Contemporary Japanese Women's Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls' Aesthetics by Nobuko Anan (review)

It has been long since the Japanese media and scholarly circles began discussing the cuteness (kawaii) of Japanese culture. There is no doubt that cuteness is a double-edged tool for Japanese women. Can we really call the girls of the theatre group YUBIWA Hotel in the cover photo of the book cute and innocent? Am I the only one who feels the strong will behind their Mona Lisa "uncatchable smile"?

Nobuko Anan, calling herself "a girl researcher," examines what she calls "girls' aesthetics" in Japanese contemporary performance and visual arts. The incisively chosen examples for the monograph support the originality of her argument for girls' aesthetics. The book is a precious source for English-speaking scholars who would like to know about Japanese women's creativity in the 1970s and onward. The examples vary from two-dimensional manga to three-dimensional dance, theatre, film, and visual artwork. Her analytical approaches derive from a variety of fields, including theatre and performance studies, history, sociology, psychology, and gender studies. She interrogates new concepts of female bodies referring to critical theorists from the West as well as Japan.

Girls in Anan's book "are not necessarily female adolescents" (p. 2). Anan asserts the eternity of the liminality of girlhood, which is not just the transitional period to womanhood. She regards two stereotypical strategies of being girls, innocence and purity, as "nonconformity to the patriarchal, heteronormative social structure" (p. 2). Girls may not "question dominant [male] gender and sexual ideology" directly but "reject the masculinist notion of subjecthood," avoid being materialized, and stay incontestably political (p. 3). Anan postulates that the girls' aesthetics has "emerged as a resistance to the dominant gender and sexual ideology in the modern period" (p. 20)—good wives, wise mothers. This prewar girls' aesthetics, according to Anan, was carried over to postwar Japan after coeducation was introduced during the US occupation, and in the 1950s girls introduced a new strategy to feminize males in their imagination. In the 1970s girls were rediscovered as consumers in a variety of fields including "fashion, manga, films, and theatrical and social performance" (p. 24).

The book thematically divides Japanese artists and their works into four chapters. Chapter 1 explores the conception of time and space of girls' aesthetics, highlighting two theatre directors—Hitsujiya Shirotama and Kisaragi Koharu—and a visual artist, Yanagi Miwa. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the characteristics of girls' aesthetics, focusing on gender, sexuality, and bodies originating from girls' manga—Hagio Moto's The Heart of Thomas and Ikeda Riyoko's The Rose of Versailles—and discuss their stage and film adaptations. The last chapter contemplates the all-female dance group KATHY.

The girls portrayed in chapter 1 commonly create an ahistorical and closed imaginary space and "resist their reduction to reproduction functions" (p. 65). Anan demonstrates how Hitsujiya converted the 1997 version of Lear written by the Japanese female playwright Kishida Rio and directed by the Singaporean male director Ong Keng Sen into her 2004 version. Kishida and Ong focus on violence of Older Daughter (equivalent of Goneril and Regan) against Old Man (equivalent of King Lear) to seize his throne. Meanwhile, Hitsujiya's girls use murder and violence "not to acquire patriarchal power, but to avoid losing the status of girls" (p. 30). According to Anan, Hitsujiya's girls do not share Kishida's generation's leftist critique against the patriarchal role of the Japanese emperor, but present their "psychological pains" against masculinist society and indifference to the "oppressive reality" of becoming housewives and mothers (p. 33). Hitsujiya's girls fantasize about killing their husbands and reject childbirth. In the last scene of the play, girls murder a young mother who has given birth to a baby. Anan regards it as Freudian melancholia representing a symbolic "suicide of a melancholic" as well as a way to be "an eternal woman" in their imagination (pp. 31–37).

In Kisaragi's DOLL (1983), Anan discovers something...