Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost by Satoko Shimazaki (review)

Satoko Shimazaki's Edo Kabuki in Transition is a major work of scholarship on the culture of Japan's early modern period (1603–1868). Reflecting—and contributing to—the continuing vitality of kabuki as an area of academic inquiry, Shimazaki's analysis carefully builds on prior studies and draws from a wide range of primary source material. A focus on Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan by Edo kabuki playwright Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755–1829) unifies the study. (The play's title is usually shortened, as it is in the book, to Yotsuya kaidan, (Ghost Stories at Yotsuya). Making the case that kabuki during the early modern period should be seen as an ongoing cultural process in which plays were mutable events rather than fixed texts, Shimazaki convincingly argues that the debut of Yotsuya kaidan on stage two centuries ago stands for, as she says, "The beginning of the end of kabuki as generations of theatergoers had known it" (p. 2). The advent of avenging female ghost characters, represented by Yotsuya kaidan's Oiwa, marked the transition from a kabuki that "created its present through historical samurai worlds" to one emphasizing expressions of "emerging early modern selfhood" (pp. 29, 28). The book culminates in an examination of the twentieth-century drive to create a canon of kabuki plays in an authoritative, printed form amenable to reading and study—and, crucially, from Shimazaki's perspective, no longer subject to the open-ended processes of actor-centered playmaking that typified kabuki during the Edo period. Inclusion of Yotsuya kaidan in the canon has helped ensure its popularity—which has been amplified through adaptations in a variety of media—to this day.

The first production of Yotsuya kaidan, starring Onoe Kikugorō III (1784–1849) in multiple roles, including Oiwa, was a box-office hit when it opened at the end of the seventh month of 1825 at Edo's Nakamura-za theatre. The dramatic imagery of the play—epitomized by the spectacular stage effects created to depict Oiwa—resonated on the streets of Edo, where ghost tales circulated in numerous printed forms. By presenting this bold new work in the seventh month, Nanboku challenged not just the significance of the eleventh-month kaomise ("face-showing") production as the long-established start of the kabuki theatre year but, implicitly, the entire raison d'être of the Edo kabuki calendar. Even more important, as Shimazaki contends, the productions of Yotsuya kaidan that followed during the last decades of the early modern period signaled a move away from a kabuki dramaturgy based on the framing "worlds" (sekai) of samurai historical narratives. Along with other ghost plays and different types of dramas crafted by Nanboku and his fellow playwrights, Yotsuya kaidan opened up new modes of expression suited to the changing times. The figure of the ghost, as embodied in the character of Oiwa from the time Yotsuya kaidan was introduced to audiences, "was interesting because it could be freed from the basic set of Confucian relationships … that were so important to both actual society and the kabuki plays based in conventional sekai" (pp. 27–28).

The core argument is that kabuki theatres were a space for the production of "community memory" during the early modern period and that kabuki plays in text form became touchstones of "national memory" in the modern period. Yotsuya kaidan, for which, according to Shimazaki, more than twenty critical editions can now be found, is a pivot point in that transition—and its prime exemplar. The Nanboku play became a key instrument of efforts to foster a shared past for all of Japan through kabuki, which, "[i]n terms of the number of plays staged and the size of its audiences … is still the most vibrant theatrical form in Japan" (p. 238). To take this point a step further, I would add that the success of...