This is the first volume in a monumental four-volume series that brings together the texts of 51 kabuki plays previously untranslated into English. Edited by two outstanding kabuki scholars, the collection, the first of its kind in a quarter-century, is the result of the combined efforts of 22 translators.
The plays themselves (this first volume contains 13) represent the work of two dozen playwrights and extend from the 1697 "Shibaraku" to the 1905 "A Sinking Moon Over the Lonely Castle Where the Cuckoo Cries." They were chosen because (in addition to not having been translated before) they were thought to show "the full sweep of kabuki dramaturgy." Included are period plays, domestic plays and dance pieces -- all of them illustrated with full-color wood-block prints and color or black-and-white photographs.
Though there are many translations of plays from noh, "kyogen" and the doll-drama, there have been relatively few from kabuki. From a repertoire of nearly 300 plays, less than 20 have been translated into English. In addition, from the puppet-drama plays incorporated into kabuki, no more than a dozen have been translated.
Unfortunate though this is, there have been reasons. While the noh plays are confidently ascribed to single playwrights, and while the puppet dramas often have behind them the authority of Edo Period playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, most kabuki plays are the product of several writers. Though this practice was also seen in Elizabethan and Jacobian theater, there is a prejudice that attaches less worth to coscripted plays, implying that their integrity is somehow compromised.
More serious is the fact that kabuki plays were often coscripted with actors who were inspired not by the needs of dramaturgy, but by inclinations toward fuller or more fitting roles for themselves. The characters in some kabuki plays are stereotypes with no complexity at all, since the leading roles were determined solely by the strengths of the actors performing them.
If one of them, for example Sakata Tojuro, was considered good at playing a gentle and amorous young man involved in unhappy circumstances, the playwright was stuck with this somewhat wimpy character. Even the great Chikamatsu could not solve this problem, and those plays he wrote directly for kabuki are thought less worthy. Donald Keene has written that such works "are inferior in every respect to the [puppet] plays he wrote at the same period."
One of the reasons for this was not only that the doll-drama did not have actors with grandiose agendas, it also had only puppets (much more primitive then than now) who needed all the complexity that they could get. For the doll-drama, Chikamatsu could take a one-dimensional matinee idol and flesh him out with such realistic contradictions that he became Tokubei in "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki."
Another reason for a perceived lack of interest in kabuki texts is that they are being read the wrong way. Western readers (and younger Japanese readers as well) expect realism, since that is the only dramaturgical style they know. Kabuki librettists, however, suffered no such bias. In fact, Japanese dramaturgy was, until quite recently, unconcerned with the realistic means perceived in the West as necessary.
Chikamatsu himself wrote that the "joruri" (chanted narrative used in the doll-drama) was "basically a musical form, and the length of the lines recited is therefore determined by the melody." The eminent kabuki scholar C. Andrew Gerstle has pointed out that once realism is removed as a favored style it is possible to see new virtues in the text. One ought to read it as one reads the libretto of an opera -- "human feeling, particularly sadness, expressed by words riding the high notes of the music." If you read a kabuki playwright as a kind of Japanese Lorenzo da Ponte, than his excellences become evident.
The editors of this collection might agree. They include elaborate stage directions, and many indications of the music used, and they suggest that the reader pay as much attention to these as is given the dialogue itself. The result offers the reader a new dimension to appreciate, a new way into the sometimes arcane drama of kabuki itself.
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