Mama

Abstract

Known best for his postwar dramas, Tanaka Chikao's (1905-1995) debut play, Mama, is a remarkably accomplished work.1 The playwright Tsujimura Sumiko-she would marry Tanaka in 1934-saw the premiere and recalled: "What impressed me was how the Japanese language could be conveyed so vividly. Each and every line was thrillingly dramatic. There was no plot to speak of, but I discovered what I had never encountered before: that the love of a mother and child could be so intensely portrayed, almost exclusively through their dialogue. And all who saw the play felt the same."2 Tanaka was a protégé of Kishida Kunio, and, like Kishida, he was a brilliant student of French dialogue and dramaturgy. In 1927, while still a student of French literature at Keiō University, he joined the New Theatre Research Institute (Shingeki Kenkyūsho), which had been established by Kishida, Iwata Toyoo, and others. In 1931, he became a staff writer for Playwriting, serializing a translation of Léon Brémont's L'Art de Dire. Mama was Tanaka's first play. The strong cast included Tamura Akiko, who played the title role; Nakamura Nobuo as the son (1908-1991; like Sugimura, he was a fixture in Ozu films and was later to become Betsuyaku Minoru's favorite actor); Horikoshi Setsuko as the daughter, Mineko; and Sugimura Haruko as Mrs. Munakata. Senda Koreya's brother, Itō Kisaku (1899-1967), designed the set. The Tsukiji-za practice was to stage a new production once every month for a run of three to five days. Mama played only three days, but it was a hit. The Tsukiji-za revived it the following year. It then toured the Osaka region; NHK (then Japan's only radio network) broadcast a studio recording of the play. The play was a perfect collaboration between a magazine devoted to new drama and a theatre company whose express purpose, like its precursor, the Tsukiji Little Theatre, was the creation of modern theatre in Japan. The story is deceptively simple: Ogura Saka, a widow from Shimabara in Kyushu, has had to struggle to raise her two children, Eiichirō and Mineko, on her own in Tokyo. Eiichirō is in his final year at university, and it is the night before his second job interview with a newspaper company. His little sister, Mineko, is a high school student. Saka is concerned about her son's prospects, but Eiichirō seems strangely indifferent. In fact, he has already accepted a position in a bank in Nagoya, something Saka learns only later when a boy and his mother, Mrs. Munakata, arrive unexpectedly at their door to thank Eiichirō for teaching her son for the past four years. Saka is shocked that her son has told these strangers but kept the truth from her. She decides to follow him to Nagoya and leave her daughter in lodgings in Tokyo. The work, which many critics have called the original "home drama" (domestic soap opera, a popular genre on Japanese television), is a remarkably deft portrayal of an overprotective mother and a resentful son eager to strike off on his own-a theme that still resonates, and not just with Japanese audiences. At the same time, however, the play's balanced portrayal of each character and its wry humor avoid any trace of melodrama or sentimentalism so characteristic of this genre. In both theme and style, the play is as fresh today as when it was first written. Tanaka's skill in writing dialogue and character is remarkable in such an early work. Oyama Isao notes the following: The charm of Tanaka Chikao's works during this [prewar] period lies chiefly in their dialogue. His language is lively, witty, and well articulated; every twist and turn of his characters' psychology is brilliantly portrayed with penetrating insight. Mama is a classic example of this, and in dramatizing so skillfully an ordinary day in the life of the most ordinary sort of people, it displays a fresh appeal that the more schematic and ideologically oriented proletarian plays of that time were incapable of portraying. In such postwar works as Education (Kyōiku, 1954) and The Head of Mary (Maria no kubi, 1959), Tanaka would use highly figurative and poetic language to tackle difficult philosophical and metaphysical problems.4 Here, however, his gaze is level and quotidian, his language resolutely realistic. The only trace of the author's Christianity is a portrait of Christ on the wall, but this is juxtaposed with the banal, a photograph of an actress and a rugby poster. The image of Christ no doubt refers to the mother's birthplace, Shimabara, and Saka's conflicted feelings toward this historically Christian region of Japan are an important element in the play, but she is more inclined to pray for her son's success at a Shinto shrine than in a church. If the sacred is being juxtaposed with the profane here, it is the latter that is dominant. It is enough, however, that Tanaka portrays with the skill he does the dynamics of family relationships-the bond (sometimes in this play it seems forged in iron) between mother and son is at the heart of this play-but he is equally good at limning the affectionate rivalry between brother and sister, as well as Saka's nastier jealousy toward her daughter. This is, after all, the fodder of Freud's family romance, the sort of material that makes us who we are. Just as the family is a master trope for examining issues of modern selfhood, it is also a synecdoche of society itself; it is the lens through which we are able to project ourselves upon the world. There are problems here, Tanaka tells us, and inasmuch as the family is a metaphor, perhaps metaphysics are at work here as well. Tanaka himself admitted that women represented for him both a spiritual stumbling block and a challenge. In an interview he confessed that "man's ego is for him the absolute. He thinks that he alone is absolute. Yet there are obstacles to this belief. One is woman."5 Tanaka thus regarded women as either the object of spirituality (the Virgin Mary) or agents of an ego-erasing sexuality. He admitted that his prewar plays had oscillated between "womanhating" works and "woman-worshipping" works. Critic Abe Itaru has noted that for Tanaka, "Women both exist in time and eternally transcend its influence. . . . It is as if Tanaka wished to say that women possess no subjectivity."6 At center in this play is the primal relationship between a man and a woman, and it is essentially the mother's lack of subjectivity that is the problem. Kikuchi Kan's play Father Returns focused on how the prodigal father's return stirred up the elder son's resentment. Here, the father is long dead, and Saka has assumed what feminist Ueno Chizuko has called a "transvestite patriarchy": she is a woman with no identity of her own.7 She lives vicariously through her son; her daughter stands in the way of her almost sexual connection with Eiichirō. The play focuses on a time of peak anxiety for her: her elder brother from back home has just left after a stay with them that stirred up uncomfortable feelings of how far she and her children have come down in the world. At the same time, Eiichirō is preparing to graduate from college and join the workforce, becoming the head of the family-that is, assuming the family will stay together-but he is eager to escape the maternal embrace. Mineko mentions to her mother that Eiichirō had expressed an interest in moving out-most of his friends live on their own-and she herself betrays a naïve and romantic notion of the pleasures of independence. When Saka asks her who would wash her socks, cook her dinner, and do her dishes, Mineko quickly loses interest in this fantasy-for the time being, the comforts of family life make the responsibility of independence seem too burdensome-but her mother turns the tables on her by proposing at the end of the play to abandon her in order to set up a cozier domestic arrangement with her brother in Nagoya, something neither of the children want. The play thus builds on the tension created by Saka's anxiety and ignorance of her son's plans, and when this tension is released by the revelation that her son means to go to Nagoya, the play concludes with a new cycle of tension created by her decision to accompany him.8 Saka masks her selfishness in the form of maternal self-sacrifice; her treatment of her son is suffocating and that of her daughter, callous. Yet she is no monster; Tanaka portrays her with considerable wit and affection. We may not completely sympathize with her, but we can understand her. © 2010 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.