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“What Really Happens Backstage”: A Nineteenth-Century Kabuki Document

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Samuel L. Leiter
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Extract

In 1967 the National Theatre of Japan (Kokuritsu Gekijô) published a facsimile version of Okyôgen Gakuya no Honsetsu (What Really Happens Backstage), a two-volume, four-part work, originally published in the midnineteenth century in Edo (Tokyo), and written by Santei Shunba, with the first volume (1858) illustrated by Baichôrô Kunisada and Ichieisai Yoshitsuya, and the second (1859) by Ichiransai Kunitsuna. The book offers numerous illustrations of kabuki stage effects, with brief explanations of their purposes. Despite its great value as a historical resource, this work had been barely known to the Japanese academic community, apart from the fact that one of its pictures appeared in Ihara Toshirô's 1913 Kinsei Nihon Engeki Shi (History of Japanese Theatre from the Edo Period) and was reproduced frequently thereafter. The chief source of information concerning its contents was an entry in the six-volume Engeki Hyakka Daijiten (Encyclopedia of the Theatre), published by Waseda University in 1962. This entry contained several inaccuracies, including errors in the number of the book's volumes and its publication date.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , November 1997 , pp. 109 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1997

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References

1. I am indebted for this background to Hattori Yukio's commentary in Okyôgen Gakuya no Honsetsu, Kabuki no Bunken [Kabuki Documents] series, (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Gekijô, 1967), 2: 151–154Google Scholar.

2. In 1629, women were officially banned from kabuki but female impersonation remained, primarily as an act of sexual enticement, most of the actors—all of them attractive youths—also being prostitutes. Not until the 1660s did female impersonation become the serious art form it remains today.

3. By the nineteenth century, the art of physical transformation had become so advanced that there was a craze for dance plays in which a star played up to twelve strongly contrasting roles. These works were called henge buyô (“transformation dances”).

4. See Leiter, Samuel L., “Keren: Spectacle and Trickery on theKabuki Stage,” Educational Theatre Journal 28 (1976): 174—188CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. A vivid, excellently illustrated, account of these beliefs is in Addis, Stephen, ed, Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural (New York: George Braziller, in association with the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1985)Google Scholar.

6. Most terms and titles given in this article have an entry in Leiter, Samuel L., New Kabuki Encyclopedia: A Revised Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1997)Google Scholar.

7. Unidentified work quoted by Southern, Richard, “Trickwork on the English Stage,” in Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Hartnoll, Phyllis, 2d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 800, and the 3d ed. (1967), 957Google Scholar.

8. The play is translated in Gerstle, C. Andrew, Inobe, Kiyoshi, and Malm, William P., Theater as Music: The Bunraku Play “Mt. Imo and Mt. Se: An Exemplary Tale of Womanly Virtue” (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1990.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. See Leiter, Samuel L., “The Kanamaru-za: Japan's Oldest Kabuki Theatre” Asian Theatre Journal 15:1 (Spring 1997): 56–92, which provides numerous photographs of this old theatreCrossRefGoogle Scholar.