In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Kabuki: Baroque Fusion of the Arts
  • Samuel L. Leiter (bio)
Kabuki: Baroque Fusion of the Arts. By Kawatake Toshio. Translated by Frank and Jean Connell Hoff. International House of Japan, LTCB International Library, Tokyo, 2004. xxiv, 301 pages. ¥3,000.

The author of this book is the son of the distinguished theater historian, Kawatake Shigetoshi, who was himself the adopted son of the great nineteenth-century kabuki playwright Kawatake Mokuami. The latter wrote around 360 plays, and Kawatake Shigetoshi was a very prolific scholar; it should not be surprising, then, to read in the epilogue of Kabuki: Baroque Fusion of the Arts that Kawatake Toshio has written 78 books "so far." Kawatake (as I will refer to him hereafter) has had a previous book translated into English, Japan on Stage (1990), which, like the vast bulk of his [End Page 236] output, focuses on kabuki, but he claims of the present volume that "it might be called the culmination of fifty years of scholarship not to mention" (p.279) his extensive experience as an arranger and supervisor of kabuki productions both in Japan and on tour.

Had this claim been made in the prologue, rather than in the epilogue, it would have set up expectations that the book does not quite fulfill. Despite certain drawbacks, though, the book has much to offer, especially for those not very familiar with kabuki. The first serious English-language book strictly focused on kabuki was Zoë Kincaid's Kabuki: The Popular Theatre of Japan (1925). Subsequently, nothing of importance was published until the postwar period, which saw an explosion of international interest in kabuki reflected in books by Faubion Bowers, Earle Ernst, Masakatsu Gunji (in translation), James R. Brandon, and others, including myself. Many such books were thorough introductory overviews, several of them outstanding examples of both scholarship and writing, while a smaller number were more specialized, discussing particular historical, dramaturgical, or aesthetic issues. Despite the existence of serious studies of kabuki (primarily in edited collections), their number and the depth of their investigations do not compare with works that, especially recently, have been devoted to Japan's theater by writers such as Steven Brown, Janet Goff, Gerry Yokota-Murakami, Etsuko Terasaki, Mae Smethurst, and Eric Rath. (Bunraku and kyōgen, it might be noted, lag far, far behind in either English-language overviews or specialized studies.)

Kawatake's book is a very smart introduction to kabuki but it is still an introduction. It covers a lot of ground made familiar in other books, especially those of the last two decades. In fact, one of its flaws is its review of material that Kawatake himself introduced in Japan on Stage. For example, he retells the story of kabuki's first tours to the West in the 1960s, and how—to the surprise of the Japanese producers—foreign audiences reacted more positively to dramatic plays such as Shunkan and Kanadehon Chūshingura (Treasury of loyal retainers) than to lyrical dance plays such as Musume Dōjōji (The maiden at the Dōjō temple) or visually beautiful but dramatically vague theatricalist exercises like the "Kuruma biki" (Pulling the carriage apart) scene in Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the secrets of calligraphy). Kawatake revisits his experience as a literary adviser to the troupe, gathering data on audience reactions via the use of questionnaires. Other déjà vu examples appear in his discussion of kabuki's "travel scene" (michiyuki); the etymology of the Sino-Japanese graph for geki (drama); the rarity of anything like the auditorium passageway (hanamichi) in other premodern world theaters (and the difficulty of setting one up when touring abroad); and the perception of kabuki as a baroque theater form. Tsubouchi Shōyō's explanation of kabuki as a chimera, an analogy introduced in English in Kawatake's father's book, Kabuki: Japanese Drama [End Page 237] (1958), is another area Kawatake need not have recycled. Moreover, several subjects, which might have been considered new just a few years ago, were introduced to English-language readers in far greater detail elsewhere before this book's appearance: these include Faubion Bowers's role in ending the censorship of kabuki during the...

pdf