Rakugo: Performing Comedy and Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Tokyo (review)

Everyone interested in Japanese popular culture must be aware by now of what is described as a comedy boom in the country. An extraordinary wave of interest in comedy and various kinds of humor is sweeping Japanese audiences, who treat favorite comedians like pop stars. The phenomenon is not limited to popular culture: Kansai University is preparing to open a center for laughter and humor research and will start offering a bachelor degree course in humor studies in a few years. And while the number of foreign scholars interested in Japanese humor is still small, there is growing interest in the phenomenon among Western Japanologists.

Of the several Japanese comedy genres, rakugo, the art of humorous storytelling, would appear to be particularly important for scholars and critics. Beside a huge range of publications in Japanese, a few articles, such as “Rakugo and Humor in Japanese Interpersonal Communication” by Kimie Ōshima, and a book, Rakugo: The Popular Narrative Art of Japan, by Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki are available in English.¹ However, in my opinion, these publications do not really tackle the question of how a classical comedy style still works in contemporary Japan. Instead, they tend to make rakugo appear like a relic from the Edo period that is still popular with modern Japanese. For readers with only vague ideas about Japanese comedians, based for example on Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or a little familiarity with Beat Takeshi (also known as Kitano Takeshi), such introductions to rakugo can easily lead to the conclusion that it is an anachronism and to its relegation to the status of an old-fashioned wonderland.

Lorie Brau’s book, Rakugo: Performing Comedy and Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Tokyo, takes a new approach to the topic. Although Brau does not directly criticize earlier English writings on rakugo, one gets the impression that she is definitely aware of their shortcomings. She sets out to answer the question of how it is possible for an art form, one that has existed for hundreds of years and is proud of its traditions, to survive in the present. Brau therefore examines rakugo not as a relic but, as mentioned in the title, as “cultural heritage.” The keyword “cultural heritage” refers here to a concept outlined by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Brau quotes Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s definition of cultural heritage as a “new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.” It extends “museological values and methods (collection, documentation, preservation, presentation, evaluation, and interpretation) to living persons, their knowledge, practices, artifacts, social worlds, and life spaces” and endows endangered or outmoded cultures with “a second life as an exhibition of itself” (p. 4). Using this concept as the basis of her study, Brau is able to look at the specific tension between past and present within rakugo.

A unique aspect of Brau’s approach to rakugo is her own entrance into the world of rakugo as a pupil of a rakugo master. Thus, she does not investigate this world purely from the outside. She gained access to places and experienced things not possible for other scholars without losing sight of her academic interest in rakugo.

The first chapter of the book, with the title “Ethnographer as Mummy-Hunter” in reference to the Japanese proverb “Miiratori ga miira ni naru” (The mummy-hunter becomes a mummy) (p. 11), leads the reader into Brau’s personal approach by describing first her search for a rakugo master who would accept her and then her experiences as a pupil. The reader gains good insight into the hierarchical structures of the artists’ world and the atmosphere of their life and work. Right from the beginning of the book, Brau builds the reader’s confidence in her unique insights and abilities on this topic and heightens the reader’s curiosity regarding what is to come.

The...