(Japanese dance), so I would often watch her classes. For five years I more or less lived inside the Kabuki theater.
Kabuki seems to me to have the perfect balance between the sensuality and ritual which are the two poles of Japanese culture. On one hand, there is Japan’s freewheeling sexuality, out of which was born the riotous
ukiyo
(floating world) of Edo: courtesans, colorful woodblock prints, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, ‘naked festivals’, brilliantly decorated kimono, etc. This is a remnant of ancient Southeast Asian influence on Japan, and is more akin to Bangkok than to Beijing or Seoul. In fact, early Jesuits traveling from Beijing to Nagasaki at the end of the sixteenth century wrote letters in which they contrasted the
colorful costumes of the Japanese with the drab gowns of the common people of Beijing.
At the same time, there is a tendency in Japan towards over-decoration, towards cheap sensuality too overt to be art. Recognizing this, the Japanese turn against the sensual. They polish, refine, slow down, trying to reduce art and life to its pure essentials. From this reaction were born the rituals of tea ceremony, Noh drama and Zen. In the history of Japanese art you can see these two tendencies warring against each other. In the late Muromachi period, gorgeous gold screens were in the ascendant; along came the tea masters, and suddenly the aesthetic was misshapen brown tea bowls. By late Edo the emphasis had swung back to courtesans and the pleasure quarters.
Today, this war goes on. There are garish
pachinko
parlors and late-night pornographic TV, and there is a reaction against all that, which I call the ‘process of sterilization’: the tendency to fill every garden with raked sand and every modern structure with flat concrete and granite. Kabuki, however, has the right balance. It began as a popular art, and is rich in humor, raw emotion and sexual appeal. At the same time, after hundreds of years, it has been slowed and refined to the point where, within the sensuality, there is that timeless ‘stop’ – the meditational calm which is Japan’s special achievement.
Kabuki, like all theater, is a world of illusion. With its extreme elaboration of costumes, make-up and the
kata
(prescribed ‘forms’ of movement), it may be the most illusionistic of all: when the elegant court lady removes her make-up, one is left facing an Osaka businessman. Once, I was translating for Tamasaburo when an Englishman asked him, ‘Why did you want to become an actor?’ Tamasaburo answered, ‘Because I longed for a world of beauty beyond my reach.’ I, too, was bewitched by this elusive world of illusion.
In the play
Iriya
, there is a scene where the woman Michitose is about to meet her lover after a long separation. Her samurai is
being hunted by the police but has crept through the snow to see her. He waits in front of some
fusuma
sliding doors. Hearing of his arrival, she bursts into the room and the lovers are reunited. When Tamasaburo was once playing the part of Michitose, we were sitting together backstage, next to the
fusuma
doors and more or less on the stage itself, just prior to Michitose’s dramatic entrance. Tamasaburo was chatting casually and was not the least bit feminine – very much an average man, although he was in full costume. When the time came for his entrance, he stood up, laughed, said, ‘OK, here I go!’, and walked over to the
fusuma.
He adjusted his robe, flung open the
fusuma
, and in that instant was transformed into a beauty straight out of an Ukiyoe print. In a silvery voice fit to melt the audience’s heart, he cried out, ‘
Aitakatta, aitakatta, aitakatta wai na!
’ – ‘I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you so much!’ A world of illusion had sprung up from one side of a
fusuma
to the other.
The illusion is achieved by Kabuki stagecraft, probably the most highly developed in the world. The
hanamichi
(‘flower path’) through
Kabuki seems to me to have the perfect balance between the sensuality and ritual which are the two poles of Japanese culture. On one hand, there is Japan’s freewheeling sexuality, out of which was born the riotous
ukiyo
(floating world) of Edo: courtesans, colorful woodblock prints, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, ‘naked festivals’, brilliantly decorated kimono, etc. This is a remnant of ancient Southeast Asian influence on Japan, and is more akin to Bangkok than to Beijing or Seoul. In fact, early Jesuits traveling from Beijing to Nagasaki at the end of the sixteenth century wrote letters in which they contrasted the
colorful costumes of the Japanese with the drab gowns of the common people of Beijing.
At the same time, there is a tendency in Japan towards over-decoration, towards cheap sensuality too overt to be art. Recognizing this, the Japanese turn against the sensual. They polish, refine, slow down, trying to reduce art and life to its pure essentials. From this reaction were born the rituals of tea ceremony, Noh drama and Zen. In the history of Japanese art you can see these two tendencies warring against each other. In the late Muromachi period, gorgeous gold screens were in the ascendant; along came the tea masters, and suddenly the aesthetic was misshapen brown tea bowls. By late Edo the emphasis had swung back to courtesans and the pleasure quarters.
Today, this war goes on. There are garish
pachinko
parlors and late-night pornographic TV, and there is a reaction against all that, which I call the ‘process of sterilization’: the tendency to fill every garden with raked sand and every modern structure with flat concrete and granite. Kabuki, however, has the right balance. It began as a popular art, and is rich in humor, raw emotion and sexual appeal. At the same time, after hundreds of years, it has been slowed and refined to the point where, within the sensuality, there is that timeless ‘stop’ – the meditational calm which is Japan’s special achievement.
Kabuki, like all theater, is a world of illusion. With its extreme elaboration of costumes, make-up and the
kata
(prescribed ‘forms’ of movement), it may be the most illusionistic of all: when the elegant court lady removes her make-up, one is left facing an Osaka businessman. Once, I was translating for Tamasaburo when an Englishman asked him, ‘Why did you want to become an actor?’ Tamasaburo answered, ‘Because I longed for a world of beauty beyond my reach.’ I, too, was bewitched by this elusive world of illusion.
In the play
Iriya
, there is a scene where the woman Michitose is about to meet her lover after a long separation. Her samurai is
being hunted by the police but has crept through the snow to see her. He waits in front of some
fusuma
sliding doors. Hearing of his arrival, she bursts into the room and the lovers are reunited. When Tamasaburo was once playing the part of Michitose, we were sitting together backstage, next to the
fusuma
doors and more or less on the stage itself, just prior to Michitose’s dramatic entrance. Tamasaburo was chatting casually and was not the least bit feminine – very much an average man, although he was in full costume. When the time came for his entrance, he stood up, laughed, said, ‘OK, here I go!’, and walked over to the
fusuma.
He adjusted his robe, flung open the
fusuma
, and in that instant was transformed into a beauty straight out of an Ukiyoe print. In a silvery voice fit to melt the audience’s heart, he cried out, ‘
Aitakatta, aitakatta, aitakatta wai na!
’ – ‘I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you so much!’ A world of illusion had sprung up from one side of a
fusuma
to the other.
The illusion is achieved by Kabuki stagecraft, probably the most highly developed in the world. The
hanamichi
(‘flower path’) through
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