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

Preface

Preface vii Forget kabuki. Ignore tradition. Move, don’t dance! Talk, don’t sing! —osanai kaoru, admonishing the actors during rehearsals for Tsubouchi Shōyō’s En the Ascetic For a couple of decades in the early twentieth century, straddling the Taishō era (1912–1926), drama enjoyed something of a heyday in Japanese literature. Almost every writer of the day at least dabbled in this form, and many— including Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamamoto Yūzō, Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Arishima Takeo, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Nogami Yaeko, and Ueda (Enchi) Fumiko, to name just a few—established themselves as playwrights before or while still settling into fiction as their dominant medium of expression. Some, like Yoshii Isamu and Kinoshita Mokutarō, were poets who caught the drama bug. Many more—men and women like Suzuki Senzaburō, Okada Yachiyo, Hasegawa Shigure, Kubota Mantarō, Kishida Kunio, and Akita Ujaku—devoted themselves almost exclusively to writing for the stage. One of the first scholars to write a major study of modern drama in Japan, Ōyama Isao, lists some eighty professional playwrights active in Japan between about 1900 and 1940; the volume of work that they produced is immense.1 Some of the earliest modern Japanese literature to be translated into European languages was of drama by Shōyō,Tanizaki, Yamamoto, Mushanokōji, Kikuchi, and Kishida (among others). Kōri Torahiko even wrote drama in English, and at least one of his plays, The Death of Yoritomo, was performed on the London stage. Many of these writers, particularly those who were almost exclusively playwrights, are practically forgotten today, and the ones we remember are often remembered for other things.In fact,drama is a subject that has been given remarkably short shrift in Japanese literary studies over the past century or so. preface viii Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui,1887),for example,has amassed a significant body of criticism in English, to say nothing of Japanese, but this work was really a footnote to a life devoted to theatre and drama, and few since Shōyō’s death in 1935 have bothered to study the playwright’s works in any great detail.2 The only prewar Japanese playwright whose work is still read, discussed, and performed with any regularity is Kishida Kunio, and his reputation has been tarnished in Japan by his collaboration with the militarists in the early 1940s. By the 1930s, something happened to drama and theatre in Japan, such that the so-called “age of Taishō drama” seemed in retrospect like a flash in the pan.True, many of the plays (especially the translations available from the 1920s and early ’30s) are rather dated now. But a major chapter in the study of modern Japanese literature and theatre would be missing if we neglected these works, and, in fact, there are some fascinating gems still to be found there.While the rise of the so-called New Theatre (shingeki) movement in Japan in the early twentieth century has been fairly well documented, considerably less attention has been focused on the role that drama played in the modernization of Japanese literature and theatre during this time.3 Japan has one of the greatest theatre traditions in the world, and drama has played no small part in this. The country has produced unique forms like nō, the puppet theatre, and kabuki; the latter two in particular played a crucial role in the rise of early modern Japanese culture.It would be no exaggeration to say that during the Edo era, kabuki was the dominant form of cultural expression for the Japanese. The theatre spawned a huge industry of related artistic media, including ukiyoe (pictures of the floating world), fan magazines, and illustrated playbooks.Fans vied to imitate their favorite actors in such amateur theatricals as chaban kyōgen. References to popular kabuki actors and plays were also used as marketing ploys to sell new stories and commercial products. Family feuds; hidden, mistaken, and revealed identities; the quest for a fetish, like a family sword or scroll (a device called a “weenie” by early silent movie actress Pearl White and a “McGuffin” by Alfred Hitchcock); true crimes like extortion, murder, larceny, adultery, double suicides, and vendettas—all were stock plot devices that were first exploited in the puppet and kabuki theatres. These “theatrical” devices found their way not only into Edo pulp fiction but also into such storytelling arts as kōshaku and rakugo.4 The enormous casts and convoluted...