Read Online Lost Japan by Alex Kerr - Free Book Online

to our seats high in the rafters.
    As the dance ‘Fuji Musume’ (‘Wisteria Maiden’) began, I saw that the
onnagata
playing the maiden was not one of the ugly old women of my childhood memory, but was truly picture lovely. The flute and drums were fast-flowing; the sliding feet and impossible turns of the neck and wrists of the dancer were playful and sensuous – everything I had been missing. I was stagestruck.
    After the dance, Gail informed me to my surprise that the
onnagata
, whom I had thought to be about twenty-five years old, was the veteran actor Nakamura Jakuemon, aged sixty at the time. On leaving the theater, Gail took me to a nearby teahouse called Kaika. The master of the teahouse asked me what I had thought of
kaomise
, and I replied, ‘Jakuemon was amazing. His sixty-year-old body managed to be totally sensuous.’ The master gestured to the woman sitting next to me, and said, ‘She has an appointment with Jakuemon right now. Why don’t you go along?’ So before I knew it, I was backstage at the Minamiza Theater. One minute, Jakuemon was a vision dancing on a stage miles below me, someone I could only view from afar with no hope of ever meeting; the next, I was backstage talking to him.
    Jakuemon, still in make-up, looked fortyish, like a refined Kyoto matron. But he had a sly grin, and a coquettish sideways glance flashed from eyes lined with red and black. This sideways glance, called
nagashime
(literally, ‘flowing eyes’), was a hallmark of beautiful women in old Japan, and is found in countless woodblock prints of courtesans and
onnagata.
I was seeing it at close range. An attendant dressed in black brought out a small saucer, in which Jakuemon blended white face powder and crimson lipstick with a gentle hand. Dipping a brush in the resulting ‘
onnagata
pink’, he wrote the character
hana
(flower) for me on a square
shikishi
(calligraphic plaque). Then, with the removal of wig, robes and make-up, there emerged a tanned, short-haired man, who looked like a tough Osaka businessman. With a brusque ‘See ya’, spoken in a gravelly voice, he strolled out of the room in white suit and shades.
    In my case, the secret door to the world of Kabuki was the Kaika teahouse.
Kaika
, which means ‘transformation’, refers to the Bunmei Kaika (Transformation of Civilization) that took place in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The master of Kaika was a former Kabuki
onnagata
, and the interior of the teashop was covered with Meiji- and Taisho-period theater
decorations. As it was close to the Minamiza Theater, Kaika was a meeting place for actors and teachers of traditional Japanese music and dance.
    After my audience with Jakuemon, I was taken to see various other actors, among them Kawarazaki Kunitaro, a childhood friend of the Kaika master. Kunitaro, who was in his sixties, was a true child of the Meiji ‘transformation’, his father having founded Tokyo’s first coffee house on the Ginza at the turn of the century. As a young man, Kunitaro joined a group of leftist intellectuals who broke away from traditional Kabuki and cofounded a theater troupe called Zenshinza (Progressive Theater). Kunitaro was especially adept at
akuba
roles – sharp-tongued townswomen. Other actors would come to him to study his distinctive technique of
sute-serifu
– catty quips ‘tossed’ at the audience.
    I found it curious that the Progressive Theater featured something so retrograde as
onnagata.
Kabuki was founded by a troupe of women in the early 1600s, but during the Edo period, women were banned from the Kabuki stage because they were considered conducive to immoral behavior. The
onnagata
took their place. There was a brief attempt in early Meiji to replace
onnagata
with real women but the audience rejected them. By that point, Kabuki was so thoroughly imbued with the art of
onnagata
that real women did not play the roles properly. After Meiji, women found their place in modern theater. However, in