Karazuki (空月) by Clairine Daphne Tjahjono

A male dancer wrestles with his self-expression on and off stage, with the help of his female dance partner.

First published in Pandan Weekly in July 2024.

​From the author:

“Karazuki” came about as a creative project for my gender performance in East Asian theatre class, which I took to give myself a bit of a challenge. I never really thought of gender as having that much of an impact on my life—though it most likely does in subtle ways—especially compared to issues such as mental health, which is always my biggest concern. I learned a lot of new concepts from my friends who are also enrolled in the class and who, like me on the topic of mental health, cannot escape dealing with this issue of gender in their daily lives.

Still, my own attitude toward it hasn’t changed: I just want to act however I want without having to think if I’m falling under gender stereotypes. This inevitably gets reflected in my short story, where this conflict of gender identity is brief, almost fleeting, but none the more important to figuring out your sense of self and the way you would like to live out the rest of your life.

I always found that dealing with such issues is easier for me through fiction that is not explicitly speculative but nevertheless takes place somewhere that doesn’t exist but feels extremely familiar due to being an amalgamation of real-world cultures. The dance/theatre form in the story is something I’ve been thinking of for a very long time for a potential long-running series I want to write in the future, and learning more about the intricacies of Japanese kabuki, especially, in terms of gender performance helped me think of more concrete and unique details for it, hopefully making it feel like an actual tradition that might exist somewhere—particularly in a place that ultimately combines Southeast Asian and Japanese cultures.

Aksa couldn’t remember if he saw the sun or the moon, or the amalgamation of the two, but one thing he was sure of was that there was light—and all the shadows that come with the light—in their widened eyes… as if the dancer’s pupils, their lashes, every wrinkle and crease were all involved in the performance. Every single breath and beat of the heart let loose in the chaos without ever truly losing themselves in it... at least, not until the music ends, at which point the dancer would decide for themselves if they want to end up one way, or the other, or everything else in between.

A silk sleeve quivered in another gust from the open vents, the waxed-on golden warbler—just beneath where the palm must be stretched out and kept still—fluttered its wings for a moment to tease the audience with the promise of flight. Then, the other sleeve—falling from the shoulder where it had naturally bunched up after the dancer’s vigorous motions—came swinging past, and for that split second when a curtain of azure blue obscured the warbler from view, the sleeve had taken the life out of the bird again. The hidden palm kept curling into a closed fist, stubbornly trying to grab something that was already lost to begin with.

Aksa always ended up looking too closely, something that Raden Bai-se pointed out to be both his biggest strength and greatest weakness early on in his training. He could remember the design of the kimono in detail, the sweeping motions of the left foot and the sudden jabs of the dancer’s right hand after the prolonged silences, the way their eyes drew him in and never let him go again… but no matter how hard he tried to think about it, he could never seem to remember the color of their eyes.

Surely, they had to match the kimono they were wearing. No matter what kind of role a hyōri dancer is playing, the shade of the cloth has to somehow complement the most striking feature of their body: a soft tea green for a spindly copper hand, a decadent cardinal red for flushed bow-shaped lips, an azure blue for eyes that’ll draw you through the darkness even though you’re not yet sure where they’ll take you…

It’s not easy to forget eyes that shone gold in silver light, but for a moment he seemed to forget their color too as she raised both sleeves up to her lower lashes, the curve of a satisfied smile visible through the slight gap between the billowing fabric.

“This is the moment where you clap, Mugen-kun.”

Aksa blinked and looked around the empty theater hall where, the other night, three hundred people had crammed into the lower floor alone, free to peer up at the faces of the dancers in the hopes they’d fall into a dream that they’d never have to wake up from (much like what happened to him a long time ago). In his mind, the place was always crowded—everyone pushing forward wherever the air was thrumming the loudest and dreams were most tangible.

“Right.”

He watched Sori tuck her hands into her sleeves, her smile growing until she was satisfied with his reaction; by the time she slipped off one arm to wave him away, the palms of his copper-tinted hands were flushed with a sheepish red (he had decided to take it upon himself to clap like an entire full house).

She laughed, her voice coming out breathy as if she’s purposefully holding it back (Aksa felt like she was always holding herself back, like she’s constantly saving up energy for the next dance, which could happen at any moment). As always, he wasn’t able to tell if she was laughing at him or herself as she shrugged off the rest of the kimono from her bare shoulders, the silk falling in billows of thick navy onto the wooden stage. “So, the moon won again this time, huh?”

“You weren’t kidding when you said she’s your favorite.”

“That’s why I agreed to play her. No questions asked.” She swung her legs over the edge, dropping from the stage to walk toward the half-open entrance of the theater.Her braided hair swung like a thick pendulum in front of and then back over her shoulder as she strode along on her tiptoes, the spot on her heel that she had hit too hard against the sharp corner of the stage finally starting to bleed with color as the numbing euphoria wore off.

No questions asked.

It was strange that the two leads of the production would, equally, be the most compliant out of the whole crew when everyone else—the writer’s team, the musicians, their fellow dancers—was probably boiling on the inside ever since the first day, when it was already clear a script was never going to be finished in time for opening night.

“Fine, we’ll do it the karagen way then. Let Aksa and Sori decide at the moment of each performance,” Raden Bai-se had announced, slightly begrudgingly as he shot a look at the two dancers who seemed to be permanently positioned at the edge of the central stage, both having separately taken a silent oath to let the fighting—which was bound to happen at some point—unfold around them, but never with and between them if they could help it…

Not when they too didn’t know where to start with their performance, even if someone had the attention to spare to actually ask them.

Everyone knew the risk they were taking when the Raden of both companies proposed the joint production.

“Mugenjō and karagen—a marriage of the two branches in the hopes of achieving the true essence of hyōri. Ambitious, unprecedented—but fitting for the most popular company of each respective tradition. The only way that we can achieve beyond our present skills is by challenging ourselves with the never-before-seen, the almost impossible…”

Raden Bai-se had a way with words.

But Aksa was used to his mentor’s pretty prose. No, he did it for the story—and he would’ve volunteered should the Raden not immediately think he was ready for it in the first place, no questions asked…

“Hmmm…”

Aksa bit his lip, rubbing the back of his ear awkwardly as Sori continued to face him. Hands tucked into the pockets of her loose practice hakama, she backed her way through the sunburnt, dust-tinged street, somehow managing to avoid the crimson carts with their unsteady, odd-numbered wheels that naturally tumbled down the slopes of the tiered cityscape and had to be jerked in the right direction. There were a few close calls, of course: her pirouetting in a too-narrow arc over and around the nose of a cart then leaning in curiously—led by her nose—to the window, which obviously obscures none of the smell and look of feet-pounded rice cakes and brown sugar syrup, diced up fruit and coarsely crushed peanut sauce, honey-ginger water and cincau grass jelly. It’s as if she could tell. Not in the way that someone memorizes a series of steps, tracing familiar paths on the beat of a familiar rhythm down streets that refuse to—that cannot—thrive on anything but undulation.

It’s by instinct—one you could only get when you wake up in the midst of that chaos every day and let yourself be absorbed by the rhythm of everything and anything going on at once. Knowing that when the moment comes, you’ll know to avoid the cart behind you that’s just about to run you over, to lean in as soon as you catch a whiff of a familiar, mouthwatering smell, to strike out your arms as the transformation dawns on you then to gently trace the line of your jaw with the uneven edges of your fingernails as the silver from your silver-gold eyes burst forth, rippling into a reflection of what’s taken hold inside you…

Aksa liked to think he still had that instinct whenever he came to the Lower Towns, that he would never lose that sense of knowing the unpredictable as long as he kept coming back every once in a while. But not with dancing, the only thing he could actually do well.

Sori stretched out her leg, just quick enough for the tip of her pointed foot to tap the emptied watermelon ball back in the direction of its owners: children in soaked shorts, probably from swimming in a flooded part of the neighborhood beyond the main road (Aksa overheard it was the front of the market entrance today, where the lychee and mango stands were). She ruffled their heads as they swerved around the two of them. She turned around to smile at them, perhaps also at Aksa, who could never really tell if she too was just happy at her own performance and the reactions of her open-mouthed audience, or if she was especially amused that the same audience member was going to be her partner for the next few months: someone too aware of every sight and sound, smell and touch, the way the light hits the stage and catches the patterns on an ever-flowing kimono instead of the music itself, and a dancer caught up in the sweep of it all.

“You’re going to bump into someone.” Though he knew that that was never going to happen.

She pivoted on her heels as he said that (he wondered if he caught her flinching in that split second; if she did, it was almost unnoticeable), spinning smoothly once more around a vendor carrying a stack of woven bamboo trays on the top of her head. By the time her body reached the end of the motion, she was facing him again, a handful of dried persimmons stretched out towards him with that smile.

“I’ve got more important things I want to think about right now.”

The vendor only chuckled as she passed. A silver coin glinted at the rim of the topmost tray amongst the browned fruit skins.

“Like what?”

She was already popping a dried persimmon into her mouth when he reached to take one. Her words came out in a tingling hum as the faint sweetness burst out and then dissipated just as quickly, filling his ears with a sunlit, sugary daze. “Like the way you move. Do you know you move differently now than when you’re dancing?”

Aksa always admired karagen for two main reasons: one, it was his first introduction to hyōri, and two—and it’s the more important one—was that he couldn’t do it no matter how hard he tried.

He treasured the feeling of being taken by the hands (as a boy, he had been draped over the shoulders) to see the crowd with its sea of swiveling heads, their mouths twirling the words and spitting out new syllables on and under the undulating melodies of the instruments. Their voices echo from one of the corners of the theater and weave with those coming from the opposite corner, past the main stage at the center. He didn’t mind having to constantly look up, his widened eyes climbing up the tiers and tiers of latticed screens precariously barring off the crowds on the upper floors—which only reached up to the chests of the tallest adults even when they’re already sitting cross-legged—then back down until the liquid gold spilling down in hazy cascades from the chandelier (actually a nest of leftover paper lanterns from the last festival that had been strung together randomly) intertwined with the strands of hair, the lines on the dancer’s kimono on the center stage right below. He remembered the confusion that overtook him as moving figures and echoing voices constantly tugged at him at the corner of his eyes whenever he turned to one of the five stages—the sense of vertigo that made his lips quiver but held back the tears for him as he gazed into the chaos of color and music and movements that told a story without being swept up in the flow of time.

It wasn’t beautiful per se, but nothing has to actually be beautiful to be undeniably captivating. The wild thrashes of their limbs that cut through the air and snatched your breath away; the subsequent, sudden chink in their joints as their bodies decided to stop midway because that “other side”—the peace to their violence, the love to their hatred, the light to their darkness—decided to take over; the random pattern of silences and then rapid movements that didn’t necessarily follow the resonating rhythms of the strings and flutes and percussions because they came from within… the reason why everyone came in the first place.

They didn’t come to see control because there’s no way to control your body the moment you give it its freedom. No, they came to see what the music stirred within you and what you’d bring to the story that was your own—a performance that even you yourself wouldn’t be able to replicate any other night, even if the same piece was being played over and over and over again… The true karagen dancer didn’t need memories, just the acceptance of the vast, daunting freedom that the song would offer to you every time without fail—if you knew how to take it.

Aksa always admired karagen. But it didn’t change the fact that it didn’t suit him. It never did.

“It’s almost like a puppet, really,” Sori breathed out half in confusion, half in wonder as she played the master’s hand: tugging at the ribbons that were caught on the buttons of his sleeves, and which were, purposefully this time, coiled around his waist and elbows. She was trying to bring out the subtle movements that, to Aksa at that point, came as naturally as breathing.

A mixture of giggles and gasps wafted into his ears. Upon craning his neck gently so as not to break the immersion, he shot a sheepish smile at the row of children sitting cross-legged along the edge of the rooftop. The little girl whose ribbons they borrowed (after she had asked the both of them to braid her hair, only for one of the ribbons to get caught on his sleeve) had the most wide-open mouth in the group as she hugged her wooden ribbon box to her chest with thin, dangly arms.

“That’s pretty,” she whispered, her eyes following the loose curls of her cotton ribbons as Aksa (through Sori) brought his limbs back toward his body. The girl observed the taut lines and angles when he straightened the ribbons to their full length, whilst his fingers—left unbound because the ribbons were too thick—adjusted themselves to the positions undertaken by the rest of his body to complete the picture he needed and wanted to paint.

“It is, isn’t it?” The movements were difficult to memorize, but he eventually found ways to understand them, like how he’d realized a lot of the finger shapes he was often asked to do were just slight alterations of those shadow animals he learned to make as a child.

“It suits you,” Sori hummed behind him. “I wonder if this one does though—”

“He-eeyy!” Aksa swore he could hear his bones crack into place as she jerked all of the ribbons as far as they could go in the same direction. He managed to muster enough strength in his wrists to not let them fly away and be dislocated up to 180 degrees behind his back. “You know we can’t train a replacement two weeks before opening night, right?”

“Well, now we know you’re stronger than you look.” Sori gave him one of her lopsided smiles as she shoved her head over his shoulder. “Besides, this is to prove my point.”

“Aren’t you just having too much fun?”

The ends of her lips twitched a little. She paused, just enough for Aksa to understand “Yes, that too.” “The point is you dance like Aksa, but you go outside the theater and… well, you’re not him anymore, are you?”

“What do you…”

A mugenjō dancer knows what their body is doing. It’s impossible to control everything about it, but one could still try. Movement, slight shifts. Just enough to evoke feeling, just enough to play and tug with the flow of music in the air and change its course with a flick of a finger—that’s how you make it your own.

A mugenjō dancer is always aware of their body. So, even Aksa knew he was simply putting off acknowledging the truth in Sori’s words. As he breathed, he felt the taut frame of his shoulders, his chin and his square jaw, his puffed-out chest and the pronounced arc of his legs that would embarrass him if he were actually onstage.

“So, when you told me this was your first time doing Surya’s role…” It’s only after Sori spoke that he noticed she’d let go of the ribbons, now lax and coiled in uneven circles across the bamboo floor, around and away from his widely set feet. Now she stood in front of him, her tall frame looking just a bit shorter, narrower than usual as he couldn’t seem to let go of this stance just yet.

Aksa had played Kirana twice before. He wouldn’t have minded any role, as long as he was allowed to perform on stage with that story in mind: the separation of Surya and Kirana, the deities of the sun and the moon, from the one entity that had created the entire world—and that of hyōri. Especially hyōri.

He still didn’t quite know why he loved that story the most, and frankly it was quite the most predictable piece for a dancer to choose as their favorite. It’s considered one of the major stories wherein a dancer, if given either of the main roles and succeeded in it, would be considered to have graduated from the amateur ranks and earned the Raden’s trust to pick their own roles in the productions to follow. So, whilst he was simply more than happy to be chosen as Kirana the first time around, the next time the same story was set to be performed, he found himself picking the moon’s role again without hesitation.

Maybe it was because of the challenge: chaos and control, peace and violence, light and darkness—every conflict, every pair of opposing forces that hyōri had portrayed on stage throughout its long history needed to somehow be amalgamated into that one performance. The first war, the last battle. The essence of hyōri. How could one person possibly portray everything at once without losing themselves in the turmoil? Many had done it before, in their own way, but not everyone who’d done it once could do it again, twice or thrice. After all, a flower could blossom and wither gradually forever, but there is no guarantee that it’ll bloom a second time.

But the moon—why the moon? If it was the actual moon, he surely liked gazing up at it better. A pitch-black sky where the only source of light came in different shapes every night, and which was sometimes not there at all—coming and going on its own accord. Silvery, subtle—beautiful without being blinding. As beautiful as gold.

It’s the same way with the story. He always admired karagen, but he loved the way both sides were portrayed differently in mugenjō. Surya as the courageous, confident god that, in his passion, burned everything, including those he loved and fought to protect, until there were not even bones, no ashes to remember them by; Kirana as the goddess drawn further and further into the conflict within herself, burdened with the choice of freeing herself from her suffering or embracing both the pains and hopes that come with living, existing as she is and always will be. Two conflicts: one outside, and one within.

In mugenjō, the burden was shared. There would always be a Surya, always a Kirana. But karagen just wanted the one: both still caught in a war within a single body, the sun and the moon waiting for their single, shared soul to be ripped apart.

There was no Surya and Kirana—there was only both, but all at once… There was only you.

“Why do you think the moon wins out more often for you?”

“Why?” The smoke seemed to speak for her as her voice got caught in its translucent trail.

Pulling the pipe away, she squinted through the hazy curtain at Aksa sitting across from her, him absentmindedly beating the yolk of the soft-boiled egg until all the whites were buried under a smooth carpet of orange and splotches of soy sauce. She always broke the eggs as a child, knew from the moment the ball of decadent gold burst into viscid ribbons from its crushed shell that she had done it again. Even that she had managed to mess up… all because she thought and thought and forgot how to feel.

She sighed, just enough for a hole to appear in the wispy veil still spreading thin in front of her. Reaching through the opening, she exchanged the pipe for the chopsticks in his hand, which she then placed gently on the plate of sweet toast shared between them.

“I think we have this in common, if not anything else.”

Aksa glanced at the pipe then finally looked up at her. It looked alien in his hands, his fingers holding it too loosely then clutching it too tightly in an irregular rhythm as he simply waited for whatever she was about to say.

She drew her leg up onto the seat. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the carts running, the vendors shouting from beneath their woven bamboo trays, the children kicking up dust on the streets below until clouds of it hung constantly right where the tiered levels of the city—the sturdy walls of alabaster white that shone brighter and brighter and stretched further and further to the sides the higher up the city they were—filtered out the blueness of the sky, wrapped around their world like thick silk ribbons.

“It’s prettier, of course. Just—prettier.”

He blinked at her once, twice… then broke into a smile. The pipe shifted in his hand, his fingers holding it so loosely to the point that it might have tumbled out if one of his fingers decided to let go. So loosely because it became a part of him. One of the tricks of mugenjō. This time she didn’t need the smoke, the mirage to be able to see it: long, spindly hands wrapped loosely around the gold-engraved pipe above the saucer of viscous eggs—white bleeding into pure yellow like dust marring sunlight, the heart thrown into a chaos of swirling color—served by her little grubby, dust-covered fingers.She found herself laughing as she bit into the toast, letting a cloud of saccharine sweetness fill her mouth and dissipate just as quickly, her throat thrumming with the remains of sunlit, sugary notes. “If you’re just going to hold that, then give it back.”

“Oh, wait. I’ve always held one for performances, but never actually tried it.”

She laughed louder as he grimaced at the taste. “Holding one looks prettier than actually smoking it, right?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I’ll stick to that.”

And as he reached over to return the pipe, she noticed how his shoulders relaxed, his arms drawn in more toward his body like he was already preparing himself for the next dance, ready to go back to the world where he belonged, and that also belonged to him.

Note:

- hyōri (表裏): a dance/theater form that I came up with that deals with the conflict between two opposing forces, such as chaos and control, light and darkness, pride and humility, etc., hence the kanji for it is composed of the ones for “omote” and “ura,” which translate to the real-life concepts of “public face” and the “private face,” respectively. “Omote” could be described as the façade that people present to the rest of society, whereas “ura” is basically the truth behind this “mask” of omote. Hyōri is composed of two branches: mugenjō and karagen.

- mugenjō (夢幻上): could literally be translated as “above fantasy” or “beyond fantasy,” which refers to its focus on aestheticized movements and thus contributing to this greater understanding that the story is, in fact, taking place in a play—a spectacle to be looked at. It is also marked by the grander scale of its productions, wherein more props and dancers are involved than in the case of karagen. Whilst this is only hinted upon in the story with the image of a tiered cityscape reflecting social hierarchies, mugenjō is meant to be a more highbrow branch of hyōri whose stricter movement patterns are literally meant to make the dancers into works of fine art.

- karagen (空現): using the kanji characters for “sky/empty” and “reality,” karagen is more of an “individualistic” branch of hyōri because it tends to focus on the internal duality/conflict within oneself, thereby rejecting the fantastical tales of war between two visible forces (each played by a different dancer in mugenjō, as with the story of Surya and Kirana) and embracing the “emptiness” of reality with its sole main dancer and the relative bareness of their performance. This is the style preferred by the people from the “Lower Towns” due to its focus on improvisation; the lone main dancer naturally tries to cover the whole stage with bigger movements, something that adds to the sense of chaos and freedom, and which makes it more exciting for lower-class audiences.

Clairine Daphne Tjahjono is currently a literature student living in Tokyo, Japan. Born and raised in Indonesia, she fell in love with English literature from an early age and has since experimented with writing for a variety of media in English, from web articles to short stories to text-based games. Her short story has been published before in her university’s creative online magazine, The Pomegranate Waseda, and she is now a contributing writer of Japonica Publication on Medium, writing about all things Japanese culture in English, which she hopes to continue doing as a full-time gig upon graduation.

Instagram: @clairinedaphne LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairine-daphne-tjahjono-baa3a9187

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