Kabuki at the Time of Kunisada

by J. Thomas Rimer

However stately the art of Kabuki may seem to contemporary audiences, with monthly cycles of elegantly prepared performances enshrined at the Kabukiza and the National Theater in Tokyo, its development to an art of classic status from a raucous and somewhat shady entertainment early in the 17th century has been a slow and sometimes halting one. Often in competition with the puppet theater (now known as Bunraku), Kabuki only attained its final ascendancy as Japan's greatest popular drama at the end of the 18th century. Kunisada's striking theater prints, therefore, chronicle the great age of this art and thus provide crucial insights into a form of theater which, so successful in mirroring its society, was eagerly sustained by its public.

Modern Kabuki as staged in Tokyo and elsewhere often depends on elaborate stage effects that demand considerable technical skills: complex lighting effects, quick shifts of scenery, and so forth. The technical dexterity now possible in these productions, however, may obscure to some extent the fact that the art of Kabuki has always been actor-centered. Early stages were quite simple, often adapted from the older No models, which were open to the elements. Eventually, such stages were placed inside larger structures to permit performances in all weathers, but it was not until 1796 that the gabled roof familiar from No was finally removed, allowing for the possibilities of a more elaborate scenic spectacle. With these new resources, plus the use of the famous hanamichi, or "flower way," which permitted the actors to enter directly into the auditorium space in order to create and sustain an intimate contact with their audiences, the Kabuki finally triumphed over the puppet theater and entered into a period of great brilliance at the end of the Edo period.

Kunisada's visual chronicles of these performances and performers show the vitality of the theater at that time. First of all, his prints tell us something about the repertory itself. While it has often been suggested that, until the end of the 19th century, Kabuki was basically a contemporary theater, staging new plays on a more or less continuous basis, Kunisada's prints reveal clearly that the great classics of the Kabuki canon had already been identified and were often performed, although doubtless sometimes in revised or truncated versions.

The most famous of the older plays recorded by Kunisada is Chushingura, or, more properly, Kanadehon Chushingura (The treasury of loyal retainers), first written for the puppet theater in 1748 by a trio of writers, Takeda Izumo, Miyoshi Shoraku and Namiki Senryu. The play, in eleven acts, was adapted for actors soon after its premiere, and has formed a staple of the repertory down to the present time. Chronicling the famous revenge of the forty-seven masterless samurai (ronin) against the man who forced their master to commit ritual suicide, the play, with the national myth of revenge, self-abnegation, and dedication that sustains it, has never lost its potency with the public.

Another puppet play by the same authors, Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the secrets of calligraphy), first staged two years earlier, in 1746, had also long been a favorite with audiences, to be revived time and time again. In a sense, a play such as Sugawara provided a means for the public, largely made up of the merchant class, to observe one of the important events in Japanese history, the banishment of the courtier Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), a notable early poet and calligrapher, who died in political exile. However inaccurate the play may be in terms of the niceties of historical detail, the audience watching it could learn something of its cultural patrimony and so come to enjoy its own place within the larger sweep of Japan's aristocratic heritage. And, like Chushingura, the seven-act Sugawara contains a number of powerful roles in which noted performers could excel.

Among the great parts that Kabuki provided, none showed more staying power than that of Sukeroku in the one-act Sukeroku yukari no Edo zakura (Sukeroku: Flower of Edo), first presented in 1713. It was to become one of the touchstones throughout the Edo period for those performers who were assigned (or assigned to themselves) the young heroic roles. The play centered on perhaps the most vivid of those courageous and resourceful figures so admired by the merchant class. In the course of its best-known scene, the brash townsman hero Sukeroku triumphs in his affection for the courtesan Agemaki, repulsing the hypocritical Ikyu, a vicious old man who represents the power of the status quo. The role of Sukeroku, first performed by the famous actor Ichikawa Danjuro II, was carried in his family line down through the generations to provide the model for performances by those actors from the Danjuro clan who were depicted by Kunisada himself.

Performances of other classic plays can also be found in Kunisada's prints. One of them, Soga no taimen (A meeting with the Soga), dates back to 1676 and provides an occasion for a bravura scene of the classic vendetta of the Soga brothers, famous in early Japanese history, whose father was killed when they were children; they avenged themselves upon his murderer in a hunting party held on Mt. Fuji in 1193. Like the other great vendetta piece, Chushingura, mentioned above, plays about the Soga brothers have long remained a central part of the Kabuki repertory.

The other great source book of Japanese history and legend, the Heike monogatari (Tale of the Heike), retells, along with other similar medieval war chronicles, the complicated events surrounding the great civil war of 1185, in which the Minamoto defeated the Taira, thus ending the hegemony of court culture and marking the rise of the warrior clans. These chronicles also provided the impetus for many theatrical works in both the No and Kabuki traditions. Kunisada records a performance of one classic play dealing with this subject, the 1732 Dan-no-ura kabuto gunki (Battle tale of Dan-no-ura), also originally a puppet play; here the protagonist is the famous general Taira Kagekiyo (d. 1186), the prototype of the loyal warrior so touchingly described in the chronicles, whose death helps bring about the final defeat of the Taira clan. In this work, the part of his mistress, Akoya (a character added to his entourage by the playwrights), provided a crucial foil to the onrush of dramatic action.

Such a variety of classic roles demanded bravura performers, and Kunisada's prints permit glimpses of some of the greatest, and most notorious, stars of his day. Among them are three members of the famous Ichikawa Danjuro family, the lineage of which goes back to Ichikawa Danjuro I (1660-1704) and the beginnings of Kabuki as an art form. Danjuro VII (1791-1859) was a figure of particular notoriety; banished from Edo for leading too prominent and luxurious a life, he soon re-created his brilliant career in Osaka and Kyoto and helped establish the so-called Eighteen Plays performed by the Ichikawa family, thus preserving their hegemony in Kabuki circles. His eldest son, Danjuro VIII (1823-1854), was by all reports so good-looking that he became the most popular actor during the final years of the shogunate; public grief over his suicide made him all the more famous. Danjuro IX (1839-1903), still a young performer during Kunisada's period of activity, went on to participate in a reform of the Kabuki theater during the early Meiji period and introduced modern "psychological" methods of acting.

A number of other famous actors of the day were portrayed by Kunisada. Bando Mitsugoro III (1773-1831) was particularly adept at dance dramas; Iwai Hanshiro V (1776-1847), one of the most accomplished onnagata (performers of female roles in this all-male theater) in the century, specialized in playing rough, depraved women. Perhaps the best-known of all those depicted by Kunisada is Onoe Kikugoro III (1784-1849), often held to be the leading all-around actor of his period, who was capable of assuming an astonishing variety of character parts. His celebrated skill in ghost roles calls to mind in turn his association with perhaps the finest of the true Kabuki playwrights, Tsuruya Namboku (1755-1829).

With the work of Tsuruya Namboku, the visual effect of Kunisada's art and the atmosphere of Kabuki in his time are at their closest. Among the extraordinary number of plays that Namboku wrote (Donald Keene cites the figure of over one hundred), his greatest successes were perfectly tailored to an age in which the noble ideals of the past, even as explicated in such still-popular dramas as Chushingura or "Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy," were now to become subjects for parody. His 1817 masterpiece Sakurahime Azuma bunsho (The scarlet princess of Edo), which tells a complex and decadent story of love and betrayal, was written for the talents of the onnagata Iwai Hanshiro V, who played the princess. This play in particular has given Namboku his present high reputation as a Kabuki dramatist in the United States, since the most famous performer of female roles in our generation, Bando Tamasaburo, brought a brilliant and disturbing production of it to New York, Washington and elsewhere in 1985. In Japan, however, Namboku's most famous work remains Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (Ghost story of Yotsuya on the Tokaido), first staged in 1825. Onoe Kikugoro III achieved great fame with this production, since he used a series of astonishing costume-changing devices in order to perform three central roles: Oiwa, wife of the protagonist (a dissolute masterless samurai); Osode, Oiwa's sister; and Yomoshichi, Osode's lover. In both of these plays by Namboku, the heroines become physically disfigured from poison and take their revenge on the men who have betrayed them. In Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan, Namboku hooked his plot into the Chushingura story, thus adding additional layers of irony. Tamiya Ie'mon, the masterless samurai, has decided not to join the forty-seven ronin in seeking an honorable vengeance for his master's death; rather, he scoffs at the morality of his society. No greater contrast between the world of classic Kabuki and the air of decadence and cynicism that characterized the theater of Kunisada's period can be imagined.

The actor prints of Kunisada capture to a striking degree this sense of social decay and moral fatigue, making them, like the dramas they represent, quite modern in their implicit questioning of established values. It is no wonder that the Tokugawa government found it necessary to censor from time to time a theater that seemed to call into question the very ideology on which society had been constructed since the time of Tokugawa Ieyasu in the early 17th century.

However concerned the authorities may have been by a theater that had shed any responsibility for maintaining an atmosphere of moral correctness, Kabuki at the time of Tsuruya Namboku was successful in creating the artistic means to capture the truth of its period. In that sense, although not a realistic theater in our usual post-Ibsen understanding of the word, 19th-century Kabuki, in measuring the emotional malaise of the time, proved a far more reliable frame through which to view society than the long-worn-out Confucian pronouncements still provided by the government. In mirroring that same atmosphere in his prints, Kunisada also reflects the realities of his age. And we, living in an age rife with its own uncertainties, can find in ourselves a natural response to that truthfulness, which fascinates even as it may disturb.

Note: There is, in my view, no better way to appreciate the visual values brought by Kunisada to his theatrical prints than to read the plays themselves. While relatively few have been translated into English, the texts that are available make exciting reading and provide a crucial context for understanding the significance of the printmaker's art:
Chushingura, trans. Donald Keene, New York: Columbia University Press, 1971;
The Scarlet Princess of Edo, trans. James Brandon, in James Brandon, ed.,
Kabuki: Five Classic Plays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975; 2nd ed., Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 1993;
Sugawara Michizane and the Secrets of Calligraphy, trans. Stanleigh Jones, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985;
Sukeroku: Flower of Edo, trans. James Brandon, in Brandon, ed., Kabuki: Five Classic Plays.