ENGEKIKAI (No. 10, October 2020)

Ichikawa Ennosuke IV in Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura. Photo: Shinoyama Kishin.

Apologies for the delay in posting covers from Engekikai (Theatre World), Japan’s kabuki magazine of record. Postal restrictions stemming from the coronavirus are to blame. The issues themselves are less robust, of course, because of the limits placed on production over the past year. Two more issues recently arrived, closing out 2020. This cover is for October 2020 issue, #10. It shows the “Yoshinoyama” scene from Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura, starring Ichikawa Ennosuke IV as Satō Tadanobu, in reality Genkurō the fox.

 

While the issue has many other things in it, the headlines on the cover point to several of its leading articles. The biggest headline, at the right, is for “The Opening of Young Stars [Hanagata] Kabuki in August,” a series of commentaries by fifteen of the actors involved. At the left is mentioned an interview with the great star Nakamura Kichiemon II. Headlines at the bottom point to an essay on “Zoom Kabuki,” the streaming of kabuki productions during the pandemic; a transcript of the September “earphone guide” to that month’s productions at the Kabuki-za, a service inspired by the limitations on audience attendance in the wake of Covid-19; August and September theatre trends; the next installment in actor Matsumoto Kōshirō’s long-running series “Kōshirō’s Thousand and One Nights”; and the reprinting of an old essay about Nakamura Kichiemon I, one of the greatest stars of the first half of the twentieth century.