From Being Jealous

of a Dog’s Vein

Hijikata Tatsumi

Only when, despite having a normal, healthy body, you come to wish that
you were disabled or had been born disabled, do you take your first step in
butoh. A person who dances butoh has just such a fervent desire, much like a
child’s longing to be crippled.
When I see children throw sticks and stones at a lame dog trying to slink
from sight, then corner it against a wall, and mindlessly beat it, I feel jealous
of the dog. Why? Because it is the dog which derives the most benefit here. It
is the dog that tempts the children and, without considering its own situation,
exposes itself completely. One kind of dog may even do so with its intestines
hanging red from its belly.
With fish and birds, things are quite different. First of all, fish do not have
legs. Also, I have to prepare myself in various ways before entering that dimly
lit world that fish see each day. With birds, I am unable to get excited unless I
first crush the birds together with their nesting box before taking them on. I
get my first thrill only after I struggle to clear away heavy obstacles, then find
lots of eggs incubating underneath it all.
I am able to look at a naked human body savaged by a dog. This is an es-
sential lesson for butoh and leads to the question of exactly what ancestor a
butoh person is.
I adore rib cages but, again, it seems to me that a dog’s rib cage is superior
to mine. This may be some old mental image I have. On rainy days I some-
times see a dog’s rib cage and feel defeated by it. From the start, my butoh has
had no use for cumbersome fat or superfluous curves. Just skin and bones,
with a bare minimum of muscle—that’s the ideal. If blue veins can be seen
through a dog’s skin, then there is no need at all for a woman’s body. Even
when, as now, I struggle to write something, a woman is just no help; she is
not even able to serve as an eraser. I have known this for as long as I can re-
member, with an understanding that reverberates deep in my heart.
I have yearned again and again for the meaning of where to start, a meaning
I have not been able to ascertain in my own life and which does not come alive
in my talent. I cherish wet animals and the bodies of the old, withered like
dead trees, precisely because I believe that through them I may be able to come
close to my desire. My body longs to be cut into pieces and to hide itself some-
where cold. I think that is, after all, the place to which I shall return and am

The Drama Review ,  (T), Spring . English translation copyright © 
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


 Jealous of a Dog’s Vein 

. Hijikata Tatsumi in
Keijijøgaku (Emotion in
Metaphysics, ) directed
by Hijikata for Takai
Tomiko’s Dance Recital.
(Photo by Nakatani
Tadao)

certain that, frozen hard and about to fall down, what my eyes have seen there
is simply an intimacy with things which continue to die their own deaths.
I have now and again thought about keeping a corpse. But I get bored with
things such as cotton or spider webs, lightbulbs or bread, which require gentle
handling. Undoubtedly, I too grew up melting my brain while drowning in
the futon in the closet and eating soggy rice crackers, but those feelings, those
emotions have now gone totally astray somewhere in my body and are unable
to develop into anything even close to that terror I felt, wondering where I
had gone in the dead of the night.
If the whereabouts of food that can jolt us is lost, I think humans will be as
good as half dead. I have a childhood memory of eating so much chicken, a
food that frightened both my mind and body, that I only nibbled at other
foods, without swallowing them. For that reason alone, my body has bred
several important things. By the same token, though, I was often severely
punished for it. When I saw children with their mouths gaping or children
 Hijikata Tatsumi

drowning their hearts in the shallows, I thought they were merely plump,
messy creatures, only there for the breeding. Salmon roe seemed to me like
the intestines of Christ and I did not eat it. I have at present a steadily grow-
ing desire somehow to get away from food by gnawing only on air or by put-
ting a small piece of wood between my teeth. Because I believe that the
things that get lost once I eat them have actually settled down in my body, I
may at last no longer allow food to go into my stomach. If that time comes,
there will be absolutely no need for my family and friends to worry or to
weep. When it happens, everything must inevitably become clear, but since
my dead sister started living within my body, things no longer work like that.
My sister, moreover, does not complain at all but only makes an inarticulate
sound maybe twice a day. If she were to complain, she would no longer be a
sister to me and, more than that, disaster would never again walk by my
house. Then I would be in trouble. How shall I be able to communicate that,
because I used to be a positive genius at finding things with monetary value, I
. Hijikata Tatsumi in could not afford to dream? I no longer think I need to talk about how I was
Honegami tøge in my childhood, using the economics of romantic adults.
hotokekazura (Corpse I conceived all manner of things and made them come erect along the long
Vine on Ossa Famine hallway of a normal school, and because of that my body became utterly hol-
Ridge, ) written by low and dim. I was seized by a feeling that a sperm, using a laxative on every-
Nosaka Akiyuki and di- thing and abandoned by rhythm, was staggering along this hallway.
rected by Eda Kazuo at the Twelve or thirteen years later I saw the butoh of a young woman who had
Shinjuku to siat crawled on her hands and knees under the porch and stayed there, with a wet
(Shinjuku Art Theater) for a cotton cloth on her face. No matter what, she did not come out from under
performance with Ningenza the porch. Her face was like burned charcoal, and I have believed since then
(Human Theatre Group). that no one would bother to wonder just what it was that that young woman
(Photo by Hosoe Eikø) and my sperm had eaten which linked them together. At the time, I smeared
a rabbit on a wet, splintered board of wood and tried
to draw a picture, but the crayon slipped and the
color didn’t take well. The feeling between my
sperm and that young woman seemed to drift up
like smoke from that hidden place. Since then, I do
not think I have ever had the experience of con-
cretely and directly hiding such an emotion as a re-
sult of a relationship with a normal, healthy woman.
When I think about spirit exalted to physiology,
my taste remains unperturbed, remorselessly smash-
ing even the shadow of a naked body sobbing on the
edge of the abyss. After that, however insignificant,
however indistinct, I feel that a piece of me that is
difficult to discern remains in subtle light. This is the
way things are. I am someone who rejoices when
people die. It makes no difference if they are intel-
lectuals or even those who defend writers. There is a
wind-bell echoing in my cursed head and I want
only to sit down, like a child on the threshold of
wholeness who is waiting for something to be
handed out. But in three years my hair grew too
heavy to flutter in the wind. I make the “farmhands”
who come to my house in Meguro eat like cows,
with their eyes closed, and urinate standing, with
their heads hanging down. I have transformed myself
again and again into a strange and brutal musical in-
strument that does not even sweat and I live my life
turning a stick of silence beating on silence into a
 Jealous of a Dog’s Vein 

shinbone. I have transformed myself too into an empty chest of drawers and a
gasping willow trunk. I have also seen ghosts doing sumø [wrestling] in a par-
lor and have been able any number of times to create a baby who picks up
their bones and bleeds at the nose. One day an evil wind, like a beautiful
woman, came moving in a clot, and when it touched me there on my head I,
too, hardened into a lump.
When I think about the menarche of an old woman, I have the feeling I
can go anywhere. But these phenomena occur in the world where sound has
ceased. It seems to me that these things, squishy like somnolent sweets, will
eventually come under the control of things frozen hard. This “I” breathing
nearby will make this faraway “me” who, numbed with cold, no longer even
knows whose ancestor I am, aware of myself as one virgin body. What I
dance there is nowhere even near the “butohification” of experience, much
less the mastery of butoh. I want to become and be a body with its eyes just
open wide, a body tensed to the snapping point in response to the majestic
landscape around it. Not that I think it is better at such a time not to look at
my own body, but my regret for having looked at it is also numbed and I am
unable to allow my hapless body to bud.
Where butoh is a means of expression, it only provides a form of hot butoh,
which is based on the whole gamut of jealousy and submission, and always
takes the shape of supplication and prostration. This is not very important to
me. While a lack is yet a lack, one can still call any lack in his or her body a
self-sufficiency. Though it be indecent, because of my need to restore some-
thing to my cold body, I think I will keep this face that is fresh from waking up
a little while longer. In the past, several of my butoh used to sit on veneered
tatami mats facing the garden. When the sun shined, I would rush outside.
It seems almost clear to me what help my butoh must have so as not to be
hit or miss.

May 
Originally Published as “Inu no jømyakuni shitto suru koto kara” in Bijutsu Techø