Some of you know I’m pretty excited about this traditional form of storytelling here called rakugo (and it looks like I get to do an independent study on it next semester!). It came up around the same time as Shakespeare, so the language can be pretty hard to understand, even for native speakers. It’s performed by one person who plays all the characters, differentiating them through subtle physical and vocal changes. I was first exposed to it at the language school I went to last year. If you’re interested in watching a very excited British woman explain it more in detail, please click here.
Anyway, I went by myself this past Saturday to a 10 AM performance. As expected, I was called out for being the only foreigner in the audience. As someone who enjoys clowning and performing for people, I think I take this “foreigner as zoo animal” phenomenon better than some of my fellows here, but it really can get exhausting always getting called out for being different when I’m just trying to blend in. Japan lives on blending in.
Anyway, it turns out this performance was more like a “Rakugo 101” sort of thing, so they explained how the performer, who’s allotted a folding fan and a small towel as his/her only props, can use the props as different objects. We all wrote down our names and ideas of how else to use them, and handed them in. They call a couple young boys up to the stage, who act out the different uses they came up with then go back to their seats, then they call up an adult. And then what do you know, they call me up to the stage.
Learn from me, people: when you come to Japan, I don’t care how cool you think your shoes are. Think very hard before you bring shoes here that will take you longer than immediately to take off. You will have issues.
I was wearing some Converse-style high-tops. I got down to the little staircase up to the stage and one of the knots just would not come undone. I was using the bottom stair to try and pry it off, and I RIPPED A BOARD OUT.
Most people in the audience, I think, didn’t see it happen, but the rakugo guy standing there was, despite comedy permeating every situation here in Osaka, was so stunned he couldn’t make a joke.
So I apologized about five times (which is like once in English, so maybe I’m rude) and just went up the stairs because I didn’t exactly have my tool belt on me.
These two rakugo guys are up there, and I plop down on the cushion in between them. They, of course, remark on my being able to sit seiza style because who’da thunk it—a foreigner can sit with her legs folded! They are, of course, shocked that I’m even there, let alone have seen rakugo before, and, as it turns out, one of the three guys who came to my language school last year is actually quite famous, so that was even more surprising. Then, they ask how long I’ve been in Japan, and I say a month. That’s a reaction I never get tired of!
Well, it was then that I made the mistake of saying that I’ve done rakugo before. There was a rakugo club at the language school I went to last year, and I performed a short story at the talent show. In Japan, when you say something like that, there is just no way of getting out of displaying your talents, so I ended up murdering my way through this one-minute story I haven’t recited in over a year, but they all clapped and were very nice. They handed me this little envelope, and I very dazedly stumbled back to my seat with my shoes half on, as the rakugo guy at the stairs deliberately cacophonously “hammered” the stairs back together. It wasn’t until the next day that I even opened the envelope—there was 100 yen in it! That’s about 88 cents in American sense, but I earned money, which means I’m a PRO now!
That’s not even half my weekend, but certainly the most “write home about” news there was!
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