Panel 6: Japanese Theatre

Chair: Michael Brownstein, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Laura MacDonald, Michigan State University, “Knowledge and Power in Musical Theatre: The International Journeys of East Asian Performers and Producers”

In Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (1988), anthropologist Mary W. Helms explores how different cultures gain knowledge and power through journeys to other lands. In this paper, I build on Helms to trace and evaluate the journeys from Japan to the United States of singer and actor Yukimura Izumi in the 1950s and 1960s, and theatre producer Yamazaki Yoshito from the 2000s onwards, as well as the journeys of the Korean producer Yun Hojin to study theatre and performance studies at NYU in the 1980s, and musical theatre actors Nam Kyung-Ju and Yang Joon-Mo, to Russia, North Korea, Japan, and the US for training and performance opportunities from the 1990s onwards. How did their transnational experiences in different decades help them to sustain careers in Japan and South Korea? Yukimura performed on stage and screen, and also translated musical theatre song lyrics from English to Japanese. Yamazaki produces Western musicals in translation and presents international tours in Japan. Yun has staged Korean histories of Empress Myeonseon and activist An Jung-geun, both in Korean and internationally. Nam and Yang both continue to perform in Western and Korean musicals while writing PhD dissertations and teaching the next generation of performers as faculty at Korean universities. To what extent has international experience contributed to each theatre professional’s success and rise to positions of power?

Michael Brownstein, University of Notre Dame, “Freud and the Nō: Mourning and Melancholia in Matsukaze”

This paper is an exercise in psychanalytic literary criticism applied to the medieval Nō play MATSUKAZE (“Wind in the Pines”). MATSUKAZE belongs to the category of so-called “wig plays” (kazura-mono), which includes IZUTSU (“The Well-Cradle”) and NONOMIYA (“The Shrine in the Fields”), all written by the great playwright/performer Zeami Motokiyo early in the fifteenth century. What might these plays, which scholars count among Zeami’s greatest, have meant to his original audience, and what might account for their continuing appeal?

In these plays, the main character is the ghost of a woman who suffers from an obsessive attachment (mōshū) to the memory of her long dead lover, an attachment that causes her to linger in the world of the living as a phantom or spirit. The paper is not so much an attempt to psychoanalyze the ghost of a fictitious character, in this case a woman named “Matsukaze,” but rather to explore how, through its narrative and use of poetic language, the play dramatizes a psychological problem Freud identified as “melancholia” in his essay, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). I will argue that a Freudian perspective on MATSUKAZE helps us understand why this and other plays in this category continue to be compelling in performance today, not just for the beauty of their imagery, their sources in earlier literary classics, or the skills of the actors, but also because the pathology of obsessive attachment at the heart of the stories is still very much with us.

Aragorn Quinn, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, “Disembodied Tales: Terayama Shuji’s Yamamba and the Showa Radio Drama”

Unique among performance genres, the radio drama is defined by disembodiment. Performance theorists invariably assume copresence of performer(s) and audience as minimally essential components for a performative act to take place. Yet despite lacking the core element of embodiment, the radio drama was an enormously popular mode of performance throughout the 20th century. The radio drama dominated every time slot, and every audience demographic, from Japan’s very first commercially broadcast radio in March 1925. It retained popularity even after audiences of the visual storytelling medium of television surpassed radio audiences in 1962. This paper probes avant garde filmmaker and theater producer Terayama Shuji’s 1964 radio play Yamamba to understand the role of the body in performance. Even though much of Terayama’s work foregrounded the body in provocative ways, he was nonetheless a prolific writer of radio drama until his death in 1983. As a retelling of the folktale and noh play of the same name, in Yamamba Terayama repurposes formal properties of embodied genres into a disembodied medium. The content of the narrative also features the eponymous character who embodies notions of femininity in complicated and conflicting ways. Thus, Terayama’s radio drama comments upon embodiment in performance through both thematic content and formal approach. This paper, part of a larger project, seeks to understand through the radio drama to what extent embodiment is the defining feature of performance. What is left of performance when the body is removed?

Stephen Filler, Oakland University, “Miyabe Miyuki’s Copycat Killer: Murder as Participatory Theatre”

Miyabe Miyuki’s epic novel Mohōhan (The Copycat Killer; 2001) portrays a series of “theatrical” abductions and murders of young women in the late 1990s. It has received worldwide attention through a 2023 Taiwanese TV adaptation, distributed through Netflix. The events are portrayed from the perspective of the victims’ families, the police, the media, and the perpetrators themselves. While the novel relies on tricks of popular fiction, including fantastic coincidences, plot twists, constructed criminal psychologies, and a hint of the supernatural, it is firmly realistic and addresses many of the perceived social issues of the time, in particular the double standard in how female victims are viewed depending on their perceived sexual morality. Childhood trauma and the breakdown of the family are also prominent themes. Mohōhan is built on the premise of crimes as drama. The perpetrators aim to produce a society-wide “drama” in which perpetrators, victims, police, and the public all play their roles. It addresses the negative aspects of mass media coverage of crimes, particularly the popular “wide shows,” news programs, tabloid papers, highbrow magazines, and the then-emergent Internet. Ironically, the novel itself purports to portray the reality “on the ground” from various points of view that are overlooked or distorted by other media. Particularly compelling is essential role played by the survivors of crimes and the intuitions of ordinary citizens in identifying the criminals. As in her other works, Miyabe admires ordinary working men and women and seems to call for greater respect for their values and wisdom.