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.