RICHARD HAWKINS

Richard Hawkins’s speculations on the Shibusawa-Hijikata connection revolve around two artefacts coinciding with the early days of butoh: Yokoo Tadanori’s poster for Hijikata’s Rose Colored Dance (1965) and the caricature of the decadent scholar in Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Dawn (1970). In the latter, the increasingly-fascist Mishima portrays a character loosely based on Shibusawa, who represents what he considers the worst of culture descending into decline, a serial fantasiser of rituals called ‘murder theaters’–a more frensied version of the perceived affect of butoh performance, but not so far from Hijikata’s own more privately imaginative wanderings. In the Tadanori poster, the designer emphasised less the performance’s title, Rose Coloured and more its subtitle A La Maison de Civecawa, a mixture of Proust-allusion and absurdist French with the intent of making indisputably obvious the fruitful conversations Hijikata and Shibusawa must have had within the scholar’s cabinet-of-decadent-curiosities home and library.