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> Jun Tsutsui “The Buddha Pond – Revisited” FFT Düsseldorf 2024.11.21, 23
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Jun Tsutsui “The Buddha Pond – Revisited”
FFT Düsseldorf
2024.11.21, 23

Written by Kenta Yamazaki|2025.2.4

photo: Susanne Diesner

 

Is it a rabbit or a duck? Is that the question? The image of the rabbit-duck, discussed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, is an example of how there can be multiple but mutually exclusive ways of looking at something. A rabbit or a duck can be seen in the image, but both cannot be seen at the same time.

At first glance, “The Buddha Pond – Revisited,” written and directed by Jun Tsutsui, appears to be dealing with that very theme. Inspired by the Shakagaike Incident of 1880, the work is structured as a dialogue between two completely different accounts of the event: the children’s book Kamo to hara-kiri jiisan (The Duck and the Belly-Cutting Old Man), written in Japanese, and the German-language Prinz Heinrichs Weltumsegelung (Prince Heinrich’s Journey Around the World). For example (although this is a minor detail with little bearing on the whole), the children’s book has Heinrich hunting for ducks, while the travelogue mentions rabbits. Given this, arguing that the work is about the rabbit-duck problem would appear to make sense.

Such an explanation, however, would fail to capture important parts of the work. Like the line “The travelogue is a travelogue; the children’s book is a children’s book” succinctly states, the performance of “The Buddha Pond – Revisited” is conducted so as to avoid, to the extent possible, reaching the almost obvious conclusion that the two accounts are referring to the same incident.

 

photo: Susanne Diesner

 

The following is a brief summary of the Shakagaike Incident. During a stay in Japan in 1880, Prince Heinrich of Prussia went duck hunting at the Shakagaike pond in Osaka. Hunting, however, was not allowed in the area, and the prince got into trouble with local residents, with police called to the scene. The German consul lodged a protest with the Osaka prefectural government the next day. Fearing a serious diplomatic incident, the Japanese government decided to punish the local party and issue an apology to the Germans. 

The two performers in “The Buddha Pond – Revisited”—Jun Tsutsui, a playwright and director from Osaka who does not understand German, and Oleg Zhukov, an Odessa-born actor who lives in Germany and does not understand Japanese—each read the children’s book and the travelogue, and communicate their contents to each other while commenting on the texts. The Shakagaike Incident was exacerbated by the parties’ inability to communicate with each other, but the performance is subtitled in Japanese and German, so the two men on stage can understand what the other is saying. Anyone in the audience with a command of either Japanese or German will (should) have no problem understanding the content either. In a sense, the subtitles provided throughout the performance make for a visual and auditory demonstration of how subject matter can be expressed in multiple ways.

Some way into the performance, Zhukov tries to suggest that the two books might be referring to the same event, but Tsutsui cuts him off. The connotation is that such a pronouncement would kill the dialogue as effectively as a “You’re being serious?!”—a well-known punchline in Japanese comedy, popularized by Osaka comedians—kills a gag. While Tsutsui’s insistence that “being serious” equates to declaring the end of the act fails to convince Zhukov, the latter agrees to avoid this and continue the dialogue, letting the performance go on.

 

photo: Susanne Diesner

 

You could call this development farcical, but the fact that continuing the dialogue is prioritized here is interesting. There are certainly cases in which meaning is found in the continuation of dialogue, or in the process of dialogue that leads to a conclusion, rather than in reaching the conclusion itself. For this reason, we also need to recognize that the playing field of dialogue is not always a fair one. Avoiding “You’re being serious?!” is no more than a rule introduced unilaterally by Tsutsui. To illustrate this argument further, the script itself was written by Tsutsui, with Zhukov merely speaking the lines written for him. An immense imbalance of power underlies this dialogue between two testimonies about a single event.

When seen from the outside, however, the tables turn. That’s because the work was performed at the FFT Düsseldorf theater in Germany as part of a program called Nippon Performance Nights. Tsutsui’s work was likely judged by a largely German-speaking audience under German standards for performing art. This tricky state of affairs can certainly be appreciated in light of the Shakagaike Incident—the conclusion of which was influenced by the unbalanced relationship between the two countries at the time.

 

photo: Susanne Diesner

 

To be sure, these are only my observations as a Japanese speaker who does not understand German. In the extreme, it is possible that a German speaker may perceive “The Buddha Pond – Revisited” as a completely different work. I hear Tsutsui chiming in with “You’re being serious?!”…but would like to conclude this review by observing that the charm of this work is not only in its clever composition, but equally—or even primarily—in the interaction between the carefree and shady Tsutsui and the earnest and charming Zhukov.

 

Translated by Ilmari Saarinen

INFORMATION

“The Buddha Pond – Revisited"

Date: 2024.11.21, 23
Venue: FFT Düsseldorf (Konrad-Adenauer-Platz 1, 40210 Düsseldorf, Germany)

Writer/Director: Jun Tsutsui
Cast: Oleg Zhukov, Jun Tsutsui

WRITER PROFILE

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山﨑健太 Kenta Yamazaki

Born in 1983, he is a critic and dramaturg. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the theater review magazine Paperback and regularly reviews performing arts for the web magazine artscape. From 2019, he has presented stage works as y/n with director/actor Kiyoshi Hashimoto. He co-directed all of y/n’s works with Kiyoshi.

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