Tokyo Grand Guignol Organizer Norimizu Ameya

　　★Tokyo Grand Guignol★       

       Organizer Norimizu Ameya      

　　　　　　🍬 From JUNE (magazine)🍬　

These are articles that were published in magazines at the time. 

The first article was written by a reporter who had interviewed Ameya Norimizu several times. The following article is an essay that Ameya Norimizu serialized in a magazine called JUNE. JUNE was a magazine that featured beautiful boys and young men who were pure gays, so Grand Guignol, with its cast of beautiful young men, was probably a suitable subject for JUNE's theme.

　
The spring of a 15-year-old will never end. If I summon pitch black darkness to this city.

A (Ameya Norimizu) muttered to himself as the last of his childhood was about to be consumed.

It was when he was already over 20 years old that he began to remember with deep regret that boys were a privileged class.

A wondered. Why did he end his childhood with just that one mutter? Perhaps he believed that in the afterimage of his boyhood, he alone would never age and would remain a boy forever.

He muttered, but it was just meant to be a pose of toughness...

So it was probably A's way of thinking about it as a ritual to prolong his boyhood.

But that mutter marked the end of A's childhood.

He could now vividly recognize it.

So how could he sublimate the murderous intent and cruelty that he had put into a state of moratorium for the sake of mental ease? A is enraged by his own childhood that has come to an end.

Boys are the theme of our times. Boys are everywhere. But these are boys who did not want to be talked about well. A is a negative boy.

Stars with charisma are always somewhat boyish. These days, even female stars are boyish. A is not the boy that wise people pretend to be, but a boy who remains a boy with a malice that never makes him taller.

A has a handsome face. But he does not know the angle from which his face looks the most beautiful.

He does not have the purity that lures old people with his beauty. He knows with confidence that no matter how ugly he appears, he will not lose even a bit of his boyish brilliance. So A is overflowing, revealing the most boyish cruelty.

A is a never-ending revenge drama directed at boyhood.

Tokyo Grand Guignol's plays feature many boys. It is almost as if only boys appear in the story. Mature women are treated like pigs and have iron penises inserted into them. They are suddenly erased from the story of "Lychee" and never appear again.

A woman is inserted into the story only to be violated and despised. There is only one girl allowed in A's story. In "Lychee", it is a girl called Marin who is crushed by Koshi Miharu.

Koshi Miharu - the most boyish girl who recently released an LP called "Boy Soprano".

Koshi Miharu must be the girl who calls herself "boku".

A's world is deliberately immature.

A has a mean look in his eyes like an old man. He laughs loudly in a hushed voice. A is a secret society of boys. A never tries to lead a secret society.

An outsider who is respected by the boy who leads the society. And yet he has influence over the society.

There must be at least one sharp boy like that in every school. A boy who will never be twenty. A is trying to take revenge on the childhood of every person.

A was doing sound for the J Theater Company. They only used popular songs. At the time, he didn't think much of it. A was going to perform a play with tap dancers, so they started practicing tap dancing. While practicing in the basement, A suddenly remembered his childhood.

Stomping our feet in the basement like this was our dance.

The boy, whose memories had come back to him, never returned to the theater company. And so the opening scene of "Mercuro," in which the boys stomped their feet to the beat of PIL's drums, was created.

A muttered that Tokyo Grand Guignol's first performance, "Mercuro," was because they wanted to stage the image of manga artist Maruo Suehiro's work... They wanted to create a stage performance using our favorite songs, not popular songs... Thinking I understand, I write things like "Tokyo Grand Guignol, an anarchic, romantic theater company that stages its productions." When I meet A a while later, he looks a little dazed and says, "I never said that. I'm just annoyed when people say that my stage productions don't resemble Maruo Suehiro's manga." 

Your favorite image, your favorite sound... If you can't do that, you can't do a play.

I once had a meal with A. It was scorched rice. When soup is poured over the parched rice, it sizzles and steam rises all over the table. A looked on with disinterest.

In the second performance, "Galatia," scorched rice appeared on stage. It looked like water was poured over hot coke, but it had quite a feeling. That's not straightforward.

This time it was "lychee." Surely that's not the lychee that was served as dessert after the scorched rice? Yes it is. A smiles mischievously. Lychee (Shimada Kyusaku) is an artificial human who uses lychees as energy. He falls in love with a girl and gains consciousness. "Lychee" seems to be based on Umezu Kazuo's "I am Shingo". The girl's name is Marine, after all...

Tokyo Grand Guignol's interests in creating plays are far removed from things like society. They could be the dessert lychee, manga, or images of musicians. In a broad sense, they can be said to be theater that lives in a meta era.

The quality of the actors is also changing. This is also a change in the way we see things, but we are now looking at characters that are closer to the real thing than at the performance. When it comes to characters, Tokyo Grand Guignol's Shimada Kyusaku is outstanding. His jaw looks like it has an artificial bone implanted in it, he drools while he talks, and he dances like crazy. His characters that go beyond acting are worth seeing.

After each performance, the actors of Tokyo Grand Guignol disperse. Some go into bands, some go back to school... Although a few of them return, the next play will be performed by mostly new members. This is also a sign of the times. They may be worthy of acting, but there is no point in being recognized for it.

I Love Mr. Vampire.
Ameya Norimizu (Head of Tokyo Grand Guignol)
I think watching and making movies (or anything else) is a lot like being in love. No matter how many flaws they have, you can't help but like them. And you should only badmouth or ignore them if you haven't grown to like them. The deciding factor in any work is: Does it have so much charm that you don't care about its flaws? See, I even loved The Goonies, widely panned as it is. I made my own weaponized belt buckle gimmick as soon as I got home from it. The number of *gimmicks* in the movie is equivalent to how irreplaceable it is to me. Listen, the course of my whole life was set in motion when I saw a girl in one movie flip her skirt up and show her legs.**
Come to think of it, I was troubled when people who saw Litchi Hikari Club said there was too much pointless stuff in it. Let me get this straight: my plays are pointless from beginning to end. They are masses of coagulated pointlessness. Theatre, whether you make it or watch it, accomplishes (much like love) nothing at all, and is not only a complete waste of time, it's a complete waste of life. But that utterly ridiculous waste is why you can live in a run-down apartment and still pretend to be a Tokyo Ludwig.***
I've gone off topic, but I think Mr. Vampire is the epitome of "riddled with flaws but awesome". I already love Hong Kong movies-- you can easily get a sense of kitsch or camp from older films, but nowadays you can only find it in ones from Hong Kong. Freed from the filthy need to try and make some kind statement, its beauty lies in the ridiculous amount of passion it pours into the fun and stylistic skill of kung fu. Plus, the movements in kung fu are sharp, swift and wildly artificial, so I love them a ton. I even thought of Tokyo Grand Guignol when I saw the opening with the corpses hopping in a line. The shapes of the coffins are insanely cool, the bicycle with the incense sticks is something I'd love to put in a play, and they even used a technique involving lychees to burn the zombie****-- I might as well marry the movie at this point. 

    

*The Japanese title of Mr. Vampire is "Reigen Doushi", meaning 'Phantom Daoshi (Taoist priest).
**I don't know what movie he's talking about!
***Referring, of course, to Ludwig II of Bavaria, infamous for his extravagance.
****I've seen the movie and I don't remember this-- they used sticky rice and chicken blood against the zombie, but I don't recall any lychees. Maybe it was a different movie?

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　　　　　　　A story from my childhood  

                        Tokyo Grand Guignol Ameya Norimizu           

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　　　　　　　　　　　　　1986

　May 1st, sunny. Takei drove me to a new house. It's spacious enough for just the two of us, my cat and I. I'm happy. But thanks to that, I haven't written the June article that's due today. I was planning to write it before the move, but yesterday I went to a concert by Grand Guignol's Ishikawa-kun (Nico), his band "DAYS", and the day before yesterday I went to a concert by Ryuichi Sakamoto with Miharu-chan... I was just playing around. I'll write about it tomorrow. Sasaki, the new drummer in "DAYS", is a very sexy young man, and Yamaji plays sharp guitar, so I hope all readers will go to a live show.

May 2nd, cloudy, later with occasional rain (unfortunately not radioactive). I was surprised at the letter from a reader in last month's issue. I'm amazed that you found the "Nobara" video. There are so many people in the countryside who are interested in Grand Guignol. Maybe we should do a regional tour...

Also, you said that there were two Grand Guignol actors in the video, and that was me and Miharu. Is it an exaggeration to say that I looked about 13 years old?

Anyway, this time you asked me to talk about my childhood. Hmm, when I was a child...

A newborn candy shop Kun came to a place called Odawara in Kanagawa Prefecture. Odawara is a mountain area just off the sea, and there is a large river called the Sakagawa River. He played there like a wild child. When he wasn't playing, he would read picture books in his room. He didn't play baseball with the neighborhood kids very often. He'd always been short, so the neighborhood kids would say things like, "Hierarchy among people is determined by height," and he hated being bossed around by younger kids. So he spent his time catching bugs by himself, swimming in the river, climbing cliffs, exploring the air raid shelter... that's about it. He found a dog's skeleton deep inside the air raid shelter. One time, I put it in the drawer of my teacher's desk at school, and she got mad. Brrr.

Speaking of getting mad, my ordinary first love was a female teacher at school, and one day she was sketching a cow's skull in the art room. People who draw pictures often do that, don't they? So, this precocious candy shop boy, whose only weakness was his abnormally developed libido, went to the slaughterhouse and had a freshly killed cow's head wrapped in plastic and gave it to the princess as a present, hoping to impress her and get a kiss. Yep, she got mad then too. More than being mad, I'd say she was just envious. Since then, , whenever I see anything that could be called a female teacher, I stick my iron penis between her legs and rape her.

Apart from insects, my favorite animals were amphibians, like frogs and snakes. I loved them a lot, but I bullied them. Whenever I found a snake, I beat it to death, and for frogs, I skinned them and made them swim in boiling water. I felt that the shell of a turtle was somehow unfair, so I smeared paint thinner on it, set it on fire, and made it walk around. It would have been fine if it had gotten hot enough to come out of its shell. I also electrolyzed water by putting a goldfish inside a goldfish wasp and passing a 100V current through it.

Despite all that bullying, in my elementary school yearbook I nonchalantly wrote, "In the future, I will be a talented biologist." But that is what I really wanted to be. So why am I acting now? Even I don't know. Bzzz. The above is a story from my childhood, nothing particularly nostalgic.