Shūji Terayama

Biography

Terayama was born December 10, 1935, in Hirosaki, Aomori, the only son of Hachiro and Hatsu Terayama. His father died at the end of Pacific War in Indonesia in September 1945. When Terayama was nine, his mother moved to Kyūshū to work at an American military base, while he himself went to live with relatives in the city of Misawa, also in Aomori. Terayama lived through the Aomori air raids that killed more than 30,000 people.

Terayama entered Aomori High School in 1951, and in 1954 he enrolled in Waseda University's Faculty of Education to study Japanese language and literature. However, he soon dropped out because he fell ill with nephrotic syndrome. He received his education through working in bars in Shinjuku. His oeuvre includes a number of essays claiming that more can be learned about life through boxing and horse racing than by attending school and studying hard. Accordingly, he was one of the central figures of the "runaway" movement in Japan in the late 1960s, as depicted in his book, play, and film Throw Away Your Books, Run into the Streets! (書を捨てよ、町へ出よう).

In 1967, Terayama formed the Tenjō Sajiki (天井桟敷) theater troupe, whose name comes from the Japanese translation of the 1945 Marcel Carné film Les Enfants du Paradis and literally translates to "ceiling gallery" (with a meaning similar to the English term "peanut gallery"). The troupe was dedicated to the avant-garde and staged a number of controversial plays tackling social issues from an iconoclastic perspective. Some major plays include "Bluebeard" (青ひげ), "Yes" (イエス), and "The Crime of Fatso Oyama" (大山デブコの犯罪), among others. Also involved with the theater were artists Aquirax Uno (宇野亜喜良) and Tadanori Yokoo (横尾忠則), who designed many of the advertisement posters for the group. Musically, he worked closely with experimental composer J.A. Seazer and folk musician Kan Mikami. Playwright Rio Kishida was also part of the company. She viewed Terayama as a mentor, and together they collaborated on Shintokumaru (Poison Boy), The Audience Seats, and Lemmings.

He was also involved in poetry and at 18 was the second winner of the Tanka Studies Award.

Terayama experimented with 'city plays', a fantastical satire of civic life.

Also in 1967, Terayama started an experimental cinema and gallery called 'Universal Gravitation,' which is still in existence at Misawa as a resource center. The Terayama Shūji Memorial Hall, which has a large collection of his plays, novels, poetry, photography and a great number of his personal effects and relics from his theatre productions, can also be found in Misawa. In 1976, he was a member of the jury at the 26th Berlin International Film Festival.

Terayama published almost 200 literary works, and over 20 short and full-length films.

He was married to Tenjō Sajiki co-founder Kyōko Kujō (九條今日子), but they later divorced, although they continued to work together until Terayama's death on May 4, 1983 from cirrhosis of the liver. Kujō died on April 30, 2014.

Works

His film oeuvre is well known for its experimentalism and includes:

Plays

Short fiction

Collected in: The Crimson Thread of Abandon

Screenplays

Short films

Feature-length films

Photography