Manga Discourse in Japanese Theater: The Location of Noda Hideki's Yume no Yūminsha (review)

As the popularity of manga in the West increases—U.S. newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are carrying a manga strip in their Sunday comic sections—Yoshiko Fukushima's Manga Discourse in Japanese Theatre offers a timely investigation into manga's broader impact and significance for popular culture, especially theatre. Fukushima's analysis of manga's relationship with shōgekijō (Japanese little theatre) from the 1960s to the 1980s focuses on the work of Noda Hideki and his Yume no Y minsha troupe. While the book principally deals with Japanese theatre, it is Fukushima's use of "manga discourse" to express the shared motifs of sh gekij and manga that is most innovative. Fukushima's exploration of the five key qualities of manga discourse—playfulness and seriousness, copresence of visual and verbal texts, absorbent nature of stories, codification and codified realism, and closeness of reader/audience to text/performance—sets up a richly contextualized insight into Japanese aesthetics. With manga discourse Fukushima explains both the form of manga and the relationship between the audience and the text, setting up a template that can then be applied to other forms, such as drama. With this laid out, Fukushima is able to mine the ideological background of postwar and contemporary Japanese aesthetics. Noda's Yume no Y minsha troupe, with its avantgarde-meets-popular culture aesthetic, provides Fukushima with the perfect case study to explore the postmodern issues raised by the ludic and infantile yet ideological and serious elements of manga.

The central question of Fukushima's book addresses how Noda and his Yume no Y minsha troupe became so popular and came to represent its time and audience—particularly the youth of Japan's 1980s "bubble" economy. Arguing that the impact of manga extends beyond the popular appeal of comics in Japan, Fukushima points out that by the height of manga's popularity in the mid-1980s, it had become a powerfully expressive and well-known language for a postwar generation. That is, comic books had come to express the dominant language for Japanese youth—one that privileges "seeing images and listening to sounds" (42) rather than reading words. Noda's work shared this new dominant language and was able to articulate the desires and imaginings of a generation through it.

The book is divided into five chapters: The first two discuss aspects of manga and shōgekijō in terms of common social and artistic motifs; the last three review the history of Japanese theatre from premodern times to modernization and Westernization, to conclude with the shōgekijō movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapters 4 and 5 offer an analysis of Noda's Yume no Y minsha troupe and its significance within modern Japanese theatre through discussions of its audience, management, and Noda's performance theory.

One of the major achievements of Fukushima's book is the justice it does to the complexity of Noda's work through careful use of primary and secondary sources as well as relevant theories within postmodernism and semiotics. Fukushima's interviews with Noda himself and actors in his troupe provide a substantial insight into key events in Yume no Y minsha history. Fukushima's reading of the continuities, influences, and differences between various performance traditions and pop-cultural influences reveals an analysis that is sensitive to the whole fabric of Japanese arts. In particular, she maps out a number of key tensions within contemporary theatre: the struggles between the experimental and the commercial, the serious and playful, and the avantgarde and popular. The solutions Noda develops out of his negotiation of these tensions provides an informative and inspiring end to Fukushima's book.

Fukushima's meticulous translation of sections from Noda's scripts effectively conveys the complexity of Noda's wordplay to a non-Japanese audience. Each...