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.
Metamorphosis from a Distance Rimer, Thomas
Theatre journal (Washington, D.C.),
10/2007, Volume:
59, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In general, to make a rough analogy from those stages of cultural accommodation outlined by Patrice Pavis in his Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, i have generally found that the emphasis for me ...in creating a usable translation must be placed on what the spectator can be expected to usefully receive, rather than on attempting to maintain any overly stern fidelity to the nuances of the original.25 During the course of many years i have worked to translate theatre texts both from contemporary and classical Japanese, and i have translated a certain number of critical texts from both as well. Perhaps the most significant issue in translating classical Japanese theatre texts centers on the fact that, from a Western perspective, nô, bunraku (the eighteenth-century puppet theatre), and kabuki texts resemble more the librettos to operas than they do any fully sustained dramatic texts. nô in particular is often described as a kind of total theatre, involving text, music, dance, mime, declamation, and so on; thus the text, however beautiful, is only one element in the total spectacle, which has been as carefully mapped out in its fashion as an opera by Mozart.
Beneath the veneer of honor provided by their traditional status as a lineage of hereditary village headman, the family was ravaged during TÅson's lifetime by mental illness, physical infirmity, ...financial incompetence, sexual impropriety, and a devastating house fire. Reduced to poverty in part by the profligacy of his troubled relatives, TÅson himself suffered from cramped quarters, embarrassing debts, and the torment of watching several of his loved ones succumb to hunger, sickness, depression, and premature death. Social historians have long understood that the fear of financial ruin constantly hounded the Japanese rural elite, whose positions in a competitive commercial order could be wrecked by a single dissolute heir or a string of bad luck in the market.
EPILOGUE Rimer, J. Thomas
Like Clouds or Mists,
01/2014
Book Chapter
The Tale of the Heike seems to serve as one quintessential source book for nō and other forms of medieval theater, as the preceding chapters in this volume have shown. In addition, Heike has ...continued to show a robust life ever since, providing inspiration and topics for kabuki and other forms of popular theater down to the twentieth century, where its characters and subjects have resurfaced again in anime, manga, and television dramas. Each succeeding age, of course, adapts borrowed material to suit its own concerns, and so Heike, its larger themes, and its characters, come out a bit differently
This volume is organized to roughly follow the order of events presented in the Kakuichi-bon variant of the Heike. Essays and translations focus on a series of major events from the Heike: Kiyomori's ...rise (the Gi? cycle of plays); Yoshinaka's push to the capital; the flight of the Heike and the battle of Ichi-no-tani; and the aftermath of the war. Each event features a series of one to three plays preceded by essays.
In the current era of economic renewal, the threat to a distinctive Japanese culture is not Western dominance per se but international pop aesthetics and commercialism.
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