Lychee before Furuya: These images are from the short mangas Das Brute: Blood, Moon Age 15: Damnation, and Jinta ☆ Jinta by pseudonymous manga author Not Osada. Like Furuya, Osada was an audience member for the original Tokyo Grand Guignol underground performances who was left fascinated by the aesthetics and bizarre narratives of their plays. While Furuya’s manga was based more or less on the direct events of the play, in Osada’s short stories a student council reminiscent of the light club are depicted carrying out various atrocities in scenes that mirror the aesthetic fixations of the plays. The short comics in question were published in the anthologies Night Reading Room (1988) and Blind Beast (1996). Moon Age 15 would be most recognizable to fans. In the short story, the club grow concerned about their current hideout (an abandoned industrial shelter that they converted into a space called Eden) after a lonely girl discovers a lab rabbit kept by one of the members outside the space. They eventually lure her into Eden under the pretense of letting her meet her first friend, just to shock her with a grotesque robot made of garbage. They then trap her in the space and burn it to the ground, killing both the girl and the robot in the process. Moonlight lingers as a continual archetype throughout the stories, matching the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s distinctly nocturnal atmosphere. And during the climax of Das Brute: Blood, the student council’s leader (the story’s own stand-in for Zera) refers to the blood of their last victim as being “dirty”, like how the teacher in Mercuro calls Mikami’s blood dirty after killing him in the medical lab at the end of act 2.
In concern of the mixed relations between later Lychee adaptions and the original Tokyo Grand Guignol affiliates, while many members held complicated feelings towards Furuya’s manga, many speak of Osada’s renditions with an open fondness. Despite Osada having retired from horror manga, he remains a fan of the Tokyo Grand Guignol. On Tsunekawa’s own accounts, Osada was even invited as a cohost for a special Tokyo Grand Guignol memorial event. While I understand the concerns of said affiliates with the increasingly detached and commercial nature of subsequent Lychee spinoffs (with there now being an idol band, comedy anime, etc) I like both Furuya and Osada’s manga works equally as their own interpretations of the TGG’s story. Neither can be direct replacements or likenesses, but instead unique adaptions of a now phantom-like work in how it was known to exist, but can never be directly witnessed in its original form. The screenplay for Lychee Light Club remains unreleased to this day, whilst the screenplays for Mercuro, Galatia Teito Monogatari and Walpurgis were all printed in one way or another in various publications. Osada and Furuya were both authors who were inspired by the underground originality of the production, but Furuya’s was the one that would gain a broader commercial success despite the underground nature of the Tokyo Grand Guignol. It could essentially be read as an ideological complication, with how the theater group was abandoned with the departure of Ameya and K Tagane, what should happen with the legacy of their art? Some fear that the success of Furuya’s manga would ultimately erase Ameya and Tagane’s history. With proper handling though, it could be a gateway into a previously obscure period of underground theater. Original video recordings do exist of several of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s events, and if published through a public service like Ubuweb (which hosts videos of performances by the Tenjo Sajiki like Directions To Servants, Cloud Cuckooland and The Lemmings), the plays can be assured a lasting cultural legacy in the field of experimental art.
In a recent pandemic-era interview, Norimizu Ameya gave his opinions regarding the availability of video recordings of his plays. In the interview, he roughly said the following:
“I’ve always believed that there is a finite nature to theater. The fact that it disappears on the spot is the ultimate fate of theater. I have left behind hardly any works from my past. I see myself as a director rather than a playwright, so I have almost no plays. I also feel that many people generally wouldn’t enjoy the videos that do exist as records. I do think however that it’s very important that anyone who is interested in a work can watch it at any time, even if it’s a small number of people. When I was asked to direct Transfer Student, I went to the Wasada Theater Museum to watch a video of the play’s first performance under Oriza Hirata’s direction. I think it’s a good thing that the eyes that have passed through time were able to create a circuit that provides a direct connection to the past. The fact that it’s possible to transcend the finite limit to help others is a testament of humanity.“
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