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棄劇 Kigeki – A Comedy Which Should Never Have Been (Excerpt)

legion-web

No one asked for it, and you aren’t getting any more.

This excerpt is from Portrait de Legion (レギオンの肖像) which comes in four parts, and this is from the beginning of the second part (written first).

Don’t read this book actually. I don’t recommend it, unless blood curdling screams, gratuitous sexual and non-sexual violence, torture and cannibalism are your thing. It’s also confusing as hell until you’re most of the way through. It does, however, provide the set up for the events of Jane Does, which compared to this, is very tame.

Portrait de Legion’s other subtitle is La Machine Infernale and Jean Cocteau is the poet mentioned below.

This excerpt is safe for work.

—

The Witch’s Bedchamber

The frivolous poet prince wrote: forever, you must strive to be drunk — whether your drink be a glass filled to the brim with wine, or the dried dregs of the opium poppy, a nauseating degree of virtue, or a fit inducing depth of immorality. Whatever it be, whichever it be, we all must strive to be forever drunk.

The witch lay in her bed, staring at the accumulated tobacco smoke swirling above her. A hookah sat at her bedside, quietly toasting the tobacco leaves in its bowl hardened with honey. She inhaled shallowly from a golden mouthpiece, holding the smoke in her mouth and letting it sluggishly seep down into her lungs. She rose partially out of bed and rested her back against two pillows laid behind her. As her right hand held the mouthpiece she tossed her left arm out towards her bedside table, upon which there was a single plate. Upon the plate were three jujubes, seven pieces of hard candy, five dried figs, and nothing else. As she exhaled, the smoke formed a ring as it drifted out towards the stagnant smoke above, mixing with it until you couldn’t tell which was there first and which was there last — nothing of it could be told.

The witch looked to a hourglass upon her vanity table. It was filled with dark red grains that continued to fall slowly through its center. Her exhaled smoke danced as if on stage, as it lost all rhyme and reason drifting to all four corners of the ceiling. Furrowing her brow, she then reached for a book that lay beside her in bed, and flipped through its pages. There were no details in its pages. It was a void of nothing, page after page, only formed into the shape of a moldy book.

If sometimes, the poet continued: you find yourself on the stone steps of a palace, or the verdant slopes on the side of a canal, or in a gloomy room filled with ashen swirls, and drunkenness, like an gallivanting energetic child dances right out the gate and away, I dare you to ask. Ask what? What time it is now.

The door to her room creaked open.

“Shall I say, as always? — or how rare?”

A sickly sweet voice tinged with night-shaded sneer, danced its way with spider’s feet into the witch’s ear, piercing its hairy needles through the skull to stroke the brain. It was awfully unpleasant.

With exaggerated motions, the devil slipped through the thin gap in the door and walked toward the witch. She fanned the butterflies of smoke away as she pulled an old round stool to the bedside, sitting down cross-legged. She rested her elbow on a knee and her head on her hand bending forward to look closely at the witch.

In the devil’s other hand swung a dark red pendulum — no, it was an hourglass. What should have been resting on the vanity, she had taken, and was now swinging in front of the witch’s face. She smiled — happily, joyfully, annoyed, sad, but smiling she swung it.

“Patchouli,” the devil said, in her sweet venomous voice, “soon Sakuya will die.”

“Again,” the witch replied, her voice low and hoarse. She turned a page, and then it was quiet.

“No, not yet, Patchouli. This play is always still beginning. Nothing will end, and so nothing will begin. Even so, this error-ridden love letter will continue, eternally. So we must end it. That is our promise.”

“No, it is a promise with you and me.”

“Patchouli, let us end this boring comedy, this idle tragedy, the kind of story no child would ever enjoy.”

The witch reached out to touch the devil’s face.

“Dying again, I see.”

“Still dying.”

The poet wrote: so verily shall the flowing wind, the flying birds, the swaying trees, the open sky, all say to you: be drunk. Yes now, be drunk.

***

The Cast

Gramophone А: A Gramophone, broken eighty-one years ago
Gramophone Б: A Gramophone, killed two hundred and six years ago
Man: sitting for the past 19,683 years

Gramophone А, sits stage left. Gramophone Б, stage right.

Center stage, man sits in a chair. Beside him, is a puppet theater stage.

Man turns the crank on the side of the puppet theater stage.

Gramophone А and Gramophone Б start to sing.

Gramophone А: Koschei! Koschei!