Izumi Kyoka (1873-1938) was much admired by Tanizaki, with whom he shared an esteem for Edo culture, by Mishima, who cherished his elaborate style, and by Akutagawa, who much admired his handling of supernatural themes and had a volume of Kyoka's open on his desk the day he committed suicide.
Ghosts, goblins and the life beyond are the stuff of Izumi's drama, all presented in high Edo style and laced with lavish language. These plays were, however, not at all well known during most of the playwright's life. The only one of them staged during his lifetime was "Demon Pond," and though the author so wanted to see his "The Castle Tower" on the stage that he offered to pay the actors and waive his royalties, it was not performed until 1951. One of his best plays, "Yamabuki," was only put on in 1977 and some of his other plays have never been staged at all.
There are a number of reasons for this late approval -- the rise of a less realistic theater, the interest of such avant-garde playwrights as Terayama Shuji and Kara Juro, the devotion of such actors as Bando Tamasaburo, and (as Cody Poulton, author of this interesting study of Kyoka's plays, suggests) changes in the Japanese language.
"Never an easy writer, Kyoka now is practically impenetrable for the modern reader. His images are far more accessible to modern audiences through stage or film than through the thick weave of his language." This, coupled with what is taken for his "new age" interests -- astral beings and the like -- has made the drama fairly popular.
Also, the eccentricities of the author himself contributed to his late popularity. Superstitious, he entertained a number of taboos and fetishes concerning the usage of language. Rough drafts were offered before a photograph of his mentor, Ozaki Koyo, and then burned. The ashes were then eaten as a talisman against cholera, a disease of which Kyoka was in mortal fear. Such entertaining anecdotes can only appeal in an age of pragmatic standardization and a result is that Kyoka is an established, if marginal, playwright.
This is ironic because, while the plays were being ignored, stages were brimming with Kyoka's language, the reason being that his fiction proved so popular that adaptations were being made for the shimpa theater.
Intended as something of an antidote to kabuki, the marginally more realistic shimpa had a need of new vehicles and popular literature was continually being raided to provide these. Since this fiction thought itself realist and was usually sensational, it consisted often of melodrama.
In exploring this irony ("that the shimpa adaptations which have been performed continuously for close to a century now, have faired much better than his original plays,") Poulton finds himself in an interesting scholarly position.
This he acknowledges when he writes in his concluding chapter that "this study has been in part a defense of the shimpa and an apology for the melodramatic element in Kyoka's literature." Though quite aware of the sentimentality and stereotyping of melodrama, he argues that this is as much a part of "theater" as is anything else. And if this leads to cant, cliche and kitsch, then this too is part of stage presentation.
In his closely reasoned argument, Poulton shows not only the influence of noh and kabuki but also such symbolist playwrights as Haupmann and Maeterlinck. He notes the effect of Wilde's "Salome," seen in Japan as early as 1907, and reaches a number of conclusions. Among these is that in his fiction (and I think his plays as well) Kyoka was "reworking the same kind of moral schematization seen in Edo drama, one predicated either on the vindication of good over evil, or the encouragement of virtue and the castigation of vice." Kyoka's contribution was to problemize the notion.
How this was done is indicated by the study of the work, a complete translation of three plays ("Demon Pond," "The Sea God's Villa," and "The Castle Tower") and a full essay on each. These in hand, the reader is prepared for an encounter with one of Japan's most romantic moderns, a man it is said who created a dramaturgy of the sacred from the dregs of the past.
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