Kwaidan: Three Japanese Ghost Stories
Avant-garde theater isn’t generally known for its nostalgia. Alienation from traditional storytelling fuels most postmodernists’ dismantling of cherished cultural traditions as they reveal a bitterly clever sense of humor about the dislocations of the late 20th century. Watching the Wooster Group’s assaultive techno grids or Goat Island’s abstract, precise dance spectacles, we expect the avant-garde to reveal the postmodern cyborg haunting our cultural fantasies. If the question of holiness ever comes up, it’s usually a joke–a sitting duck deconstructed for our viewing pleasure.
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Last weekend, after a 15-year absence from Chicago, Chong showcased his latest collaborative project, Kwaidan: Three Japanese Ghost Stories, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A stunning reinterpretation of classic Japanese tales, it’s designed, he says in a program note, as “a respite and a reminder of what we have sacrificed in a world of commodification at the end of the 20th century.” This it is, awakening a nostalgic longing for the quiet simplicity of a Zen monk’s life. In the process, however, Chong ignores some of the contradictions he’s often highlighted in earlier work about Chinese and Japanese stereotypes.
Chong’s three ghost stories at first seem too gentle to be unsettling or even theatrical, but his exquisite stagecraft gives them a startling mystery. “Jikininki” is the story of a fearless monk’s meeting with a spirit doomed to eat the flesh of the dead. “Miminashi-Hoichi” is the story of a blind musician bewitched into playing his biwa night after night for the restless spirits of a massacred clan. Chong takes the greatest artistic license with “The Story of O-tei,” a tale of reincarnation he updates to a comparatively chaotic westernized Japan. Each story emphasizes the results of a life (or death) out of balance and promises a return to peace if proper behavior is resumed. But the beauty of the performance obscures the irony of this promise in the modern world; only in the final story does the impossibility of balance become clear. It seems that Chong is setting us up to absorb lessons like rapt children–lessons that will fail us. In the remarkable theatrical experience of Kwaidan, we claim and then lose innocence. But whether Chong intended our faith to fail is not clear.
In such a world the mythology of ancient Japan is extremely seductive. For the end of “The Story of O-tei,” the collaborative team re-creates the most franchised icon of American culture–a McDonald’s, located here in urban Japan. O-tei, the betrothed girl, is reincarnated as a clerk, and customers place their orders in one window while in the center opening a pair of hands enters them on a huge cash register. O-tei’s pleasant face fills the third window, intoning the familiar words, “May I take your order?” Satirizing U.S. cultural imperialism and the messy cosmopolitanism of McDonald’s, Chong creates a rambling line of punkish, exaggerated faces, ending suddenly with the dignified face of the story’s hero. Shifting briefly back into the mysterious, Chong establishes a slightly goofy but touching romantic pause as the two estranged lovers, with their enormous faces, look “into” each other’s eyes. The final scene gives us a bird’s-eye view of a city park where the two embrace, then takes us into the clouds–out of the modern world again but with a clear vision of the encroaching city.
