NOTES ON RECENT READING:
Keller Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki’s (eds.) PUBLISHING THE STAGE: PRINT AND PERFORMANCE IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN (2011)
By Samuel L. Leiter
Readers familiar with my academic background
who may have perused the list I recently posted on Facebook of books I read last year
perhaps wondered why none of those 46 works dealt with Japanese theatre/culture.
After completing my book Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes
the previous year (published at the end of 2022), which required two years
of immersion in Japan-related research (in both Japanese and English), and then
having moved on to write Brooklyn Takes the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Theater
in the City of Churches (just published), I decided to remain within the borders
of Western theatre throughout 2023.
However, a new book published in
December—Jonathan E. Zwicker’s Kabuki’s Nineteenth Century: Stage and Print
in Early Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)—came
to my attention, stirring my Japanese theatre juices again; I quickly arranged
to review it formally for the 2025 issue of Impressions: The Journal of
the Japanese Art Society of America.
The subject of Prof. Zwicker’s book,
the relationship between print media and 19th-century kabuki, reminded
me of another book on my shelves, one I’ve had for years but never got around
to reading (more’s the pity, as noted later), that deals with related material although
written by multiple authors. I decided to read it as preparation for the new book
only to discover that Zwicker (UC Berkeley) has a chapter in it, one of which he
makes substantial use in his new publication.
The older book, Publishing the
Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan (Boulder, C0: Center for
Asian Studies, Boulder, CO, 2011, 247 pp.), was edited by Keller Kimbrough and
Satoko Shimazaki (on whose Columbia University doctoral committee I later served
as an outside advisor), using 11 papers delivered at the University of Colorado
conference that gave the publication its name. This is a scholarly collection obviously
aimed at a niche academic audience, its contributors coming from the US, Japan,
and the UK.
Kimbrough and Shimazaki provide a
useful introduction, which is followed by eight essays in English and three in
Japanese, each expanded from their originals. (Two of the original 13 papers didn’t
make it into the volume.) Helpfully, all the English-language writers use
Japanese transcriptions for names and titles (in both roman letters and Chinese
characters), albeit with occasional inconsistencies, and all the essays have an
abstract in both Japanese and English at the back of the book. The writing is
generally straightforward and accessible, although, as even Japanese culture
specialists will admit, there are so many names, terms, and titles it’s easy to
miss the forest for the trees. I, too, have been guilty of this unavoidable
situation. Fortunately, only one or two English-language participants stray somewhat
into theoretical denseness, requiring a bit more effort to comprehend their
points without falling asleep.
Given its subject, Publishing the
Stage benefits from the many black/white images it reproduces, but several
of these are too dimly printed to appreciate the commentary on them. Also, this
is a paperback-only publication and its construction is not of the highest
quality. Three days after I began reading it, the pages began to come loose
from the binding. The most serious drawback of this otherwise valuable book,
however, it its lack of an index.
Rather than attempt to describe the book’s
wide-ranging coverage, let me quote from Kimbrough and Shimazaki’s opening paragraph
in their introduction: “it seeks to examine the early-modern history of the
Japanese stage—in particular, the seventeenth-century ko-jōruri
古浄瑠 (“old,” or pre-Chikamatsu) puppet theater, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
kabuki歌舞伎—in
the context of commercial publishing, a thriving urban industry that by the
mid-1600s had become inextricably enmeshed in the evolving world of popular
entertainment.” A brief glimpse at roughly half the papers should suffice to
suggest what Kimbrough and Shimazaki are talking about.
I should mention that, while I’m in no
way as knowledgeable on the subject of Edo-period theatrical publications as are
the scholars in Publishing the Stage, interested readers may find useful
my essay, ““Kabuki, Its History as Seen in Ukiyo-e Prints,” for The Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese Woodblock
Prints, ed. by Amy Reigle Newland. Leiden, the Netherlands: Hotei (2006): 128-132.
Janice Shizue Kanemitsu’s article, “Guts
and Tears: Kinpira Jōruri and Its Textual Transformation,” deals with the pre-Chikamatsu
Monzaemon puppet theatre of the 17th century, focusing on works about
the enormously popular young superhero samurai Sakata no Kinpira, whose stories,
in the genre called Kinpira jōruri (jōruri being a term for puppet
theatre), became even more widely disseminated through the images and texts of the
new technologies of woodblock printing. These works were part of a movement in
which heroic figures were involved in numerous prequels and sequels, not unlike
those of the Star Wars spinoffs, both in the Kamigata region (Osaka/Kyoto)
and Edo, the printed texts themselves influencing what was performed in their
wake.
Following Hioki Atsuko’s “Unfolding
Chūjōhime Lore: Following Leads from the Painted Life of Chūjōhime at the Taima
Temple Nakanobō Cloister,” the least theatre-related essay in the book, we arrive
at Katherine Saltzman-Li’s “Kabuki Knowledge: Professional Manuscripts and
Commercial Texts on the Art of Kabuki.” This essay explores the wide range of materials
that explained kabuki to both specialists or insiders, including “secret”
traditions, and to the wide audience of kabuki fans who wanted to know everything
they could about the theatre, much of which was presented in illustrated guides.
Only the puppet theatre published its scripts, so kabuki fans had to do with
ancillary publications that provided illustrated plot summaries and other
methods of communicating what plays presented. For a good idea of what a 19th-century
guidebook picturing stage techniques (including quick changes) looks like, see
my article “What Really Happens Backstage (Okyôgen Gakuya no Honsetsu):
A Nineteenth-Century Kabuki Document” Theatre Survey 38 (Fall 1997).
108-128. To my knowledge, it’s the only English-language article of its kind.
Given the intrinsic interest in the backstage/onstage techniques of kabuki,
something along the same lines for a different document might have been valuable
in Publishing the Stage.
Next up is Yamashita Takumi’s “Kabuki
in Late Nineteenth-Century European and American Publications.” In Japanese
with healthy dollops of English quotes, it comes as a surprise because it treats
precisely the topic that informs my book Meiji Kabuki. Hioki briefly
examines only a handful of writings by the few foreigners who commented on
their experiences at kabuki in the 1850s and 1860s; my book—which includes
the writers cited by Yamashita, but much more fully—surveys the entire Edo period
but goes into depth about the Meiji period (1868-1912). Seeing it here made me kick
myself for having overlooked it (even as it sat so close to my desk) when I was
doing my research.
“Publishing Illustrated Edo Actor
Books,” by Matsura Ryōko, in Japanese, covers the phenomenon of actor picture
books of several major artist schools, revealing how these books of actor pictures
were received, what their goals were, how the artists were involved in the
theatre world they depicted, and the way in which the portraits came to move
from stylized representations to more accurate ones of the actors they
depicted.
Following Yamashita Noriko’s “Late Edo-Period
Formulations of Actor Mitate Prints: The Case of Portraits of the Thirty-Six
Poetic Geniuses,” in Japanese, is Akiko Yano’s “Capturing the Body: Ryūkōsai’s
Notes on ‘Realism’ in Representing Actors on Stage,” in which we learn about
the relative lifelikeness of the actor portraits of Ryūkōsai
Jokei, the late 18th-century Osaka artist who introduced full color
woodblock prints of actors, although he was actually an amateur with another
source of income. A long-lost work representing his artistic methods, rediscovered
in 2010, is a principal part of the discussion, its contents displaying his
belief that, before an actor could be properly illustrated, he must first be
drawn naked and only then have his costume added.
Andrew Gerstle, perhaps the book’s best-known
scholar of actor prints (Osaka’s in particular), provides “Creating Celebrity:
Poetry in Osaka Actor Surimono and Prints,” in which he explains the connections of printed
materials to kabuki’s need for publicity and financial support, with
actor prints being of particular value in creating the kind of celebrity that would
draw crowds. The differences between Edo and Kamigata play a part in this
discussion, with Kamigata being less commercially oriented than its eastern theatrical
counterpart. The rivalry between two Kamigata stars, Arashi Kichisaburō II and
Nakamura Utaemon II, plays an important role in the essay, particularly with
regard to the place of the poetry written on prints.
Adam Kern’s essay, “Kabuki Plays on
Stage—and Comicbook [sic] Pictures on Stage—in Edo-Period Japan”
examines the relationship between woodblock actor prints and their subjects in
terms of the differences between what he calls a “reflection hypothesis” and its
obverse, a “constructionist hypothesis.” These are too complex to describe here
but they are essentially differentiated by the degree to which kabuki-related
texts and images accurately reflect either textual or performative aspects, privileging
page to stage, or instead help “to construct the stage by advertising,
celebrating, memorializing even parodying . . . its various aspects.” Kern also
questions the centrality of kabuki to Japanese popular culture during
the Edo period, when such forms as the comic books known as kibyōshi—Kern’s
specialty—held similarly potent cultural significance.
Skipping Robert Goree’s “Publishing
Kabukiland: Late Edo Culture and Kyokutei Bakin’s Yakusha meisho zue,”
we reach the final paper, Zwicker’s “Stage and Spectacle in an Age of Maps:
Kabuki and the Cartographic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Japan.” The
author looks at how Japanese writers and artists began to see kabuki not
simply as a particular genre but as part of a gestalt embracing the universal
idea of theatre, in the 19th-century sense of shibai, rather
than kabuki. This is tied to the considerable degree to which theatre
was conceptualized cartographically, its functional parts depicted as elements
in maps, and even its actors used as metaphoric stand-ins for supposed places,
revealing how “early nineteenth-century theater historians located, even quite
literally mapped, contemporary theatrical practice in both historical and
spatial dimensions.”
I now move on to see how Zwicker employs
these concerns within the wider parameters of Kabuki’s Nineteenth Century. But it will be over a year before my response appears in Impressions.
