Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance (review)

Why is there a picture of a nô actor on the cover of a book that professes to be about modern Japanese theatre and performance? This baffled me until further reading clarified that the picture was of one of the book's contributors, Zvika Serper, appearing as the eponymous character in the nô play Jinen koji. Masked and garbed in the traditional cloak, divided skirt, and tabi (bifurcated white socks), nothing distinguishes him from a conventional performer. Serper's essay is one of several that relate how traditional forms have been appropriated and often reworked for the modern stage—an important chapter in the history of Japanese and international performance. Yet, given the plethora of outstanding visual material from the contemporary period, a picture of a nô performer, even a non-Japanese one, is misrepresentative of what is otherwise a spectacular collection of essays by many leading scholars of Japanese theatre.

If I were to speculate as to why the editors decided to use such a photo (other than to say it was an eleventh-hour decision), I would suggest that it has something to do with how several of the essays define Japanese modern theatre by stating what it is not. As David Jortner points out in his introduction, shingeki, or Japan's modern theatre of the twentieth century, has often been defined in the "negative": definitions often posit that "shingeki is everything that kabuki is not" (xi). I would argue that, by extension, nô is also viewed as the antithesis of shingeki.

But to read on, several essays clarify that the modern and contemporary theatre has a much more complex relationship with these traditional forms. Although early practitioners of shingeki sought to break entirely from them, traces of kabuki, nô, and bunraku—to name just a few premodern genres—have crept back into the mix, so it is not surprising that ten of the seventeen essays in this edited volume deal in some regard with how the contemporary theatre has wrestled with traditional forms. In their respective essays, John Gillespie, Laurence Kominz, and Carol Martin analyze how, in their individual works, playwrights Sakate Yôji, Mishima Yukio, and Miyagi Satoshi adapted the techniques and structure of nô and bunraku plays. Serper shows how his recent production of S. Ansky's The Dybbuk borrows from nô and kabuki without strictly imitating them, while Jonah Salz discusses several "super-kyôgen" plays, all of which are newly commissioned scripts that critique contemporary institutions but are performed according to the conventions of classical kyôgen. As if to further underscore the importance of the past to the present, the only play translation included in the volume is of a "super-kyôgen script," Mutsugorô (Mudskippers).

Several of the essays do, in fact, leave behind the traditional theatre altogether. David Goodman analyzes four intriguing plays by the postwar playwright Akimoto Matsuyo, John Swain probes the ambiguous wartime confession of Senda Koreya, and Guohe Zheng ponders how the play A Woman's Life (Onna no isshô), commissioned as a propaganda piece for the Japanese government during World War II, continued to receive praise during and after the Occupation when the ideology espoused in the original production was considered anathema to the goals of postwar Japan.

No fewer than three essays discuss the work of Terayama Shûji, the avant-garde dramatist. Whether he deserves such a prominent place in a volume that, by necessity, must omit so many other important practitioners of the modern stage is a matter for debate. As in her recent book, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei suggests an alternative framework to Freud's Oedipus complex in understanding Terayama's work, while Steven Clark analyzes Terayama's tours to Amsterdam during the 1970s, locating the moment when the avant-garde became international and Terayama's—and therefore Japan's—seminal place in it.

Although an essay on butô is to be expected in any account of modern Japanese theatre, perhaps the...