A Journal of the Plague Year by Terayama Shūji in Collaboration with Kishida Rio: “Contagious Magic” for a Time of Epidemic

Abstract

Terayama Shūji (1935–1983), a leading figure in the Japanese avant-garde theatre movement, founded his theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki (The Peanut Gallery) in 1967. Terayama and company member/collaborating writer Kishida Rio (1946–2003) scripted Ekibyō ryūkōki (A Journal of the Plague Year) in 1975 as the last of three plays created for a European audience. Inspired by Daniel Defoe’s fictional memoir of the same title, the play deals with isolation, denial, rage, and the many coping strategies of a community confronting a deadly epidemic. The play shows how words are a powerful contagion, and by infecting the imagination and memory, they are as much a plague as any disease. Although written and produced in 1975, with ideas from a 1772 fictional memoir about a 1665 plague in London, Terayama and Kishida’s A Journal of the Plague Year is a play for our times. It is hauntingly prescient, offering a shocking and often comical reflection of our own lives during the current COVID-19 pandemic.