Noh Theater of Japan

 

[I’ve posted a number of pieces about Kabuki, the dynamic traditional theater form of Japan, on Rick On Theater.  (See, for example, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” [1 November 2010]; “Grand Kabuki (July 1985)” [6 November 2010]; “Two Kabuki Reviews (2014)” [20 January 2018]; “‘Kabuki: Inside the Japanese Artform with its Biggest Star, Ebizo’” by Jon Wertheim [1 May 2020]; “‘The Ancient Art of Kabuki Made New, With Computer Animation’” by Micheline Maynard in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” [4 October 2021].)   

[I’ve even posted one article on the ancient performance form Gigaku (26 July 2011); but I haven’t run anything on Noh (14th century), which is older than Kabuki (17th century) and younger than Gigaku (7th century).

[On a recent Sunday, the New York Times published an interesting piece on a new movement in Japan concerning the making of Noh masks in the paper’s T Magazine, its periodic style publication.  The report, Hannah Kirshner’s “A New Face,” is short, and it doesn’t say anything about the theater form itself, so I decided an introduction to Noh was in order.

[The name Noh (sometimes written ‘Nō’) is probably familiar with most readers, but I suspect most Westerners are unfamiliar with the theater form itself.  So, before I present Kirshner’s report on the modern-day take on Noh masks, here’s a brief history and description of this classic drama.]

Noh is a Japanese classic theater form involving music, dance, and drama, originating in the 14th century.  It was developed together with Kyogen, which are comical pieces performed during interludes of the main Noh performance.  The dual art of Noh and Kyogen is known as Nohgaku, and has been designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Noh, as we know it today, was popularized and formalized by a dramatist named Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1444) during the Muromachi Period (1333-1573).  Of the known 240 Noh plays in the current repertoire, Zeami wrote 100, and he codified the acting and production techniques in use today (1400-33; On the Art of the No Drama [Princeton University Press, 1984]).

It was Zeami's work that attracted the government's patronage of the art form.  Zeami later fell out of favor with the government and was banished to Sado Island.  Four main Noh troupes were subsequently established, receiving sponsorship from shrines and temples.

During the Tokugawa Period (1603-1867), the shogunate, the administration of the supreme military commander (shogun) of feudal Japan, made Noh its official ceremonial art and issued regulations for its governance.  Noh thus became increasingly standardized, with an emphasis on tradition rather than innovation.  A fifth troupe was added during this time, making five main Noh troupes which survive and perform till this day.

Noh theater is structured around song and dance.  The movement is slow and stately, the language is poetic (and spoken in a highly stylized form of 14th-century lyric Japanese that few modern spectators can understand), and it’s sung in a monotone.  

The name ‘Noh’ means ‘skill,’ ‘talent,’ or ‘to accomplish something.’  Zeami used the term ‘elegant imitation.’  When executed with excellence, the result is the experience of yugen, or ‘supreme beauty.’  This is the ultimate goal of the Noh performer. 

The rich, elaborate, and heavy costumes consist of multiple layers and textures that create an effect of resplendent elegance but also a bulky, massive figure.  Expressiveness is enhanced by props, most notably a folding fan.  Closed, partly closed, or open, the fan may represent any object as suggested by its shape and handling, for example a dagger or a lantern.

Plots are usually drawn from legend, history, literature (primarily Japanese or Chinese classical poetry and Zen Buddhist verses), and contemporary events of the era.  Themes often relate to dreams, supernatural worlds, ghosts, and spirits.

Noh plots are essentially dance-dramas, not concerned with dramatic action.  The plays seek to explore the essence of a situation or emotion in lyrical form.  All Noh plays reach fulfillment in dance.

Noh is performed on a square stage with a roof which is supported at its four corners by pillars.  The stage, made of planks, is hollow and resounds like a drum which the actors can use for sound effects.  All sides of the stage are open except for the back which consists of a wall with a painted image of a pine tree; in addition to no walls, there’s also no curtain to separate the audience from the performance space.  (All Noh stages are virtually identical.  Even the dimensions are standardized.) 

A bridgeway (hashigakari) runs at an oblique angle off the rear left corner (i.e., “up right” in western theater jargon) of the stage (to a small structure that serves as the “wings” of a western theater) for performers to enter and exit.  Noh used to be typically staged outdoors, but modern indoor theaters have also now become a common venue.

All performers in Noh are traditionally male (though that tradition is being successfully challenged more and more).  The roles are traditional and codified:

•   shite – the leading player.  Depending on the play, the shite (pronounced shi-TAY) may act as a holy old man, a deity, a demon, a spirit, or a living man or woman.  His movements express various moods.  (The shite is the only performer who wears a mask.)

•   waki – the supporting actor.  The waki plays roles such as a priest, monk, or samurai.  In contrast to the shite, the waki always portrays living people.

•   jiutai – the chorus.  The chorus of eight to ten people, including the chorus leader, sits stage left (i.e., the right of the stage from the perspective of the spectator) and assists the shite in the narration of the story.  (Unlike the chorus of a Greek classic play, the jiutai doesn’t enter the action on stage.)

•   hayashi – the orchestra.  Four musicians provide accompaniment for the performance with a flute (fue), shoulder drum (kotsuzumi), hip drum (otsuzumi) and stick drum (taiko).  They sit upstage, at the rear of the platform.

•   koken – stage attendants.  Dressed in black (to indicate they are unseen), the stage attendants are not part of the play but assist the performers in various ways, such as handing them props or adjusting their costumes.

The cast of a Noh play is a minimum of two (the shite and the waki), which is the usual, to up to six, plus the chorus and musicians. 

The roles each actor may play are rigidly conventional, unlike in western theater.  A waki one night can’t play a shite’s part the next, and a shite wouldn’t play a waki’s role in another production.  Training starts at around age three and it takes decades for a Noh actor to move up the ranks.

A Noh play generally runs around 60-90 minutes, some divided into two acts, and a Kyogen play lasts for around 15-30 minutes.  Traditionally, a Noh program includes three to five plays, one from each of several different categories of styles.  

Each play is separated from the next by a Kyogen, usually a comic version or parody of the main Noh play, making a total performance of between 3:45 and 10:00 hours (though probably more like 4-5 hours; spectators would come and go and bring food and drink).  Modern Noh performances, with fewer plays, are considerably shorter.

The lines of the play preceding the climactic dance establish the circumstances which motivate it.  The jiutai sings the narration of the shite’s dance-story; the hayashi furnishes a musical setting and establishes the timing of the shite’s gestures.  The dancer’s every movement of his hands and feet follows set rules.

Each gesture, each pose, each movement, each vocal inflection, each musical sequence has a specific meaning.  (These codified performance techniques, passed on from generation to generation, are called kata.)  The actors and musicians must learn these and execute them precisely, and devoted Noh fans understand them as if they were speech.

One key element of Noh are the masks which the shite wears.  They tell the audience what kind of character is being portrayed.  Some masks are general characters who may appear in many plays, while others are specific and are used in only one or two plays.  Frequently used masks represent demons and spirits, as well as women and men of various ages.  

The masks, which cover only the actor’s face, are carved from blocks of Japanese cypress.  Their three-dimensional properties allow skilled actors to evince a variety of expressions with changes in head orientation.  Some Noh masks, for example, are so carefully designed that the face smiles cheerfully when the actor looks up and takes on a dark, melancholy expression when the actor looks down. 

The masks are as codified as the actor’s kata.  The traditional mask-maker (unlike the ones in the article that follows), who’s an artist as well as a craftsman, can make only the subtlest modifications to the face, but master mask-makers have more leeway to do so than an apprentice.  Like the actors and the musicians, mask-makers have their traditions that are passed on to the next generations.

                     

— Pat Byrnes, New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001 

 “A NEW FACE”
by Hannah Kirshner

[Below is Kirshner’s New York Times report on the recent development in Noh mask-making (T Magazine 26 March 2023).  It’s also available online as “MAKING IT: The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks” (The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).  There are several nice photo illustrations by Bon Duke, which I didn’t reproduce for ROT.]

Both honoring and departing from the tradition of Japanese Noh masks making, women are expanding its possibilities.

One of the world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including seasonal rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336-1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders, some of whom, like the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also acted in Noh. Presented using minimal props on a stage comprising a roof, four pillars and a bridge way, the plays dramatize myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, periodic percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colors and elaborate embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status.

But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the carved masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play. Master mask carvers have long been celebrated for their ability to create a static face that seems to come alive, its expression changing with the angle of the performer’s head and the way the light hits its features. While many Japanese people today have never seen a live Noh performance, the white visage and red lips of a Ko-omote mask (one of a few denoting a young woman) or the bulging golden eyes of the horned Hannya (one of the most famous of the demon masks, representing a wrathful, jealous woman) are both intrinsic to Japan’s visual culture.

Before World War II, only men were allowed to perform Noh professionally; now, some women play leading roles. But until recently, mask making, in which blocks of hinoki cypress carved in high relief are hollowed out, then primed with a white mixture of crushed oyster shells and animal glue -- with mineral pigment for lips and cheeks, and gold powder or copper to give the teeth and eyes of masks depicting supernatural beings an otherworldly glow -- was a craft largely handed down from father to son.

That’s changed somewhat in the years since the Kyoto-based Mitsue Nakamura, 76, started learning the craft in the 1980s. When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.

For purists, Nakamura says, a true Noh mask is never entirely decorative: It has to be used onstage, and its maker must hew precisely to a narrow set of centuries-old parameters. Today, Nakamura says, actors prize masks that are antiques or appear to be. Her pieces, each of which takes about a month to complete, often look older than they are thanks to the shadows she smudges into the contours of the face, or a weathering she achieves by scratching the paint with bamboo.

In 2018, the Kanagawa-based playwright and screenwriter Lilico Aso, 48, came to see Nakamura’s process firsthand because she was interested in developing a character who was a Noh mask carver; instead, she became a mask carver herself, drawn, she says, to the idea of being “both a craftsman and an artist.” She’s been studying with Nakamura ever since and, last fall, in a show titled “Noh Mask Maker Mitsue Nakamura and Her Four Disciples” at Tokyo’s Tanaka Yaesu gallery, she exhibited a series of four masks called “Time Capsule” inspired by celebrities and fictional characters. Rihanna became an earth goddess with pearlescent blue lips and eye shadow. Ariana Grande morphed into the moon princess Kaguya, who, in an ancient tale, rejects all her mortal suitors and returns to her lunar home; in Aso’s rendering, she has the high, soft eyebrows of a Noh beauty.

For some female Noh artisans, subtle changes to traditional forms emerge from a deep personal connection. Keiko Udaka, 43, who also works in Kyoto, grew up steeped in Noh, with a father who was both a performer and a mask maker. She began studying with him when she was a teenager; in 2021, after he died, she took over an unfinished Noh play he was working on, commissioned by a town in Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. While one of her brothers completed the script, Udaka created a mask for the main character, a folk hero who starved to death while cultivating barley for future generations, imbuing it with the features of their late father. Such homages aren’t an uncommon practice among Noh artisans, and the allure is obvious: As Udaka says, a painstakingly crafted carving is more indelible than a photo. “Memories can be recorded too easily in many places now,” she says, “and they don’t remain in our minds.”

While Udaka’s departures from tradition are subtle, those of the Tokyo-based Shuko Nakamura (no relation to the Kyoto mask maker), 34, are unignorable. Inspired by Noh history, folklore and her own imagination, she makes masks out of modeling clay and paper rather than wood. One mask depicts an old woman, a crown of blue-black crows circling above her forlorn face, alluding to the ubasute story -- which appears in both folk tales and Noh -- of an elderly family member abandoned in the forest. With deep smile lines, a long horsehair beard and bushy pompom eyebrows, another mask honors the form of Okina, a spirit who appears as an old man. A gnarled pine tree sprouts from the mask’s head in place of hair; at the roots nestle a pair of turtles. The conifers and reptiles, she says, are references to the characteristic illustrations on the fan Okina holds when he dances.

[Ubasute (‘abandoning an old woman’) is a mythical practice whereby an infirm or elderly relative is carried to some remote, desolate place, and left there to die.  It appears to be the subject of legend and doesn’t seem ever to have been a common custom.]

Out of respect for the ancient art, Shuko Nakamura refers to her creations as “creative masks” rather than Noh masks, but the tribute is clear. And even a traditional mask maker like Mitsue Nakamura sees the place for works that expand the boundaries of Noh’s conservative culture. “Of course, the best masks are those used onstage,” she says, “but I think we should also make Noh masks that can stand on their own.”

[A little more than a dozen years ago, I published a post on Rick On Theater on “The Magic of Masks” (17 September 2011; Rick On Theater: The Magic of Masks).  I looked at masking in a number of different circumstances, including various performance forms—Noh theater among them—and from several different perspectives.

[The interested ROTter might want to have a look at this post (which also touches on puppetry, an allied art form, in passing).  If anyone wants further information on masks and masking, the afterword of “The Magic of Masks” is a list of the people whom I referenced in the post and some of the sources I consulted. 

[(A few words of caution: the mask post, and therefore the list, is 12 years old.  Some of the life-dates included in the list of names are out of date and the person named has since died.  Some of the sources, too, are old and may no longer be readily available.)

[Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist.  Her reporting has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Food & Wine, among others, and on the Proof podcast from America’s Test Kitchen.  She’s the author and illustrator of Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town (Viking, 2021).  

[Kirshner’s the winner of an International Gourmand “Best In The World” award for writing on Japan.  She grew up on a small farm outside Seattle, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Ishikawa, Japan.]

'Kafka on the Shore' (Lincoln Center Festival 2015)

Let’s see.  Characters include Colonel Sanders, Johnnie Walker, and some talking felines.  Are you sure this is a Japanese play?  Well, it is and it was my second and final show in this year’s Lincoln Center Festival: Kafka on the Shore, adapted by Frank Galati from the 2002 novel by Haruki Murakami.  (My previous visit to LCF was for Cheek by Jowl’s Ubu Roi; see the report on ROT on 27 August, which includes a brief background on the Festival.)  Directed by Yukio Ninagawa and performed in Japanese with English supertitles, the LCF performance was at the David H. Koch (formerly the New York State) Theater at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.  The play ran from 23 to 26 July and Diana, my usual theater companion, and I attended the 7:30 performance on the evening of Saturday, 25 July.  A production of Tokyo’s Ninagawa Company, Kafka is co-produced by the Saitama Arts Foundation, Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, and HoriPro, Inc.

Novelist Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s most esteemed, was born in Kyoto in 1949.  Now 66, he made his début as a novelist in 1979 with Hear the Wind Sing (published in English in 1987). Following the success of this novel he published a string of works, culminating with Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, published in Japan in 2014 and in English this year.  Marukami, whose work has been translated into as many as 50 languages (and has sold in the millions of copies outside Japan), also writes short stories, essays, children’s books, nonfiction, and translations of English-language books into Japanese.  Kafka on the Shore, published in 2002 in Japan and 2005 in the U.S., attracted readers around the world.  It was chosen as one of the 10 Best Books by the New York Times in 2005 and the writer has been recognized with many international prizes and honors.  A number of his books have been adapted for the stage, playing both in Japan and in the West.

As a youth, Marukami immersed himself in American culture, reading crime novels and listening to rock and roll.  His parents were both teachers of Japanese literature, but he grew up reading Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac.  He eventually became a huge fan of jazz and he and his wife later opened a jazz bar in Tokyo.  It was a popular and successful venture, but in 1978, while he was watching a baseball game, he was taken with the idea of writing a novel.  Needless to say, his interest in American culture led him to be influenced by U.S. writers like Raymond Chandler, Vonnegut, and Brautigan.  The Japanese literary establishment continues to criticize Murakami for being “un-Japanese” in his work, which is often described, ironically, as “Kafkaesque,” employing surrealism, fatalism, magic realism, and the existence of parallel worlds in its examination of alienation and loneliness.   

In 1979, Hear the Wind Sing was published and won a prestigious newcomer award.  Throughout the 1980s, Murakami wrote novels in contemporary colloquial language with narrators in their twenties, making his books very popular with young Japanese readers who’d felt put off by the affected and artificial prose of the usual Japanese literary fiction.  In 1987, Murakami released Norwegian Wood (2000 in the U.S.), a more conventional love story—at least by Murakami’s standards.  It became so popular that, among other social phenomena, a cover recording of the Beatles song of the same title rose to number one on the Japanese charts.  In 2007, Murakami published a memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008 in English), the title of which is a reference to the Raymond Carver story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

When his fame became uncomfortable for the novelist, Murakami left Japan and traveled the world, eventually settling in the United States.  Here he wrote the novel that many feel put him the ranks of the internationally renowned writers, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1994-95 in Japan; 1997 in the U.S.), which some consider Murakami’s masterpiece.  Then, almost a decade later, Murakami, now back in Japan, released Kafka on the Shore, a novel that broke from the author’s past practices, not least by replacing his usual 20-something narrator with a teenaged boy.  In another variation, the story’s told in two parallel lines (which I’ll get to shortly because, well . . . so is the play!), and the book became another worldwide bestseller.  In an interview after Kafka was published, Murakami said:

Most of my fiction up till now has been first person narratives dealing with a male protagonist (and narrator) in his 20s or 30s.  A few years ago, however, I started taking a different direction and began writing in a different voice and perspective.  There’s something about that style of writing that suits me.  In any case, whenever I write a new novel I decide on a theme and attempt to do something new and different.

Though Kafka explores weighty ideas like the question of identity (which I’ll also get to when I describe the adaptation), Murakami doesn’t like to discuss analyses of his writing.  He considers his novels as no more than pure stories.  Nonetheless, there are identifiable motifs in Murakami’s novels: jazz as the background beat of many of his book’s scenes and, in the word of one publisher, “the sense that something is just a little out of whack with the world.”  Said Nigel Redden, director of the Lincoln Center Festival, “It’s a world where most of the preconceptions don’t hold.”  Another motif, the frequent appearance of cats, is nearly central to the novel and the play. 

Yukio Ninagawa, who will turn 80 in October, was born in Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture, about 13 miles north of Tokyo.  He began his theater career as an actor in 1955 and joined the Seihai Theater Company.  He made his directorial debut in 1969, and subsequently founded his own companies, Gendaijin-Gekijo (1967-71) and Sakura-sha (1972-74).  He became a leading figure in Tokyo’s “underground theater,” a bit like New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway.  In 1974, however, the producer of the mainstream commercial Toho Theater invited Ninagawa to direct Romeo and Juliet at his theater, beginning the entry of the 39-year-old tyro into the ranks of internationally-renowned stage directors. 

In 1984, Ninagawa started the Gekisha Ninagawa Studio in Tokyo.  This became the Young Ninagawa Company in 1991 and then the Ninagawa Company Dash in 1996.  In 2004, the company once again changed its name to the Ninagawa Studio, which is what it’s called today—though it’s often known internationally as the Ninagawa Company (they’re the same group).  It was with this troupe of young actors that the director developed the adaptation of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. 

Over the years, Yukio Ninagawa has directed a wide range of productions, including contemporary Japanese plays, classic Greek tragedies, and the works of William Shakespeare.  In fact, he’s mostly known internationally for his interpretations of Western classics, including six different versions of Hamlet.  (In Japan, he’s known as “the director who runs through time.”)  In 1998, Ninagawa launched a project to stage all of Shakespeare’s plays and in 2000, he directed a 10½-hour performance of The Greeks by John Barton and Kenneth Cavender (a combination of 10 Greek classic plays focusing on the Trojan War, originally created and performed over three nights in 1980 by England’s Royal Shakespeare Company).  

In 1983, Ninagawa directed his first production of Euripides’ Medea, which was performed in Greece and his work has toured internationally every year since.  His production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, known in the West as the Ninagawa Macbeth, was first performed in Japan in 2001 and then toured abroad (I saw it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2002); he staged Yukio Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays (2000 in Japan) as part of the Lincoln Center Festival in 2005.  

In 2006, Ninagawa became artistic director of the Sainokuni Saitama Arts Theater (one of the co-producers of Kafka) where he founded a unique troupe, the Saitama Gold Theater, for performers over 55, as well as the Saitama Next Theatre, a project to develop young performers.  (He’s also president of Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music and artistic director of Tokyo Bunkamura Theater Cocoon.)  With his production of Titus Andronicus (2004, Tokyo; 2006, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford, and the Theatre Royal, Plymouth), the director was invited to participate in the RSC’s Complete Works festival (2006-07) as Japan’s only representative.  His first Kabuki play, Twelfth Night, was presented as part of Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE) 2009 (an international festival a little like LCF: a round-up of performing arts events from around the world) and Ninagawa has participated in BITE now for several years.  In 2012, the Japanese director’s Cymbeline was presented in London as part of the World Shakespeare Festival.  Ninagawa was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2002 and a Gold Medal from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts in 2008, and he’s also received many theater awards and honorary degrees in Japan and abroad.    

Yukio Ninagawa has been unwell for a year, during which he nonetheless created Kafka on the Shore and a new version of Hamlet.  He’s recovering, but his doctors still prohibit him from traveling, so for the first time since he began participating in the Lincoln Center Festival (this is his company’s third time), he didn’t accompany his troupe to New York City.  The production was prepared entirely in Japan under Ninagawa’s careful direction.  In his program note, the director insisted that his soul would be “with . . . the company for every performance.”  After its stop at Lincoln Center, Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore moves on to Singapore (October-November 2015) and Seoul (November 2015).

The story of Kafka on the Shore is told in two parallel narratives, which overlap occasionally but, like parallels in general, never actually converge.  (In the novel, the strains alternate chapter by chapter, but the play’s scenes don’t unfold quite so regularly.)  In the first, a 15-year-old boy’s run away from his controlling father’s home in Tokyo to escape an Oedipal destiny and find his estranged mother and sister.  We don’t learn his real name but he calls himself Kafka (Nino Furuhata), after his favorite writer.  On the long bus ride to Takamatsu, a provincial capital of almost half a million inhabitants on Shikoku Island, Kafka meets Sakura (Anne Suzuki), who’s the first to reach out to him and on whom he calls later when he needs help.  (Sakura, in fact, tells enough of her background to make her seem like Kafka’s lost sister.)  During his journey he’s frequently accompanied by his alter ego or imaginary friend, Crow (Hayato Kakizawa).  (In the play, Kafka explains that the Prague writer’s name means ‘crow’ in Czech—hence the name of the boy’s avatar.  This struck me as questionable, so I looked it up.  Kafka not only doesn’t translate as ‘crow,’ but it has no known meaning.  An alternate, but less common, spelling, Kavka, doesn’t exactly mean ‘crow,’ but it does translate as ‘jackdaw,’ a member of the same family.  I suppose in Japanese, since the names sound alike, there’d be no difference in the written form—but in English, they don’t line up.)  In Takamatsu, Kafka ends up in a private library run by the mysterious and remote Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa) who allows Kafka to stay in the library   The teenager befriends Oshima (Naohito Fujiki), a (gay, female-to-male) transgender librarian to whom he reveals his private thoughts and the two discuss life and literature every day.  For Kafka, it’s an idyllic interlude until the police come to question him about the murder of his father, a famous sculptor, back in Tokyo.    

The second narrative follows Nakata (Katsumi Kiba), a 70-ish-year-old man considered slow and simple.  When he was a schoolboy at the end of World War II, he was involved in a curious incident while on a school trip.  His entire class was left unconscious by a mysterious flash of light.  Young Nakata took longer to recover than his classmates and when he did come to, he’d lost his memory but gained the ability to communicate with cats.  For his disability, Nakata gets what he calls a “sub-city” from the government but he makes a small additional income as a cat whisperer to find lost felines in his Tokyo neighborhood.  (The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli called the character a “holy fool.”)  His current search for Goma, a lost tortoiseshell, takes Nakata on his first-ever road trip.  To help with the search, Nakata interviews stray and run-away cats, including Otsuka (Yukio Tsukamoto), an old black tom, and Mimi (Katrine Mutsukiko Doi Vincent), a Siamese named for the character in Puccini’s La Bohème.  (These aren’t the cats from Cats, but fully animal-costumed felines, wonderfully designed by Ayako Maeda.)  On the road, Nakata gets a lift in the long-haul truck driven by Hoshino (Tsutomu Takahashi), who becomes, first, Nakata’s ride, then his companion, and finally, his devoted friend.  In his search for Goma, the lost cat, Nakata encounters Johnnie Walker (Masato Shinkawa), dressed, like the whiskey logo figure, in top hat, walking stick, buff breeches, English riding boots, and red hunting coat, an infamous, and especially cruel, cat killer who preserves his victims’ heads like a bug collector does insects, eats their hearts, and collects their souls.  Hoshino and the old man also meet the mysterious Colonel Sanders (Masakatsu Toriyama), who may be a spirit of some kind in human form (an aspect of Noh in which a spirit or demon appears first as a “person of the place” and then is revealed as a supernatural being).  The fast-food icon turns out to be a pimp but guides Nakata to the portal he seeks to the spirit world. 

Through this convoluted narrative, Murakami explores themes of identity—Oshima’s transgender character; the possibility that Miss Saeki is Kafka’s long-lost mother; whether Kafka and Nakata are facets of the same person in parallel existences—and destiny.  Kafka’s storyline, which gets more stage time than Nakata’s, owes more than a passing nod to the Oedipus myth and there are echoes of several of Shakespeare’s plays throughout the whole story.  Like the novel, the stage adaptation blends magic realism, allegory, suspense, humor, dream, myth, and sensuality into the two entwined odysseys.  As most reviewers pointed out, however, the “tale . . . resonates viscerally but resists logical explanation.”

Frank Galati’s adaptation of Kafka on the Shore (translated back into Japanese by Shunsuke Hiratsuka after an English-language production by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in the fall of 2008) under Ninagawa’s direction ran three hours with one intermission.  (Galati, a long-time member of Steppenwolf, is probably best known for another adaptation of a novel for the stage: Steppenwolf’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1990 Best Play Tony-winner.  Galati also won the Tony for Best Direction of a Play for the production.  Previously, he adapted and staged two Murakami short stories, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” and “Honey Pie,” in 2005-06.)  As one or two reviewers agreed, the production of Kafka started out with promise—it looked interesting and theatrically innovative—but about two-thirds of the way through the first act (say about an hour in), it hadn’t advanced as a piece of theater—nothing changed; it all remained the same—and I started to peek at my watch.  As a three-hour adaptation of a novel, with which I have some long-standing issues, it’s just about all talk, and being in Japanese with supertitles, I was doing a lot of reading.  And head-bobbing.  It was a great let-down that ended up being terribly enervating.  I think I’d have been better off reading Murakami’s novel (which is 480 pages in English). 

Greater length is a common fault of plays adapted from novels.  (Galati’s Grapes ran two-and-a-half hours.  Even the musical adaptation of Gigi, based on Colette’s novel but with the MGM film by Lerner and Loewe as a template, was two-and-a-half hours long—and musicals tend to cleave to the standard two-hour length.)  Except for a few notable exceptions (Of Mice and Men; Look Homeward, Angel; The Member of the Wedding), I have serious reservations about all that genre—and length is only one of them.  Most novel adaptations go long because the writers try to squeeze in as much of the story as they can and novels tend to have more plot than plays (and more characters).  This is what I think happened in Kafka.  If they don’t follow that path, the writers tend to cut close to the bone and omit too much story and the play leaves too many parts of the plot unrevealed.  Another tendency for stage adaptations of novels, which also occurred in Kafka, is that the adapters focus on whatever action there is and eschew the intellectual aspects of the novel, which are more difficult for actors to convey on stage.  Kafka on the Shore is a heavily philosophical book, not terribly action-packed, so Galati dropped much of the deep thinking.  Even so, given how metaphysical the novel is, this still left the script mostly dialogue, almost all of it static two-character scenes.  (Another substitute for the missing action is narration, one of the least dramatic and theatrical devices known to theater.)  The set concept (realized by Tsukasa Nakagoshi and lit by Motoi Hattori), which really looked like a fantastic idea, helped reduce the scope of the production (on the large stage at the Koch, designed to accommodate dance companies and the accompanying movement) by isolating each scene in a smidgen of set and a tiny pool of light.  (It didn’t help matters that Diana and I were sitting in the third ring—of five—in the 2,586-seat house.) 

There have been, of course, stage adaptations from novels that have worked very well.  Usually, success depends on the choice of source and the judicious and theater-savvy nature of the adapters’ transformations (think the RSC adaptation of Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby or the National Theatre of Great Britain’s stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse).  Unfortunately, Kafka on the Shore didn’t turn out to be one of them.  Like many novels, Murakami’s Kafka has many scene locations, too many to recreate on stage one at a time; scene changes alone would lake as long as a one-act play.  So director Ninagawa and set designer Nakagoshi created a collection of different-sized Plexiglas boxes within which Nakagoshi built truncated portions of the sites, from a forest to a vacant lot to Miss Saeki’s library office to the cab of Hoshino’s long-distance truck, and more.  Ninagawa has said that he’d wanted to use dioramas in his work ever since he saw some at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when he visited as a boy, and the set fragments (giving new meaning to “box set”), which are wheeled about the stage by black-clad stagehands who resembled the traditional kurombo of Kabuki theater or koken of Noh, are reminiscent of dioramas—but they also reminded me of terraria, miniature environments for living specimens.  (I was immensely impressed with the swirling movement of the rolling boxes as the scenes are reset without computer guidance or tracks—in the semi-dark, to boot.  How did they never collide, topple, or just hit the wrong spot at the wrong time?  Marvelous.) 

This, sadly, is one of the things in Kafka on the Shore that became a disappointment.  The weaving set boxes looked like a highly theatrical technique, but the process never changed.  Instead of surprising or intriguing it became routine and I just wanted it to stop so the play could continue.  In addition, the little set fragments, encased in Plexiglas and outlined by black frames, reduced the world of the play to little snapshots, like the videos on a smartphone in comparison to a movie screen.  Murakami’s novels, I gather, are mind-expanding, full of magic and metaphysics; this design concept shrinks the play’s scope.  Surrounding the scene in darkness with the silhouettes of the other boxes scattered around the stage only emphasized the isolation.  Motoi Hattori’s fluorescent lighting within the boxes, the metallic sound design by Katsuji Takahashi, and Umitaro Abe’s dissonant music supported the hypnotic character of the production but couldn’t clarify Murakami confusing concepts or Ninagawa’s breathless staging.

It was a tad difficult to form a clear impression of the individual performances in Kafka since I had to spend so much of the show reading the supertitles above the actors’ heads.  With so much dialogue—the French text of Ubu Roi two nights before was more compact (and, of course, I was familiar with that play and can still understand some French here and there)—it was a choice between knowing what the characters were saying and seeing what the actors were doing.  (I really much prefer the days of the headphones with simultaneous translations: I could watch the actors and still get the English explanation.)  Additionally, Kafka on the Shore is an ensemble play—even though the performance is divided into mostly two-character scenes—because each actor’s work feeds off of and into the work of all the others.  The one exception, to a degree, was Katsumi Kiba who played Nakata in so endearing and open-faced a way—Marilyn Stasio of Variety called his performance “disarming”—that the character nearly took over the whole production.  Kiba’s calm in the midst of everyone else’s tension and energy not only made him stand out but made him the eye of a theatrical hurricane.  The other notable performances were delivered by Yukio Tsukamoto and Katrine Mutsukiko Doi Vincent as the cats Otsuka and Mimi.  They stood upright occasionally and, of course, they spoke, but when they moved about on all fours and behaved like felines, they were as convincing as any computer-generated kitties on film—absolutely astonishing.  As for the rest of the cast, they were all clearly accomplished actors giving, despite Murakami’s and Galati’s fantastic material, excellent realistic performances, strong enough that I could often glean what they were feeling even without reading the titles.  If they hadn’t been tasked with so much to convey, I might have enjoyed their work even more.

Like Ubu Roi, the press coverage for Kafka on the Shore was scant—surprising considering the stature of both Murakami and Ninagawa and the prominence of Kafka as a centerpiece of this year’s LCF.  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli credited the Lincoln Center Festival “for taking on this staging of Murakami’s ‘Kafka on the Shore,’ with its talking cats, mysterious ‘gateway stone,’ occasional animal cruelty and possible incest” (Kafka has sex with Miss Saeki even though he thinks she might be his mother), and continued, “Even better, director Yukio Ninagawa and his cast pull it off—at least for the play’s first act.”  Visually, Vincentelli reported, the production was “stunning” and the “first half of this three-hour piece moves briskly”; however, in the second act, “things grind to a halt, the magic replaced by cloying affect and willfully confusing mumbo jumbo that will charm Harukists but bore everyone else.”  The Post reviewer put the blame largely on Murakami’s novel, but also laid some on “Ninagawa’s suddenly heavy-handed staging.  Like those wonderful cats, he should have trod more lightly.”  

“A sudden craving for Kentucky Fried Chicken swept over me at one point during” Kafka, quipped Charles Isherwood in the New York Times.  “It has been well more than a decade since I’ve visited a KFC, but those familiar with Mr. Murakami’s playful metaphysical mystery will recall that Colonel Sanders . . . is among the strange array of characters in the book.”  Calling the production “visually arresting but ponderous,” Isherwood pointed out that the whiskey icon Johnnie Walker is also a figure on stage and added that “by the conclusion” of the performance, “thoughts of crispy chicken had been swept away by a stronger craving for a bracing glass of that liquor.  Or indeed any other.”  Adapter Galati, said the Timesman, “does a smooth job of streamlining the book, but as is often the case with stage versions of philosophically inquisitive novels (or for that matter, nonphilosophically inquisitive ones),” just as I complained earlier, “story tends to take precedence over the less easily dramatized layers.”  Isherwood further explained: “As the plot develops, many more swirling currents develop, each as surprising, mystifying or simply bewildering as the one before.  Unfortunately, . . . the production does not allow for the characters to inhabit our imaginations as richly as they do in the book.  (And forget trying to parse the murky layers of meaning.)”  As I did, the Times reviewer also noted, “In the large theater, the performances likewise are unable to register powerfully, especially since the sometimes densely philosophical dialogue and the myriad oddities of the plot require us to pay close attention to the titles high above the stage.”  “Still,” he said, “the actors give winning if mostly economical interpretations of their characters.”  Isherwood ended by asserting that “in sum,” Kafka on the Shore is “a long, strange story.”

Variety’s Marilyn Stasio dubbed the adaptation “startling,”  but added that it “loses considerable magic by cramming in too many non-visual details from the novel’s mythic storyline.”  As a result, said Stasio, the “talky scenes also lose their intellectual zest on stage” and the stage adaptation of the novel became “less intimate” than the novel.  “The sense of enchantment that defines Murakami’s whimsical story,” reported the Variety review-writer, “comes across best in the amazing design work.”  While she praised the work of Hattori (lighting), Takahashi (soundscape), and Abe (music), Stasio ended by complaining that none of the production elements “can fully penetrate the deep, dark landscape of Murakami’s mind.” 

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck quipped, “‘It reminds me of some weird avant-garde play,’ comments one of the characters in Kafka on the Shore, and boy, is he right on the money.”  Scheck added that “this phantasmagorical stage production features so many ideas, themes, metaphors and literary and historical allusions that it threatens to burst at the seams,” but, said the HR reviewer, thanks to Ninagawa, “it somehow never does.”  It does make, however, for “one seriously strange evening of theater in which reality and fantasy are ever-shifting propositions” which covers “so many . . . subjects that the play should be accompanied not with a program but rather a syllabus.”  Scheck reported, “Visually, the production is a stunner,” but continued, “For a good stretch of its three-hour running time it’s all quite entertaining, thanks to the sheer audacity of its imagination and welcome doses of surreal humor.  But the longer the evening goes on the more frustrating and enervating it gets.”  He found that “there’s no denying that a strange new world has been dazzlingly conceived,” but concluded, “What it all means is anybody’s guess.”  The man from Hollywood ended by averring, “It’s fun to be there, at least for part of the wild ride,” then wisecracked: “Just don’t be surprised when you get home afterwards and find yourself tempted to discuss it with your cat.”

“‘Is it really possible for Kafka on the Shore to be a play?’ someone asked on Lincoln Center Festival’s facebook page. The answer is ‘Yes,’ but not without it’s problems.”  So wrote Susan Miyagi Hamaker on the website Japan Culture-NYC.  (It slugs itself as “All Things Japanese In New York City.”)   It’s not a formal review site, but I though it would be interesting to see what someone from inside the Japanese cultural scene might have to say about this performance.  Hamaker, a freelance writer and the editor of the site who calls herself a “Japanophile looking for all things Japanese in NYC,” summed up the experience of seeing Kafka: “It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t terrible”; she confessed, however, “I like focusing on the positive whenever I review anything Japanese-related.”  She felt that Ninagawa had “used this concept [of the Plexglas dioramas] to perfection in the staging of Murakami’s novel” and she pronounced the sets, of which this was a focal element, “Phenomenal.”  (Hamaker was especially taken with the work of the black-attired kuroko—as she called them, literally “black people,” the same as what I called kurombo or koken earlier.)  Our Japanophile was also taken with the performance of Katsumi Kiba as Nakata, who “tells the truth with his matter-of-fact delivery,” and the cats, “gorgeous and realistically cat-like thanks to flexible actors and to costume designer Ayako Maeda.”  Hamaker was less taken with Murakami’s story and its “multiple philosophical layers,” remarking, “To the production’s credit the story wasn’t wrapped up with a tidy bow, but there were many unanswered questions.”   Despite the production’s three-hour length, there “still wasn’t enough time to dive into the complexities of the story lines, the deep philosophical discussions, and the parallel stories of Kafka and Nakata that never intersected even though I kept anticipating it.”  “Despite its shortcomings,” Hamaker concluded, “it was visually stunning with delightful acting.”
Kafka on the Shore’s on a wide-ranging tour, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it shows up somewhere near where ROT-readers are.  I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the production—you see that most of the published press agreed with my assessment—unless you’re a fan of Ninagawa, Murakami, or Kafka on the Shore as a novel.  Another draw might be just to see how the director has handled the material—but three hours is a long sit just for that.  (Maybe you can second-act a performance.  But don’t tell anyone I suggested that.)

“It's Time to Retire 'Kabuki': The Word Doesn't Mean What Pundits Think It Does.”

By Jon Lackman

[A little over a year ago, a friend sent me a column from Slate, the on-line journal. At the time, the word Kabuki was making the rounds in political punditry as a term meaning ‘affectation’ or ‘pretense’ and the columnist, Jon Lackman, thought it was being overused by the chattering class. (The word Kabuki, though derived from three Chinese characters that mean song, dance, and acting skill, as a whole means ‘something abnormal or askew’ in the sense of deviating from the ordinary. Kabuki, therefore, actually means ‘off-beat performance,’ something deliberately outrageous.) I think my friend sent me the column in part because I’d studied about Kabuki and liked it as a theater form; I imagine he thought this particular article would amuse me. He was right. I’ve been waiting for a suitable slot in the ROT schedule so I can share it with the readers, and now that we’re about to lurch into another presidential campaign season, I suspect the word may have another burst of popularity among political commentators. Lackman’s original column appeared on Slate in “The Good Word: Language and How We Use It,” a regular column in the journal, on 14 April 2010 (http://www.slate.com/id/2250081/).]

Judging from op-ed pages and talk radio, American pundits know a lot about Kabuki, the 400-year-old Japanese stage tradition with the Lady Gaga get-ups. Health care reform recently brought Kabuki to mind for both Rush Limbaugh—"what you have here is 'Kabuki theater' "—and New York Times columnist Frank Rich: "[I]f I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn't choose the kabuki health care summit." For The New Yorker's George Packer, all the capital's a Far Eastern stage, and all its men and women merely players. "I looked for answers outside the Kabuki theatre of Washington personalities."

Pundits use Kabuki as a synonym for "posturing." The New Republic's Michael Crowley, for example, has defined it as a "performance, in which nothing substantive is done." But there's nothing "kabuki" about the real Kabuki. Kabuki, I'll have you know, is one of UNESCO's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity! And it's nothing like politics. It does indeed use stylized gestures, expressions, and intonations, but it's far from empty and monotonous. As the scholar A.C. Scott has written, a great Kabuki actor's performance will "contain an individuality beneath the unchanging conventions, his symbolism must be something more than imitative repetition." Unlike a Dick Durbin stemwinder, the quintessential Kabuki moment (known as a kata) is colorful and ruthlessly concise, packing meaning into a single gesture. It is synecdoche, synopsis, and metaphor rolled together—as when, in one Kabuki play, a gardener expecting a visit from the emperor cuts down all his chrysanthemums except one, the perfect one. And in contrast with our own shortsighted politics, Kabuki concerns not the present so much as a "dreamlike time shrouded in mist but ever present in the subconscious," to quote critic Shuichi Kato.

Of course, pundits don't care about the real thing. They use Kabuki precisely because they and everyone else have only a hazy idea of the word's true meaning, and they can use it purely on the level of insinuation. They deploy Kabuki because:

1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3) It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible.

Kabuki succeeds chiefly because it makes your opponent sound silly and un-American. And finally kabuki works because:

5) It sounds Japanese.

Needless to say, it sounds Japanese because it is Japanese. Point is, the word can conjure certain stereotypes about Japanese politics. As the scholar Gerald Curtis has noted, we have "an image of Japanese politics in which bureaucrats dominate . . . and policy making is little more than a process of collusion." For Rush Limbaugh, what better image with which to tar health care reform?

But how did Kabuki, one of Japan's most revered arts, come to signify loathsome fakery? Kabuki escaped derision only so long as no one had heard of it. The Japanese initially considered it too difficult to export; indeed, seeing a Kabuki play cold is like tuning into Lost midseason. Consequently, the word didn't appear in print in English until the late 19th-century, and then only rather infrequently. That changed when, following World War II, Japan's government tried to shed its image as a global marauder by touring its best Kabuki troupes. As historian Barbara Thornbury has written, "spectacular, larger-than-life kabuki was seen as having the potential to reignite America's nearly hundred-year-old romance with exotic Japan." This concept, alas, failed miserably. Although America's urban theatergoers lauded Kabuki, their good opinion did nothing to improve ties between the United States and its one-time enemy. Indeed, relations worsened due to drawn-out treaty negotiations. When American official James C. Hagerty visited Tokyo in 1960, protesters surrounded his car, broke its windows, and nearly flipped it.

According to my research, it was in this hostile atmosphere that Kabuki acquired its modern derogatory meaning. Writing in 1961 about a State Department plan to revise its security measures, Los Angeles Times writer Henry J. Taylor declared, "[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President unhitched the plan's kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing kabuki." Six months later, Taylor struck again, "Agriculture Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes' political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and 'had mentioned it informally to the president.' "

Writers have enlivened their prose with Kabuki ever since. Usage increases whenever Japan is in the news for disingenuous behavior—as in the early 1990s, when it turned out that Japan's go-go economy was an elaborate sham. It's been cropping up most recently due to the Toyota recall, which has made some Americans question the Japanese car company's commitment to safety. "Toyoda Is Wary Star of Kabuki at Capitol," blared the Wall Street Journal. The word is also on the ascendant whenever fakery seems particularly rife in American politics. Kabuki loves itself a Senate nomination hearing.

It may seem P.C. or peevish to ask writers to resist kabuki. (Is Kabuki resistance itself Kabuki?) The request is impractical, I admit. If a former theater critic such as Frank Rich can't be trusted to use it properly, who can? This is one of those writerly words that is helpfully absent from ordinary conversation, that says, "Stand back, pundit here!" (Slate writers, by the way, have also abused Kabuki—repeatedly!) But how would you feel if your favorite art form, ballet or truckers’ quilts, say, became another nation's derogatory epithet? How many Americans today steer clear of actual Kabuki (it is regularly performed here) because of the word's reputation? And there's a final reason to ditch it: Posturing is far too tepid an indictment of contemporary American politics. I'd sooner opt for Grand-Guignol, which Wikipedia aptly defines as "graphic, amoral horror entertainment." It is seppuku time for Kabuki.

© 2011 The Slate Group, LLC

[Back in November 2010, I published a column on Kabuki theater, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” followed by the republication of an old review I’d written on the performances in New York City of the Grand Kabuki company in 1985 (1 and 6 November 2010 on ROT, respectively). In the first article, I said of the theater form: “Kabuki is a world of wonder—a world of poetry, color, spectacle, grace, energy, and artistry.” That’s a far cry from the implications about which Lackman is writing above. At the end of my 1985 review, I asserted, “Singing, ballet, acting, storytelling, music, poetry—even worship—are integral parts of most Eastern performances. Kabuki is an example, as the current tour of the Grand Kabuki demonstrates to incomparable pleasure.” I think, like Lackman—who seems to know Kabuki himself—that most Americans who toss around the word derisively have never marveled at an actual Kabuki performance. I’ve been in and around theater most of my life, perhaps as long as 55 years as spectator, actor, director, teacher, and writer. I was on my second grad school go-round when I first encountered Kabuki, so I was no novice to theater—and I fell madly in love with the performance form immediately. It is, in my opinion, one of the most astonishing and remarkable forms of art—not just performance—I have ever experienced. For those of us who know the art, misusing its name as dismissively as do the pundits Lackman deplores is more than unfortunate and misleading. It’s a mark of ignorance.]

Gigaku

[In 1976, my parents made a trip to Japan, something they’d wanted to do for a long time. It was their habit to bring something interesting back as a sort of souvenir for me from their travels and while they were visiting Kyoto, my folks bought a Gigaku mask. Probably a modern copy or interpretation—original Gigaku masks are all mostly in temple museums and are extremely old and in delicate condition—the mask is a carved wooden image of the character Konron, possibly lacquered, with grotesque features, and painted bright red—an altogether frightening aspect. Years later, after I’d studied some Japanese theater forms (Kabuki, Noh, and a little Bunraku), I got curious about the mask and the character it represents, so I went to the Japan Society on East 47th Street and used its library to do a little research on the theater form and Konron. Here’s what I learned about this ancient performance which predates both Kabuki and Noh and has entirely disappeared in modern Japan.]

Gigaku is an ancient comic dance drama, performed outdoors mostly in temple courtyards. It was intended originally to add color and excitement to the long, solemn Buddhist ceremonies. A lost form, little is known about the performances today except that they merged mime, masked dances, and music. It’s said to have originated in the central Chinese kingdom of Wu, but, as no similar forms are known in China, it’s also quite likely it originated in west or southwest Asia. In Japanese, the Chinese character for Wu is pronounced "Go," and the dance is properly called Gogaku, "music of Go." Today, it’s known as Gigaku, "skillful” or “elegant music." Gigaku masks, among the world’s oldest, are the earliest known in Japan. Tradition has it that a Korean musician named Mimashi imported Gigaku into Japan in 612. The dances, performed to the accompaniment of a simple orchestra of flute, cymbals, tsutsumi drums, and gong, were a major part of temple ceremonies. The masked dramas were sung, danced, and mimed without spoken dialogue or poetry and there are some preserved musical manuscripts, but no record of what the dancing was like. Despite its connection to the temple, Gigaku was not necessarily solemn; the plays were “wide-ranging, explicit, and popular.” Early enactments, however, were described as unrefined and lewd, displaying foreign influences from countries all along the Silk Road, from Mediterranean Europe through North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, India, Indonesia, Indochina, to Japan.

From the 7th to 10th centuries, the Yamato court in Japan greatly admired Chinese and Korean culture, imitating the splendor of the mainland models. This involved importing and assimilating not only Buddhism and Chinese culture, but the music, dances, theater, and ceremonies, as well. In 612, Mimashi, who’d studied in China, brought Gigaku to the Japanese court and the Yamato prince-regent directed him to set up a school at the imperial court to teach music and dance to boys sent to learn the new art form. Gigaku promoted the new religion of Buddhism, which the prince-regent devotedly supported. The dance drama reached its heyday in Japan in the first half of the 8th century, during the Nara period (710-794), but by the start of the 9th century in the Heian period (794-1192), Bugaku had replaced it as the official entertainment at court and Gigaku began to decay in the 10th century because it didn’t fit the more refined Buddhism and aesthetic attitude of the new era. By the 12th century, Gigaku had lost imperial support and performances gradually ceased until the form became essentially extinct. The last recorded performances were in the Genroku period (1688-1704).

Gigaku masks are large and constructed to cover the upper part of the head, including the ears, as well as the face (unlike Noh masks, which cover only the face). Because the plays were often performed out-of-doors at court or temples, the masks were carved with highly exaggerated features so that their comic impression could still be seen in the vast courtyards. Shading and dark lines around the facial features increased the dramatic effect and hair was even glued on some masks. The size and deep carving also served to heighten the effect. As many as 14 characters, apparently influenced by designs from India, China, and Indonesia, have been identified, ranging from humans, shishi lions, bird-beaked creatures, demons, and superhumans. They are traditionally divided into four categories:

• Kojin (“barbarian,” or foreign) characters: Chido, the “one who prepares the way”; Baramon, an Indian Brahmin; Suiko-o, a drunk foreign king; and Suiko-ju, a drunk foreign retainer
• Gojin (people of Wu) masks: Goko, King of Wu; Gojo, Princess of Wu; Kongo, a Buddhist god of strength; Rikishi, a wrestler; Taikofu, an old man or woman accompanied by children; Taikoshi, children on a pilgrimage
• Nankaijin (people from the southern sea) group: Konron, a villain
• Irui (animals) characters: Shishi, a lion; Karora or Karura, king of the birds.

Extant masks, some as old as 1300 years, in monastery museums, are mostly at the temple museums of Todai-ji and Shoso-in in Nara where about 100 of the 250 known examples, including 7th-century masks brought to Japan by Mimashi, are preserved. Usually carved by Buddhist artists, exemplifying the style and technique of contemporary Buddhist sculpture, they were hewn from wood or, less often, dry lacquer, and covered in successive layers of linen and lacquer before painting. The bold, grand style of the Konron (also called Kuron) mask is particularly impressive. The largest of Gigaku masks, its weight was kept to a minimum by the use of paulownia wood. Konron’s expression stresses demonic or beastly traits, with bulging eyes, a wide nose, and visible upper row of teeth with fangs, enhanced by the bat-like ears. (In fact, he resembles nothing so much as Western images of Satan.)

In early times the savages of the southern sea were called konron, but later the term was extended to apply to slaves and pagans in general. The Gigaku Konron, however, was a lustful creature who attempted to seduce Gojo, the maiden or princess of Wu, creating great merriment by his silly, vulgar gestures and making a disheartened exit with his phallus broken off by Gojo’s protectors. Konron was a dark-complexioned man from the southern sea (K’un-lun) who represents the villain of the Gigaku play, the non-Buddhist, the “alien.”

The most complete description of a Gigaku performance is the Kyokunsho, the description of Koma Chikazane (1172-1242), a Bugaku musician, compiled in 1233 from tradition and old music books. Though it dates from 400 years after Gigaku disappeared from court performances and 500 years after the form’s highpoint, it’s considered an accurate account when taken with other historical records and the masks. There appear to have been as many as ten Gigaku pieces, all beginning with a ritualistic musical prelude and a procession of chanting monks. The procession seems to have started inside the temple and moved to some kind of stage in the courtyard, surrounded by thousands of monks and worshipers. There was no curtain or set and very few props; except for the musicians, however, all the performers wore elaborate masks and colorful costumes. The procession began with purely ritual music, then the monks paraded around and around the courtyard reciting prayers at chapels and statues. This was followed by the Gigaku procession as the masks were carried in a procession around the temple yard to musical accompaniment. Chido, in a red mask with a wide mouth, bulging eyes, a long nose, and black eyebrows and whiskers, purified the path, followed by the musicians. Then a lion (Shishi), played by two men with a brightly-colored mask whose jaw moved when the lead performer moved his head, appeared, trailed by two lion cubs (Shishiko) in friendly, smiling child masks. The lions performed “The Lions of the Five Directions,” a ritual dance accompanied by songs. After a comic interlude to teach Buddhist wisdom, Konron was performed, followed by three short pantomimes to present Buddhist lessons. After this, music would be played to conclude the ceremony and the performers would proceed back into the temple where they started.

Konron, a kind of Buddhist mystery play, had six to ten characters. First, Goko, the King of Wu, entered in a dignified mask and royal crown. He ordered the flute to be blown to announce the commencement of the main program. With musical accompaniment, Kongo, a symbol of firmness, an attribute of Buddha, entered wearing a fierce mask, and seated himself next to the king. Next Karora (or Karura), wearing a mask looking like a weird bird, entered and danced energetically. Karora may have been Garuda in Sanskrit, king of birds in Indian mythology, or he may have been the fire-eating bird or the monster bird who eats poisonous snakes—there is no proof for any of the theories. The character who entered next was Gojo, the daughter of the king, who wore a lovely girl’s mask and took up a conspicuous position on the stage. Each character’s entry was always accompanied by appropriate music.

Finally Konron, the villain, entered wearing the mask of a horrible demon. He introduced himself in an impetuous dance, focusing his eyes on Gojo. Enchanted by the girl, he beat a phallus-shaped stick with a fan, dancing a violent, impulsive, seductive dance at the end of which he caught hold of Princess Gojo. At this point, Rishiki, a wrestler, opened the gate, and Kongo, wearing a mask suggestive of strength, walked onto the stage, clapping his hands vigorously and performing a dance of entrance. With the assistance of Rikishi, he grappled fiercely with Konron and finally suppressed him, rescuing Gojo from her predicament. Putting a rope on Konron’s phallus stick, he swung it about, bending it and knocking it around. Religiously, the piece, however comic, was a commandment against lust. Konron was the incarnation of lust, the obstacle to enlightenment; Gojo, the medium for enlightenment; Rishiki and Kongo, primarily guardians of Buddhism.

Next, the three pantomimes were presented: Baramon, a warning against lust; Taiko, a lesson on how to hold rites for the dead; Suiko, a commandment against drunkenness. When the dramatic pieces were finished, parades of dancers were staged as a finale. The whole Gigaku program ended with a procession of joyous music.

Nomura Mannojo, a Japanese director and producer, has revived the ancient tradition of Gigaku masked performance in Japan. During research across the Silk Road, Nomura, a scion of a famous Kyogen family in Japan, discovered the connections between the Gigaku masks of Japan and other large-mask traditions in China, Tibet, and India. Informed by folk entertainments and literary scholarship, he researched remnants of reference books and picture scrolls. He studied numerous traditional entertainment and music that reflected the diversity of Japan's various regions. Based on this research he has organized a troupe, Ethnos, whose dancers come from several countries and in Gigaku masks perform dance dramas drawn from Japanese tradition. Nomura has recreated some of the historical masks for his dance troupe. There are reportedly other, amateur troupes, many at universities such as the Heisei Gigaku Troupe at Tenri University in Nara, that have engaged in putative revivals of Gigaku—though, like Nomura’s company, they have to base their reconstructions on speculation and imagination since so little record of the form has existed for over 1000 years.

[The principal sources for this article, supplemented by other research, were: Yoshinobu Inoura and Toshio Kawatake’s The Traditional Theater of Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1981); Benito Ortolani’s article "To Court and Shrine from the World: Gigaku and Bugaku" in Samuel Leiter’s Japanese Theater in the World (New York: Japan Society, 1997); Seiroku Noma’s Masks, No. 1 Arts & Crafts of Japan (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, c. 1957); and Kyotaro Nishikawa’s Bugaku Masks (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978).]

'Throne of Blood' (BAM)

On Saturday evening, 13 November, my friend Diana and I drove over to Brooklyn to see Ping Chong’s staging of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. This is the great filmmaker’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth, starring Toshiro Mifune in a masterful performance as Taketoki Washizu, the ambitious samurai who is the Macbeth character in the film as well as Chong’s stage adaptation. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the Kurosawa flick—college, I think—so I don’t remember many of the details, except that it was black and white and a driving, thrilling movie, a classic in its own right, even without Shakespeare’s poetry. Chong’s version, of course, is in English, but he doesn’t return to the Shakespearean text.

Chong’s stage version, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House over an hour and 40 minutes without intermission, was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the cast is drawn from the resident Ashland troupe. (The play ran at OSF’s Angus Bowmer Theatre from 21 July to 31 October this year.) The cast is heterogeneous so, aside from the English dialogue, Chong’s adaptation is already a step or two away from Kurosawa’s vision. Furthermore, the stage obviously can’t accommodate the sweep and visual force of Kurosawa’s film, which was almost wordless.

Chong’s Throne of Blood is a curious, but fascinating, effort. First of all, it’s not Shakespeare and it’s not Kurosawa; Chong, known for his multi-media experimental and avant-garde performances for the past 30 years, isn’t up to that level of artistry in my opinion. The only review I saw before Saturday was Charles Isherwood’s notice in the Times the day before, and he took Chong to task essentially for not doing the movie or the Elizabethan original. But if you look at Chong’s Throne of Blood as an artwork on its own, rather than an attempt to capture the essence of either of its predecessors, that doesn’t matter as much (even though Isherwood’s right in the short run). My companion was unimpressed (to put it mildly): “What do you get out of it?” she asked, after I disagreed with her negative response. A profound theatrical experience, it’s not. This isn’t West Side Story or My Fair Lady set beside Romeo and Juliet or Pygmalion. It’s also not Terrence McNally and Kander and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman compared to the Hector Babenco film. What’s on show here are the staging techniques and the visual effects Chong devises to accomplish what Kurosawa did with his camera. And while even these aren’t fully satisfying in their execution, there are some ideas it’s intriguing to imagine in their ultimate perfection (as they probably can only be achieved on the mind’s stage).

The outlines of Shakespeare’s story are still here, as they were in Kurosawa’s film, transposed from medieval Scotland to feudal Japan. Chong, I think wisely, doesn’t revert to the playwright’s words (except for a few allusions to phrases from several plays), which would only make the play seem pretentious and more derivative than it already is. The language of Chong’s version, based on the subtitles from the film, is neither poetry nor contemporary prose. What it resembles more than anything else is the English translation of classical Japanese theater, principally Kabuki. Since Chong draws considerably on Kabuki and Noh staging traditions for his presentation, this seems appropriate to me, rather than a draw-back. It comes off as being foreign—sort of like a well-dubbed film—but neither lofty nor pretentious. It also let me remember that I was watching a performance, not a slice of reality or fictionalized history like, say, Lion in Winter or Man for All Seasons. Since there are other elements in the production that are presentational, this fits with the style I believe Chong is after.

Isherwood seemed to complain about the film sequences Chong used (designed by Maya Ciarrocchi) and the suggested scenery (by Christopher Acebo) because the one suggests Kurosawa’s cinematography without realizing its “mood and atmosphere,” and the other doesn’t evoke the “sweep and intensity” of Kurosawa’s outdoor imagery. Again, if you don’t insist on comparing this play with the film, that becomes an academic point, I think, and both work for what Chong is doing. The films, which are projected in a strip above the set, are mostly segments of nature scenery—trees in a forest, cherry blossoms, rain. These serve as fragments of projected scenery, to set the image of the terrain and the landscape the way fragmentary sets do for interiors on a stage. Some of the projections are story-related, like the moving of Spider Web Forest (the stand-in for Birnam Wood). One repeated image is the abstract ink drawing, in a style reminiscent of Japanese painting, of bare branches with two leaves that become a pair of staring eyes in a suggested face at the end of the two Forest Spirit scenes. The fact that the projections resemble film means they unavoidably call cinema to mind, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in particular, but I don’t believe that Chong means for this technique to substitute for Kurosawa’s film work; Chong, after all, is a multi-media artist in his own right. Aside from directing, writing, and choreographing, Chong, whose parents were performers in Chinese opera (a precursor of Kabuki), is also a video installation artist. He got his start as a performer with Meredith Monk, and has worked in such diverse fields as puppetry and oral history.

As for the stage sets, it’s incontrovertible that they can’t compete with the outdoor vistas that made Kurosawa’s film so visually powerful, but since this is a stage play and not a film, no setting could, so why try to compete? The play is episodic, one of its weaknesses, so there are a lot of scene changes. The set fragments, which silently move in electronically on slides or drop down from the flies, accomplish this with alacrity and elegance, giving the impression of a place without depicting it literally. While Kabuki plays use elaborate and often quite realistic sets (Noh uses almost no scenery), this looks more like Japanese interior design—simple, unobtrusive, spare.

The acting, though, is what was interesting to me. Chong obviously wants to incorporate the stylized performance of Noh and Kabuki in his staging of Kurosawa’s semi-realistic screenplay (written by the director with four collaborators). First of all, the whole play is framed as a flashback, with a prologue and an epilogue (in Japanese with English supertitles projected on a photograph of the ruins of Spider Web Castle) that outline the backstory—and, in Brechtian manner, remind us that this is an ancient tale, not a contemporary one. This makes the play an enactment of the history of the place, a very typical Noh structure. (In true Noh, the narrator of the tale, who’s only a voice-over in Throne, transforms into the spirit of the place, often a demon or the ghost of someone connected to the story. This isn’t part of either version of Throne of Blood.) Then the music, composed by Todd Barton (who also did the sound design, which includes such effects as the sounds of weather conditions—very integral to Kurosawa’s film—nature, and horses’ hoofbeats), is recognizably evocative of Kabuki and Noh music (that is, for anyone who has a familiarity with those forms of theater, of course). There are also koken, the black-clad stage assistants of Kabuki and Noh theater, on stage several times.

The Forest Spirit, Throne’s stand-in for the witch (there’s only one instead of three as in Shakespeare), is a Noh demon, all in white with a very long, full white wig. Sitting on a small platform, the spirit turns the wheel of a loom, weaving . . . . what? A spider web? He’s in Spider Web Forest—and a familiar character in Noh and Noh-derived Kabuki is the Demon Spider (who looks a lot like this Forest Spirit). Is this spirit out to ensnare Washizu in his magical web of enticing prophesies? As portrayed by Cristofer Jean, he speaks in a rasping, unreal, stylized (and electronically manipulated) voice that is an approximation of the slow, rhythmic delivery of many Noh characters.

Lady Asaji (the Lady Macbeth character), the most Noh-infused role in the film, wears pasty makeup with stylized facial features so that her face resembles a living Noh mask. The actress (Ako, who is from Japan originally and performed there with an all-female troupe, the Takarazuka Theatre) moves with the deliberate gait of a Noh actor. These and other aspects of the performance demonstrate that Chong wants to evoke traditional Japanese theater in his staging. This is where his experiment fails for me.

Chong can’t improve on Shakespeare and he can’t duplicate Kurosawa’s masterpiece, so what would have worked for me was to see the script interpreted in a hybrid of Western and Japanese staging styles. As I said, I think that’s what Chong is attempting, but while he can get the production artists—the designers and technicians—to approximate Japanese staging techniques, he can’t make Western actors do after a few weeks of rehearsals what Japanese actors do. So, though I can see what Chong probably wants on stage (because, as some of you know, I’ve studied Asian theater, especially Kabuki, for some time), I can also tell that the performers don’t execute it precisely. It’s the difference, I’d say, between learning a language from childhood, with years of study and living among native speakers, and learning some speeches phonetically after a few months of practice and coaching. (Ako, who trained in Kabuki dance, lent her knowledge and expertise in Japanese traditional performance to the task of training the company, along with a movement coach.) I’ll give you one example. There’s limited action in the play; many scenes involve groups of characters sitting, as in the great councils the emperor holds several times. In a Kabuki play, when an actor isn’t the focus of attention on the stage, he’s absolutely still. Having struck the pose he’ll hold during that scene, often kneeling and sitting on his heels, he doesn’t move a muscle until he has lines or business. (This is a very important element of Kabuki performance, and total stillness is a skill all novice Kabuki actors must learn very early.) This stillness makes the slightest movement momentously dramatic and theatrical; but it also makes the merest twitch from an actor not in focus destructively distracting. In Throne, the actors come on stage for those councils, say, and take their positions in semi-darkness, and we can see them strike their poses, usually a wide-legged seated stance, because they do it with a sharp, deliberate movement, all executed at the same instant. But Western actor aren’t expected to be totally still under just about any ordinary stage circumstances—and no actor who’s not been trained in this technique can manage it. So while they’re sitting without moving about or turning their heads, they aren’t really still. What I believe is supposed to be a Kabuki moment just isn’t, which mars what I think Chong is aiming for theatrically.

Stillness is only the most salient of this kind of problem, the easiest to spot and to describe. There are similar issues with walking—both Noh and Kabuki have very distinctive walking styles and it looked like the cast was trying to approximate them here—and the choreographed fight sequences, which seem to be modeled on Kabuki tachimawari battle techniques. Only Ako, trained and experienced in this performance style, executes it well—and her presence on stage makes the slips and lapses of the Western actors that much more obvious. (In my studies of Asian theater, one of my teachers has been James Brandon of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His department there has a program of presenting Asian theater forms in English with American actors, and I’ve seen taped performances of Kabuki in English. Those actors, who are coached by professionals from the theater they’re emulating, have similar problems because the discipline is different.)

I think I’ve made this all sound much more disastrous than it was. I said that in my mind, I could see the perfect version of what I believe Chong wants, but for an ordinary Western viewer, I suspect none of that is noticeable. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive, or at least hypercritical. Without the execution of the Japanese traditional techniques in Throne, however, we do come back to Diana’s question: “What do you get out of it?” For whatever reason, the Japanese seem taken with Macbeth: aside from Kurosawa’s 1957 treatment, popular Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando V became the first onnagata (specialist in female roles in the all-male Kabuki theater) to portray a Western female character when he played Lady Macbeth at Tokyo’s Nissei Theatre in 1976; in the ‘70s and ’80s, director Shozo Sato created a Kabuki Macbeth (and a Kabuki Lady Macbeth); in 1986, New York’s Pan Asian Rep staged Shogun Macbeth; and in 1990, BAM imported the image-dominated, experimental Macbeth by Yukio Ninagawa. The various staging styles aside, what these adaptations all show is the universality of Shakespeare’s play about ambition and treachery, which I believe was Kurosawa’s motivation to make Throne of Blood 53 years ago. (Kurosawa’s been said to have been responding to World War II, which ended just a dozen years before he made the film. Chong has said that he sees the world today as very similarly self-destructive.) But having already demonstrated that (assuming, of course, that the very longevity of Shakespeare’s tragedy hadn’t already made that clear), why translate to the stage what Kurosawa already showed on film? Well, besides making the screenplay accessible in a different medium (not to say, a different language), I contend that it’s the staging style, the theatricality Chong envisioned, that prompts yet another go at the Scottish play à la japonaise. (At the risk of making an unnecessary, and perhaps irrelevant, joke, it begins to sound as if we’re encroaching on the territory of that silly series of ads for Starburst candy where a character calls his son a “contradiction” because he’s “Scotch-Korean.”) If that vision is badly executed, the experiment fails, I’d say. The idea’s not uninteresting, theatrically speaking, but without a much longer training time, and maybe some resident Kabuki or Noh actors in the company, I don’t think it’s viable. Still, the attempt was interesting—even a failed experiment can be worthwhile—and I don’t join my friend Diana in saying it was a painful experience. (I should probably equivocate some here: without my admittedly somewhat rare perspective, other spectators might find far less of interest in the production.)

One thing about which Isherwood was correct is that “most of the actors make little impression.” Except for Ako, as he noted, no one stands out. (Cristofer Jean gets spotlighted as the Forest Spirit, but that’s the role, not so much the performance, that’s prominent. Jean does a fine job of it, however.) Kevin Kenerly as Washizu, much like the other soldiers, has little to do but bluster and strut, He has a couple of choreographed fights with the samurai sword, and he’s convincing enough given the caveat I’ve already issued about the tachimawari, but it even took me a few scenes to be sure which actor was Kenerly as Washizu and which was Danforth Comins as Yoshiako Miki (Banquo) because there’s so little to distinguish one character from another aside from the costumes. (The costumes, which approximate 17th-century Japanese armor and other dress, are beautifully designed by Stefani Mar. They’re modeled more from museum exhibits, I’d say, than from Kabuki or Noh costumes, but they have an air of authenticity. I must add that the battle helmets are wonderfully exotic, with horns, wings, and crescents looming atop the actors’ heads.) Eventually, the plot made the distinction for me, but there’s nothing in the staging that might have approximated, say, a bombastic aragoto (“rough style”) performance from Washizu, as I might have expected in a Kabuki rendition. In fact, in several scenes of great tension with Lady Asaji, while she’s kneeling in stillness, a figure all in white (including her face makeup) except for the blood-red splotches on her kimono, Washizu paces all around her in what looked to me like aimless agitation. That weakens the character (in Kabuki terms, it almost makes him a wagoto, or “soft style,” character), which may align with psychologically realistic Western behavior, but in a traditional Japanese performance, it makes him less than the ruthless protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy as reflected in a Kabuki mirror. Washizu’s fall is more anticlimactic here than tragic. I can’t entirely blame Kenerly for this; it looked like a directorial choice, not an actor’s; but if Chong had been true to the Kabuki or Noh style in such moments, Washizu would have stood stock still, looking like a giant in an oversized costume, or stridden across the stage in slow, heavy steps.

If Chong doesn’t entirely succeed in translating Kurosawa’s film masterpiece to the stage, he has done some intriguing work in the attempt. Isherwood called the effort “an ill-conceived theatrical enterprise,” and Diana agreed with that. The Backstage reviewer, however, asserted that the production “succeeds and then some” in its ambitious aims. I don’t agree with either estimation, but I ended feeling it was a worthwhile theater experience—although I may have had an inside track.

[For some explanation of the Kabuki terms and techniques I mentioned in this report, see my recent article, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” (1 November).]