Tsugaru is a region full of narratives. According to one explanation, it is the long winters with its deep snows that produced such a plethora of tales. Another theory suggests that it is the geographical distance from the administrative and commercial heart of the country. In the capital where power is underscored to the point of avarice, wealth accumulated and information managed, all structures are essentially realist. The further removed one is, the more easily illusions take root. The weight of isolation at the fringes transforms the fragments of information that trickle in, tinting them with native colors and layering them with the region's dialect to be told as the tales of Tsugaru. This latter explanation is easier for me to understand. Poverty is not a matter of wealth. Essentially, it has to do with the loss of information. There is no consciousness of poverty among poor people if everyone is poor, but along comes a bit of information that stirs envy or unease with news of this or that "in the capital" or "in Tokyo,..." It hardly needs to be said that disregarding differences in degree, poverty is no different today. And the more one-sided the relationship, the greater the difference people feel. Poverty is the visual representations of difference. Narratives, then, are invented as if the tellers are driven to fill this discrepancy, this difference. In these tales, the person one comes face to face with is oneself. Those spaces without distance, where the storyteller's outstretched hand brushes his listeners lips, and his legs, thrown in front of him, could easily reach the genitals of the person sitting on the other side of the low table covered with quilts ─ it is such spaces that have given rise to narratives. Sitting eyeball to eyeball and listening intently to the cold winds outside, the people of Tsugaru have charged others with the contents of their private imaginings. 　Winter Moon 　I wallop the wife and go outside 　─ there's the moon, dim through the snow. 　Wading through the snowdrifts after the blizzard, 　I've got nowhere to go really. 　I've come outside. . . but why did I hate her like that? 　There's sure more feeling in hate than love 　So, why is it I love her more than ever now? 　Ah, it's all like the swirling snow ─ after its over ─ 　like the dim winter moon. My "narrative." The language most appropriate for telling my tale is the dialect of my native Tsugaru. This dialect more than anything else is the beginning of narrative and the meaning implied in the gestures that accompany oral narratives. It contains collective nuances, shared physical signals and a common earthiness. It is a phenomenon born of spaces where the organs of sense common to all ─ eyes, mouth, ears and hands ─ are close enough to reach out and touch. The words you need to communicate to the person you want to communicate with. A dialect is the embodiment of a desire to communicate. It comes out of the physical being that wishes to communicate. The poem above is from a collection of poems titled "Marmelo" by Kyozo Takagi who was a poet of Tsugaru. Compared to the written words, the poem read aloud is incomparably sad, pensive and beautiful. Only once in my life, and long ago at that, I heard Takagi's voice at a small theater in Tsugaru. I was awestruck. On the stage was a physical being producing a voice full of emotion, whose every syllable struck my soul. Now that I recall it, I remember feeling as if the winds of Jusanko were howling in my ears. Successions of waves danced upon the sands of Sotogahama and scenes of villages with their feeble lights glimmering, frozen and pale through snowstorms, raced through me making my back feel a froth of cold. Of course─. It hardly needs to be said that this "narrative" is a privilege in the narrow sense, afforded only to those who understand the dialect of Tsugaru and have in common the feelings of the region and the sounds of its language. In the case of a performance, I wonder if it is not imagination that forms the link between the individuals who are party to this kind of narrowly defined privilege. Although a performance is by a solitary physical being within a unique situation, is it not this common characteristic that keeps the channels of performance from ever running dry? Speaking paradoxically, narratives have been kept alive by feelings of rejection and repudiation. They cannot be handed down to everyone the way one flips channels or selects a button to push. Because it is difficult to grasp and is shut away, waiting with bated breath in the darkness, "narratives" have emerged with the functions of narratives. In this sense, Tsugaru to me is "the King of Imagination" even now.

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