Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost by Satoko Shimazaki (review)

This fascinating book on historical kabuki is a must-read for students of that theatrical form and is recommended to anyone interested in the popular culture of Japan's Edo period (1603–1867). Using a variety of historical sources, Satoko Shimazaki contextualizes the production of the play at the center of the book's argument, Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan (Ghost story of Yotsuya on the Tōkaidō Highway), written by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755–1829) and first staged at the Nakamura-za in Edo in 1825. The date of this production places it squarely in the Kasei period (1804–30), a cultural epoch that saw the return of a thriving urban culture including publishing houses and kabuki theaters. Unlike that of the earlier Genroku era (1688–1704), the culture of this new golden age was centered in Edo, the seat of the shogun's government and the realm's largest metropolis, which also had usurped Kyoto's position as the country's cultural capital.

By locating the genesis of the play in this context, and in an interconnected web of narratives and images, of kabuki conventions, acting traditions, and commercial pressures, Shimazaki strives not only to give the reader a sense of how Nanboku's famous play might have appeared in its original performance but also to demonstrate that this performance was only a momentary event in an ongoing process. All kabuki plays have been subject to modification and revision over time. New plays, in particular, were inherently unstable. Although a plan for the whole was usually constructed in advance, often only a part of the play was presented on opening day. Over the course of the production, additional acts and scenes would be gradually added, while unsuccessful scenes might be reworked or abandoned. In the case of Yotsuya kaidan, it is uncertain which parts of the play were performed during its successful initial run (p. 5). This state of affairs Shimazaki contrasts with modern readings of the play based on the assumption of a complete and stable text. Only by acknowledging the gap between kabuki as a historical cultural practice and its modern reification in texts, she argues, "can we undertake a new exploration of the play and the broader history of Edo kabuki" (p. 275).

While much of the book is thus devoted to an in-depth exploration of the play as a particular performance produced in a particular historical context, Shimazaki is also concerned, as her subtitle indicates, with the broader history. Following the introduction, the book is divided into three parts bearing the titles "The Birth of Edo Kabuki," "The Beginning of the End of Edo Kabuki," and "The Modern Rebirth of Kabuki," suggesting a dialectical historical process. The single chapter in part 1 shows how kabuki producers created "a cultural space in which the past, particularly the samurai past, could be infused into the present, instilling in audience members from all levels of society an awareness of the past as something that remained implicated in the here and now" (p. 41). This was largely achieved by employing the complementary structural devices of sekai ("world"; a familiar narrative drawn from history, legend, or literature together with its particular cast of characters) and shukō (new characters or twists in the plot), which allowed for the narrative to be brought into the present and into the world of the Edo theater audience. This explains why the presumably plebeian entertainment of kabuki served to glorify and transmit samurai values and ideology. Related to this is the function of government censorship. The popular conception, held also by many scholars, is that kabuki has always been "a sort of oppositional theater of the common people that subverted the interests of the ruling class" (p. 86). Shimazaki shows that the theater audience was more stratified than is commonly thought, and she examines...