Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan Edited by Keller Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki (review)

Publishing the Stage focuses on the complex interrelation between commercial publishing and the two major theater forms that developed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, ko-jōruri (old jōruri) puppet theater and kabuki. This collection of papers is the result of a March 2011 conference at the University of Colorado Boulder that explored the theater and publishing in Edo- and Meiji-period Japan.

Born at approximately the same time and place, the early modern publishing industry and the new theatrical genres spread from early-seventeenth-century Kyoto, to Osaka and Edo, and, finally, to other regional centers, developing and thriving together. While reading through the eleven papers in this collection (four in Japanese and seven in English, all with abstracts in both languages), I found myself returning more than once to the editors’ introduction for its very helpful overview of what Keller Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki call the “complicated symbiotic relationship” between early modern developments in the theater and the burgeoning trade in theater books and illustrations (p. 2).

The first two papers deal, either wholly or in part, with the puppet theater. Janice Shizue Kanemitsu’s paper takes up the relatively neglected art of Kinpira ko-jōruri, named after the fierce warrior, Sakata no Kinpira. This style of puppet theater developed in Edo during the 1650s and provided a major impetus for publishing in Edo, which gradually overtook Kyoto as the center of jōruri activities. Texts of the plays were transmitted back to the Kamigata region (Kyoto and Osaka) and adapted for performance there, resulting in what Kanemitsu calls the “transregional hybridization” of the theatrical genre through print (p. 15). Next, in her study of the Chūjōhime legend, Hioki Atsuko explores the connections between sermons, printed texts, pictorial biographies, and sekkyō-jōruri. A version of this legend for the puppet theater plays a relatively minor part in the complex interplay between different genres. The paper contains a valuable analysis of the relationship between pictorial representations and literary motifs.

The collection then moves on to the subject of kabuki and publishing. Katherine Saltzman-Li provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding “books on the theater” (gekisho; p. 55) by discussing Akama Ryō’s influential schema of texts for insiders (theater professionals) versus those for outsiders (fans). She identifies how the distinction was blurred later in the Edo period as supposedly secret books gradually became available for sale. For developments in the kabuki theater during the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods, researchers can draw on the written comments by foreign visitors and the illustrations of theater interiors in works like Aimé Humbert’s Le Japon Illustré (Hachette, 1870). Examples of both appear in the paper by Yamashita Takumi, who analyzes a variety of impressions by early spectators, beginning with Edward Sylvester Morse and Sir Rutherford Alcock in English and followed by lesser-known sources in German and French.

Three papers are devoted to the different ways that actors were represented on or off the stage. Matsuba Ryōko gives a clear overview of the long tradition of yakusha ehon (actor print books) and nigao-e (portraits), well illustrated with examples of both. Yamashita Noriko analyzes an example of yakusha mitate (actor prints) from 1852 in which the poems of Japan’s thirty-six “immortal” poetic geniuses (Sanjūrokkasen) are playfully associated with particular kabuki characters and actors. Intriguingly, Yamashita finds that some actors are represented in roles in which they never actually performed. Akiko Yano shows how the artist Ryūkōsai Jokei developed techniques first in realistic portraiture and then in the representation of actors’ bodily movements through sketches that depicted them naked or in loincloths—an idea that may have been derived from Western pictorial methods. The sketches analyzed by Yano were discovered in 2010 after having been lost for eighty years...