Akaji Maro

‘Many people have a preconception about butoh — that it is performed by dancers whose bodies are painted white. So when we debuted our current program, ‘Crazy Camel,’ in France, and we came on stage covered in gold-colored powder, the fans and experts there thought we were pioneering a new style,” 72-year-old butoh master Akaji Maro says in a recent email interview. “In fact, this gold-powdered showy performance style has existed as a cabaret-show flip side of orthodox butoh since not long after the genre was started in 1959. It was developed by two trailblazers — Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-86) and Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010).”

Tomoo, a college student, lives in a Western-style house where strange people live, such as his landlady Yukiko and her older brother Kishi, the crook Hosoda, and his idiot wife Tamae, Miyamoto, who lost both legs in the war, his mistress with tattoos, Nozawa, who has no energy, and Shizue, a lover with heart disease. Detective Harada recently discovered the strangled corpses of four women, and while the local residents are suspicious and conducting a secret investigation, a strange incident has occurred, and suspicion falls on Tomio...