Acting
A director faces creative block while working on his latest film – a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.
As a family goes on with their day, the shadows on their walls lead a completely different life.
In a Japanese colony, children overthrow their parental guardians and attempt to form a new society. Their plan spirals out of control and they are soon lost in a web of sexual deviation and violence.
Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.
Paper-Scissor-Rock wars draws an episode where the two generals portray the Second World War, mostly through the rock-scissors-bag, but also by some absurd torture techniques that bring to mind some sort of Japanese artificial 70s jack ass. To the sound of classical music, birds chirping and Nazi incendiary speeches travels generals, ever contestant in the seemingly meaningless game around at an abandoned industrial area.
A man claiming to be the heir of an estate in northern japan finds himself at the doors of his mansion, only to find it overrun by servants and maids playing pretend as master or mistress, while the real master is nowhere to be found. As he makes his way down the many rooms of the mansion and witnesses the staff's strange antics, he gradually loses his own role and sense of identity. In this subversive play performed by Tenjo Sajiki, the spectator is asked to question their own role as hierarchical structures are reversed and walls between character and actor, actor and audience gradually break down.
