Mizuta: When you were younger, you wrote poetry, and your first collection of poems, Courtesy in Return (1956), received the H Prize. Following this volume came several collections of poetry, and your first short story, "Facing the Hills They Stand," was published in 1971. Have you stopped writing poetry entirely since then?

Tomioka: I had stopped writing poetry several years before I published my first short story. Although I was not fully aware of it at the time, the content of what I was writing called for the descriptive prose of narration rather than poetry. My style of poetry was not a type of singing; rather, it restrained singing and avoided meter in order to criticize meter, although ultimately this is also singing. I had reached the point where I felt that I could not satisfy my desire for expression through that medium. "Facing the Hills They Stand" was my first fictional work, and I did not attempt any trial works prior to it.

When I think back now, my childhood was a "mythic" period when I could not speak well, and my twenties were a period of "oral literature" and "song," in which I wanted to narrate things, including lies, through prose. And then criticism. When I look back on this process, it appears to trace the very history of the human desire for expression, and I think, half-seriously, that it's true, as they say, that individual development repeats genealogical development.

Mizuta: What position does your collection The Funeral of a Giraffe: Seven Stories by Tomioka Taeko occupy among your other work?

Tomioka: It gathers together, from among my early works, those short stories that were first able to stand as autonomous works, so one could say that it is a collection of my first "self-conscious" stories. There are discrepancies with my present consciousness of fiction at certain points, but this is difficult for me to analyze even now. The basis of my thinking has always been that people should be able to experience life more deeply, and yet, at the same time, I have an admiration for those who have the ability to do away with the ego and live as animals: these two sentiments exist in contradiction to each other. The former is connected to anger and criticism, and I am sometimes critical of my own undisguised anger that comes through in such works as Undulating Land, The White Light, and Sakagami. The Funeral of a Giraffe belongs in the second category, which is linked to religion or to a curiosity about religion.

Mizuta: You have written scenarios for Shinoda Masahirō's Double Suicide (1968) and Gonza the Spearman (1985). What was it like to work with Shinoda?

Tomioka: Double Suicide was the first screenplay that I ever wrote. I had no idea how to write one. Mr. Shinoda must have invited me to work with him because he was seeking a script that did not rely on already established ways of writing. My curiosity about and interest in the idea of adapting a work from Chikamatsu's puppet theater to the cinema led me to agree to work with Shinoda, but if it had not been Double Suicide I don't know whether I would have agreed, or rather would have been able, to write it. At the time I promised Shinoda another screenplay from Chikamatsu, and this became a reality seventeen years later as Gonza the Spearman.

What is interesting about working in film is that, in the production of a new film, groups are organized around directors—the "Shinoda Group" for Shinoda Masahirō or the "Oshima Group" for Oshima Nagisa-in the manner of yakuza organizations such as the "Yamaguchi Group." The technicians and workers who do makeup, lighting, sets, and props, as well as the famous and unknown actors who have been gathered in this group, live together on location, and there is a strong sense of family centered on the director. When you live in such a group, especially in the days when each film company had its own large studio and was actively making films, it is impossible to live according to one's principles in the world. In that sense it resembles the world of the yakuza [criminal underworld]. Each group breaks up after the film is finished, but people wander from one film group to another, and go on living in this film world. The Japanese cinema has been in decline and things are different now, but still, it was this sense of quasi-family life created by these "groups" that I found interesting. The people worked together on a single project and formed family-like bonds, that I found interesting.

Mizuta: As a native of Ōsaka, you have been familiar with the jōruri puppet theater [also called Bunraku and performed on a stage by puppeteers to the accompaniment of the shamisen, a three string instrument, and one or more reciters at the side emoting in the gidayū style] since childhood; in addition to film scripts, you have written a book, Personal Thoughts on Chikamatsu's Jōruri (1979). You are also well-versed in the popular arts of Osaka (known as kamigata engei)], and the protagonists of Sakagami are sisters who had a manzai act [comic dialogue]in their youth. You have also worked on a critical biography of Akita Makoto, who is known as the "father" of 1930s Osaka manzai (Manzai Author Akita Makoto, 1986). What are the connections between this performing art and your own sensibilities, and the style of your fiction?

Tomioka: I became familiar with the sound of jōruri in my teens, and even when I read Chikamatsu, I read not only the words but also the melody and music of the "recitation." Indeed, this was probably the way it was originally done. Popular religious narratives from the middle ages [by performers attired as Buddhist priests] were linked with the shamisen and mechanical dolls, and, through the gidayū reciters, a new performance based on the melody of recitation called jōruri was created. There are places in Chikamatsu's texts where his style sacrifices music for the sake of plot and rhetoric. It is, however, a style that is unmistakably meant for recitation, based on the rhythms of the Osaka/Kamigata dialect.

The Kamigata dialect is my mother tongue and it is also the basis for my sense of language. In that sense, I find it easy to identify with the rhythms and the rhetoric of jōruri.

Mizuta: In your work since "Facing the Hills They Stand," including A Family in Hell (1974), The Ritual of Plants (1973), Straw Dog (1979), Undulating Land (1983), White Light (1988), and Sakagami (1990), you consistently write on sexuality, reproduction, and the family. Will sexuality and the family continue to be important themes in your work?

Tomioka: Certainly, until now, sexuality, reproduction, and the family have been the main themes of my fiction, but with Sakagami as a point of demarcation, I think that the next works will be different. Of course, this is not to say that I have lost interest in these themes. Perhaps it is better to say that the works will broaden into different areas.

Why has sexuality oppressed people, particularly women, and why does it continue to be an oppressive force even today? I don't think there is any single answer to that question. Fiction presents a roundabout, inefficient route of questioning, but there should be joy in confirming the depth and breadth of the question's dark space (if it exists).

Sexuality and the family will no doubt change for women in the future, but I feel that, rather than changes in their relations with men, there will be a variety of changes in relation to race, nation, and culture.

Mizuta Noriko. “Interview with Tomioka Taeko,” from: Tomioka Taeko. The Funeral of a Giraffe: Seven Stories by Tomioka Taiko. Kyoko Selden and Mizuta Noriko (transl.). Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000; pp. xiii-xvii. For notes, see original.