KASANE
SERIES - Life size wooden cut out
MATERIAL - Rosewood
SIZE - 6ft x 4 ft
MEDIUM - OIL
IROMOYO CHOTTO KARIMAME
Translated by Karen Santry told by Heisei Nakamura.
When Tamasaburo’s Kasane took off her purple hood on the stage passage, the whole audience sighed and then applauded, fascinated by her beauty. kasane has come chasing the man who had deserted her. The man is about to start a new life. The woman talks about the beginning and happy moments of their love, and confesses her pregnancy. She begs him to die with her, if she is to be abandoned. When the man reluctantly agrees, a wooden tablet and a skull came floating down the river. The moment he pulled out a sickle from the skull and broke the tablet. the face of the woman was half covered with ugly patches and her legs were crippled because of a grudge of the spirit of the dead. The skull and the tablet once belonged to kasane’s father who had been killed by the man.
The man and the woman are enemies, and now that this has become known, he attempts to murder her. He wants to kill her not only because she is an enemy to murder her. He wants to kill her not only because she is an enemy but also to murder. He wants to kill her not only because she is an enemy but also because she now ugly and it is clear that their lives must part ways. He does not live merely for love. He will seek career, live on work, and love other women. She will live for the only one man, want a family, and rear her children. When he realized the ugliness of his woman, this essential difference in how the see their lives became clear, and the happy love burned into hatred and murderous intent.
Tamasaburo expressed the woman’s tragedy by his hands. In the first half, ” Iredbokuro ( this in erasable tattooing of my lover’s mark…)”, his white hands delineated the happiness of the woman, Kasane, in love. And in the latter part, “Katakinaruhitoto shirazushite ( Had i but known he was my enemy…)” , the finger that pointed to the man bespoke the woman’s hatred and fierce desire to reserve her love. It was a finger that accused and loved. Thus a woman’s life was sketched in a sharp relief by the motions of that beautiful hand.