Witnessing the Mundane

Abstract

‘Witnessing the Mundane: Spectatorship and the domestic onstage’ by Jessica Nakamura considers how performance can facilitate noticing the mundane and the ethical implications of such noticing. The article analyses contemporary Japanese playwright/director Yamada Yuri’s Wakarō to ha omotteiru kedo (2019) (English title: I’m Trying to Understand You, But … ) to focus on the portrayal of the mundane in domestic settings. Taking place over the course of one evening in the dining room of a woman called Teru’s apartment, Wakarō highlights the mundane elements of our domestic lives while calling attention to their concealment. As the play unfolds and Teru tells her boyfriend Koh about her pregnancy and concerns about it, Wakarō reveals that the home space can contain the potential for pain and domestic everyday activities can conceal harmful acts.

By focusing on Wakarō’s treatment of its domestic space and behaviours in it, the article considers the ways in which performance can foster witnessing the mundane. While Wakarō is not mundane in its performance content and style, Wakarō’s setting of the home foregrounds the mundane’s domestic workings and contemplates how we might engage with them. The article follows a major device of the performance: two maids, mysterious, unexplained, yet ever-present in the home space. Through these characters, who are part of the mundane circumstances portrayed onstage and separate enough to observe them, Wakarō models acts of witnessing that can extend beyond the performance itself, enacting a spectatorship to carry forward into future observations of mundane conditions. By extension, the article considers how performances about the mundane can help us expand what counts as witnessing and re-pose questions about the ethics of spectatorship more broadly.

Notes

1 I am grateful to Zeitaku Binbou, particularly Yamada Yuri and producer Hori Asami, for access to materials and for inviting me to observe a company workshop in May 2023. Japanese names are given in the Japanese tradition of surname before given name. The English title of Wakarō is from the company’s website, but it is a fairly direct translation of the Japanese, 『わかろうと はおもっているけど』. Wakarō premiered in 2019 in Yokohama and Tokyo, and was most recently performed in Paris in 2022. It received an even wider audience when The Japan Foundation added a video of the 2019 performance to its YouTube channel from 20 March 2022 to 19 March 2023. My analysis is based on videos of the 2019 and 2022 performances, as well as the unpublished Japanese-language script of the 2022 performance.

2 Kim qualifies that the mundane is not unconscious, but rather seems ‘in some measure programmed into the body’, a programming that ‘leaves open the possibility of transformation through the repetition of alternative behaviors, a process that in one context is called assimilation, and in another, theatrical rehearsals’ (2015: 4).

3 For instance, see Cole (2010), Patraka (1999) and Puga (2008) on Apartheid, the Holocaust, and dictatorship in South America respectively. In Caroline Wake’s article, ‘The accident and the account’, Wake notes that the ‘emergence of the witness in theatre and performance studies coincides with the appearance of witnessing within the humanities more generally and with the emergence of trauma studies more specifically’ (2009: 83)

4 In Life and Words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary, Das moves us into the domestic sphere in her fourth chapter, when she explores the possibility of betrayal and kinship relations, identifying the important question of ‘how women may have taken these noxious signs of violation and reoccupied them through the work of domestication, ritualization, and renarration’ (2007: 59).

5 According to Yamada, Zeitaku Binbou’s meaning, ‘extravagant poverty’, refers to when she started making theatre in college. While she and her fellow artists were lacking in financial resources, they had the extravagance of time to devote to their productions (2023).

6 As Allison describes, this postwar concept of the home can be defined as ‘my-home-ism’: ‘what people came to desire and what they received in return for working hard, for sticking to a normative life course, and for staying focused on the small picture’ (2013: 22).

7 Ueno reminds us that these questions are also determined by class when she traces the increased number of women returning to work after taking time off for marriage and childbirth. She concludes, ‘analyzing women’s employment based only on economic factors sheds light on the plain and simple fact that women who have no choice but to work have already been working, while those who have no need to work have not’ (Ueno 2008: 49).

8 Based on Article 750 of the 1898 Civil Code, Japanese couples must take one surname upon marriage. While the law does not stipulate which surname, a majority of couples use the husband’s surname. This law has been challenged and upheld by the supreme court on several occasions, the last in 2021. See Japan Times (2021).

9 See a brief history of the company at https://bit.ly/4245lLb.

10 The Uchi Purojekuto has since ended. The 2015 archival report prepared by Hori Asami, company producer and Yamada’s manager, briefly discusses the ways in which the effects of Uchi Purojekuto have influenced the company. As I will explore here, Wakarō’s engagement with the audience and its focus on the home have carried over from Uchi Purojekuto.

11 After she dies, a woman is typically buried in her husband’s family grave, a point the members of Zeitaku Binbou stressed when I met with them in May 2023.

12 The 2022 unpublished script reads ‘without saying a word, [she] utters a sound in a soft voice’ (2, translation mine).

13 According to Yamada (2023), the maids are also a tribute to the aesthetic of Wes Anderson films.

14 From the 2022 unpublished script of Wakarō (13).

15 This line was cut from the 2022 performance script, but the maids nevertheless function as model audience members.

16 In the Japanese text, the maids’ names for Prudie and Libby are Saba and Rizu respectively, a reference in Japanese to ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, their English names similarly referencing conservativism (in prudence) and liberalism (email correspondence with company, October 2023). The progression of the maid’s spectatorship corresponds to how much characters notice the maids in the space. While they are initially treated as part of the background of the home, after Teru tells Koh about her pregnancy, Koh first notices the maids. After he and Teru get into an argument about her pregnancy, he asks Libby to tell everyone that he has not run away when he hides under the table.