Erotic Grotesque Nonsense by Miriam Silverberg

Author:Miriam Silverberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

SOEDA AZENBŌ’S ASAKUSA (WORDS OF A BALLADEER)

The idea of Asakusa as play site central to the new moment is evident in Asakusa Teiryūki (Record of the undercurrents of Asakusa), by Soeda Azenbō, the anarchist songwriter, street performer and author of the topical song of 1924, “Earthquake Ballad.” This work, which was organized in montage form opened with the segment “Fragments.” Ever since Kawabata Yasunari appropriated “Fragments” when adapting Soeda’s documentary account of Asakusa space and relationships to the seemingly documentary novel The Asakusa Crimson Gang, it has often been quoted in accounts of Asakusa.12 Soeda began by offering an overtly erotic allusion to “naked human desires” before focusing on the movement of the masses within a constantly reformulated space. Like Gonda, Soeda was primarily concerned with the masses pursuing entertainment, in historical motion. Unlike Gonda, he allowed the modernist a place in Asakusa; more than Gonda, he wanted to represent distinctions within these masses. Here was an anarchist voice. Soeda expressed allegiance to neither state directives nor to the mandates of Marxist categories:

FRAGMENTS

In Asakusa, all sorts of things are thrown out in raw form.

All sorts of human desires are dancing naked.

Asakusa is the heart of Tokyo—

Asakusa is a marketplace of humans—

Asakusa is the Asakusa for all.

It’s a safe zone where everybody can expose themselves to their guts.

The Asakusa where the masses keep walking hour by hour; the Asakusa of those masses, is a foundry where all old forms are melted down, to be transformed into new forms.

One day’s dream. Fleeting adoration for the outdated.

Asakusa mood. Those without authority who grieve for the real Asakusa, ignoring new currents, withdraw.

You, proponent of cleanliness who aims to make Asakusa into a palace of lapis lazuli, pull back.

All things of Asakusa may be vulgar; they lack refinement.

But they boldly walk the walk of the masses, they move with vitality. . . .

The Modernist who inhales nourishment from the Western painting of the new era walks alongside believers of the Goddess of Mercy who buys favors from the Buddha with copper coins.

A huge stream of all sorts of classes, all sorts of peoples, all mixed up together. A strange rhythm lying at the base of that stream. That’s the flow of instincts.

Sounds and Brightness. Entangled, whirl, one grand symphony—There’s the beauty of discord there.

Men, Women, flow into the rushing around of these colors and this symphony, and from within it they pick out the hope to live on tomorrow. (SA, 3–5)

Soeda’s hero and agent of history is not Gonda’s worker, whose time is defined by the factory clock. It is the beggar in “Asakusa from Morning until Middle of the Night,” the chapter following Fragments. In this chapter, and throughout Soeda’s mini-essays on Asakusa landmarks, language, and personalities, the desperate (but enterprising) beggar-vagrant is highlighted as living an active, enterprising everyday.

The term ero is not indexed in any of Soeda’s carefully subtitled chapters, but if we adopt Audre Lorde’s definition in “The Erotic as Power,” we can begin to see how Asakusa modernity was erotic and how Soeda Azenbō’s modern classic tells us it was so.

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