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  • Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics by Nobuko Anan
  • Ayako Kano
Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics. By Nobuko Anan. Contemporary Performance InterActions series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; pp. 230.

Nobuko Anan’s Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts joins a fleet of scholarly books published in the last several decades on Japanese girls’ culture. Solidly researched, this study integrates Japanese, European, and American scholarship, combining in-depth analysis of specific theatre works and theoretical concepts as well as historical overviews. It enhances our understanding of Japanese performance since the 1970s and is a welcome addition to the field.

Anan defines girls’ aesthetics as an aesthetics that celebrates the rejection of female material bodies. This includes rejection of heteronormativity, compulsory wifehood, and motherhood; and the valorization of immaterial, two-dimensional fictional bodies. She examines a grouping of works in each chapter that connects two- and three-dimensional worlds, with her examples ranging from graphic novels (manga) and theatre to film and video art. The sustained focus on theatrical and cinematic adaptation of manga is a particularly intriguing aspect of [End Page 599] this study. Chapter 1, the most wide-ranging, begins with an overview of the cultural history of girls in Japan, originating with the girls’ schools in the nineteenth century and reaching the “big bang” of girls’ culture during the 1970s. The chapter then closely analyzes several works that portray girls as choosing to confine themselves in space and time, while simultaneously transcending those limitations. These girls are also depicted as behaving violently against one another and themselves. Anan carefully deploys the Freudian psychoanalytical understanding of mourning and melancholia to interpret these somewhat puzzling non-narrative works. Her case studies include theatre troupe YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear (2004), troupe NOISE’s DOLL (1983), and Yanagi Miwa’s video installation Granddaughters (2002–03). Lear is inspired by Kishida Rio’s adaptation of Shakespeare, and the NOISE was led by Kisaragi Koharu; Kishida and Kisaragi were key figures in Japanese women’s theatre after the late 1970s and are briefly discussed within that context.

Chapter 2 explores girls’ intimacies with one another. It focuses on Hagio Moto’s groundbreaking manga Heart of Thomas (1974), its stage adaptation with all male-performers (1996), and its film adaptation, Summer Vacation 1999 (1988), scripted by Kishida and performed by a cast of four girls. Hagio’s manga depicting intimacies among boys can be described as a precursor to what would later develop as the celebrated and controversial Boys Love (BL) genre, known for its graphic representation of male same-sex relations, usually produced and consumed by women. Anan gives an overview of the depiction of gender and sexuality in the development of girls’ manga, especially the so-called Year 24 Group, which includes Hagio. Anan argues that the boy characters in Heart of Thomas are actually to be interpreted as girls, and that the two-dimensional bodies in manga liberate girl readers from the constraints of material bodies. This liberation flounders in the theatre version foregrounding male bodies, but it is imaginatively captured in the film adaptation, which is unusual in separating the bodies and voices of performers: the bodies are those of young actresses, but the dubbing by voice-actors performing in boy-like voices, reminds the viewer of the effects of two-dimensional characters in animation.

Chapter 3 discusses Ikeda Riyoko’s famous manga The Rose of Versailles (1972–73), its live-action film adaptation Lady Oscar (1979), and the adaptations by the famous all-female Takarazuka Revue (premiered 1974 and frequently performed and updated, most recently in 2014). This chapter focuses on the relationship among girls, citizenship, nationalism, and violence. In my view this is the most interesting and successful chapter: Anan deftly triangulates the masculinist New Left movement that influenced Ikeda, the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, and the girls’ aesthetics found in the depiction of a heroine who joins the French Revolution dressed as a man. The extremely popular Takarazuka version is more overtly nationalistic, yet there are queer possibilities opened up by the female performers, such as the star Anju Mira...

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