watches our behavior as human beings. Generally, in a Christian society, that would be God watching.. And if we assume that it is God, then it is an existence outside of humans. This means that there is a world of the outside that we as human beings can do nothing about.

The world of the outside, and the world of recognition and analysis where we are watching the fly. How these worlds turn around, and how to make this kind of reversal possible–this is the concept of the “kyotai/non-substantial body.”
I have started to think that perhaps the dancer that directly expresses Haniya’s “kyotai/non-substantial body” is actually Ko Murobushi, rather than Kazuo Ohno.There is a well-known phrase that goes, “Displeasure of the law of identification.” I do not know the correct way to translate this–the displeasure in regards to the law of samelessness, the law of identification meaning “I am I,” “A is A.” These words come up in “SHIREI” as well.

The irrationality (called “Sinnwidrigkait,” it seems) against the existence that is integrated in that way, and the outside as its irrationality. And “it is not me.” In opposition to “I am I,” I am not me. I am alien to me. I am heterogeneous to me, I am the outside, I am not me. This concept of alien, extraneous, and in summary, the body of alien, the outside. Whether Ko was aware of Yutaka Haniya or not aside, the basic concept of Haniya’s idea and Ko’s concept of the outside in “One Thousand and One Nights of the Outside” are, in fact, very much related.Regarding “I am not me,” Yutaka Haniya says that it is from the state of being torn apart under the idea that “it appears I am not me” that empty space appears, and gives birth to the basic concept of the “kyotai.” The point in question is how the connection is made between the “kyotai” and the thought from outside when the two connect.

Yutaka Haniya started to write “SHIREI” just after World War II. It was July 1946. Details on when he had started planning on writing “SHIREI” are thoroughly explained by Shugo Honda within the volume “SHIREI.” A rather detailed biography is also conveniently included. With this biography, in 1930, Yutaka Haniya became an activist of the Proletarian Science Research Institute, and it seems this story is quite famous.In 1931, he joined the Japanese Communist Party and started an underground life. In 1932, he was arrested in accordance with the Peace Preservation Law, indicted, and sent to jail.In other words, he was an activist of a communist party when he was young, around 19, 20, 21 years old. It was during his time in jail that he read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and was stimulated by this. From this, the concept of “displeasure of the law of identification” appeared.After a while, he converted ideologies and led a jobless life for a period of time. The place where he wandered during his jobless period is the stage for “SHIREI.” After that, he worked as an editor, and it was during this time that Japan entered into the empty hole upon suffering defeat. It is from this empty hole that his concept of the “kyotai/non-substantial body” materialized.

The concept of the “outside” established by Foucault is connected to the May 1968 events in Paris. From the defeat of May 68, a kind of political uplift was completely shattered. It was in that occasion that Foucault wrote “The Birth of the Prison” in 1975. This kind of political activity, as well as its failure, collapse, and conversion–the same things also happened in Japan in the 1960s.So, in terms of where we should stand, that would be the outside. We think about the outside. With his Butoh at Hakushu where I told him that his Butoh was alien-like, he showed us how the organs in one’s body can be thrown towards the outside with his movements.

Of course, in reality, it is impossible to cut the body into pieces and throw out one’s organs. But I think the point is how we can do it with physical training and consciousness. That’s why it is slightly different from the dead body.It was within this kind of a trend that Murobushi thought about “the body of impossibility” and came up with the frame for “infinite judgment,” or in short, infinite space that is not limited, even if this is impossible for us to attain in the real world.To put it in Haniya’s terms, he said in his novel that “what is most alluring is falling headfirst into what we shouldn’t think about.” However, that would be the body of impossibility; there lies a kind of discontent that is beyond description, discontent beyond expression. This is also quite an important concept of Haniya’s.“I am not I. I am alien to me.” Murobushi felt this kind of “discontent beyond description,” and so he had no way but to fall down. Whether my opinion is applicable to Murobushi’s dance or not aside, it is from this meaning of connecting with such kinds of thought, acknowledgment, and consciousness that his dance was created in connection to the spirit of the era.

The first time I saw Ko was when I saw “HINAGATA 7” as the opening performance for his underground cabaret “Shy.” At the time I had never seen Butoh, so this performance was the first Butoh performance. We can look at Lotus Cabaret “Shy” from before as a “cabaret of death,” just from its name the “cabaret of the lotus.”His performance was given the exaggerated title of “The point of explosion of Neon or Neant,” and before the performance, I was made to wait a long time in front of a rather dirty door. But I liked that I had to wait in front of an iron door. When I opened the iron door and descended the steps that led underground, there was but a small and narrow space.

So I named this iron door “the door to hell.” When I opened it and went underground, there was a grave and a human squatting. This human squatting was Ko Murobushi.And he didn’t move for a long time. After a while, he started to move little by little. The behavior of this mummy as a resident of the grave, with his eyes wrapped in bandages and his sight and eyes lost, expresses an awakening in the underworld and the pain that is brought by this awakening at the same time.  This was the theme for “HINAGATA 7,” or rather, the aim of this performance.Awakening doesn’t simply become joy. The pain that is brought by awakening is the same as the kyotai, with the pain that was brought by awakening in the midst of a vacuum after the war.

Ko desired for consciousness to expand without limit, but at the same time, it is captured by the frame that creates discontent beyond description. And so, little by little, this pain changes into madness.It is almost the same world as “SHIREI.” I recommend you to re-read “SHIREI.” At the time, I happened to remember Princess Margarita in Velazquez’s “Las Meninas.”As to why this came to mind, the performance that Kantor attempted to do just before his death was called “Today Is My Birthday,” but he passed away from overstimulation just one day before the premier of this performance. Rehearsals were held the day before the premier, and Kantor founded many points that he was dissatisfied with. As he began to scream about these various points, he had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital by ambulance, but passed away. The most significant image in that moment for me is Margarita, the princess of death.Kantor named his own theatre the “drama of death”, and the important point is that we can find a relation between his work and death. It is also related to awakening. Awakening, pain, and death. If so, then why should I awaken in this moment? Why is it that we feel pain in the process of awakening, and why do we die? It is because there is the outside. There has to be consciousness towards the outside, and infinite consciousness.In the final moment, he released a fire, and the audience was surrounded by fire. I thought then, you should burn by yourself. The important point here is how the outside of the 1980s and the emptiness, vacuum, and imaginary body of the 1950s are related.

It is also important to discuss, as intellectual history, the differences between appearances of the alien in the 1980s and the outside after the 1990s, or at least their historicity.Social structure and historicity in society, and how we connect our consciousness and our thoughts in regards to these–this has to be one of the cores of the body, not only for Butoh but for any expression. This is a proposal to you from me, who couldn’t come to Mexico with all of you. I would be happy if you could discuss while including these points from me.

It is a pity that I could not come to Mexico, but these past few days, I have been so out of breath that, looking at the situation, I finally had to decide to not make the trip. It is possible that we will not be able to meet again, but please enjoy your discussion.