This first volume in a series collecting kabuki play translations draws on new research in kabuki performance and history and presents translations of traditional plays by 22 scholars ranging from the eminent to emerging. Includes over two dozen playwrights and 51 plays representing a range of history or period plays (judaimono), domestic plays (sewamono), and dance pieces (shosagoto or buyo-geki). Plays were selected to show the widest array of kabuki dramaturgy from the Genroku era to the turn of the 20th century. Fine color and b&w illustrations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Kabuki Plays On Stage represents a monumental achievement in Japanese theatre studies, being the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in twenty-five years. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. Volume 1 consists of thirteen plays that showcase early kabuki's scintillating and boisterous styles of performance and illustrates the contrasting dramatic techniques cultivated by actors in Edo (Tokyo) and Kamigata (Osaka and Kyoto). The twelve plays translated in Volume 2 cover a brief period, but one that saw important developments in kabuki architecture, acting, dance, and the manipulation of characters and themes. As the series title indicates, the plays were translated to capture the vivacity of performances on stage. The translations, each accompanied by a thorough introduction that contextualizes the play, are based not only on published texts, but performance scripts and the study of the plays as they are performed in theatres today. Each volume is lavishly illustrated with rare woodblock prints in full color of Tokugawa- and Meiji-period productions as well as color and black-and-white photographs of contemporary performances. Published with the assistance of the Nippon Foundation.
Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, is the third volume in a monumental new series-the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in nearly a quarter of a century. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. The fourteen plays translated in Volume 3, Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, mark an extreme point in the development of kabuki dramaturgy. The plays are remarkable, even within kabuki, for their intense theatricality, gutsy individualism of character, cold-blooded and ferocious violence, realism pushed into fantasy and grotesquery, novelty for its own sake, sexual aggressiveness, and assertion of female will. The plays depict a society in extremis, the end of an era, a time often marked by unmitigated darkness and desire.
Kabuki Plays On Stage represents a monumental achievement in Japanese theatre studies, being the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in twenty-five years. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. Volume 1 consists of thirteen plays that showcase early kabuki's scintillating and boisterous styles of performance and illustrates the contrasting dramatic techniques cultivated by actors in Edo (Tokyo) and Kamigata (Osaka and Kyoto). The twelve plays translated in Volume 2 cover a brief period, but one that saw important developments in kabuki architecture, acting, dance, and the manipulation of characters and themes. As the series title indicates, the plays were translated to capture the vivacity of performances on stage. The translations, each accompanied by a thorough introduction that contextualizes the play, are based not only on published texts, but performance scripts and the study of the plays as they are performed in theatres today. Each volume is lavishly illustrated with rare woodblock prints in full color of Tokugawa- and Meiji-period productions as well as color and black-and-white photographs of contemporary performances.
Unique in any Western language, this is an invaluable resource for the study of one of the world's great theatrical forms. It includes essays by established experts on Kabuki as well as younger scholars now entering the field, and provides a comprehensive survey of the history of Kabuki; how it is written, produced, staged, and performed; and its place in world theater. Compiled by the editor of the influential Asian Theater Journal, the book covers four essential areas - history, performance, theaters, and plays - and includes a translation of one Kabuki play as an illustration of Kabuki techniques.
Offering the first book-length study in English on Tsubouchi and Shakespeare, Gallimore offers an overview of the theory and practice of Tsubouchi’s Shakespeare translation and argues for Tsubouchi’s place as "the Japanese Shakespeare." Shakespeare translation is one of the achievements of modern Japanese culture, and no one is more associated with that achievement than the writer and scholar Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935). This book looks at how Tsubouchi received Shakespeare in the context of his native literature and his strategies for bridging the gaps between Shakespeare’s rhetoric and his developing language. Offering a significant contribution to the field of global Shakespeare and literary translation, Gallimore explores dominant stylistic features of the early twentieth-century Shakespeare translations of Tsubouchi and analyses the translations within larger linguistic, historical, and cultural traditions in local Japanese, universal Chinese, and spiritual Western elements. This book will appeal to any student, researcher, or scholar of literary translation, particularly those interested in the complexities of Shakespeare in translation and Japanese language, culture, and society.
Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance is a collection of sixteen essays on Japanese theatre, including historical overviews of twentieth century theatre, analyses of specific productions and individuals, and consideration of the intercultural nature of modern Japanese theatre. Also included is a new translation of a 'Superkyogen' play.
As part of its program to promote democracy in Japan after World War II, the American Occupation, headed by General Douglas MacArthur, undertook to enforce rigid censorship policies aimed at eliminating all traces of feudal thought in media and entertainment, including kabuki. Faubion Bowers (1917-1999), who served as personal aide and interpreter to MacArthur during the Occupation, was appalled by the censorship policies and anticipated the extinction of a great theatrical art. He used his position in the Occupation administration and his knowledge of Japanese theatre in his tireless campaign to save kabuki. Largely through Bowers's efforts, censorship of kabuki had for the most part been eliminated by the time he left Japan in 1948. Although Bowers is at the center of the story, this lively and skillfully adapted translation from the original Japanese treats a critical period in the long history of kabuki as it was affected by a single individual who had a commanding influence over it. It offers fascinating and little-known details about Occupation censorship politics and kabuki performance while providing yet another perspective on the history of an enduring Japanese art form. Read Bowers' impressions of Gen. MacArthur on the Japanese-American Veterans' Association website.
This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.
According to a myth constructed after Japan’s surrender to the Allied Forces in 1945, kabuki was a pure, classical art form with no real place in modern Japanese society. In Kabuki’s Forgotten War, senior theater scholar James R. Brandon calls this view into question and makes a compelling case that, up to the very end of the Pacific War, kabuki was a living theater and, as an institution, an active participant in contemporary events, rising and falling in consonance with Japan’s imperial adventures. Drawing extensively from Japanese sources—books, newspapers, magazines, war reports, speeches, scripts, and diaries—Brandon shows that kabuki played an important role in Japan’s Fifteen-Year Sacred War. He reveals, for example, that kabuki stars raised funds to buy fighter and bomber aircraft for the imperial forces and that pro-ducers arranged large-scale tours for kabuki troupes to entertain soldiers stationed in Manchuria, China, and Korea. Kabuki playwrights contributed no less than 160 new plays that dramatized frontline battles or rewrote history to propagate imperial ideology. Abridged by censors, molded by the Bureau of Information, and partially incorporated into the League of Touring Theaters, kabuki reached new audiences as it expanded along with the new Japanese empire. By the end of the war, however, it had fallen from government favor and in 1944–1946 it nearly expired when Japanese government decrees banished leading kabuki companies to minor urban theaters and the countryside. Kabuki’s Forgotten War includes more than a hundred illustrations, many of which have never been published in an English-language work. It is nothing less than a com-plete revision of kabuki’s recent history and as such goes beyond correcting a significant misconception. This new study remedies a historical absence that has distorted our understanding of Japan’s imperial enterprise and its aftermath.
