When did I open a cardboard box tied up with a yellow ribbon on a seafaring voyage? I can't recall exactly. It feels like another life—a time soaked in the smell of salt, cigarette smoke, and pages left too long under the sun. That box had been waiting for me, or perhaps I had been waiting for it.

I was foolish enough to untie it, ignoring Terayama's cryptic warning: "Do not pick it up; if you do, the sequel to this story will begin." I didn't listen. Curiosity was already gnawing at me, that eternal hunger for the strange and the forbidden. When I finally opened it, I found not the yellow ribbon anymore—it was gone—but a skeleton instead. A skeleton of stories, of forgotten dreams, of the mind's deep corridors where literature decays and is reborn.

That moment was my descent—like Orpheus descending into Hades—into the subterranean mind of Dostoyevsky, whom I had just finished reading. Notes from Underground had wrecked my brain in the most divine way. I thought I would stop there, satisfied with Dostoyevsky's psychological labyrinth. But then Terayama arrived, uninvited, like a trickster god emerging from a neon fog.

That year I wrote my first story, Ishwar to Gaubha Bats. I had to write it. I didn't have a choice. My head was full of ghosts and laughter, of words that wanted to become something else—something between poetry and scream. Terayama's voice was whispering, "Don't just write—shatter language."

He was, indeed, a strange storyteller. His prose and poetry didn't haunt me in the Gothic sense, but they haunted me like unfinished dreams. What I loved most was his ability to fuse haiku-like brevity with surrealist imagery—each line felt like a spark that lit up the mind's dark cave. He took the Japanese folk soul and tossed it into a blender with cinematic montage, creating what I can only call a literary hallucination.

Terayama's fragmentation reminded me of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty—a theatre where language is beaten, twisted, made to bleed, and resurrected in screams. His sentences refuse plainness. They burst with phonic excess, with rhythm, with breath.

That line struck me like lightning. It wasn't just imagery; it was desecration and devotion tangled together. It was an Oedipal scream disguised as poetry—a cosmic burial. I called it Terayama's Oedipal desecration, and it burned itself into my youth, like a fever that never truly left.

At night, when insomnia gnawed at me, I used to ask myself: What language should one use to express the night? The plain human tongue fails under moonlight. Night demands madness. It demands screams. It demands a language that has forgotten grammar and remembered pain.

Terayama understood that. His writing deconstructed Japanese syntax—he inserted repetitions, phonetic play, contradictions, and sudden breaks. His words felt like they were trying to escape from themselves. I later recognized this as something close to Artaud's glossolalia—the primal scream, the attempt to reach the pre-linguistic core of being.

A midnight experiment: I tried it once. I screamed my heart out in my room at midnight, hoping the words would fall away and only the soul would remain. For a moment, I felt language collapse—like a wall breaking into light. Maybe that's what Terayama wanted: to strip us of our borrowed tongues and return us to something ancient and wordless.

He was not just a poet or playwright; he was a mirror reflecting the fragmented psyche of the modern self. He did to the Japanese language what Nietzsche did to morality—he shattered it to find something purer underneath. Terayama's art was rebellion disguised as theatre, mythology dressed as cinema, madness painted as beauty.

When I think back now, that yellow-ribboned box was never just a box. It was my initiation into a certain kind of madness—the creative one. It was the skeleton of literature itself: bones of stories, crushed syntax, and the ghost of poetry refusing to die.

Even now, when I read Terayama, I feel that same electric ache, that haunting echo of youth when language was still raw and dangerous. He taught me that literature isn't about meaning—it's about becoming. About risking your sanity for a glimpse of something unsayable.