I apologize for how long this blog has been dormant. Covid
and the ultimate demise of the great kabuki magazine, ENGEKIKAI, whose monthly issues
I used to chronicle, are part of the reason. Also, my other research and
writing interests were involved. Recently, though, I was commissioned to
write an essay related to the release of the new Japanese movie, Kokuho, which is Japan’s entry into the
Academy Awards competition for BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM. The essay was intended as a reference point for
Western journalists writing about the movie. Now that the film is released I’m
posting the essay below for those who might be interested. The movie is
definitely worth seeing,, but this is not a review.
KABUKI: An Introduction to Kokuho
Samuel L. Leiter
Kabuki, one of the world’s most honored theatrical
traditions, shines brightly in Lee Sang-Il’s Kokuho, a movie whose
title, meaning “National Treasure,” applies to kabuki as well as to a handful
of its actors and musicians who have received that honor. It is one of Japan’s four classical theatre
genres, the others being the ritualistic noh, the comical kyogen, and the
dramatic puppet theatre called bunraku; kabuki draws material from each, but
especially from the last, which provides perhaps half its plays.
Born in Kyoto in 1603, kabuki originally meant anything
“offbeat,” but came to be written with characters meaning “song,” “dance,” and “prostitute”
(later replaced by “skill”). It began as a popular art of songs, dances, and
sketches set in the pleasure quarters among prostitutes and their clients that
delighted the burgeoning urban citizenry under the newly established Tokugawa
shogunate. Kabuki’s creative and performative centers were in Osaka and Kyoto,
in Western Japan, and Edo (later Tokyo), in the East. These areas competed in intense
rivalry for artistic dominance. Kokuho’s leading actors are from Osaka, but
also play in Tokyo.
While noh and kyogen were associated with the samurai class,
the highly commercialized kabuki (like its rival, bunraku) was ragingly popular
among the masses, its leading performers as glorified and well paid as movie or
rock stars. Scandal and family dissension could as easily arise among them then
as today. While many parallels can be drawn between kabuki and the commercial theatres
of the West, it differed largely—apart from its native subject matter and conventions—in
the breadth of its artistic methods.
Actors, who often begin their rigorous training before
they’re even in kindergarten, learn to perform in serious historical and
domestic dramas with tales of revenge, murder, suicide, romance, dissipation, theft,
power, war, inheritance, usurpation, loyalty, and the like. They also learn to
dance in a vast repertory ranging from symbolic to dramatic.
Kabuki is an all-male theatre whose female roles are played
by specialists called onnagata (onna=woman, gata=person),
as we see in Kokuho. This practice began in the mid-seventeenth century
after real women were banned from the stage in 1629, following incidents of
rowdiness stirred by men seeking the actresses’ favors. The shift from
depending on the natural sex appeal of women to performances by men intent on
deepening the internal representation of women led to a marked enrichment of
kabuki as a serious artistic form.
At one time, some top-rated onnagata, seeking realism
in their art, lived as much like women offstage as possible, even when
married with children. Externally, these male actors created a stage femininity
that strongly influenced the behavior and fashions of women in real life. It
should be noted though, that despite gender-role specialization, many actors play
both males and females, requiring the best of them to be part Baryshnikov and
part Graham, part Olivier and part Streep.
As in any traditional Japanese art, devotion to perfection can
be all-consuming for kabuki actors. Kokuho presents a glimpse of the rigorous
training process as well as substantial selections from five kabuki works, four
from famous dances and one adapted from a classic 1703 puppet play. A typical
program, which might last over four hours, presents several such pieces, including
both dance and drama.
The non-dance plays are mainly well-known scenes drawn from
longer plays whose full-length versions are only rarely staged. This accounts
for the unique, semi-musical way the female character shown in Kokuho’s
dramatic scene speaks, based as it is on the narrative style of the puppet
theatre chanter, who recites everyone’s lines in distinctly different voices
according to long-established musical and poetic conventions.
The dances in Kokuho represent several types, but
it’s interesting that two of them allow the film’s two young actors to perform roles
that closely mirror one another. In one selection, they play vigorous male
lions, playfully swinging around their floor-length manes; in the other they’re
beautiful dancers—in reality, jealous women transformed into serpents—visiting
a temple’s bell-raising ceremony, during which they shed their gorgeous costumes
as a serpent does its skin.
Although a work of fiction in which the names of the characters
and theatres are made up, Kokuho truthfully reflects many things about
kabuki, including allusions to a historical background that gives credence to
the dramatized events. The film provides a trustworthy depiction of a world
where actors take different names with a new ordinal number as their artistry
progresses. In this world, an actor’s successor succeeds to a name as the present
holder—if still active—takes a new one during a highly formalized public
ceremony. Further, succession need not be to a biological relative. None of
kabuki’s longest dynasties—there have been eighteen actors called Nakamura
Kanzaburo—has a direct blood connection to its founders.
From a theatregoer’s perspective, Kokuho—filmed in
real kabuki theatres—shows both the premodern seating arrangements still found
in a few old-time venues, where audiences sit on the ground in small, boxed-in
enclosures, and modern ones with their comfortable Western seats. We also
witness the use not only of an audience runway, the famous hanamichi, but of an
elevator trap fitted into it for magical entrances. And, obviously, kabuki’s
various stage conventions catch the eye, as do its quick onstage changes,
stylized posing, visible onstage assistants, and exquisite scenery, costumes,
wigs, and makeup.
Kokuho provides a lens through
which to view kabuki, a living tradition where artistic legacy and personal
ambition intersect. The film spotlights the rigorous practices, name-succession
pressures, and theatrical conventions that define this four-and-a-quarter-century
art form, revealing the human dynamics behind the iconic makeup and spectacle.
