Kabuki Plays on Stage: Brilliance and Bravado, 1697-1766, and: Kabuki Plays on Stage: Villainy and Vengeance, 1773-1799, and: Kabuki Plays on Stage: Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864 (review)

Kabuki, as James Brandon himself has said of traditional Asian theatre in general, derives its vitality mainly from the prowess of its actors. In the four centuries since Okuni's riverbank performances, kabuki has become one of the most technically intricate and visually sumptuous theatrical forms in the world. However, appreciation of kabuki's spectacle has tended to eclipse recognition of its literary achievements, both in Japan and abroad. Rehearsal scripts (daihon or gikyoku), which form the largest body of written kabuki texts, were not published. Formal scripts, when written, were often anonymous or collaborative, and playwrights were not mentioned in official theatrical records until the late 18th century. It was only as the bunraku puppet theatre declined at the turn of the 19th century that kabuki drama began to move beyond mere adaptation of puppet plays. When Ichikawa Danjuro VII compiled what remains the most famous collection of kabuki plays in 1832, Kabuki juhachi ban (Eighteen Kabuki Plays), it was not for the sake of the plays themselves so much as to establish a repertoire for his family's aragoto acting style.

The trend, since the early 19th century, to present excerpted scenes rather than complete plays arguably detracted from the appreciation of playwriting as well. Imagine how differently Shakespeare might be viewed if rather than performing Hamlet, troupes merely performed the gravedigger scene alongside scenes from plays by Dryden and Shaw! Whereas the written texts of noh plays have held abiding interest for Western playwrights and directors, and Chikamatsu Monzaemon (who, though he did write kabuki plays, wrote more for bunraku) has been hailed as "the Japanese Shakespeare," kabuki's foremost playwrights are largely unknown in the West. How many in the West, for example, know the work of the two most celebrated 19th-century playwrights, Tsuruya Nanboku IV and Kawatake Mokuami, who between them wrote nearly 500 kabuki plays? Out of approximately 300 kabuki plays that are still performed (and many more that are not) only about 20 have been available in English.

James Brandon and Samuel Leiter have done much in the past three decades to promote this neglected dramatic literature in the English-speaking world.

Brandon's Kabuki: Five Classic Plays (1975, 1992) and Leiter's The Art of Kabuki: Famous Plays in Performance (1979, 2000) have been the standard collections of kabuki texts in translation for quite some time. Their new anthology, Kabuki Plays on Stage, whose 51 plays are distributed across four volumes (the first three of which are reviewed here), nearly quadruples the number of kabuki plays previously available in English. Each volume contains 12 to 14 selections, each of which consists of a series of commonly performed scenes from a longer play. All the selections are included based on continuing popularity and relevance to the repertoire; the plays are arranged chronologically according to the dates of their premieres. All are new translations of previously untranslated works, though some are closely linked to other translated pieces. For example, a different selection of scenes from The Ghost Stories at Yotsuya on the Tokaido (translated in vol. 3), appear in Karen Brazell's Traditional Japanese Theater:An Anthology of Plays (1998).

The contents of the first two volumes are fairly evenly divided between the Edo (Tokyo) and Kamigata (Osaka...