Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater by Maki Isaka (review)

Often hailed as an epitome of refined femininity, onnagata have been customarily known to enthusiasts of Japanese culture as male actors who specialize in playing female characters in Kabuki theatre. However, in Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater, Maki Isaka adamantly challenges this conventional understanding of onnagata and argues compellingly that the historical treatment of them is far more complex than previously theorized.

Interested in “the idea of gender as it was manifest in the context of kabuki theater” (xiii; emphasis in original), Isaka investigates how female-role performers in Kabuki have constructed their gender identities both onstage and off in the theatre’s quatercentenary existence, and how the conceptualization of onnagata’s femininity has altered over time. The main body of the monograph consists of four parts. In part 1 (introduction and chapter 1) Isaka scrutinizes the inception of onnagata artistry at the dawn of the Edo era (1603–1868), when the first generations of onnagata adopted futanarihira (androgyny) aesthetics from wakashu (young boys) Kabuki female-role players, who were youthful practitioners of samurai manhood. By highlighting the influence that nascent onnagata received from wakashu, the author argues that before they were recognized as an epitome of ideal femininity, onnagata were known as players exhibiting military masculinity or androgynous allures.

In the four chapters that comprise part 2, Isaka focuses on the eighteenth century, when epochal onnagata like Yoshizawa Ayame I (1673–1729) and Segawa Kikunojŏ I (1693–1749) and their treatises on onnagata acting became canonized. The author perceptively notes that unlike their early Edo precursors, eighteenth-century onnagata constructed their gender roles both onstage and off by faithfully imitating women, thus presenting coherent femininity transcending the boundary of the stage; at the same time, female spectators, through Kabuki performances and theatre-related publications, emulated the paradigm of femininity that onnagata practiced. Hence in eighteenth-century Japan, women and onnagata actively circulated femininity through mutual imitation.

In part 3 (chapters 6–7) Isaka turns her attention to a neglected subject in Kabuki history—namely, the so-called women-actors (onna yakusha). The author’s study of the fin-de-siècle female onnagata Ichikawa Kumehachi I (ca.1846–1913) convincingly argues that the erasure of women-actors in modern Kabuki historiography is not because they were not artistically competent, but instead because the renewed understanding of onnagata’s femininity after the advent of modernity sought to draw a distinction between their femininity and that of women, rather than underscoring an affinity between the two. For this reason, female onnagata like Kumehachi were abjected in order to make possible male onnagata’s monopoly in the Kabuki world.

The author’s discussion of modern onnagata continues in part 4 (chapter 8 and epilogue), in which she discerningly notes that since the arrival of modernity, onnagata’s femininity has been considered to be essentially “artistic/artificial” and distinct from biological women’s “natural” femininity. The advent of the epistemological split between “natural” and “artistic/artificial” femininity facilitated what Isaka calls “the Foucauldian birth of onnagata,” a decisive moment marking the genesis of “onnagata as we know them today” (150).

The book’s primary contribution lies in the compelling challenge that it poses to some of the most fundamental beliefs and premises of existing onnagata scholarship and modern Kabuki historiography. Chief among these is her reconsideration of Yoshizawa Ayame’s influential treatise “The Words of Ayame.” Isaka concludes that despite having been heavily referenced by English-language scholarship since the 1950s, the purported remark by Ayame—that onnagata performance is not available to female actors—cannot in fact be located in the actor’s original treatise (7). Similarly, by pointing out the empirical oversights of Kabuki scholar Katherine Mezur’s well-known theorization of onnagata performance, which regards male genitalia as a prerequisite for onnagata acting, Isaka cogently contends that the theoretical negation of women’s legitimacy of performing onnagata, as in the work of Mezur, obscures the fact that female actors who...