Sick Dancing Princess
The following is chapter 1 of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Sick Dancing Princess or Ailing Dancer. Translated by Rhizome Lee.¹ Edited by Adam Koan. I have also added translation cross references by Kuniichi Uno who was then translated to English by Bruce Baird.²
1. The Method of Clouding the Body (Obscuring)
I was brought up with the method of obscuring the body, participating in observations I overheard. I remember hearing, “Hey, look at them! Insects are alive without breathing. Look! The thinned-down waist smoke bugs have come walking this way. Surely there must be a bug in the middle, reincarnating into something.” All this was because of the shrinking and attentiveness of an old man who knew the uselessness of the body wandering around me.
As a boy, I suddenly became stupid without intention and kept myself in a strange brightness, barely alive. Yet, my eyes fell into something shady, as if cursed. I had an excessive curiosity toward nameless things such as lead balls or string, and I was forced to work my eyes like a spy, guessing that the lead ball and string must be pretending to rest.
2. A Body Being Eaten by the Snow
I lived watching through my fingers the eye of a fish or flirting with a girl who had a rubber dove. In fact, I was always growing in mood to the point I was even taken as a pulse. I was often almost eaten by snow, and in the fall, I was bitten by grasshoppers. During the rainy season, I was cut by catfish, and in early spring, my whole body was swallowed by the river. My eyes are probably inclined to such things.
I once hit a salted salmon with a plate, watched a bicycle-cart under the blazing sun, felt nostalgia from a medicine bottle with uneven glass, and felt suspicious of people who used an enema fig. I explored the darkness of a rusty kitchen knife during the rainy season, standing in such a place, and practiced how to seriously wipe tears. Because monotonic and anxious things stormed into my body, I might have faintly aimed to fabricate fake things by wearing a haze over my body.
3. Worms and Fever
Worms were always generated in my belly, wriggling slowly in my anus. Sometimes, they came out. I wonder if this was due to eating too many greens from the backyard. Moreover, I always got a fever and vomited red and blue things. I wonder if this was because I ran around too much under the hot sun. Adults said, “This is a strange fever,” and hearing this gave me a sense of relief, as if I were protected by something. It made me feel my faint breath even more. I was swelling this way.
My nature would solve any misfortune easily, and a bud of a weak heart and something close to no will seemed to blow out from my body.
4. Resonance of the Crying Woman and Crying Physical Phenomena
In the old days, the light bulb often shook. Under the shaking light, a crying woman was seen everywhere. Crying physical phenomena could also be seen around her. I worried that the crying woman might have been controlling the physical phenomena. My brain always floated just four centimeters above my head, but it was scared of white flesh fish and a rusty mousetrap.
5. My Sooty Princess
There is no doubt that a sweet nostalgic and hopeless longing hits anyone. Anyone would have decided to approach the princess for a dance without hesitation and would have felt the body temperature of the princess in their blood vessels. My princess was sooty, her feet wrapped with cotton, and she sometimes had a kitchen knife in hand with a wary forehead. However, it was only a brief moment before she went off to sleep, leaving behind only squishy laughter.
6. Baby
When watching and observing the breath of a baby, I noticed that the sleeper’s breathing was damp and sticky, not like cylindrical air sucked through a straw. I wondered what world could be hatching out in this graffiti-like baby. I faced the fake-like atmosphere swaying around the baby, which I could hardly discern. It had such a dislocated shape, as if it had been catching something eccentric for a long time. Suddenly, I wanted to satisfy a sense of hunger, like a brutish man taking food away from a baby’s mouth.
7. A Human That Huddles By His Body Alone
In the case of being cornered, humans huddle via their body alone. There was an old lady in the neighborhood. She often showed a changing color ball from the mouth with a demeanor
like mustard vegetables, or she put an odorless smoke ball in her hands from around the butt. I was often teased because I was such a kid who stood gazing at worms in the sink.
All children seem to carry a quiet longing—to conveniently miss opportunities while still breathing through them, hoping to hold onto that expectancy of love. As an elementary school student, I carried the aura of a toad and the scent of turtle-shaped soap. I felt as though I had already lived far longer than a lifetime.
There were moments when I felt defeated by something as simple as a pair of knitted long johns or a shirt hanging under the eaves. There were many such things. Also, Takahashi’s mother, who lived nearby, gave me the creeps—she never seemed to touch anything in her own house.
8. A Woman Glared at Me and I Became a Stick
One day, a woman wearing a kimono in the house made a small stretch while chewing on a piece of string she had picked up from the tatami floor. After that, she placed her hands behind her obi with a terrifying expression and glared at me with narrowed eyes.
Silently, I slipped out the back door and stood quietly behind the house, watching an ordinary stick leaning against the eaves. Before I knew it, I had become that stick—and I was playing.
9. A Hidden State
I sometimes danced playfully while drinking cider, that much is true. But there were so many adults who devoured their meals with anger, and people who worked tirelessly, grinding their bodies like tools. Because of this, I began to live in an abstract place—where my emotions took on the form of a pitiful shadow.
There was an atmosphere in that place, something that restrained me from going too far, and it felt as though it whispered to me in signs. This hidden state had the face of a reality stripped of all attributes—and yet, I too seemed to be swallowed by it. My breathing, over time, had to become increasingly subdued.
[A Body Without Intermediary]
My body did not speak, but it seemed to sense something that existed in a place beyond infantile things or anything marked by shame. It was as if my body kept leaving itself and returning again. My forehead was always exposed, yet my eyes had grown to accept nothing. It became a body with no intermediary processes—like a flower that suddenly blooms a moment before stumbling and falling while walking.
I never thought of performing surgery on such a body. But perhaps it wouldn’t even be possible. When something is that enjoyable, I’ve decided—I will not dance.
10. A Vague Figure
A vague figure, which I had inhaled along with the smell of spoiled lunch and the dusty hue of sour pickled eggplant, may have been something precious.
11. A Woman with Exploding Hair
I felt a strange fear and anxiety—the kind that comes with the boredom of a boy gnawing on lacquered chopsticks, and of a woman who entered the tatami room with hair standing on end, as if electrified. I wondered if they had all become like that from passing through some kind of explosion. But why were there so many swollen legs around me? Was something mocking me, making me see these things?
Though I stared for a long time, what surfaced before me were scraps of cloth glowing faintly with yellow light, and dim, pale yellowish faces fading away.
Beside them, a child cried until the color of his ears turned red, and another—mocked because of a rumor that he cried red tears and spat thread from his mouth—had grown up. In those days, when running ears and trachoma were common, light was used sparingly, perhaps to illuminate just such scenes, as though exploring them. Something slightly broken and decaying seemed to gently snuggle next to a schoolgirl who reeked intensely of toilet.
[A Feeling of Having Already Been Danced by Someone]
I was always drawn toward crying, pale children. I would bark at green onions that had grown too tall to eat. I was caught in a strange sensation—as if I had already been danced by someone else.
I was shrouded in steam or became like the remnant of a life completely lost. The absence of gravity in my body taught me gestures—ones that consumed form and floated into thought by chance.
[A Body That Was Forgotten]
In my movements, a room might appear and vanish—filled with a certain affection or tenderness. As if my body were not my own, I had forgotten my arms and legs. Even the body itself seemed to have been forgotten.
Cross Reference 1: Uno Kunichii’s Translation (English Translation: Bruce Baird)
I am beset by the feeling that I am already being caused to dance by something. I became like matter which has suddenly lost its life, possibly because I was enveloped in steam. Probably, the condition of my body itself not feeling gravity also taught me the gesture of rapidly eating the forms which suddenly floated into my thoughts. It appeared that any crevice where affection and discernment might enter my conduct completely disappeared. I guess I even forgot my hands and feet and even my body itself, as if the body was not my own thing to possess. HTZ 1: 15
As evidence that I couldn’t fully grasp what came into my eyes, I found myself standing in a place, watching a wet piece of paper slowly turn yellow and dry—while a butterfly rested on it for an hour. Perhaps because of that, I’m still afraid of my chopsticks slipping while eating a bowl of eel and rice.
The ever-shifting whereabouts of my moods—my sudden loss of energy or the rising of my spirits in the evening—seem to melt into my body, making it increasingly difficult to trace or follow them with any precision.
[Practice of the Gloom That Oozes from the Kneeling Position]
Yet, even in this state of bodily forgetfulness, I cannot forget the weight of the stone on top of the pickle barrel, dusted with white powder. The kneeling position I took when lifting the stone to retrieve the stretched eggplant—and the gloom that oozed out of that very posture—was likely something naturally built into the body, but at the same time, it was something I had practiced.
12. Fear of Silk Thread
It took me many long years to stop being scared of silk thread, and I went through various refracted experiences before I recognized a woman standing in the kitchen, her two breasts hanging heavily with deep breathing, as something beautiful.
13. A Body Whose Outlines Have Been Removed
Various things entwine the body whose outlines have been erased, and if I peeled them away, I felt as if a new wind was printed on it—but sometimes, the wind would make mistakes, and perhaps I would simply repeat those mistakes.
[Eyeball for Watching the Invisible Huge Creature in the Air]
If I didn’t have an eyeball on my forehead, I would have been eaten in the struggle against those things hanging all over the place, and I wouldn’t have been able to see the invisible huge creature in the air. My body seemed to be sandwiched in that space. I often bought and ate food, walking the street with a dirty face from eating. I rubbed candy and dried squid against dogs passing by and ate again. I was like that.
14. A Body Left Alone Too Much
The sound of boiling food was heard under the sky, as if Ishikawa Goemon* might appear. Rather, I wished to be able to hear it. Or perhaps the threads of my thoughts had been cut off, because I had stared too much at the tatami mat pattern, though I might have been able to hear it. My thoughts had unconsciously drifted toward the body that had been left alone too much.
*Ishikawa Goemon: a legendary great thief.
[Body Stolen by Steam]
When steam blew up from the boiling iron pot of rice at dusk, I lost my appetite. My thoughts became like steam, and my body grew into something fictional. Thus, my body was stolen even by the steam. Though it had been stolen and danced by someone already, I had no idea how I could get it back or regenerate it. I wondered if a blind man and a lion-like laughter were hidden faintly in the rising steam. What cannot succeed as thought—like binding water by hand—was mixed into that steam, something very difficult.
[It Was Not Only Me Who Had Been Danced By Someone]
In retrospect, the elusive whereabouts might be hidden only in places like the missing bones of a fish pierced into wet cloth. It was not only me who had been danced by someone. I returned the stare of a pig watching dull children and sometimes stood under the chilly sun like a chicken looking up at the sky. At times like those, I tried to bite a pillar with my teeth or forget the bitterness of cucumber in the field.
[Creature That Lives in a Sound No One Knows]
The shapes of creatures living in sounds no one knows might be glimpsed through people unfolding crumpled paper inside the house. But my young body fell into a place without blame or bypassed the light brown robber socks stopper in fear.
15. A Body That Continues to Be Eaten
I played in the street until sunset; my vocal cords were about to collapse like brown sugar candy. The buttons on my jacket were smashed enough, even if the daytime heat had not faded by evening. When I got home, I inserted cotton painted with black ointment on the tip of disposable chopsticks into my rear while in a groveling position.
After I returned home, the dusk stretched out like the fleeing angle of small animals nearby. Red dragonflies and tiny insects hit my face, and I swallowed them deep into my throat. Perhaps this rough-throat sensation connected deeply to my body.
My body, dripping blue nasal discharge, was also violently bitten by a horsefly. I ate various sweets with that body: roasted barley flour fragments, granulated sugar, brown sugar, ginger rice crackers, soybean paste bread, twisted candy, fist candy, bomb candy, and banana sweets. Somehow, when I ate those things, a thin man trickled out from inside the house, put a hoe in the back field, and pulled out green onions.
I also wondered about a strange blue-faced person who quickly ran away beside me while I ate various wild fruits.
Like these people—spies and those who quickly vanish from view—I was a simple creature. If we live too far from childishness, oldness, and smoke, we forget that we can become one-eyed child monsters just by sticking our tongues out fully. We lose the ability to distinguish between a crying thing and a melting thing. Even a child’s shout of “Oh, help me!” might sound like mere hysteria, and I cannot descend to the depths.
The tatami and shoji in the house have kept their surfaces unchanged. Days passed, guessing whether things might lose the chance for love. Though I struggled and made noise by twisting my body and stomping violently, I had been defeated by the spreading empty space invading my body. When I realized that the cake and candy I wanted to eat would never come, images of a flat dog and a stretched-out cat like strings appeared around my head. I made strange decisions, like imagining dogs and cats as candy.
This body—I thought—would continue to be eaten.
16. Gods Ripping People to Shreds
There were one or two gods ripping you to shreds wherever you went. In every house we entered, people who could no longer suppress the passions of their souls were sitting inside, shouting and screeching while holding nostalgic iron tongs. I had been watching these people as they tasted the precision of being on the verge of becoming fools, and with empathy, I could understand them.
17. The Basis of Humanity Had Collapsed Around Me
Compared to such a state, probably what we discovered with sharp sight was mostly broken, merely an empty corpse of a form. Because the basis of humanity had collapsed all around me, I was able to watch it without any thought.
Cross Reference 2: Uno Kunichii’s Translation (English Translation: Bruce Baird)
I was only thinking about the way that this body will likely continue to be eaten away unless some unusual event does not immediately occur in the sky. There were always one or two gods that would rip you to shreds no matter which house you went to, and no matter which house, there was always someone sitting there who couldn’t suppress the violent passions of their soul, and they would scream in a shrill voice while gripping those nostalgic fire tongs. I guess I had the feeling that I could understand these people, who taste all the particulars of being on the brink of cowardice, so I looked at them. It is certain that the things which I quickly found out, when compared with this situation, were almost all damaged and not more than the corpses of forms. Because the roots of humanity had already crumbled away from the people around me, it could seem as if it was OK for me not to do any thinking. HTZ 1: 17
18. Relationships That Are Threatened by the Demeanor of Things
A quiet and thin person picking eggplant, many flying butterflies, soy sauce bottles with a certain weight, the heaviness of a charcoal briquette, the weight of a hammer, and a yukata robe brought back from the cold—all of these encouraged human violent emotions. But when viewed from the perspective of relationships threatened by the demeanor of such things, it seemed possible that our very breath could leave our bodies, and so people had to live cautiously and in darkness. They might have unknowingly set aside the sharp, unsettling gaze that surprises humans, treating it like a kind of disease.
19. Lessons of the Sick Dancing Princess
A sickly person, whether sleeping or waking, was always groaning in a dark part of the house. My habit was to let my body release onto the tatami like a fish, a practice I learned through the lessons of this sickly dancing princess. Her body appeared as if shaped by an outline making a wish. Yet it was caught in a darkness, like a fruit bursting somewhere. No one would remember the darkness on the other side—something unknown to everyone—this beginning like a revival. I have grown up breathing in a place where learning was impossible. When forced to watch these sick people, a desire to release my body—like being struck strongly on the knee by something like a stick—had been scraped away from me. But most of the time, my body had no desire; it moved as if drifting across the shadow of a malformation.
Cross Reference 3: Uno Kunichii’s Translation (English Translation: Bruce Baird)
A feeble person who slept and woke over and over was always moaning in a dark corner of the house. You could say that I learned from the lessons of this feeble terpsichore my habit of turning loose my body on the tatami like a fish. It appeared that her body was made with the contours of doing something like desiring, but even so, it was captured by a darkness that was like something ruptured and ripened somewhere. She[/I] probably didn’t remember the darkness on the other side that no one knows, this dark resurrection which is like a beginning. HTZ 1: 18
[I might have been fused and merged with the Sick Dancing Princess]
Sometimes, I might have thought I wanted to recapture and reconstruct this body that could be easily bitten by anything. But it had fluttered along the existence of the sickly dancing princess who was sleeping or waking, and I would have been fused and merged with her immediately.
[20. An observation that is going to stray]
I was living with a body as if the sound of sipping snivel faintly echoed like a spirit. I spent time watching chickens whose colors resembled the gloom under the rim, completely forgetting about the horse’s teeth. My body was brought to a place as if bowed by frogs and balloons.
Maybe I followed uncertain contexts too much, or became too involved with people who laughed while wrapping nails in paper and appeared before the fence of coal tar, unable to follow its outlines. I ran and lived as if a closet drawer full of sighs was slipping out. However, even when I brightly observed my mind, there was no reason for the movement—playing like a dog going back and forth—to disappear quickly from my body.
While moving my roundish ankle and playing, I touched my mother’s shoulder, which smelled of dust and hand towel, or listened to the sound of the kettle while fiddling with her shaggy shoulder. I found peace watching her downy facial hair left unshaved, while looking away from the eerie vastness of her mouth and feeling the eyes that did not see me.
The soul hides in that place and cannot be seen by any eyes on the face. But when will I become the kind of man who can carefully and naturally peel the skin of boiled eggs? I thought I did not need to focus especially on such behavior. The more I thought, the more my observation began to stray.
[Brightness and Darkness of Breath]
I often cut my tongue by licking candy with empty nests inside.
I watched the coolness of an ice cream seller with suffering eyes, something more boundless than the doctors who froze me. Then, when approaching such a cool place, I suddenly stopped and stiffened. Sooty thoughts and eroded shadows lived around it, and worries suddenly turned to ease. The brightness and darkness of breath—things not needing to be untied or erased—connected to my body. Anyway, I preferred such a state as if the shade let the light breathe.
However, a body that drank water without bitter medicine, when joining others, appeared as a body failing to disguise itself and caused a big fuss.
[21. Dusk of Vague Mind]
If we do not reach a completely exhausted mental state, we might not grasp the true relationships between people. We can release them into this dusk of vague mind—what we cherish as sacred things like catfish, loach, and winter crucian, and also those who gave us candy while stroking our faces jingling, and who bowed politely. How could we see this by opening our eyes if we didn’t prefer to hide in this dusk? And if there was not something there wishing to be broken?
It is connected unpromisingly to the vague dusk, as well as what I watched—the edible wild plants and beans boiled and soaked in the pot’s water for several days—and also when I was chased in a room by a lascivious and frank woman who came to sell chicken only on that noisy windy day.
[22. God Would Crawl into the Bed]
The sleeping face of any person appears like makeup—hard to express in words. God would also crawl into the bed. The size of the body also seems to be determined.
[23. What is visible might be the dark hole itself]
Though the visible things must certainly be horses and cows, I wonder if they might actually be the dark hole itself, or if they are things entering the hole and becoming invisible.
Cross Reference 4: Uno Kunichii’s Translation (English Translation: Bruce Baird)
That thing I can see is certainly a horse or a cow, but is it indeed a dark hole, or probably something that went into the hole and now I can’t see it anymore? HTZ 1: 20
Uno Kunichii’s Translations Continued (Past Rhizome Lee’s Ch. 1 Translations)
The I which applied a charcoal fire mold to my shin always felt distressed towards my body as if I were being suspected of something. When I would step into this suspicious territory, I would embrace a strange space-time. It is likely that the I who was wearing the shell of chaos, wanted to be treated as the body that had thrown that off. The I (that stored up something like a marching band at his side and in his face in which his furrowed brow was connected directly to a gap in the sky) sometimes showed a nimble panic. When the sun would cloud over, his feelings would cloud over, and in just that way come to resemble his body. Like a frog with only half a body, I would press my back against a fence. HTZ 1: 33–34
Whatever you do, you cannot say anything that will help you understand that you are you. HTZ 1: 61
The immediate future is imperiled; I was surrounded by something that resembled the atmosphere of fluttering butterfly wings. Even the vapor that surrounded me (that was like I was silently watching a small snake melt) approached the hermetically sealed space along with the butterfly. For the shape of such an I, there is no childhood and no past. There is not even anything like something one would have no choice but to invent. HTZ 1: 73
I was certainly and clearly sucking up through my pores, a wind which was probably blowing on the skin of the dead. Who was it who was encouraging it [/me], “just a little bit more, just a little bit more,” and being cleansed by the transparent wind, and exposed to consolation? Is it because it is only the dead who can sleep contently when the light of a thunderbolt goes behind their eyes? HTZ 1: 84
On account of the painful injection that came from that damp earth, even though I was full of lies, I became a body unable to lie. The things that are propped up all around that body, seemed as if they had completely died, leaving only the dark texture of me behind. Even after this thing called I dies, I guess the shape of me folding my arms over my chest will remain. Around me the voice(s) of rumors could be heard. HTZ 1:104
Everyone disappeared from the house. Even the taciturn person suddenly disappeared who turned his/her shoes backwards and waved them. It is just submerged earthworms. I have a feeling that I saw a corpse person striding along with giant steps wearing the form of an unfamiliar clear stomach. I also have the feeling that I have seen a corpse in the shape of a long slender stomach tying off the slender stomach and somewhat regretfully disappearing. HTZ 1:120
¹ Lee, Rhizome. The Butoh. First Edition. 2017. Pages 337 – 354.
² Baird, Bruce. “The Book of Butoh; The Book of The Dead”. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Page 171-176. Translation of: Uno, Kuniichi. 1986. “Butō no sho, shisha no sho.” Yurīka no. 237 (18 July): 30–37.
