What kind of store is this? (Repeated)

A comedy sketch first performed at the event “milkyeast Pub Night: Inn, Tavern, Alehouse” (organized by Kota Sakagawa + TARKY Toshima), held at milkyeast. Among O,1,2nine's sketches, it marked an important turning point.

For now, it is probably fair to call it a comedy-sketch (live-performance?) version of Toshima's earlier text works such as 23 Variations for Texts on Invention and Atama-yama Variations, whose theme was “formal repetition, and the development that comes from deviating and leaping away from it.” In the end, however, this sketch came to feel very much like a culmination of the works Toshima had made with that method up to then, and Toshima privately thought, “If I can pull this off, maybe I'm done with this method (self-praise).”

The sketch begins with a thoroughly clichéd situation, “shopkeeper and customer,” but through the repetition of lines and actions, and the slippage between them, it opens up into different developments. Incidentally, the event took place during the Obon season, and the content unexpectedly ended up with a faintly Obon-like feel, too.

After What kind of store is this? (Repeated) ended, there was also a roughly ten-minute “answering a prompt” performance (Toshima went upstairs and gave Yoshida, downstairs, a prompt; Yoshida answered it with an action; then, watching Yoshida's movements, Toshima said something that further defined them).

In addition, both of them performed in Masterpiece Detective Amemura Ken episode1 by the theater company Whales (led by Eijiro Takahashi), held on the first day of this two-day event. Toshima played the detective, and Yoshida played the culprit.

This sketch would later also be taken up at the 2024 symposium “Toward Signs: The Brightness of Events, the Weight of the Subject” (Masataka Matsuda, Rena Miyazaki, TARKY Toshima, Nike Tobita) at Ko Murobushi Archive Cafe Shy (Tokyo). Lately, Toshima says, I have really been feeling that “if you keep doing all sorts of things, good things do happen.”