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

Notes

Notes 237 Preface Epigraph. Osanai Kaoru, “Enshutsu nōto: En no gyōja no daiichiya wo oete” (A director’s notes: Completing the first night of En no gyōja), in Osanai, Osanai Kaoru zenshū 6 (Kyoto: Rinsen shobō, 1975), 460. 1. See Ōyama Isao, Kindai Nihon gikyokushi, 4 vols. (Yamagata: Kindai Nihon gikyokushi kankōkai, 1968). 2. A recent exception is Tsuno Kaitarō’s biography, Kokkei na kyojin: Tsubouchi Shōyō no yume (Heibonsha, 2002). 3. Two recent books—Ayano Kano’s Acting like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001) and Brian Powell’s Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Continuity and Change (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002)—have focused on acting and the establishment of theatre companies. J.Thomas Rimer’s Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974); Brian Powell’s Kabuki in Modern Japan: Mayama Seika and His Plays (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1990); and my own Spirits of Another Sort:The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (Ann Arbor: Center of Japanese Studies, University of Michigan Press, 2001) are devoted to individual playwrights. 4. Suwa Haruo dates the influence of kabuki dramaturgy on fiction to the Hōei and Kyōhō periods (ca. 1703–1736). Ejima Kiseki (1666–1735) was one of the first authors to adopt kabuki techniques of plotting and scenic structure. See Suwa 238 Haruo, Edo: Sono geinō to bungaku (Mainichi shinbunsha, 1976), 187–192. Kōdan was the term used in the Meiji era for kōshaku, a popular genre of storytelling that specialized in military narratives like the Taiheiki, vendettas and tales of knights-errant. Rakugo (comic monologue) had its start in the Edo era (1600–1868) and remains a most popular art. 5. Kishida Kunio, “Engeki yori bungaku wo haijo subeki ka” (Should theatre be rid of literature?), in Kishida, Kishida Kunio zenshū 21 (Iwanami shoten, 1989), 210. Kishida borrows the phrase “beggar’s art” from the French dramatist Jules Amed ée Barbey d’Aurevilly. 6. Kobayashi Hideo, “Yakusha,” in Kangaeru hinto; cited in Miyashita Nobuo , “Gikyoku,” in Suwa Haruo and Sugai Yukio, eds., Kōza Nihon no engeki 1: Nihon engekishi no shiten (Benseisha, 1992), 109. 7. Cited in Gioia Ottaviani, “‘Difference’ and ‘Reflexivity’: Osanai Kaoru and the Shingeki Movement.” Asian Theatre Journal 11, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 220. 8. “Gekijō no setsubi ni taisuru kibō” (My hopes in regard to the theatre, 1913), in Tanizaki, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū (Chūō kōronsha, 1982), 22:10, 11. 9. Nihon kindai engekishi kenkyūkai, ed., Nihon no kindai gikyoku (Kanrin shobō, 1997). Chapter 1: Meiji Drama Theory before Ibsen 1. The first so-called command performance, or tenrangeki, before Emperor Meiji of nō was in 1878. Iwakura Tomomi, who had led the 1871–1873 mission to Europe and the United States, was instrumental in establishing a public nō theatre where Hōshō Kurō (1837–1913), Umewaka Minoru (1828–1909), and other lead actors were able to ensure nō’s revival. 2. Cited in Fujiki Hiroyuki, “Gikyokushi 3,” in Gikyokuron (Engekiron kōza 5), edited by Tsugami Tadashi, Sugai Yukio, and Kagawa Yoshinari (Shōbunsha, 1977), 127. 3. Ibid. 4. For a discussion of the effect of censorship on the development of shingeki in the late Meiji era, see Ayako Kano, Acting like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater , Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 154–156ff. 5. See the account in Komiya Toyotaka, Japanese Music and Drama in the Meiji Era, translated and adapted by Donald Keene (Tōyō bunko, 1969), 191. Kan’ya’s Morita-za was the first theatre to move from its original location in Saruwaka-chō, next to the Yoshiwara licensed quarters, to the more central Shintomi-chō. It burned down in 1876, and the Shintomi-za that replaced it was notes to pages ix–3 239 touted as Japan’s first “modern” theatre. See Yuichirō Takahashi, “Kabuki Goes Official : The 1878 Opening of the Shintomi-za,” in A Kabuki Reader, edited by Samuel L. Leiter (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 123–151. 6. Toyama Masakazu, for one, pushed for the eradication of kabuki’s traditional stage conventions. See “Engeki kairyōron shikō” (Personal thoughts on theatre reform), in Meiji bungaku zenshū 79: Meiji geijutsu, bungaku ronshū, edited by Hijikata Teiichi (Chikuma shobō, 1975), 139–148. 7. Suematsu Kenchō, “Engeki kairyō iken...