The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama ed. by J. Thomas Rimer, Mitsuya Mori, and M. Cody Poulton (review)

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama makes a valuable contribution to the study of Japanese theatre by presenting a collection of plays in translation that spans theatrical activity in Japan from 1920 to 2004. The volume includes the modern and contemporary Japanese playwrights best known in the West such as Abe Kōbō, Mishima Yukio, and Okada Toshiki (in translations by Donald Keene, Laurence R. Kominz, and Aya Ogawa, respectively), in addition to major playwrights whose work is presented in English for the first time. The editors balance previously published translations and new translations in their selections. With seventeen new translations, the volume significantly increases the availability of Japanese theatre for English-language readers. Notably, one act of Morimoto Kaoru’s A Woman’s Life (translated by Guohe Zheng) and the full text of Inoue Hisashi’s Living with Father (translated by Zeljko Cipris) appear for the first time in translation. The presence of the new translations in this volume complements previous anthologies of modern Japanese theatre, which mostly have focused on a distinct moment rather than the broad scope of the present volume.

The anthology presents a sweep of aesthetic, cultural, and political shifts in Japanese theatre over nearly a century. The editors have organized the book into six sections. Five sections are organized chronologically to correspond to major periods in Japanese social and political history. The final section, a welcome addition to previous anthologies that have omitted popular entertainment, presents examples from Kabuki and Takarazuka. The chronological sections lay out a narrative of modern and contemporary Japanese theatre that begins with the modernist experiments of the early twentieth century and then extends through wartime censorship, the avant-garde of the sixties, and contemporary theatre. Each section includes an introduction by one of the anthology’s editors that situates the period in Japanese theatre history and includes translations of artistic statements by the featured writers and major directors. Readers will come away from the volume understanding the major developments in theatre, as well as the social and political circumstances the artists addressed in their works.

The editors offer an impressive range of theatrical and translation styles in their selections. For example, the section on “The Tsukiji Little Theatre and Its Aftermath,” which covers the fervor of activity in the late 1920s, includes a constructivist historical epic for puppets (Murayama Tomoyoshi’s A Nero in Skirts translated by Yuko Matsukawa), a sparsely lyrical duet (Kishida Kunio’s Paper Balloon translated by Richard McKinnon), and a darkly satirical Living Newspaper (Kubo Sakae’s Fascist Doll, also translated by Matsukawa). The editors pair the range of theatrical styles with a range of translation styles. Some translations that deserve particular mention are the collaboration of Chiyori Miyagawa and John Gillespie on the haunting The Dressing Room: That Which Flows Away Ultimately Becomes Nostalgia by Shimizu Kunio, the imagistic verse of Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s translation of Poison Boy by Terayama Shūji in collaboration with Kishida Rio, and the colloquial language that captures contemporary disaffected youth in Ogawa’s translation of Okada’s Five Days in March.

The volume’s weakness is its lack of representation of female writers. The editors include only two plays written by women, Enchi Fumiko’s dramatization of the tension between engaged art and art for art’s sake in Restless Night in Late Spring (translated with nuance by Ayako Kano) and Akimoto Matsuyo’s beautiful postwar play Ceremonial Clothes (in a fluid translation by Ganshi Murata). In an attempt to address this omission, Yoshie Inoue contributes an essay that summarizes the theatrical activity of women playwrights from the nineteenth century to the present. Inoue’s essay elucidates the major female writers, their key works, and their connections to the broader narrative of Japanese theatre with copious footnotes for the reader who seeks to undertake further reading. However, Inoue can...