Inugami

Dead poets never die, they just metamorphose. Their lives become legends. Poet-playwright-filmmaker-essayist-director-photographer and enfant maudit Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) continues to exert a cult fascination on Japanese youth. The tenth anniversary of his death from peritonitis occasioned a flurry of exhibits, stage productions, books, documentaries, and retrospective film showings. Sanctified and demonized, more popular in death than in life-and certainly more accepted by the Japanese arts establishment-Terayama remains the quintessential avant-garde playwright of the late 1960s and 1970s. Born in the remote northeastern prefecture of Aomori, Terayama identified with outsiders and outcasts. He maintained that bumping his head during a fall down the stairs at age three had transformed his thinking process. He referred to himself as fat (he was hefty, but hardly a sumo wrestler) and emphasized his origins in the superstition-laden Tohoku region. Like Federico Fellini (whose 8 1/2 and Amarcord clearly inspired Terayama's finest film Denen ni shisu), he was entranced by the liminal world of traveling circus performers and cheap carnivals. Criminals, prostitutes, dwarfs, hunchbacks, rebellious students, magicians, mediums, superstitious old women, transvestites, itinerant actors-all were characters in his plays and in his life. Although he studied the history and literature of kabuki while a student at Waseda University and at the age of eighteen won a distinguished literary prize for his book of classical-style tanka poetry, Terayama claimed to be ignorant of the cultural traditions of

Sociology · History · Theatre and Performance Studies

• A Influência da Estética Tradicional Japonesa na Arquitetura de Tadao Ando

  Open Access•Waldemiro Francisco Sorte Junior•Estudos Japoneses•2018

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