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This anthology is the first to survey the full range of modern Japanese drama and make available Japan's best and most representative twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century works in one volume. It opens with a comprehensive introduction to Meiji-period drama and follows with six chronological sections: \"The Age of Taisho Drama\"; The Tsukiji Little Theater and Its Aftermath\"; \"Wartime and Postwar Drama\"; \"The 1960s and Underground Theater\"; \"The 1980s and Beyond\"; and \"Popular Theater,\" providing a complete history of modern Japanese theater for students, scholars, instructors, and dramatists. The collection features a mix of original and previously published translations of works, among them plays by such writers as Masamune Hakucho (The Couple Next Door), Enchi Fumiko (Restless Night in Late Spring), Morimoto Kaoru (A Woman's Life), Abe Kobo (The Man Who Turned into a Stick), Kara Juro (Two Women), Terayama Shuji (Poison Boy), Noda Hideki (Poems for Sale), and Mishima Yukio (The Sardine Seller's Net of Love). Leading translators include Donald Keene, J. Thomas Rimer, M. Cody Poulton, John K. Gillespie, Mari Boyd, and Brian Powell. Each section features an introduction to the developments and character of the period, notes on the plays' productions, and photographs of their stage performances. The volume complements any study of modern Japanese literature and modern drama in China, Korea, or other Asian or contemporary Western nations.

This book endeavours to unravel the complicated skeins of Japanese theatre in the modern period and offers an appreciation of the richness of choice of presentational and representational theatre forms.Since the end of world War II there has been continuing but different conflict between the major theatrical genres. Kabuki continues to defend its ground successfully, but the 'new drama' (shingeki) became firmly established in its own right in the 1960s. It was a vigorous and exuberant 'underground' theatre which exploited anything and everything in the Japanese and western theatre traditions.Now, thirty years on, they too have been superseded. The youth theatre of the 1980s and 90s has thrown aside the concerns of the angry underground and developed a fast-moving bewilderingly kaleidoscopic drama of breath-taking energy.

Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater and its representations of medieval Japanese tales and tradition, reframing Edo kabuki as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity. Challenging the common understanding of kabuki as subversive, Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history.

This is a multi-author work which examines the cultural dimensions of the relations between East Asia’s two great powers, China and Japan, in a period of change and turmoil, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. This period saw Japanese invasion of China, the occupation of China’s North-east (Manchuria) and Taiwan, and war between the two nations from 1937-1945; the scars of that war are still evident in relations between the two countries today. In their quest for modernity, the rulers and leading thinkers of China and Japan defined themselves in contradisctinction to the other, influenced both by traditional bonds of classical culture and by the influx of new Western ideas that flowed through Japan to China. The experiences of intellectual and cultural awakening in the two countries were inextricably linked, as our studies of poetry, fiction, philosophy, theatre, and popular culture demonstrate. The chapters explore this process of “transculturation” – the sharing and exchange of ideas and artistic expression – not only in Japan and China, but in the larger region which Joshua Fogel has called the “Sinosphere,” an area including Korea and parts of Southeast Asia with a shared heritage of Confucian statecraft and values underpinned by the classical Chinese language. The authors of the chapters, who include established senior academics and younger scholars, and employ a range of disciplines and methodologies, were selected by the editors for their expertise in particular aspects of this rich and complex cultural relationship. As for the editors: Richard King and Cody Poulton are scholars and translators of Chinese literature and Japanese theatre respectively, each taking a historical and comparative perspective to the study of their subject; Katsuhiko Endo is an intellectual historian dealing with both Japan and China.

This essay analyzes the cultural meaning of the enormous popularity of, and significance attributed to, Japanese objects in the United States during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By locating this significance at the intersection of the United States' racial, economic, and material imaginaries, the essay argues for an interpretation of the Japanese object as an \"ethnic thing\" that suggests new ways of understanding of the relationship between objectification and racialization.

In 1815, Shikitei Sanba wrote prefaces to two scrapbooks: one in which he had collected ephemera and broadsheets related to the history of Edo's reconteurs and the other a 16-album collection of playbills. As physical objects, both are deeply suggestive: each is a manuscript comprised entirely of printed matter, a unique object fashioned from mass-produced material. This essay uses these collections to explore the historical imagination in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a time when the theater loomed large as a metaphor for the broader social world and a time when that world came increasingly to be defined by print and commerce.

From one of the foremost poets in contemporary Japan comes this entrancing memoir that traces a boy's childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Originally published in 1970, this translation is the first available in English. In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, Twelve Views from the Distancepresents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from his youth, Mutsuo Takahashi captures the full range of his internal life as a boy, shifting between his experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. With great candor, he also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man's early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown. Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many of his contemporaries have written about, Takahashi experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. In addition to his personal remembrances, the book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan. With profuse local color and detail, he re-creates the lost world that was the setting for his beginnings as a gay man and poet.

Offers an analysis of the influence of the George C. Miln theater company's 1891 tour of Japan which featured the first Shakespearean productions performed in complete texts on the Japanese stage. Offers insight into the history of British theatrical touring companies in the late nineteenth century and profiles the activities of the Miln company. Recalls the reactions of Japanese intellectuals to the performances of Shakespearean texts, commenting particularly on how the productions influenced Shoyo Tsubouchi.

Hiiki is the word commonly used for support given to a Kabuki actor, or for the supporter or fan himself. It can be applied to other sorts of ‘fan’, such as one who follows a particular sumō wrestler. The derivation of the word is not certain, but it is generally taken as a lengthened form of hiki, with a meaning of ‘pulling’ or ‘pulling together’. The clubs themselves were known as hiiki renchū, the last element having the alternative pronunciation renjū. Throughout this paper, ‘hiiki’, ‘supporter’ and ‘fan’ have been used indiscriminately with the same meaning.