A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930

Two Men at Play with Life, by Kishida Kunio

Photo of Kishida Kunio courtesy of the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University. 172 TWO MEN AT PLAY WITH LIFE Kishida Kunio Introduction More has been written in English on Kishida Kunio than on any other figure in modern Japanese theatre, and more of his works have been translated than those of any other prewar Japanese playwright. English criticism on Kishida nonetheless reflects the fierce debate his name stirs up in Japanese letters. For Thomas Rimer, author of a seminal study of Kishida and the shingeki movement , Kishida was “the first dramatist to succeed in putting into dramatic form the contemporary Japanese spirit.”1 David Goodman, in his trenchant introduction to a collection of Kishida’s plays in English, reflects the more circumspect view taken by the majority of shingeki critics and practitioners when he claims that Kishida was “a major but tragically flawed Japanese dramatist whose work commands our attention because of its richly evocative language.” Kishida’s politics fatally compromised his artistic legacy, suggests Goodman.2 Within months of the crackdown on shingeki companies and the arrest of hundreds on August 14, 1940, Kishida accepted the position of director of the cultural section of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai ), Japan’s fascist wartime cabinet; the playwright’s collaboration with After the Quake 173 173 the militarists during the war earned him the undying enmity of most of his contemporaries in Japanese theatre. Critic Ōzasa Yoshio, whose assessment is more positive (he calls Kishida a “forgotten star”), points out that while the centenary of Chekhov’s death in 2004 was commemorated in Japan with numerous publications and performances, the fiftieth anniversary that same year of Kishida’s death went by largely unnoticed.3 The issue is more complex than any claim that Kishida was a good artist but a poor judge of politics, and there seems little common ground between Rimer’s and Goodman’s assessments of the man beyond their acknowledgment that he was a superb stylist. Rimer calls Kishida a “moralist,” where Goodman asserts that the writer’s “lack of a comprehensible moral cosmology” precipitated his wartime collaboration. Indeed, Kishida’s stance as an artist, Goodman claims, cannot be divorced from his politics. The playwright was a nihilist whose “dramaturgy provided no principles, no rationale, for resisting the war. Staunchly ahistorical and divorced from social reality, it provided no barricade against barbarism.”4 At the heart of these two divergent opinions lies a debate on the meaning and purpose of dramatic art that goes back to the 1920s; in aesthetic terms at least, Kishida’s differences with Osanai and other members of the Tsukiji Little Theatre revolved around the forms, uses, and limits of realism. (Kishida’s debate with Osanai over whether to stage original Japanese plays and, if so, which ones, has been discussed in chapter 3.) Specifically, Kishida’s and Osanai ’s positions represented two versions of realism, the former psychological, the latter sociological.A similar debate swept Japanese fiction at the time.The naturalism that had held Japanese theatre and letters in sway during the first decade of the twentieth century had spawned two antagonistic movements, one focused on confession and the exploration of the modern, privatized self, and the other increasingly devoted to the idea of art as an ideological tool to promote social action. Ultimately, this debate was about the limits of art itself: can art alone ever save anyone, either personally or politically? Kishida defined his artistic differences with Osanai and the Tsukiji Little Theatre along the lines of “northern” and “southern” theatrical styles: Osanai and his followers represented the “northern” style of German, Scandinavian, and Russian theatre, whereas he ascribed to the “southern,” French style of Jacques Copeau, whose student he had been from 1921 to 1923. The latter was, according to Kishida, a style that “valued fragrance over strength, nuance over depth; it does not deal directly with human suffering but uses all sorts of fantastic elements to turn suffering into comedy. Rather than portray ‘society’s cruelty,’ it suggests (without any attempt at making sense of it) a beggar’s art 174 the self-contempt of humans who cannot bear such cruelty or who instead attempt to laugh off their indignation at their ill treatment.”5 Indeed, such a sensibility was opposed to that of Osanai and the Tsukiji Little Theatre’s socially and increasingly politically motivated theatre. For his part, Osanai’s view...