Humankind’s Search for the Living in Shinichi Anasako and Pijin Neji’s “Stand by Me”

How does a coming-of-age story look like today, at a time of a global ecological catastrophe and increasingly dire social, economic, political crises looming in the future? Kyoto-based playwright and director Shinichi Anasako offers an answer in Stand by Me. The title references the classic 1986 coming-of-age movie of the same name, based on Stephen King’s novella. At a post-performance talk-back held during the Kyoto Experiment festival (that commissioned the piece), Anasako together with the show’s co-creator and co-director, Tokyo-based choreographer and dancer Pijin Neji, explained that their idea for Stand by Me began with an inversion of the journey in the original movie. If in the American drama, the four protagonists, four boys, go on a journey to find the dead body of a missing kid, in the 2024 Stand by Me, the four protagonists, played by three actresses and one actor (Haruka Sakai, Sachi Nakamura, Akari Nomura, and Leon Kou Nakayama), have already died and begin a journey to find the living.

Anasako and Neji approached the heavy topic with a calm, unassuming hand and a lot of playfulness and humor. They staged the show in a large, rectangular exhibition room belonging to the Horikawa Oike Gallery. The audience entered the space through the large sliding doors at one end of the room, crossed the playing area, and was seated at the opposite end of the space, facing both the stage and the doors upstage. As the play unfolded in this white box space, I realized that the white expanse gently held us all together in the limbo of the spirit world. Minimal props were strewn across the space in Ayami Sasaki’s stage design: a round, small coffee table with a few chairs, along with five little treadmills scattered through the space that the actors occasionally mounted to suggest their journeying through the underworld. The playful symbolism in the use of objects onstage extended to a thin, silver roll of plastic that stood in for a river and thermal coffee mugs that were supposed to steam throughout the show, destabilizing our sense of time.

The world depicted in the play came alive in all its otherworldliness through the central role given to light and sound. Nami Nakayama’s light design boldly played with color and shapes across the white surfaces. Bunsho Nishikawa’s sound design collaborated with the live DJ-ing provided by Tentenko, an electronic music artist and former member of the famous pop punk, idol girl group BiS. As the largest set piece, Tentenko’s mixing table dominated the stage, and she was working at it, walking on her treadmill, for the entirety of the show. A scene that garnered chuckles from the audience depicted one of the protagonists asking Tentenko who she is and what she does, and her replying matter-of-factly in her cute, elfish voice with her own name and the line “I’m in charge of the music.” As manipulator of a time-based, atmospheric, and world-building art, Tentenko was revealed to be Time itself in the play.

The cast of actors was completed by one more person: the fascinating to watch, professional Noh performer Haruna Tanaka. Like Tentenko, Tanaka acted out an amplified, uncanny version of herself. Dressed in the traditional kimono suitable for a shite actor during practice, rehearsals, and lessons (not the more elaborate, extravagant masked attire worn during a Noh performance), Tanaka spent a large part of the play just walking around the space in the traditional suri-ashi style, and occasionally chanting in the traditional style of the Noh narrator, describing aspects of the protagonists’ journey. The chanting was funny because it incongruously merged the form of the archaic, sacerdotal declamation with the quotidian content of contemporary information. A lot of the time Tanaka walked very slowly, as performers do during Noh entrances, but sometimes she picked up the rhythm and fluttered off the stage. One of the running jokes in the play had the protagonists wonder why Noh is so slow. During the talk-back, Neji recounted with flair that initially, they envisioned Tanaka merely walking around the space like a Roomba, a hilarious image given the similarity in linear locomotion with stopping to turn between the robot and the suri-ashi. Yet despite the levity with which Stand by Me highlighted Noh’s strangeness and its distance from the aesthetic tastes of modern generations, the play seriously engaged with the art form and honored its philosophical inclinations. Stand by Me called upon Noh to help it explore its themes, given that Noh is the traditional expert on staging roaming spirits and the porous lines between the living and the dead. In a way, Stand by Me is a kind of contemporary Noh play reflecting on the bond between dying and living. In her speaking scene, Tanaka as a Noh master who can sense and communicate with spirits received the four protagonists who had come to her because they thought that staging a Noh play could be redemptive or could help them parse what happened. The scene of the Noh lesson started strong, eliciting plenty of smiles in the audience, but resolved itself anticlimactically and disappointingly with the five characters suri-ashi-ing for a few seconds. The reason for the underdeveloped nature of this scene became clear in the talk-back, when Anasako and Neji specified how late in the project they decided to give lines to Tanaka too.

Nothing much happened in this dramatically modest play centered on walking and talking in a casual, ordinary way. When Tanaka first met the protagonist and said she knew all about them because she had heard them talking when crossing the bridge (bridge crossing and water crossing symbolizing the passages between realms), one character mumbled: “We didn’t say much.” The funny aside is representative of the dialogue style. Ordinarily, I’m very much into the anti-emphatic, non-theatricalized playwriting and acting style, but in this particular situation, having to glance back and forth between the actors and a side screen projecting the English translation, the unmodulated delivery made it difficult for me to identify crucial information. I’m not entirely clear on the details of the action, nor how much the ambiguity was the writer’s intention or a product of my lack of understanding. A large disaster took place that wiped out the population of a city, but it’s unclear what kind of disaster specifically. I believe the protagonists were all in a café at the moment of the disaster that killed them all, but I’m not entirely sure, because a character kept talking about her brother who did something bad. They also talked about this person, Mae-chan, but I remain with no clue as to who they were.

One of my favorite parts of Stand by Me, however, was how I gradually pieced together that two of the protagonists, Machitani and Kumi, were human, while the other two, Sarada and Fujikawa, were goldfish that were swimming in a decorative aquarium in the café at the time of their death. Nothing in the costumes designed by Chie Ohno indicated that the performers embody different species. They all wore young-looking, casual street clothes. The fish were just a tiny bit more colorful in a pastel pink T-shirt and a lavender hoodie, respectively. Even better, nothing in the acting manners suggested that two performers represented fish. The leveling of importance between fish and people, offering the fish roles just as central and with just as many lines as the humans, reveals Stand by Me’s contemporary take on human/non-human relationships. Like Timothy Morton (see his 2017 book Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People), Anasako and Neji envision humankind as an inclusive category stressing the dependencies between beings, human and non-human, organic and inorganic, dead and alive.

In the talk-back, Anasako and Neji declared their lack of interest in classical impersonation and theatricalized acting styles. Instead, they encouraged the actors to be on stage as themselves. Anasako and Neji called this a “natural” acting style, but there never is anything “natural” about people on display acting out stories in front of other people. Our very social personas are performative too. The result of this acting minimalism was a softly embraced awkwardness that communicated acceptance for any way of being. Which is why, even though it didn’t help me understand the plot, I’m still all for it. The deadpan, placid acting style also had the effect of magnifying any physical or vocal choices made by the performers. At the very end of the performance, one of the protagonists, the goldfish played by Nakayama, got to return to the realm of the living. He went to the closed doors upstage, and as he waited for them to open, he did an adorable little shoulder shimmy, a small nod to fishness. The doors slid open, and we watched Nakayama walk out of the white space, cross the lobby, and into the street.

All in all, I had a thoroughly enjoyable experience watching Stand by Me. At the same time, I wonder whether this charming play is perhaps too palatable and easy to digest. Its resolute levity and cuteness overload risks trivializing the themes of disaster and mass death it wanted to address. If Anasako and Neji wanted to include some social criticism or intended the play to induce us to reflect on the unfolding global catastrophes, these aims were not achieved. Stand by Me sacrificed some substance to reach its quirky final form. I don’t know why such a high prize is put on being quirky. It reminded me of a lovely dinner I had at the beginning of my residency in Kyoto where I talked at length on various topics with a philosophy student from Doshisha University. At some point, he took out a pack of paper tissues and pointed to the cartoon cat’s face on its packaging: “Everything has to be cute in Japan.”

This review was drafted by the author during the “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” program organized by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and funded by the European Union.