One of Japan's leading playwrights and stage directors, Hirata Oriza (b. 1962) won the 2018 Tsuruya Nanboku Prize for his stage adaptation of Takahashi Gen ichiro's (b. 1951) novel The Rise and Fall ...of Japanese Literature. In August 2019, Hirata gave a public lecture at the downtown Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University that, in touching on this play, discussed the social and political forces behind Japan's creation of modern literature, theatre, and music since the Meiji Era (1868-1912). Hirata's talk was a kid-gloved punch at reactionary forces in Japan today that are attempting to quash freedom of expression. NOTE: In this review I follow the traditional order for Japanese names: family name first, followed by personal name. Cody Poulton is professor emeritus of Japanese theatre, literature, and cultural studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. Author ofA Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930 (University of Hawaii Press, 2010), he is coeditor (with J. Thomas Rimer and Mitsuya Mori) of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2014) and editor and principle translator of Oriza Hirata, Citizens of Tokyo: Six Plays (Seagull Press, 2019).
This anthology is the first to survey the full range of modern Japanese drama and make available Japan's best and most representative twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century works in one volume. It ...opens with a comprehensive introduction to Meiji-period drama and follows with six chronological sections: "The Age of Taisho Drama"; The Tsukiji Little Theater and Its Aftermath"; "Wartime and Postwar Drama"; "The 1960s and Underground Theater"; "The 1980s and Beyond"; and "Popular Theater," providing a complete history of modern Japanese theater for students, scholars, instructors, and dramatists. The collection features a mix of original and previously published translations of works, among them plays by such writers as Masamune Hakucho (The Couple Next Door), Enchi Fumiko (Restless Night in Late Spring), Morimoto Kaoru (A Woman's Life), Abe Kobo (The Man Who Turned into a Stick), Kara Juro (Two Women), Terayama Shuji (Poison Boy), Noda Hideki (Poems for Sale), and Mishima Yukio (The Sardine Seller's Net of Love). Leading translators include Donald Keene, J. Thomas Rimer, M. Cody Poulton, John K. Gillespie, Mari Boyd, and Brian Powell. Each section features an introduction to the developments and character of the period, notes on the plays' productions, and photographs of their stage performances. The volume complements any study of modern Japanese literature and modern drama in China, Korea, or other Asian or contemporary Western nations.
This is a multi-author work which examines the cultural dimensions of the relations between East Asia’s two great powers, China and Japan, in a period of change and turmoil, from the late nineteenth ...century to the end of the Second World War. This period saw Japanese invasion of China, the occupation of China’s North-east (Manchuria) and Taiwan, and war between the two nations from 1937-1945; the scars of that war are still evident in relations between the two countries today. In their quest for modernity, the rulers and leading thinkers of China and Japan defined themselves in contradisctinction to the other, influenced both by traditional bonds of classical culture and by the influx of new Western ideas that flowed through Japan to China. The experiences of intellectual and cultural awakening in the two countries were inextricably linked, as our studies of poetry, fiction, philosophy, theatre, and popular culture demonstrate. The chapters explore this process of “transculturation” – the sharing and exchange of ideas and artistic expression – not only in Japan and China, but in the larger region which Joshua Fogel has called the “Sinosphere,” an area including Korea and parts of Southeast Asia with a shared heritage of Confucian statecraft and values underpinned by the classical Chinese language. The authors of the chapters, who include established senior academics and younger scholars, and employ a range of disciplines and methodologies, were selected by the editors for their expertise in particular aspects of this rich and complex cultural relationship. As for the editors: Richard King and Cody Poulton are scholars and translators of Chinese literature and Japanese theatre respectively, each taking a historical and comparative perspective to the study of their subject; Katsuhiko Endo is an intellectual historian dealing with both Japan and China.
Hirata Oriza's Tokyo Notes, which has had some forty productions since it won the thirty-ninth Kishida Kunio Award, Japan's highest prize for new drama, in 1995, toured North America in the fall of ...2000. In its focus on the understated and ordinary, the play is an exemplary work of the shizuka na engeki (quiet theatre) movement prevalent in Japan in the past decade. In his introduction, translator M. Cody Poulton argues that while Hirata's theatre recalls the naturalism of early-twentieth-century shingeki (new theatre), the playwright's aversion to dramatic convention and overt expressions of emotion or ideological messages, as well as his use of colloquial Japanese, make him a significant voice in contemporary Japanese theatre. M. Cody Poulton teaches Japanese theatre and literature at the University of Victoria in Canada. He is the author of Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (2001) and translator of three kabuki plays for the series Kabuki Plays On Stage edited by James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter, which is being published by the University of Hawai'i Press.
