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Photo of Suzuki Senzaburō (1926) in Gendai Gikyoku Zenshū. Vol 19. Kokumin Tosho, 1926. 99 THE VALLEY DEEP Suzuki Senzaburō Introduction Aside from Koheiji Lives (Ikiteiru Koheiji, 1924),which Ōyama Isao considered one of the most important Japanese plays of the twentieth century, not much is known about Suzuki Senzaburō (1893–1924) and the almost two dozen plays he wrote during his short life. Few of his plays have been republished since they first appeared, mostly in the early 1920s, and the fame of Koheiji Lives, which continues to be staged regularly and has seen at least two film versions, as well as the equally accomplished Confessions of Jirōkichi ( Jirōkichi zange, 1923), has given readers and audiences the impression that Suzuki was a shin-kabuki writer, though only five of his plays have premodern settings.1 Very little has been written about this playwright. Suzuki spent much of his adulthood bedridden with the tuberculosis that would take his life, and he died at the age of thirty-one, just as he was starting to make a name for himself. “When my body is at rest,” Suzuki wrote in a diary he kept when ill, the Byōchūki, “my mind flies and leaps. . . . I am free to do as I please.”2 No doubt his physical condition gave rise to a morbid imagination because his plays are filled with characters who are the victims a beggar’s art 100 100 of extreme psychological stresses and the perpetrators of sometimes shocking crimes. (His diaries and scrapbooks were filled with lurid reports from the crime and gossip pages of the newspapers.)3 Suzuki demonstrates in his plays a taste for the devious and the abnormal; adultery, murder, and suicide are his stock in trade.The decadent quality of his work caught the tenor of the times and in many respects resembles the drama and fiction that his contemporary, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, was writing around this time. Born in Tokyo, Suzuki studied haiku and tanka poetry and was an avid theatergoer as a teenager. In 1913, at the age of twenty, he won an award worth one hundred yen—a substantial sum in those days—for Before the Doors (Tobira no mae nite), a play he submitted to a literary contest mounted by the Mitsukoshi department store. The same year he began working as an editor for Genbunsha, a publishing house, writing reviews for such magazines as Entertainment Illustrated and New Entertainment. Suzuki would continue working for Genbunsha,honing his skills as a theatre critic,until the company folded in the aftermath of the Great Earthquake of 1923. After his debut work (which appears to be lost),4 Suzuki did not return to writing plays until 1919; he wrote the remaining twenty-two in a burst of creative activity in the remaining six years of his life. His morbid fascination for the cruel and abnormal is exemplified in such works as Auto da fé (Hiaburi, 1921), about a sadistic artist who ties up his mistress hand and foot for a portrait he is painting ; then, when he finds that she loves his student, he attempts to set fire to her but is himself killed in the process.5 Critic Kōno Toshirō sums up Suzuki’s style as follows: “In Suzuki Senzaburō’s drama we find hardly any signs of lightheartedness, humor, or wordplay; instead, they burn with the flames of ruin and twisted love. His plays are sparked by the flickering doubts that pass between men and women and are founded on what can only be called obsession .”6 Heady stuff, perhaps, but in fact Suzuki was a subtler stylist than this characterization would give one to believe, and his best plays rely less on sensational acts than on the underlying psychology that motivates his characters . Suzuki was a dramatist of great economy, and there are no characters, dialogue, or actions that do not advance the dramatic effect in his best plays. Though his concerns differed, his mastery of dialogue anticipates the work of Kishida Kunio. One of his later works, A Secret History of the Mountain Yam (Yamaimo hitan, 1924), has been likened to Kishida’s Two Men at Play with Life (translated here) as a kind of vaudeville.7 Unlike many writers who were writing plays during the Taishō era, Suzuki did not do so simply as a literary exercise. “Theatre is theatre,” he stated. “It is not a byproduct of literature.”8 [18.225.209.95] Project...

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