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. I have also collected many archival images from various sources to illustrate the book.
My voice won’t come out! A turbulent start to my time as Top Star
My first performance after becoming Top Star was Hays Code, which took place in Theatre Drama City in Umeda and Nippon Seinenkan Hall in Tokyo ahead of my debut in the Grand Theatre. I was staying at a hotel, and perhaps because it was too dry, I got a terrible cold and my voice wouldn’t come out at all. I made it on stage, of course, but the songs were cut, and I was trying to get my lines across while my voice was wavering all over because of my condition… Maybe, even though I hadn’t realized myself the pressures of a debut as Top Star, it was coming out in my voice. I ended up developing nodules on my vocal cords, so for a while I continued performing in that condition.
Even though my singing was my main ‘weapon’, I had to perform without singing, so I felt so apologetic towards the audience and became very depressed. I wondered what I could convey onstage, since I couldn’t use my best skill, and lost my confidence. The story itself was very funny, so there were so many people saying “Of course we’d like to hear you sing, but it’s fine without the songs!”, which cheered me up, and those voices really saved me.
It was an awful experience, but without that I might have lost my voice during the Grand Theatre debut performance, so when all was said and done I decided to think of it as a positive. But even so, later on in the Hakataza performance of Secret Hunter I caught a cold again, and once again my voice wouldn’t come out. If it had been any of the other roles there could have been a substitution, but as Top there’s nothing else to do but perform.
During the play I sang as best I could, but during the revue they played audio that had been recorded during the dress rehearsal (a rehearsal exactly the same as the final performance), and I got through it somehow. I felt so frustrated, and pathetic, and embarrassed… The production’s run lasted around 3 weeks, and I lost my voice in the middle of it, so I spent every day going directly back to my hotel after the end of the performances. I wasn’t able to eat any of the delicious regional foods, or talk to anybody. If I listened to music, my vocal cords would naturally move along with it, so I didn’t turn on the television, and just shut myself up in my totally silent hotel room.
I became so stressed and miserable that I couldn’t sleep at night. It was a hot time of year as well, and it all kept affecting me more mentally and physically. Everyone else in the cast did their best to pay attention and follow along with me, and that also made me feel apologetic and ashamed. Since I was performing while I still wasn’t well, I remember that it took a long time to recover. I had never experienced so much frustration before.
After that, I got a break of about three days and then immediately started the rehearsal period for the next show. During the time I was Top Star, there was a space of about a month between the Grand Theatre and Tokyo Takarazuka Theatre performances, so there would be other productions in between. Besides that, Top Stars had lots of off-stage work to do, so I was constantly dashing here and there: not only did I naturally lose weight from this, but it was so much to deal with that I no longer remember some of the specific details of that time.
I feel like, prior to becoming Top Star, I had too much confidence in my own vocal tract. Therefore, if I hadn’t had those two experiences, I would have kept failing to look after myself, and I might have ended up in an even worse state at some point. Ever since then, I would try anything I heard was good for the throat and made sure to take care of it. Even now, I’ve kept on wrapping my neck in a towel to sleep, no matter how hot it is. When my throat hurts, I use a propolis spray1, I take Vitamin B before I go to bed, and, since I heard it’s good for the mucous membranes, I eat natto with eggs for breakfast. I also eat raw eggs without doing anything to them, since my father told me that all the singers in Korea do it.
I’ve also continued my pre-performance stretch routine from my Takarazuka days as a permanent habit. Although, while I was in Takarazuka, it was easy to find my own pace, after retiring there are much larger spaces between performances. I don’t want to shock my body, so I do stretching that’s much slower and more relaxed than when I was in Takarazuka in order to ‘wake up’ my body.
While it’s very bad as a pro to fail to keep up my condition like that, thanks to that, I learned how important it is to look after my throat and body. In that way, I now see the tumultuous start to my time as Top Star as a positive.
When I think back on it, ever since I was a little girl singing in front of my television, my love of singing has never changed. In fact, once a really scary teacher that all my classmates were afraid of told me “You always come to my class like you’re enjoying yourself singing at karaoke. It’s like I’m just playing piano for you to sing along to” (laughs). I didn’t mean it that way at all, but I guess it looked that way to the teacher.
Actually, if I’m thinking about that, I also once had a director tell me “I’m tired of hearing your voice.” I was young so I thought maybe a so-called ‘pretty voice’ wasn’t what I should aim for, so I longed for a husky voice and even thought about trying to crush my voice down2. But I was so fickle back then that I gave up on that the moment someone told me “You’ve got such a nice voice”.
Although the time when I was longing for a husky voice is now in the past, I still hold a desire for a voice that can express the things in the story, and a voice that joins with the emotions of the music.
1 – Propolis is a bee product that is used as a supplement.
2 – The practice of deliberately damaging the voice to create a lower range.