This book is a memoir of Aran Kei’s time as a member of Takarazuka, as well as her post-Takarazuka career and memories of her childhood. It was published in 2010 to commemorate the 20th year of her stage career. It also features messages from Takarazuka classmates and other colleagues and theatre artists she has worked with.
Some paragraph breaks have been added for ease of reading in English.
“One day I’ll fly away from here!” – What I swore in my heart during my childhood
Since my eyes were large even when I was a newborn, I was given the name ‘Touko’1. First, I think I want to begin by talking about the time before Touko became Aran Kei.
If I’m going to talk about my childhood, my father is of course very significant. My father was a second-generation Zainichi Korean, so he went through a lot of struggles. Since he had to live resolutely through a time where he faced much more discrimination than there is now, he was an extremely strong man. Rather than merely laying down severe rules, his strictness came from living a life full of turmoil.
Perhaps because we were raised by a father like that, us four siblings—my older sister, my younger brother, my younger sister, and myself—all get along very well. Having siblings who shared the same feelings and worked to help each other has been a great help for us. One of our aunts once told us “You were all brought up so diligently and properly, weren’t you?”
Thinking back on it now, my father must have had his own vision of ‘an ideal family’ that he was striving for. When I was little, he would often tell me that I should become a doctor or a lawyer. But my father and mother both liked singing and were very good at it; so, at some point, I came to love singing.
When I was a child, my parents liked to listen toJapanese minyou and enka2. The whole family would get together to watch the Red and White Song Battle3. My father’s favorite song to perform was “Longing on the Hawaiian Sea Route”4, and apparently my grandfather was so good at singing that he once was in talks to have a record released. My father had all kinds of different jobs, but at one point, he sold karaoke equipment. Also, when he was running a coffee shop, he installed a jukebox, so I was able to listen to all kinds of records.
When I was 3 years old, I was already using the karaoke machine to sing the chanson “Ne’er-do-well”5. The artists I became obsessed with started with Saijou Hideki and the Big Three6, as well as Pink Lady, Tahara Toshihiko, and Matsuda Seiko. I would sit in front of the TV with a book of lyrics that came inserted in an idol magazine and sing along, and us siblings would often sing together and imitate their choreography.
Although I liked performing in front of people and getting their attention, I had trouble dealing with being on stage for specifically prepared events like school talent shows. Instead, I would do things like singing a Pink Lady song with my friends at the children’s club Christmas party, or singing in front of everyone during school cleaning time; I liked performing simply in my own way.
One day during music class, I was singing loudly and forcefully. But then, in front of everyone, the teacher said ‘there’s someone here with a really strong voice’. That made me really self-conscious, so after that I didn’t like singing in front of people any more. Also, although I got together with a friend and started thinking of material during the ‘manzai boom’7, we ended up not performing at all.
Even though I didn’t like being in front of people, I was a bit of a ‘delinquent gang leader’ (laughs); I would get into fights with a boy I hated from the classroom next door.
I was born and raised in Kousei, Shiga Prefecture (now Konan)8. It didn’t even have a movie theatre, and the nearest entertainment available was a bowling alley. Back then, there was only one train per hour, so it was a very sleepy town. The first thing I took lessons in was piano. My older sister did her best at it, but I couldn’t get used to having a male teacher touching my fingers so I started to hate it.
I joined the tennis club in middle school and made some personal progress, but, perhaps because I couldn’t run very fast, I didn’t do very well in the end. At that point I started to feel ‘if things go on this way, I guess I’ll just end up as a country delinquent?’ However, due to the influence of a neighborhood girl a year older than me, I had been taking ballet and really enjoying it since I was in elementary school, and I always went to lessons diligently. My mother, who told me that she had wanted to take ballet herself when she was a girl, would drive me to the studio 20 minutes away.
One very strong memory is of a ballet recital performance of Cinderella, where I was selected to play the Prince. There were no boys at our studio, so I was singled out since I was tall and lanky. After seeing that recital, my ballet teacher suggested “Why don’t you go to Takarazuka and see what it’s like?” Although I had seen a performance once before at the Takarazuka Family Land9 (closed in 2003), at that time, I just thought ‘huh~’. Looking back, I think that one statement from my teacher is what made me aware of Takarazuka’s existence.
After that happened, I began attending a musical theatre school in Kyoto starting in around my second year of middle school. Even though I did continue on in conventional schooling, I enjoyed discovering a new world outside of school so much that I don’t remember a bit of what I learned in high school. I don’t have many photos from school, and I didn’t make many friends there.
Because of that, the friends that I did actually make during my time in high school are very important to me. Even if we haven’t seen each other in a while, it makes me so happy that we can fill in the distance between us right away, and hearing how my friends are all doing their best in a different world from me is always really impactful. Meeting up with them always gives me a lot of energy and makes me think that I need to keep working hard too.
Although I spent all my time in high school going to performing arts lessons, I don’t think it was actually the case that I was doing all that because my heart was totally set on entering Takarazuka. I didn’t like the countryside, and I didn’t like being at home all the time. Even though my dreams were vague, I did have a strong feeling of “sometime I’ll hit the big time and fly away from here!”
For someone who was raised in the rural area of Shiga, meeting up with friends who were from Osaka, Kyoto, or Kobe had a big impact on me, and hanging out with them under the excuse that we were studying for the Takarazuka entrance exam was a lot of fun. As for thinking “I’m going to get into Takarazuka” with my whole heart, that came a bit later.
1 – Aran’s given name, Touko (瞳子) uses the kanji for ‘eye’, ‘瞳’
2 – Genres of Japanese pop music which were most popular during the Showa Era.
3 – A New Years’ Eve televised song competition.
4 – ‘Akogare no Hawaii Kourou’, a popular song from just after WWII.
5 – ‘Roku de nashi’, a French-language song that was covered in Japanese by Koshiji Fubuki in the 1960s.
6 – The three most prominent male idol singers of the 1970s.
7 – A Japanese form of stand-up comedy.
8 – Two smaller towns were merged into Konan in 2004.
9 – An amusement park near the Takarazuka Grand Theatre, run by the same company.