MISHIMA YUKIO ON NAKAMURA UTAEMON VI

 

Nakamura Utaemon VI

MISHIMA YUKIO ON KABUKI ONNAGATA NAKAMURA UTAEMON VI: 

A TRANSLATION

On January 14, 1964, I interviewed Nakamura Utaemon VI, perhaps the greatest kabuki onnagata (female-role specialist) of the second half of the last century. I was 23, in Japan on a fellowship from the University of Hawaii, where I was doing research on kabuki for my MFA thesis, a production (and exegesis) of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle using kabuki acting conventions. The interview was one of four later published in the Educational Theatre Journal and in my book, Frozen Moments: Writings on Kabuki 1966-2001.

Sometime before the interview, I had invested in an expensive coffee-table book about Utaemon (1917-2001; I’ve always remembered he was born the same year as my mother). It was a very large, heavy book that I lugged to the actor’s Kabuki-za dressing room, so he could sign it. He actually wrote a signed, dated inscription to me whose calligraphic cursive style makes it difficult to read, although it alludes to “hina kazaru” (setting out the festival dolls”), the dolls displayed for Hinamatsuri, probably as part of a seasonal verse.

Published in 1959, it contains what must be over 1,000 photos, in color and black/white of the actor in countless roles. And he still had four decades to go! There are also pages providing tables and lists with details on every aspect of Utaemon’s professional life. And there are multiple essays by distinguished writers, artists, and scholars. Most interesting, even for those more familiar with Japanese literature than theatre, is that it was edited by one of Japan’s greatest, and most notorious, writers (among other talents), Mishima Yukio (1925-1970).

I’ve looked at its pages so many times that its binding has become frayed and its spine kept in place by packing tape.

To my knowledge, Mishima’s richly evocative explanation of Utaemon’s idiosyncratic genius, beauty, and artistry, has never before been translated. Mishima was deeply enmeshed in kabuki, wrote several of the best modern kabuki plays, and had a very close relationship with Utaemon.

INTRODUCTION TO NAKAMURA UTAEMON VI

Mishima Yukio

Nakamura Utaemon VI and Mishima Yukio.

1.

An age ought to have an actor who represents that age. When we speak of the age of Duse or the age of Danjūrō and Kikugorō, the whole aspect of an age—something no retrospective account of political or economic history can encompass—appears in the minds of those who lived at the same time as those actors. Connected with this, moreover, is the circumstance that, even if an actor’s art is preserved on film or records, the true, living emotion it imparted perishes with the age and is transmitted to later generations only through logos—through words. What remains is only the testimony of eyewitnesses, and those eyewitnesses, too, eventually die out.

For the eyewitness, however, the performance of an actor who represented an age was an event. He repeatedly calls back into memory its radiance and its shuddering thrill, placing every kind of ornament around it, and, just as the sea fastens an abandoned ship to the seabed with barnacles and oyster shells, fixes the life of an actor in the deepest recesses of his own memory. Thus the memory of an actor who represented an age remains in a still more solid form than other memories that drift and disappear, including memories of the eyewitness’s own experiences of life.

Nor is that all. When one calls to mind the name of an actor who represented an age, memories of its fashionable hairstyles, its tastes in dress, its everyday customs, its fashions, and every other kind of sensory impression rise together in far greater abundance than when one recalls a major social event, spreading around that actor’s name the immediate atmosphere of the age—what might be called its skin’s texture and warmth.

They unfold all the designs and colors of the age. This is probably because the actor’s existence is something purely individual, physical, and sensuous, without the abstract quality of a social event. Compared with an actor, social events are readily detached from the eyewitness’s sensory experience, tending eventually to be regarded only as the social expression of some intellectual current of its age. An actor, by contrast, is—to put it in the strongest terms—the very individuality of an age.

2.

Now, whenever I consider Nakamura Utaemon VI, I feel that he possesses precisely the qualifications of an actor who represents an age. Certain of his stage performances make us spectators feel: “At this very moment I am witnessing the fully ripened flowering of Nakamura Utaemon VI, with its hundred blossoms blooming in profusion; this is a happiness known neither to people of earlier generations nor to those of generations to come.” In that sense, he is, unmistakably, an actor who represents an age.

Yet, faced with this age called the present, whose course cannot be predicted, we cannot compare him with Duse, Ichikawa Danjūrō IX, the previous Utaemon, or Onoe Kikugorō VI. In an age when life was simpler and forms of entertainment fewer, the faces of representative actors loomed before us like the faces on battledores decorated with padded fabric pictures. Their faces bore the pride of standing alone, carrying the tastes of the age upon their backs. In that sense, we cannot say that Utaemon bears the tastes of the present age entirely upon himself. Although such a thing would have been inconceivable in the Meiji period, there are now quite a few spectators who can think of onnagata in general only as something distasteful.

I consider him to represent the present from a dimension entirely different from that of Duse or Danjūrō. The way an actor represents an age has become different from what it once was. His way of representing the present is thoroughly anachronistic. Utaemon bears the present precisely through what the present lacks, just as the characteristics of the present reveal themselves in its lack of a unified, harmonious, classical beauty. Yet that alone would amount to nothing more than being behind the times. It is not, as people so often readily explain it, that the beauty of his performances fills the gaps in the ugliness of the present—that his figure alone represents the classical forms missing from the present and thereby compensates for its deficiencies. Rather, the reverse is true: his being an actor an all of that beauty seems to represent the illusory aspect of the modern age—the very aspect of the great, gloomy absence that the modern age necessarily bears.

Suppose that, strolling along the Ginza in daylight, I have my attention captured by the miscellaneous phenomena of modern life: young men and women walking arm in arm as though no one else existed; groups of sharp-eyed pleasure seekers; sellers of erotic pictures; streetwalkers displaying the signs of their trade even in broad daylight; and, again, famous businessmen and politicians stopping with their families at shops selling imported Western goods. Suppose that I thread my way through the crowds these people weave together, catching glimpses of the tense profiles of reporters and photographers through the windows of the numerous automobiles arriving at and departing from newspaper offices; that I finally reach the theatre, immerse my eyes, accustomed to the outdoor light, for a moment in the dimness inside, and suddenly see, on the brilliantly shining stage barely opening before me, Utaemon dancing alone through, for example, a scene from Musume Dōjōji (The Maiden at Dōjōji). What I feel at that moment is not the presence of a classical actor left behind by his age. Rather, here is a night in the very midst of day, and at the center of that night a beautiful actor, practicing something like sorcery, is drawing taut and concentrating into a single point the confused scenes of the modern afternoon that, until a moment ago, had occupied my eyes and ears. It even seems that all the miscellaneous disorder of society’s daytime outside the theatre is being controlled at this single point, its reins being skillfully handled. Such a negative representative—a representative of this darkest beauty of the age called modernity—represents the modern age in a manner closely resembling the methods employed by the evil that we commonly call its “dark side.

3.

By comparison, between Onoe Kikugorō VI (Rokudaime) and the spirit of the age of the society surrounding him, there was a certain correspondence, a harmony. Apart from the fact that, in private life, Rokudame excelled at golf and shooting and, in keeping with the improvement in actors’ social standing, enjoyed the company of distinguished gentlemen, his artistic spirit—his modern realism itself—agreed, in the narrower sense, with the tendencies of the theatrical world and, in the broader sense, with the direction toward which society as a whole was moving. Rokudaime never once directed ridicule or condemnation at the age he represented. This was by no means a fault of his. For the representative actor of any age, society was, after all, the audience that applauded him.

But Utaemon’s case is different. He has almost no direct dealings with modern society. And yet, as I said earlier, when his stage performance appears vividly, like a strange waking dream, to someone who has entered the theatre straight from the daytime streets, that person even begins to wonder which is the illusion: the figure of the dancer on this stage, or the confused modern life clamoring and crowding together outside the theatre. At first sight, this appears an antinomy, and one is seized by an impatience that demands choosing between the two and determining one’s position on one side or the other.

Yet these two may not constitute an antinomy. They may be something like the warp and weft of a single fabric, or the positive and negative of two photographs. Just as evil regulates us beyond the reach of our eyes and governs social life through the powers of darkness, perhaps what binds the modern age at its very root—this mundane world seemingly so far removed from an aesthetic life—is precisely something aesthetic, such as his stage symbolizes: an aesthetic power so pure that only a paper’s thickness separates it from nothingness. Who could consider this without feeling anew an uncanny shudder?

4.

In fact, that is how it is. The being called Nakamura Utaemon VI is an unpredictable power of beauty fully capable of standing beside evil; this exhausts what there is to say of him. There is nothing practical there, nor any social utility. But is not precisely this situation—in which beauty exists endowed with a power almost equal to evil—a characteristic of the modern age, indeed the most modern of situations?

In the good old days, beauty was another name for social order. In his plays, Kawatake Mokuami (l816-1893) endowed all his outlaw characters with beauty, but the nature and constituent elements of that beauty never departed from the patterns demanded by the social order. Consequently, evil merely served as a concealed seasoning for beauty; a situation in which evil and beauty confronted each other with equal force never arose.

What people considered beautiful could not fundamentally conflict with society’s customs and order, and beauty, however far it went, never encountered a situation in which it was left alone. Indeed, it seems that Mokuami discovered beauty’s solitary condition only after he began being made to write katsureki, those edifying moral dramas [presented as archaeologically correct representations of history].

Conversely, in the modern age, the social order does not engage in producing beauty. Beauty and evil are placed in similarly solitary conditions, alienated from society and made esoteric; they contend with one another for the actual power through which they scheme to rule society from its dark underside.

Formerly, the social order—its customs and its etiquette—both shaped kabuki’s hierarchical customs and organization and produced the particulars of its beauty. Something like Edo kabuki’s Sukeroku was a comprehensive expression of the people’s lively feelings about life and of the aesthetic consciousness embedded in their daily existence: it was, so to speak, the people’s collaborative creation within the established order. Everything, from Sukeroku’s purple headband to the lantern bearing Agemaki’s name, was beauty produced by that order, maintaining an unbroken connection with the short coats and yellow Hachijō silk worn among the audience.

Compared with beauty of this active kind, like the spearhead of martial force, beauty’s negative position in the modern age corresponds strikingly to his being an onnagata. It is no accident that the face of the actor representing the modern age assumes the form of a woman. For it splendidly embodies both beauty’s negative character and its character as something negated. On reflection, his resolve as an onnagata and his determination of his position toward the modern age were nothing other than to live as one who negates while being negated.

All his creative power was concentrated in this retaliatory process of negation. It was not beauty’s unproductiveness in the modern age, but an unceasing resistance to unproductiveness with respect to beauty: it was his own transformation, at every sacrifice, into a pitch-black mass of beauty.

I have long taken a deep interest in the narcissistic creative process of the artist called an actor, but I feel that interest deepen still further in the case of the onnagata. For the onnagata’s narcissism is, so to speak, narcissism directed toward someone who is not himself; his reflected image and his own person do not assume an identical form, as they do in the case of that beautiful Greek youth.

If, in a society where beauty cannot exist, he is to affirm its existence, he must himself become beauty. Yet what an effective condition for committing this paradox is the fact that the beautiful image in the mirror is himself and, at the same time, is not himself! And what a skillful deception! The existence of that image within the mirror is assured precisely by the actor himself; yet what a subtle paradox it is that none other than he himself is the one who denies its existence.

The onnagata’s narcissism is thus something like an unreasonable, blind, violent fever that envelops everything in contradiction. It is a terrifying, negative narcissism. If he remains unmoved by modern society’s rejection, it is because he himself, in the dressing room, precedes all society as a denier: he is Narcissus as denier. Precisely this kind of narcissism is eternally undefeated and invincible. Therefore Nakamura Utaemon VI is undefeated.

5.

Yet the creative urge of a person placed in such circumstances is solitary in the true meaning of the word. However many admirers surround him, he inhabits a world essentially without response. It is a brilliant flowering of the self, but it is an unrewarded love, a love that calls and receives no answer.

Since Ayamegusa (known in English as The Actor’s Analects), it has been considered proper practice for an onnagata to stand one step behind the tachiyaku (leading male role) and serve him. In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that we more often feel flashes of truly poignant love and longing in Utaemon’s performances when he expresses yearning without a partner present—as in the kudoki passage of Musume Dōjōji (The Maiden at Dōjōji)—than when he has a partner. Whether it is Princess Yuki in Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion), the foxfire in Jusshukō (The Incense Ceremony), or Omiwa in the palace scene of Imoseyama (Mount Imo and Mount Se), the beloved’s figure is already absent from before her eyes. In this burning of solitary love there is something essential to the art of portraying women, and its significance is entirely different from the previous Utaemon’s commanding, “female Taikō” kind of solo domination of the stage.

How beauty, narcissism, and evil are joined and interrelated within a single actor is probably a fundamental condition determining that actor’s gifts and worth. Beauty is the power of existence. It is the guarantee of objectivity. Evil is the power to bewitch. The actor is a power that employs every available artifice and the utmost ingenuity to enchant and attract people, carrying them away beyond the heavens. And narcissism is the power to forcibly combine beauty and evil within himself. That is, it is the power to incorporate into a single body, and to incorporate there, both what he himself is not—namely the entire external world, other people, and the feelings and emotions of others. Only through this does an actor become the individuality and soul of an age.

In Utaemon VI, I see a combination of these three elements that leaves no room for criticism.

6.

No one suffers the troubles of our age as Duse does, or suffers them so sublimely. . . . No one has borne the fame of the century as she has, and no one knows as little rest as she. Although her travels are a continuous triumphal procession, they suggest a flight. As someone suffering from a fever changes pillows, she passes from country to country, yet cannot find even a patch of rest large enough to set foot upon. She performs a play. Then its inferior imaginary events, its fabricated tragedies, and the whole wretched business blaze up upon her body like a garment sprinkled with poison. She will somehow cast it off. And suddenly she will return to us alone again. . . . Very many people love her as though she were a god, but only very few feel something like fear before her.

This is a beautiful passage Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote about Duse in 1903.

And then, as though providentially, just as the morning star appears in the vast sky, Nakamura Shikan VI [Utaemon VI’s previous name] flashed forth as an onnagata. When, dancing Sumizome (The Ink-Dyed Cherry Tree), his reputation began to establish its present standing, I, for one, first breathed a sigh of relief. For kabuki’s beauty cannot do without an onnagata who expresses beauty upon the stage. It was the relief of feeling that this need had at last been filled. I felt that kabuki had thereby gained several more decades of life.To tell the truth, I found the much-praised Sumizome, spoken of as a flower in full bloom, painfully lonely; it was in Komachi-hime, who comes to the barrier gate, dances, and departs in that very brief interval, that I saw perfection. His features give the impression expressed by the words, “By departing from nature, one can manifest nature.” The beauty lingering at the corners of his eyes gives the impression, so to speak, of a natural woman rather than an artistic woman. Above Shikan, too, shines the star of natural womanhood that once shone upon Danjūrō. When will he pursue that star into his own artistic domain and [bring forth] what no one has yet represented, bringing into being a tender womanhood such as no one has ever expressed?”

This is a lovely passage written by the late Orikuchi Shinobu (1887-1953) on the occasion of the Utaemon VI’s assumption of the name. Though one is dynamic and the other static, both vividly and beautifully describe the image an actor cast upon a poet’s heart; they are twin masterpieces of homage to actors of East and West.

Certainly, his appearance conveys the beauty of a woman of refinement, as Orikuchi said, but it falls short of the grotesque, obscure beauty of the onnagata of old. His delicate, graceful flavor, in the style of the Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poetry), makes one feel something far removed from what Kishida Ryūsei called ‘commonplace beauty elevated to a high artistic level,’ a flavor ‘dense, strong, bitter, barbaric, demonic, and heretical.’”

That can also be said of his art as a whole, and one might provisionally call it neoclassicism. Yet the beautiful women he portrays possess a quality like that of the shite in kazura-mono (wig plays) of noh, in which metaphysics, poetry, and sensuality form a trinity. Beneath their individual qualities, which at first glance seem unlike kabuki, the kabuki flavor identified by Kishida Ryūsei is imperceptibly deposited. Beneath their transparency lies that “density”; beneath their delicacy, that “strength”; beneath their voluptuous sweetness, that “bitterness”; beneath their excessive refinement, that “barbarism”; beneath their tragic sublimity, that “demonic quality”; and beneath their orthodox artistic style, that “heresy,” flowing underneath in a guise entirely opposite to its own. Here, too, we can discern the characteristics of his negative ideal of beauty. Beneath the glasslike transparency of his acting, richly colored yūzen patterns writhe; his supple movements conceal the tenacity of a snake. His extremely delicate technique is the ultimate in refinement, yet at the same time something in it distinctly recalls the decadent gestures of ancient pagan rites. And there is something demonic in that noble, cold stage figure.

Certainly, the feel of old kabuki that fits Kishida Ryūsei’s definition—kabuki resembling old handwoven cotton—is not Utaemon’s particular province. Yet he lives and savors the kabuki that fits Kishida’s definition, and sings it with pleasure. To compare him to a maiden, Utaemon resembles the figure of a daughter who, without decaying in the least, has been discovered after long years, her corpse enclosed within a mountain of snow. The raw, disagreeable vitality and bodily odor have already disappeared from that figure, but she lives. Everything she possessed is preserved, entirely unimpaired, deep beneath her snow-white, frozen skin. Whenever I see Utaemon’s Sagi Musume (The Heron Maiden), I always find it strange that this unassuming dance drama should evoke the image of clean, snow-white necrophilia.

7.

In April 1951, celebrating his assumption of the name Utaemon, I drafted the following piece.

Shikan’s assumption of the name Utaemon prompts various thoughts about the preconceptions attached to this stage name.

That the name Utaemon calls to mind such Momoyama-screen-like designs as solemnity, splendor, refinement, greatness, and beauty is, needless to say, due to his predecessor’s influence. Yet at the same time this name suggests hysteria, domination by the wife, supreme self-regard, aristocratic coldness, a dark beauty, the Murderous Regent, and a muffled voice.
These, too, must be the predecessor’s influence. Such is the assumption of a stage name. When the name is too great, the initial result is apt to look awkward, like a large fruit basket that once held about ten apples now containing only one. But there is no such concern in Shikan’s assumption of the name Utaemon.

What should be called the distinguishing feature of the new Utaemon is that cold passion of his, which seems to burst forth. Watching Shikan onstage, one finds it overflowing with the coldness of passion itself, rather than the coldness of detached intelligence or calculation. In Musume Dōjōji, one can vividly feel the coldness of the scales on the serpent’s body; it is also a magnificent spectacle, like watching a frozen conflagration.
Wherever Shikan moves, cold flames rise, making one feel that those flames would burn the hand like ice.

To make us feel a true modernity in kabuki is, in fact, the destiny that Shikan’s stage art must bear from now on. Shikan’s role is to serve as the antithesis to the achievement of Kikugorō VI, who introduced modernity into kabuki.”

What should be called Kikugorō VI’s modernity was, in fact, a generalized, textbook-like modernity of realism, rationalism, naturalism, and the like, none of it very deeply rooted. It was modernity of a kind one could understand by reading a textbook. And Kikugorō’s greatness was, in fact, the greatness of having systematized kabuki’s traditional techniques. Kikugorō’s newness was entirely a newness of method; it was not an essential newness.

The modernity of Shikan—of the new Utaemon—is the opposite of this. He deliberately followed the old methods. And his modernity lies in allowing us, within his strict adherence to conventional methods, to glimpse something new that those old methods alone cannot contain—like red plum blossoms breaking forth into bloom. We novelists are excessively subjective in our way of seeing, but from Shikan’s stage performances I always caught the fragrance of the decadent art of the late nineteenth century. I sensed the atmosphere of Hofmannsthal’s verse dramas and the art of the Yellow Book circle. There, a cold sensuality, crystallized into jewels of symbolism, formed the core of the stage’s beauty.

The transition from modernity on the performer’s side to modernity on the spectator’s side seems to me to be the course connecting Kikugorō with the new Utaemon. It seems to me, rather, that an element capable of attaining worldwide scope lies hidden in the sensibility of appreciation demanded by the new Utaemon’s performances—a sensibility belonging on the spectator’s side of the art called kabuki.

Utaemon: congratulations on your succession to the name.

8.

In this world there is melancholy resembling passion, and there is passion resembling melancholy. Quite unexpectedly, I discovered, within Kihi Suishu (The Imperial Consort Drunk), performed by [the great Chinese female role specialist] Mei Lan-fang, the source of that sorrow-tinged melancholy which I always glimpse in your stage presence. In that scene of Beijing opera, which embodied so profoundly the poetic feeling that “when pleasure is exhausted, sorrow arises,” lay the wellspring of the melancholy possessed by Utaemon’s stage performances. The stage is indeed like a banquet; but just as, in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the time of the human banquet ends and the time of the fairies’ banquet begins, so the emptiness and melancholy that assail the heart at the end of a banquet exhausting every excellence and every beauty invariably assail the spectator’s heart whenever one encounters your splendid stage performances. It is the ominous shadow necessarily contained in the very fact that the blossoms are now at their fullest, even though the flowers in their prime show not a single sign of decline

In truth, melancholy of this kind is too static and contemplative to possess dramatic force, but on Utaemon’s stage it sustains a quiet combustion and comes to resemble what people ordinarily call passion. That in everyday life you are free of ennui is partly because you carry within yourself a mysterious dynamo that converts ennui and melancholy, just as they are, entirely into motive power; and that your intense movements onstage never lose their measure is likewise because that dramatic movement itself resembles a kind of magnificent melancholy. This is the true feminine principle: woman’s passion is itself a deep still pool, a deep pent-up oppression. For a man, such a still pool becomes a source of thought; but when, in place of thought, you enlist the aid of all the feminine powers and transform it into passion onstage, surely at no other time do the gifts and destiny of the onnagata make you shine so brightly.

In the modern age, to accept a particular destiny and live it through is a task whose difficulty is almost beyond imagining; that alone merits respect. By taking upon himself the destiny of the onnagata, Utaemon has become a presence like a precious jewel. Unfortunately, in our country, artists bound to such a destiny are as rare as stars in the dawn sky.

 

 

 

 

THE GREAT POPULAR PERFORMING ARTS OF EDO: KABUKI, SIDESHOWS, AND RAKUGO (Ch. 1)

The Great Popular Performing Arts of Edo: Kabuki, Sideshows, and Rakugo

By

Kawazoe Yū

Translated by Samuel L. Leiter

Introduction 

Introduction (kōjō)  

This is an adaptation of Edo no Taishū Geinō: Kabuki.Misemono.Rakugo (The Great Popular Performing Arts of Edo: Kabuki, Sideshows, and Rakugo), a beautifully illustrated book by Kawazoe Yū (Kyoto: Seigensha, 2000). It is generally faithful to the original except where explanations are introduced to further clarify passages for readers unfamiliar with this material. The following is based on Kawazoe’s introduction.

There are various possible viewpoints from which to approach Japanese performing arts, but here I have tried looking at them from the perspective of “the performing arts of Edo times,” rather than “traditional performing arts.” This is also a decision to give precedence to the name of the series, “Great Edo.” However, in reality, many people and things flowed from Osaka to Edo, and this book also includes pages on the sideshows of “Going Down to Osaka,” in which Edo things traveled in the opposite direction. That is only natural, and one may say that precisely by adhering to Edo, a view of the opposite side becomes possible.

While being concerned with this question of cities, another thing to which I was particular was the viewpoint of “popular performing arts,” or “popular (= masses).” Needless to say, the masses exist not only in Tokyo but also in remote mountain regions and small islands. The masses are take cities as their center, but they do not exist only in cities. Specifically, in the Edo period (1603-1868), it is possible to think that a popular society of a certain degree had already been formed. However, it is also impossible to discuss Edo after the Genroku period (1688–1704)= when media and popular phenomena such as plays and popular songs produced flourishing cultural politics—apart from their connections to other periods. The heart of this book, however, is the popular performing arts of the period from before and after the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–1830) to the end of the shogunate. I have tried to engage actively with this urban society called Edo, in which different popular cultures and popular media were mutually connected, and, while becoming involved with one another, advanced dynamically.

The specific genres taken up are the three of kabuki, sideshows, and rakugo. These contain comparative, easy to arrange pictorial documentation. Aside from cultural history, I do not know whether there is much value in these three things placed side by side. Basically, my intention is not to detail a general history, but to attempt to indicate as clearly as possible certain circumstances and distinctive points. Therefore, I think that merely examining the visual materials will be sufficient.

The great popular performing arts (taishū geinō) were loved by the masses. They were enjoyed as “spectacles,” so understanding the circumstances of their “spectators” will be a shortcut to approaching Edo’s popular performing arts. I invite you to take a look from the opening curtain onward.

CHAPTER ONE

THEATRES BURSTING WITH EXCITEMENT: A UNION OF STAGE AND AUDIENCE

Fig. 1.

A Picture of the Great Prosperity of the Theatre (Fig. 1)

(Artist: Utagawa Toyokuni I. Three-sheet series of large-format, multicolored woodblock prints. Bunka 14 (1817). National Theatre.)y

This is a picture filled with vitality, depicting the stage of a greatly flourishing theatre and the surrounding audience seats. First, please observe the closeness of the distance between the stage and the audience seats. Surrounding the stage are the partitioned seating boxes (masu seki) of the doma (the pit), and, if one looks carefully, audience seats have also been arranged at the left rear of the stage. Literally, a densely concentrated bodily space in which the spectators envelop the actors, so to speak, conveys the atmosphere of a richly human theatre space in which everyone is “of one mind” (ichiza dōjin).This was what an Edo theatre of former times was like. Incidentally, the stage depicts the lion dance (shishi mai) performed by Ichikawa Danjūrō VII and Iwai Hanshirō V at the Kawarasaki Theatre in the third month of 1817. However, there are also many examples in which the central sheet of such a three-sheet series was replaced with that of a different production.

Spectators Viewing from Directly Beside the Stage (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2

Men and women watching from very close distances view the performance from the front, from the side, and from behind. There was created a bodily space filled with the enthusiasm of actors and spectators united as one, and the spectators became part of kabuki

The forestage, where a performance is in full progress, projects considerably forward. Consequently, as in the picture, there were many spectators who viewed the actors’ performances directly from the side. In the audience seating, one can see people eating meals, drinking sake, and watching the play in a relaxed manner, and the scene is considerably disorderly. They were not gazing intently at the stage in front of them as a serious “place,” as people do today, but there was an underlying sense of unity in the theatre as a whole as a “place,” and in this way they were immersing themselves in the world of kabuki. Incidentally, at the upper right are the sajiki (gallery seats), and on both the east and west sides there were lower sajiki and upper sajiki. A characteristic of Edo’s lower sajiki was that two horizontal wooden bars were attached to them, and because the appearance of people sticking their faces out from between them was said to resemble quails (uzura), they were popularly called “quail sajiki” (uzura sajiki), or, abbreviated, simply “uzura.”

Spectators Viewing from Behind the Stage: “Rakan-dai” and “Yoshino” (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3.

The seats constructed at the far back were called “Rakan-dai” below and “Yoshino” above (or “Tsūten”).Admission was cheap, and the seats were for the most common people, packed so tightly that they were like a stuffed lunch box. From here it was possible to see the actors from behind, and, when the curtain closed, one could see from behind the curtain, so it was also possible to observe the actors who would appear next and the way the large stage units were arranged. The designation “Rakan-dai” came from the way the people sat lined up resembling the Five Hundred Arhats at Honjo Itsutsume in Edo. “Yoshino” was so called because the cherry blossoms on the hanging branches decorating the upper part of the stage came directly before one’s eyes (Nara’s Yoshino was famous for viewing cherry blossoms). Likewise, “Tsūten” was so called because the hanging branches of autumn leaves were directly before one’s eyes (the Tsūten Bridge at Tōfukuji Temple in Kyoto was famous for viewing autumn foliage). Although these names were elegant, the spectators here enjoyed kabuki at inexpensive prices; sometimes quarrels erupted. There were also occasions when, because of a full house, spectators climbed onto the stage; when that happened the acting space disappeared, resulting in a situation described in a senryū as “Performing in a space of about one tsubo because of the full house.” The person sitting on the half-tatami mat in the foreground is the stage attendant, whose role was to restrain noisy spectators and disturbances.

Pictures of the Interior and Exterior of the Nakamura-za (Fig. 4)

(Artist: Utagawa Toyokuni I. Large-format, multicolored woodblock print, six-sheet series. Bunka 14 (1817). Waseda University Theatre Museum.)

Fig. 4

The following two ukiyo-e depict the interior and exterior of the Nakamura-za in 1817, the same year as the preceding illustrations. In Fig. 4, the customary New Year’s production of Soga no Taimen (The Soga Brothers’ Confrontation) is being performed; on the hanamichi on the left are the brothers Soga Gorō and Jūrō. The hanamichi, which passes through the audience, was a wonderful creation peculiar to kabuki, established as a permanent feature in the first half of the eighteenth century, creating an acting space on which actors and spectators came into intimate contact. There, the actors’ performance space projects outward toward the spectators, while, conversely, the hanamichi strongly directs the spectators’ lines of sight toward the actors, and the spectators’ bodies, too, approach the side of the stage. Apart from this hanamichi on the lower-hand side (west), there is a passageway on the right-hand side, called the higashi no ayumi-ita (eastern walking board). Eventually called the kari hanamichi (temporary hanamichi) when it became a removable feature, it was a passageway for spectators and vendors and, at the same time, could be used as a special acting space allowing actors to circumnavigate the auditorium.

Fig. 5.

Now, turning our attention to the exterior of the theatre (Fig. 5), at the center of the roof a yagura (drum tower), a large structure measuring nine shaku and four sun square, bearing the theatre’s crest; beneath it are the yagurashita (signboard below the yagura), recording the name of the theatre proprietor, and the atari kanban (big hit signboard), displaying the word ōiri for “full house.” Also, the various painted signboards on the right, the large title signboard (ōnadai kanban) and small title signboard (konadai kanban) on the left, and other details are clearly depicted. This print allows one to look view the theatre building amid the bustle in front of its entrance. At the entrance are also kiyōsha (“stage mimics”), who attract spectators by imitating the gestures and voices of actors, dressed in matching costumes and with their faces wrapped in hand towels. Incidentally, the titles visible here on the signboards and the actors’ faces on the stage do not necessarily correspond to the actual performance. Rather than being based on an actual production, this example may be called a kind of mitate-e (representation by analogy), celebrating the New Year at the Nakamura-za and in kabuki.

Why Depict the Theatre? The Spectators Also Took Center Stage

The Development of Ukiyo-e Theatre Pictures

Ukiyo-e genre pictures began with early modern paintings executed in ink, and include works depicting the interior and exterior of theatres throughout the ages, in the form of ink paintings (sumizuri honpon), lacquer paintings (urushi-e), red-and-brown paintings (benizuri-e), and full-color prints (nishiki-e). Particularly from the 1740s onward, illustrations of theatre interiors became a favorite subject among woodblock prints known as uki-e, which employed the Western method of perspective. That development continued even into the late Edo and Meiji periods. When we consider that ukiyo-e prints were commercially published products, we realize that theatre pictures were published because many people wanted them. In this connection, what is particularly different about pictures depicting specific actors or plays in performance and pictures of the theatre itself, is that the subject of the latter was the theatre building itself as a “place” or “space.” Because this was so, it was naturally not only the actors and performances on the stage but also the spectators who became subjects of depiction. In other words, in theatre pictures, “the spectators also took center stage.” Therefore, when the common people of Edo looked at pictures of theatres, it was very natural for them to imagine themselves in the sajiki or thinking about going there. Furthermore, the idea that a theatre exists only when there’s an audience present, and the fact that spectators ultimately came to think about the origins of the word shibai (“theatre”) as “sitting on grass” (the word’s literal meaning) are fundamental matters. The development of Edo theatre pictures can therefore be understood as something that also represents the culture of the common people of Edo.

Ichimura-za Jōnai-zu Byōbu (Folding Screen Depicting the Interior of the Ichimura-za) (Fig. 6)

Fig. 6

(Four-panel folding screen, one screen. Kyōhō 18 (1733). Waseda University Theatre Museum.)

This is a work in which we can understand the appearance of the western sajiki and the doma before the latter became divided into masu (boxed-in seating). Originally, the basic forms of audience seating were these areas, and there were periods when the sajiki were on only one level, as well as periods when there were sajiki up to the third floor. From approximately the middle of the Kyōhō era onward, there was a two-level arrangement of upper and lower galleries, as in the picture, and the middle portion was especially expensive, with the audience consisting principally of people of rank and members of wealthy merchant households. Here can also be seen spectators who appear to be accompanied by geiko (young men). Moreover, in the two kinds of prints from the late Bunka era introduced earlier, the figures of palace ladies-in-waiting were conspicuous in the better sajiki seats. The audience seats in this picture being filled predominantly with male spectators is greatly different from today, Edo kabuki’s being premised upon a large male audience. The play is Hanabusa Bunshin Soga (The Distinguished Soga Doubles), at the Ichimura-za in January of Kyōhō 18 (1733). Ichikawa Danjūrō II, as Soga Gorō, appears on the hanamichi. We see in these pictures a preoccupation with what were called “Soga plays” (Sogamono), plays about the Soga brothers, especially Shibaraku (Wait a Moment!). These depict the exaggeratedly masculine performance style called aragoto associated with Edo kabuki, typically presented within such important temporal and spatial settings as the season-opening kaomise (face-showing) productions and New Year performances.

Shibai Kyōgen no Zu (Picture of a Theatre Performance) (Fig. 7)

Fig. 7.

(Urushi-e [lacquer-style print]. Around the Kanpō era (1741–1744). National Theatre.)

This picture of the Nakamura-za’s interior is a comparatively early uki-e (perspective-picture). Although it is completely roof-covered, the vestigial existence of the hashigakari (bridgeway) upstage right, the gabled roof above the stage, and other features make it readily apparent that the kabuki stage developed from the Noh stage. Speaking in terms of the larger development, both the hashigakari and the gabled roof, which originally had clearly existed, gradually declined, becoming formalized and reduced to mere vestiges.

Uki-e Edo Sakai-chō Shibai no Zu (Perspective Picture of the Theatre in Edo’s Sakai-chō) (Fig. 8)

Fig. 8.

(Artist: Rekisentei Eiri. Large-format nishiki-e. Around the Kansei era (1789–1801). National Theatre.)

This is an uki-e of the interior of the Nakamura-za, with the spectators depicted like tiny beans. Of course, counting these tiny beans and calculating how many spectators there are is nonsense, but taking into account the artist’s intention to fill the picture with these tiny figures is necessary to “reading the picture.” The point behind this “constructed expression,” in a word, was to stress “theatre prosperity,” so, within the perspective format, even if the spectators became tiny beans, it was important to pack the space with large numbers of spectators. This is a work that, in.\;one respect, represents the importance of the audience’s presence. The passage extending across the left and right of the foreground was the naka no ayumi-ita (middle walkway), and behind it was the naka no ma (middle space), consisting of the cheap, crowded seating. In the picture, the spectators here are depicted with richly expressive faces. The actor performing Shibaraku on the hanamichi is Ichikawa Danjūrō V. Note that the pit has not yet been divided into boxed off sections, which are present in the next image.

Tōto Meisho Saruwaka-chō Shibai (Famous Places of the Eastern Capital: The Theatres of Saruwaka-chō) (Fig. 9)

Fig. 9.

(Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige I. Large-format nishiki-e. Around Kaei 3 91850]. National Theatre.)

Under the Tenpō Reforms (1841-1843), Edo’s theatre district was relocated to Asakusa’s Saruwaka-chō (discussed later); this picture shows a theatre interior during the late Edo period (bakumatsu) following that relocation. It doesn’t depict any particular theatre; rather, Hiroshige illustrates the appearance of an Edo theatre as a “famous place” (meisho). It is, essentially, a generalized theatre picture, and the play depicted is likewise the typical Soga no Taimen, with Gorō and Jūrō on the hanamichi. It is interesting as a kind of “symbolical” theatre picture.

Le Théâtre: Scène de danse (The Theatre: A Dance Scene) (Fig. 10)

Fig. 10.

A Late Edo Period (Bakumatsu) Theatre as Seen by a Foreigner (Fig. 10)

(From Aimé Humbert’s Bakumatsu Nihon Zue (Illustrated Japan at the End of the Shogunate). Meiji 3 (1870). Author’s collection.)

This is an illustration included in Bakumatsu Nihon Zue: Le Japon Illustré, published by the French firm Hachette after Swiss diplomat Aimé Humbert, who came to Japan from in Bunkyū 3 (1863), returned to his country. It shows the interior of a theatre at the very end of the bakumatsu period. The title reads “Grand Theatre: Dance Scene — LE THÉÂTRE: SCÈNE DE DANSE.” Although there are several problems regarding the accuracy of the details, I think it captures the impression of the space, which must have appeared unusual to a foreigner, quite well.. The theatre interior, where sunlight was the basic source of illumination, would have been quite dark if the weather was bad.  On the hanamichi, a shosagoto (dance piece) featuring harukoma (spring-horse dancing) is being performed, and omote-akari (face lighting), in which a candle is placed on the end of a long, slender pole and held before the face, is being used. Although this black and white depiction differs considerably from the brilliant nishiki-e, I think it too conveys one view of the truth, while the splendor of the nishiki-e presents another view related to the sensibility of the people of Edo. The essay in which Humbert discusses kabuki, errors included, is reprinted in the translator’s book, Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes.

Audience Reputation — Shikitei Sanba’s Kyakusha Hyōbanki (An Audience Critique). (Fig. 11)

Fig. 11.

The enthusiasm of the spectators, together with the stage, creates the universe of kabuki and the playhouse. . . . The person who was keenly conscious of this “theatre that exists because of the audience,” and, conversely, “the audience that exists because of the theatre”—spectators who cannot live without theatre—was Shikitei Sanba (An’ei 5 [1776]–Bunsei 5 [1822]), a writer of popular fiction who was passionately fond of theatre. Sanba is generally known for two works of kokkeibon (comic fiction), Ukiyoburo (The Floating-World Bathhouse; Bunka 6 [1809]–10 [1813]) and Ukiyodoko (The Floating-World Barbershop; Bunka 8–9 [1811–1812]), but he also produced numerous works taking the theatre as their subject, such as Gijō Kinmō Zui (An Illustrated Guide to the Theatre; Kyōwa 3 [1803]), introduced here, and Gijō Suigen Maku no Soto (Theatrical Witticisms Outside the Curtain; Bunka 3 [1806]). He even went so far as to produce Kyakusha (also Kakusha) Hyōbanki (An Audience Critique); Bunka 8 [1811]), inspired by the annual actors’ critiques (Yakusha Hyōbanki), which evaluated spectators the same way. In it, following the example of the Yakusha Hyōbanki), he ranks types of audience members and describes their manners with affection, sometimes with tongue in cheek, sometimes admiringly, and sometimes while projecting himself into them. Please enjoy the world of old-time theatre spectators that follows. (A thorough description of these works is in Jacob Raz, Audience and Actors: A Study of Their Interaction in the Traditional Japanese Theatre [1983]).

Nuregoto-ba o Miru Tei (The Manner of Watching a Love Scene) (Fig. 12)

Fig 12.

(From the first volume of Kyakusha Hyōbanki.)

A nuregoto (love scene) enacts sexual love between a man and a woman; the picture presents spectators in the dō-sajiki watching one in a dazed manner, among others. Shikitei Sanba writes (upper right), “Enraptured by the love scene of the gently falling spring rain, before they know it, saliva dribbles from their lips.” Incidentally, the dō-sajiki were boxes at the front of the second level, at the rear of the theatre, away from the stage. The front portion of these was also called hikifune.

Kankyaku no Kuraizuke (Ranking the Spectators) (Figs. 13, 14)

(From the first volume of Kyakusha Hyōbanki.)

At beginning of the illustration of Fig. 13, on the right, it says “Three Theatres of Flourishing Edo: Critique of Theatre Spectators, Complete List of Spectators.” This section ranking spectators after the model of the actor critiques. In essence, it replicates the rankings of the “Leading Male Roles Section” of the three theatres. Beginning with these, the rankings continue through “Supreme Upper-Upper Excellent: Regular Devoted Patron, Hero,” “White Supreme Upper-Upper Excellent: One Who Loves Shibaraku, Devotion,” “True Upper-Upper Excellent: Patron” . . . and “Upper-Upper Excellent: Theatre Connoisseur, Prosperous Growth,” while at the end of the scroll comes “Great Upper-Upper Excellent: Spectator in the Mat-Floored Boxes, Honesty.” Since the leading “Regular Devoted Patron” will be explained in the next section, the “Mat-Floored Boxes” of the final Great Upper-Upper Excellent ranking are seats behind the second-floor front boxes, inexpensive crowded seats so far from the stage that the dialogue cannot be heard, as indicated by the accompanying words “the moon dim in the heavens.” In this way, one can perceive Sanba’s distinctive insight into the passion of spectators who try to come into contact with the atmosphere of the theatre, even if only a little. Furthermore, at the beginning, the words “Patrons: The Eight Hundred and Eight Towns; Bathhouses in Every Town; Barbers; Within Four ri in Every Direction; Hairdressers at Every Street Corner” symbolically indicate the spread of theatre enthusiasts throughout Edo. Bathhouses and hairdressers’ shops were places of social intercourse for the common people of Edo, and this was the world in which Sanba, who wrote Ukiyoburo and Ukiyodoko, was most at home.

Hanamichi no Deha o Miru Kenbutsu no Omomuki (Spectators Watching an Entrance on the Hanamichi) 

Figs. 15a, top, 15b, bottom.

(From the first volume of Kyakusha Hyōbanki.)

Spectators in the upper sajiki, on the audience’s left, leaning forward enthusiastically to peer at an actor who on the hanamichi. Splendid food being brought in is visible, and to the left is written “Western Upper Boxes: Tayū.” Tayū was the highest-grade second-floor seating; proceeding from the side nearest the stage, there was the uchigōshi (inner lattice), next came this tayū, and the more distant section was called hira (ordinary). Moreover, the term tayū-sajiki became generalized and was used to mean a particularly good seat with an excellent view. Although the occupants of the best seats are not necessarily connoisseurs, the spectators in the picture are watching very intently.

Ureiba o Miru Kenbutsu no Tei (Spectators Watching a Sorrowful Scene) (Fig. 15b, bottom)

 (From the first volume of Kyakusha Hyōbanki.)

This, on the other hand, shows the lower boxes on audience left, popularly called the kamo-sajiki. The lower boxes, in order from the places nearest the stage, were the uchi-suiren (inner bamboo blinds), shown here; the tayū; and, in the lower-ranked places, the soto-suiren (outer bamboo blinds) and shin-gōshi (new lattice). Also, the area slightly higher than the ordinary ground-floor seating in the foreground was called the taka-doma (raised pit seating); these seats were also established beneath the eastern (audience right) and western boxes around Kyōwa 2 (1802), and their price was twenty to thirty percent higher than that of the ordinary ground-floor seats. In any case, observe how deeply the spectators watching the “sorrowful scene” emotionally identify and sympathize with the play.

Onna no Ko no Hiiki (Girl Fans) (Fig. 16a)

 (From the middle volume of Kyakusha Hyōbanki.)

Children love theatre as much as adults do. In the illustration, a couple of girls, with actor pictures before them, hold a shamisen and play with dolls. Following a section in which Sanba humorously describes adults who boast to one another about their favorite actors, Sanba also amusingly depicts the innocent rivalry of young girls who imitate the adults in their devotion to actors.

Otoko no Ko no Hiiki (Boy Fans) (Fig. 16b)

(From the middle volume of Kyakusha Hyōbanki.)

Mischievous boys are not to be outdone. When they agree to play at theatre, it quickly turns into a scene like the one seen here. The boys naturally favor the bombastic style of aragoto, and they dispute who is stronger, Susanoo no Mikoto or Benkei, or Benkei or Kintoki; then they ask which would be more powerful, Benkei and Kintoki together or Danjūrō, and their talk takes an exaggerated turn as they conclude. Sanba writes, “The more they’re scolded, the less the temple-school children listen; the teacher is forced to deal with those who imitate actors’ gestures and voices.”

Audience as Supporters — Shikitei Sanba and the Mimasu-ren

In Shikitei Sanba’s Kyakusha Hyōbanki, at the beginning of the section on leading male roles, is the designation for the “Supreme Upper-Upper Excellent: Regular Devoted Patrons.” These were spectators who patronized a particular actor with unwavering devotion and invariably attended that actor’s performances. When such like-minded spectators gathered together in an organized fashion to support a particular actor, they became a renjū (fan club). In fact, many such kabuki renjū existed. For example, let’s look at the Utei Enba (Kanpō 3 [1743]–Bunsei 5 [1822]) and the Mimasu-ren (Mimasu Association). Utei Enba will appear frequently hereafter. His original occupation was master carpenter, but he was a versatile, talented man also active as a popular-fiction writer, a jōruri playwright, a financial backer of entertainments, and a key figure who opened the way for the revival of rakugo. Enba was a leader who organized activities; ardently favoring Ichikawa Danjūrō, he organized the Mimasu-ren (mimasu, three sake measuring boxes inside one another) being Danjūrō’s standard family crest), and became its central figure. First and foremost of his duties was mobilizing audiences to attend plays in which Danjūrō appeared; in addition, the association carried out a wide variety of activities, such as compiling collections of kyōka (comic waka poetry), haikai, and the like (ten collections altogether, with approximately 1,400 contributors). Incidentally, Shikitei Sanba is said to have been a disciple of Utei Enba, both being passionate theatre enthusiasts. Furthermore, Enba published an earlier work called Kyakusha Hyōbanki, a sharebon (witty books about brothel life) published in An’ei 9 (1780). This was a comical critique of the pleasure-seekers visiting the licensed quarters.

Hana Edo Kabuki Nendaiki (Chronicle of Kabuki in Blooming Edo), First Series, Volume One (Fig. 17)

Fig. 17.

(Written by Utei Enba. Illustrated by Katsukawa Shuntei. Bunka 8 (1811). Waseda University Theatre Museum.)

Although Enba’s book may be called the first history of kabuki, it was, above all, a history of Edo kabuki centered on the Ichikawa Danjūrō line, and was written for Danjūrō’s sake. Danjūrō VI died prematurely in Kansei 2 (1790), Danjūrō VII succeeding to the name at only ten. Danjūrō V, who had retired, died in 1806. Enba became a supporter of the young Danjūrō, worked desperately to promote him, and helped make him representative of Edo.

Fig. 18.

Utei Enba at Home (Fig. 18)

(From Utei Enba’s Edo Kakki Danjūrō Hiiki (Edo Ardor: Devotion to Danjūrō), Tenmei 9 [1787]. National Theatre.)

This illustration to which considerable elegance has been added, depicts the residence of Utei Enba, named Danshūrō. Enba, who was a master carpenter, skillfully incorporated Danjūrō’s mimasu crest into the ceiling and interior decorations. Even his kimono bears the mimasu crest. There is also a hanging scroll of Danjūrō, making an environment totally devoted to Danjūrō.

Utei Enba’s New Year’s Greeting for Bunka 8 (1811) (Fig. 19)

Fig. 19.

(By Utei Enba. Artist: Utagawa Toyokuni I. Shikishiban surimono (privately printed sheet in square format). Private collection.)

Saitan (New Year’s Day) refers to works made to celebrate the New Year. This is a surimono of a daishōgoyomi (calendar of long and short months) by Utei Enba. Daishō refers to the “large months” (thirty days) and “small months” twenty-nine days or fewer) in the lunar calendar. Such privately published prints ingeniously indicated which months were large and which small (the arrangement of months changed each year in the lunar calendar). Enba continued producing and distributing New Year’s prints for several decades. Here, the pictorial motif is Ichikawa Danjūrō VII: the twenty-two-year-old Danjūrō VII is depicted using gold and silver, and the small months are recorded on his collar. In this way, Enba, acting as a behind-the-scenes fan, persistently used various means to promote the star. A member of the audience could thus be a figjure of considerable importance.