Imagine finding one of these in your letter box early one morning. There must be some mistake, you think. It’s a faded picture postcard, sent by somebody called the “Mystery Sister,” who claims that her own youngest sister has gone missing in Shanghai.
As for the rather perverse scene in the photograph, it contains some sort of narrative, but it is hard to figure out what.
Looking more closely, you note that the stamp, from Papua New Guinea, appears newish, yet the circular Yokohama postmark is from a long time ago. Furthermore, a square postmark carries the wartime slogan “Devote Your Savings to Your Country.”
You shake your head and wonder if you are still dreaming.
Dozens of such missives are currently on display at the Kanzan Gallery in Nishi Kanda, Tokyo.
The pictures tend to the bizarre and / or erotic. The texts include the tale of a conjuror who cannot find the elephant he has caused to disappear; the problems of a man at the University of Robbers in Paris; the lament of a person trapped between two mirrors and lost in endless reflections; the folk belief that devils on the bank of the River of Death knock down cairns of stones assembled by the souls of dead children.
Some of the cards are so weathered they are barely legible. Many are written in old-fashioned, early twentieth century Japanese. All are the product of the trickster-ish mind of Shuji Terayama, in the last six years of his life.
Terayama loved all kinds of fakery, to the extent of fictionalizing his own past – claiming that his father, who died of illness in South East Asia, had been executed as a war criminal, and that he himself had been born on a moving train and thus had no hometown.
He described his first attempts at manufacturing fake postcards as follows –
For a while, I was obsessed with making postcards that someone who didn’t actually exist sent (or rather didn’t send) to someone else who didn’t exist. It was a way of playing with time, making it freeze and reverse. I stuck on stamps and created fake postmarks. The texts were the product of imagination.
These picture postcards organize encounters out of a process of falsification. Examine them at your leisure. All that is projected here is your own face.
First of all, I took over ten black and white photos, removed the various shades and added artificial colours. Then I got hold of an old pen nib and wrote love letters to women who never existed, filled out addresses and affixed stamps from the 1920s and 30s.
I went to a seal-maker’s shop and asked him to make “Yokohama-Shanghai” and “Shanghai-Yokohama” seals for me. After putting postmarks on the stamps, I exposed the finished picture postcards to the sunshine so that the colours would fade. Finally I added some stains and grime with the use of a silk screen roller.
If I say so myself, when I looked at the finished articles I felt a glow of achievement.
Of course, we have no way of knowing whether this is true.
The exhibition continues until December 25th.
“Epistolary Offences”
”Even things that didn’t happen are part of history…” Shuji Terayama