Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative by Alison McQueen Tokita (review)

Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative. By Alison McQueen Tokita. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, Surrey, 2015. xv, 294 pages + CD. $124.95.

Although it may not be immediately apparent from its title, Alison Tokita’s new book is principally a work of ethnomusicology. It does not focus on the actual singers of tales, nor, to a great extent, on the performed narratives of those singers, but rather on the musicological aspects of performance in the medieval katarimono (recitative) genres of kōshiki, Heike, nō, and kōwaka, as well as the Edo-period theatrical traditions of jōruri and kabuki, in the tenth through twentieth centuries. The book title is allusive to Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press, 1960), as well as to Marshall Pihl’s The Korean Singers of Tales (Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1994), and it is inspired by Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s groundbreaking work on oral narrative, which, as Tokita explains, has led to “a world-wide revolution since the 1960s in the study of oral literature” (p. 2). Tokita’s volume does much to fill a grievous gap in our understanding of various forms of premodern Japanese literature and drama, studies of which have all too often disregarded the important roles of music and orality in their historical development.

Japanese Singers of Tales is divided into seven chapters. The first serves as an introduction; the second is devoted to the musical Buddhist preaching of kōshiki shōmyō; the third to the musical recitation of Heike monogatari; the fourth to kōwaka and nō; the fifth to jōruri recitation and the jōruri puppet theater; the sixth to bungo-kei jōruri recitation in kabuki performance; and the seventh to nagauta and Ōzatsuma-bushi recitation in kabuki. These chapters are followed by a five-page epilogue and supplemented by a 77-minute CD of exquisite recordings that are amply discussed in the text. Each chapter is generally divided into three major parts: an introductory section devoted to a relatively broad discussion of the genre in question, including “the historical factors which led to the emergence of the narrative, the people who contributed to its formation, those who performed it, the social context, patronage, audiences, and the relation between orality and textuality” (p. 22); a section titled “Generic Musical Analysis,” which tends to explicate musical structures, phrasing, melody patterns, and substyles; and a section including one or more “case studies”—illustrative examples of particular pieces, recordings of which are included on the CD—with extensive tables, outlines, linguistic and musical transcriptions, translations, and detailed explications. Although the introductory section of every chapter is interesting and accessible to the general reader, the generic musical analyses and case studies tend to be highly technical, and they may be daunting to all those without adequate musicological backgrounds. Tokita seems to have recognized this, for she explains in her introduction that “each chapter is organized so that readers interested in only literary aspects can pick these up easily from chapter to chapter, while those interested in musical aspects can follow the musical sections” (p. 22).

Tokita gets off to an ambitious start, arguing on the first page of her first chapter that “the study of Japanese performed narratives opens up the possibility of an alternative cultural history of Japan” (p. 1). She begins by invoking Barbara Ruch’s notion of “an incipient ‘national literature,’” as well as Benedict Anderson’s related and more famous notion of “imagined communities,” to argue for the significance of enduring musical narrative traditions in the formation of a Japanese “shared cultural heritage” (p. 1). Tokita’s principal argument is that “despite the apparently discrete nature of the individual genres” that she discusses—genres whose works she refers to collectively as the Heike-jōruri stream of narratives—those seemingly disparate genres in fact constitute “a continuous tradition of musically performed narrative in Japan from the tenth to the twentieth centuries” (p. 2). Tokita acknowledges significant change over time in the form of a...