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: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost is about kabuki, a four-century-old major genre in Japanese theatre, paying special attention to one of the most popular works in its repertoire, Ghost Stories at Yotsuya by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755–1829): how it has been received since its premiere in 1825 (through today) and what it has meant to the history of kabuki (and beyond). As indicated in its acknowledgments (vii), the book is based on the author’s dissertation (“Shades of Jealousy: Tôkaidô Yotsuya kaidan and the Cultural Imagination of Female Ghosts in Early Nineteenth-Century Japanese Theater and Literature,” Columbia University, 2009). Since the author chose not to make its contents available through the dissertation database, the present book is in effect the first opportunity for many to read this work. The value of this publication is thus far greater than many other books based on dissertations available via the database. As such, this meticulous study of Ghost Stories at Yotsuya is a welcome and attractive addition to kabuki studies and Japan studies.

One of the strong suits of this book lies in the wide range of sources it cites, which come from roughly three clusters of materials: primary sources on kabuki from the Edo era (1600–1867), so-called “Western” theory, and contemporary scholars’ work on kabuki mostly from Japan and North America. In particular, the variety of materials in the first category is impressive. Using such rich materials, both linguistic and pictorial, the introduction provides readers with a colorful reconstruction of how Ghost Stories at Yotsuya was appreciated by audiences in 1825 Edo, followed by chapter 1, “Presenting the Past,” which furnishes the theoretical agenda and contexts of the book. One example of these is how kabuki dramaturgy utilizes the “past.” Kabuki’s composition methodology uses the two factors of “world” (sekai) and “device” (shukô), the former of which provides a play with a paradigm established in the past and delineates the frame and context of the play. The book pays suitable attention to other fields such as poetry. The connection is effective and appropriate, for in poetry traditions there is a comparable technique called “taking-an-original-poem” (honkadori), with which a poet is expected to allude to a preexisting poem in creating a new one (72). This is important, and the book is correct in paying attention to literature. (In fact, the use of the “past” in premodern Japan was even more far-reaching than suggested by the book, well beyond theatre and literature, carrying epistemological weight for the concept of “knowledge” and its creation.) The ensuing three chapters, clustered together as part 2, present an attractive, detailed analysis of what Ghost Stories at Yotsuya meant in 1825 or thereabouts, with the focuses of production systems (chapter 2) as well as female ghosts and female bodies (chapters 3 and 4). The fifth and final chapter surveys various derivative works born out of Ghost Stories at Yotsuya in the twentieth century.

A crucial premise of the book, underlying it in its entirety, is that “audiences at the time [audiences living in 1825 or thereabouts, i.e., those who saw and/or could see the premiere of Ghost Stories at Yotsuya] knew very well that on the kabuki stage, nothing was ever fixed: if a kabuki play outlived its first production, it would inevitably be reworked, transformed into something new. By the same token, every production was inevitably a reworking, a transformation, of earlier material” (6). This is a defining proposition appearing throughout the book (e.g., pp. 8, 42, 72–73, 119), which recognizes “the nature of Edo kabuki as a process” (11) as opposed to something that can be studied “as a fixed text” (9), based...