This lavish volume, as extravagant as the kabuki itself, is devoted to the photos of Shunji Ohkura, an artist who has applied himself to chronicling the various worlds of contemporary Japan.
Recently his collection "Tokyo X" was published (Kodansha) and reviewed (Jan. 8) on these pages. In it he perceived a "phantasmal Tokyo that had been assimilated whole by computers and transformed into a virtual city." In this new collection, he discovers a phantasmal Japan preserved through the transparent intricacies of that most populist of entertainments, the kabuki.
As Donald Keene observes in his introduction, the theater -- though it has been called a "mirror of life" in other countries -- is different in Japan. Kabuki "is less a mirror than a magnifying glass, enlarging and enhancing life to bring out to the full its color, its excitement, and its theatricality."
The dramatics of the kabuki are certainly extreme. Not only are the themes lavishly melodramatic, but their execution is flamboyantly excessive. This is intended. The magnifying glass is brought very close and expressed emotions are enlarged to a degree impossible (and unwelcome) in more realist theaters.
This is presumably what the Edo theater-going public desired -- this gorgeous show about feudal virtues and their highly colored consequences.
This is also apparently what the Tokyo theater-going public still wants (contemporary kabuki plays to full houses), though the issues are no longer burning and the presentation is enshrouded in tradition. Still a venerable combination of elements we would identify as opera, pantomime, melodrama, circus, the kabuki remains Japan's most lavish entertainment, an Edo floor-show with wonder, magic and lots of glitter.
This feckless, transient glory of the kabuki is presumably what interests Ohkura. It contains something of the phantasmal and the virtual and is perhaps what corresponded two centuries ago to today's Harajuku/Aoyama scene -- the extreme and strutting fashions, the DJs, the live-houses, the raves.
Ohkura has previously published collections on the actors Tamasaburo and Kikugoro, and in this volume all the color, the posturing, the in-your-face gorgeousness of the kabuki is beautifully captured. Here is Tamasaburo towering on his lacquer geta as Yatsuhashi in "Kagotsurube"; here is Utaemon in the same role 15 years earlier with Kanzaburo as the pockmarked patron; Kikugoro, spider-webbed and psychedelic in "Tsuchigumo"; and a whole procession of Benkeis -- Danjuro, Shinnosuke, Tatsunosuke -- in a variety of "Kanjincho" performances.
Taken over 25 years, this collection slices through time to show Kikugoro in 1993 and Kikunosuke in 2000 in the same pose from "Benten Kozo," and Danjiro as Sukeroku in 1985 and his son, Shinnosuke, in the same pose in 2000.
Time is sliced in other ways as well. Perhaps one of the reasons that kabuki remains popular (and that such sumptuous and expensive books as this sell) is that the Japanese taste for the showy, the lavish and, indeed, the meretricious, is just as much a part of a national predilection as is the quiet, the subdued, the elemental -- "wabi," "sabi" and all the rest. The Kabuki/Omotesando take on "hade" (that aesthetic opposite) are both parts of the same magnifying glass of which Keene spoke. This is what Ohkura shows us in both the earlier "Tokyo X" and in this, his latest book.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.