KABUKI TODAY: The Art and Tradition. Photographs by Shunji Ohkura, text by Iwao Kamimura, translated by Kirsten McIvor. Introduction by Donald Keene. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001, 194 pp., profusely illustrated. 5,800 yen.

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."