Kabuki Costume by Ruth M. Shaver (review)

1967 BOOK REVIEWS 455 censorship of the theater, one at the end of the Edo period and the other in the postwar period by the U. S. Occupation Forces. The Confucian-oriented Tokugawa government had always looked askance at theater and tried without much success to impose numerous restrictions. However in 1841 Grand Councilor Mizuno Tadakuni began to implement an unprecedentedly severe supressive theater -policy. Three chief reasons are given for this crack-down; corruption of public morals, inflation and fire-hazard. Mizuno moved the three major Kabuki theaters to the outskirts of Edo, cut down to one third the spiraling salaries of star-actors, and set stringent rules on theater expenditures and construction. Mizuno regarded an actor as a moral "germ-carrier" who contaminated good citizens and so insisted that he be "quarantined." The deep hat like an inverted bucket that an actor used to conceal his identity on the streets reminds one of the sun-glasses movie-actors use these days, but the important difference is that the hat for an actor was not voluntary but a government-enforced anti·contamination measure. The American censorship on theater which lasted only two years was a good deal different from any that had preceded it in that it was strictly ideological. Kabuki plays which unabashedly glorified the feudal concept of loyalty and revenge such as Terakoya and Chushingura were all placed under a ban. The author tells in detail the circumstances in which the ban was enforced and then rapidly lifted. He emphatically attributes the quick removal of the censorship to an American officer, Faubion Bowers, whom a celebrated Bunraku-performer was reported to have described as the "savior of Bunraku." Nippon Engeki Bunkashiwa is neither the product of scholarship nor does it pretend to be such. It tries to provide light and interesting side-lights to the Japanese theater and it does it well. It is difficult to think of another book which includes such diverting but typically Meiji period eccentricities as the Kabuki plays in which Cassio kills Othello by mistake or Hamlet commits a very honorable "harakiri" at the end. KINYA TsuRUTA University of Toronto KABUKI COSTUME, by Ruth M. Shaver, Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Ig66, pp. 396. Price $22.50. This is the first book in English on Kabuki costume; it is handsomely, in fact lavishly got up; there are 252 illustrations, 110 in color; the author, according to the dust jacket, spent fourteen years in Japan studying the subject. It's therefore unpleasant to have to report that the book is less than satisfactory. During those fourteen years, Mrs. Shaver assembled a formidable amount of material, and she gives us all of it, useful or not. Indeed, lack of organization and sense of proportion is apparent throughout. Part I, Historical Background (pP. 33-109) is a sketchy presentation of materials, period by period, more accurately and fully treated in several other books, and it deals only partially with costume. The illustrations are referred to in the text as "Figures"; the number of the page on which they appear is not given. And so if one wants to look at the illustrations referred to in the section on Courtesan Costumes (pp. Igg202 ), he must leaf through the volume until he comes upon Fig. 60 on p. Igl, Fig. 204 on p. 325, Fig. 61 on p. Igll, Fig. 205 on p. 325. He will find, in the process, that the information accompanying the illustrations unnecessarily repeats that given in the main body of the text. 456 MODERN DRAMA February The most distressing part of the work, however, is the color illustrations done by Soma Akira and ata Gako. The colors are absolutely wrong, giving a false impression of how the costumes appear in the theater. The figures are oddly diminished, though on stage they create the effect of being larger than life. In addition, characters are invariably shown in isolation, not in the ensembles in which they appear in the theater; this is also a falsification, for much of the impact of Kabuki costumes derives from the relationships among them. In view of the quantity of prints available and the present...