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.
Paragraph breaks have been added to make it more readable in English.
A new start as a “woman”
My first time taking the stage as an actress after retirement was The Musical AIDA: From the Takarazuka work A Song For Kingdoms. Although I had played the role of Aida during my time in Takarazuka, I think that more than before, the themes of love were clear in the show. In the Takarazuka performance, if I became too conscious of Aida’s internal strength, somehow the otokoyaku mannerisms would start to come out. But when my acting partner was a man, no matter how I performed I would be received as a woman. I didn’t have to worry about coming off too strong, so the feeling of being able to perform freely was very reassuring to me.
As for what I found bewildering coming into rehearsals after retirement, it was very small things. In Takarazuka, where everyone sat was decided by their seniority level, but post retirement, when I came into the rehearsal space, I had no idea where I ought to sit. I didn’t know where to put my bag or change my clothes either.
Even though it was the same AIDA, naturally in Takarazuka it was all women.But in the rehearsals for the post retirement production, some of the men in the cast took their shirts off and were sunbathing barechested in order to get a tan for their roles, so I was really shocked (LOL).
Although I had some experience performing in shows with comedic elements, such as THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL or Singin’ in the Rain, my first real comedy was Wonderful Town, after my Takarazuka retirement. I played the protagonist, an aspiring author named Ruth who had bad luck with men. Ruth is restless but always positive, frank with her feelings yet quick to change her emotions. I tend to drag my worries along with me for a long time, so I was jealous of her strength. But apart from that, she resembles me a lot.
Her lack of romantic popularity was just too relatable, so even though I knew it would have a happily ever after ending I thought “I’ve got to do this role!” (LOL) Coming to the big city from the country to pursue her dreams, and refusing to change her attitude no matter who she was dealing with, are also things I can relate to. Even though people have told me ‘Well, what if you tried putting on airs in front of men?’ that’s totally impossible for me. No matter how hard I try, the faults always show.
Comedy is very difficult to perform, since you have to keep tensions high the whole time, it’s fun to feel the reactions of the audience and go for the perfect timing. Leonard Bernstein’s songs have a lot of key changes so they’re not easy, but I was able to enjoy singing and dancing all-out. I was surrounded by other wonderful cast members, starting with Bessho Tatsuya who played my love interest and Ohwada Miho who played my younger sister, so I enjoyed the whole Wonderful Town experience starting from the rehearsals. I loved the whole cast so much that I hated to part with them after the last performance closed.
When I was in the musical Edith Piaf, I visited many places in Paris that had a connection to Piaf, and read all sorts of documents for research, so she came to feel very close to me. Despite Piaf’s success as a singer, she went through so many separations with men, and lived a life full of turbulence. The more I came to know about her life, the more I was affected by this human side of her.
I had a really hard time figuring out how to achieve a connection with my role when I was in MITSUKO – Love Surpassing Borders. Ever since I was in Takarazuka, I had preferred to construct my characters starting with their dark sides or weaknesses. For MITSUKO, I used the stories from her later life, after she had gone through so many painful experiences, as a starting point and gradually became closer to her inner life.
Mitsuko was the first Japanese woman to have a legal international marriage and go overseas. Her husband died while her children were still young, and though she was in an environment where she had hardly anyone to support her, she had to protect her children and her husband’s estate. Although she was able to raise her 7 children well, in her later years she only had one daughter remaining with her and lived very quietly in her mansion with hardly any visitors. This was my first time playing the role of a mother, and when I learned about her last years it was a great shock to me, and it felt like it was just too painful.
When I prayed in front of her grave in Vienna, my eyes overflowed with tears thinking of how lonely she must have been on foreign land, and how much she must have wanted to go back to Japan. The futility she must have felt in her later days looking back on all she had done so far, her discontent and loneliness. MITSUKO was a show where I ended up with a different emotion towards my role rather than connection. No matter who, people cannot live relying only on others. That is what Mitsuko taught me. When the curtain fell on that performance, I feel that the strongest image it left with me was “I should keep moving forward, without looking back.
Thinking back, when I was working as an otokoyaku, I never felt any large barriers regarding “because this is a man” or “because this is a woman”. I think this is because Iwas the type to move naturally as an otokoyaku, and rather than considering whether I was playing a man or a woman I had a strong conviction that “I am playing a human being”. Since each and every one is a separate human being, it doesn’t matter whether they are a man or a woman; there are lots of things I don’t know about them, and that especially is what makes acting fun. And once I retired from Takarazuka, what I realized was that my study of ‘manliness’ as an otokoyaku ended up having a connection to my learning femininity. I feel like during Edith Piaf and MITSUKO, where I was playing the same woman from her younger days to her last years, I was able to experience even more intensely how enjoyable it is to dive deeply into constructing a character.
Compared to my time in Takarazuka, where I felt like I had to raise up my juniors, I think being surrounded by other professionals made it possible for me to be much more relaxed on stage. While in Takarazuka I was always together with my colleagues, after retiring, at the end of each production I have to part with the rest of the cast. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the loneliness of the company I sweat and created a stage production together with being dissolved.