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Enter the horse
So I'm reading Dōji kō 童子考 ("Thoughts on children") by Gunji Masakatsu 郡司正勝, and in a discussion of little-person entertainers known as shuju 侏儒 I come across this:
『信西古楽図』は、平安末期のものとされ、あるいは絵そのものが中国伝来のものか、日本へ伝えられた舞楽散楽を写したものかに疑問の余地はあるが、侏儒の舞と考えられるものが幾種かある。たとえば「入馬腹舞」とか「入壺舞」などというもので、馬のお尻から入って口から出るとか、壺の口から出たり入ったりして、長袖を翻すといったもので、あきらかに侏儒の舞と思われる。
Shinzei kogaku zu ["Shinzei's illustrated guide to venerable entertainments"] is said to date to the late Heian period, and although there is some room for doubt over whether the pictures came directly from China or whether they represent dances and entertainments transmitted to Japan, there are a number that appear to be shuju dances. For example, the "Enter-a-horse's-belly dance" and the "Enter-a-pot dance" involve entering a horse from its behind and coming out of its mouth, or popping in and out of a pot while waving long sleeves; these are clearly shuju dances.
Whatever the literary equivalent of the movie-trailer record-scratch sound is, I heard it in my head about halfway through this paragraph. Excuse me? The "Enter-a-horse's-belly dance"? This looks like a job for research on the internet.
So, first, I found a copy of Shinzei's scroll online. Is the horse thing there? Yes, it is. (The pot dancers are there, too, but whatever, dude.)
Now, obviously this did not really happen. The Heian period was not a Police Academy movie. The Tang dynasty was not a cartoon from Oz magazine. Nevertheless, here we have this picture. What are we to make of it? Fortunately, Kawai Masaru 河合勝 and Saitō Nobuhiro 斎藤修啓 have already done the heavy lifting for us here, with a poker-faced monograph entitled A Study of Horse-Swallowing Illusion ("Donbajutsu") of Japanese Classic Magic (日本古典奇術「呑馬術」について).
The trick, they say, was simply to hang a black curtain behind the horse, and allow the performer to disappear behind it and reappear at the other side. This, they note, is known as "the black art" in modern magic, and they hypothesize that horse-swallowing was effected the same way. Thus, they argue, the pictures of people swallowing horses in brightly-lit rooms, before audiences spread too widely to the side, do not reflect actual performance conditions.
I sort of prefer to believe that horse-swallowing is possible. But I do not feel the same way about the enter-a-horse's-belly dance.
Carl:
Whatever, man. I'm sure that the Heian equivalent of emergency room doctors could tell you that horse-butt interaction is real.
Also, I heard from Sei Shonagon that Murasaki Shikibu once had to be rushed to the hospital to get her stomach pumped from swallowing too much court poetry and Prince Shotoku once put a live tanooki up his sutra pipe.