Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater by Maki Isaka, and: Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost by Satoko Shimazaki (review) Carolyn Morley Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 78, Number 1, June 2018, pp. 230-242 (Review) Published by Harvard-Yenching Institute DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 7 Dec 2020 00:55 GMT from University of Hawaii at Hilo ] https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2018.0015 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705127 230 Reviews Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 78.1 (2018): 230–242 of the perfect cosmological and political order of the world partially merged with the Qing’s political ideology during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the beauty and purity of his technical methodol- ogy for the study of the classics had not the desired impact. All in all, the author of Transition should be celebrated for his fabulous insight into Qing intellectual and scientific thought. All future research on Dai Zhen and his place in history will have to reckon one way or another with the parameters Hu has set. Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater by Maki Isaka. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 256. $50.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost by Satoko Shimazaki. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 372. $60.00 cloth, $59.99 e-book. Carolyn Morley, Wellesley College The sprawling, raucous, boundary-bursting kabuki theater of the Edo period underwent a critical change as it adapted to a new era during the nineteenth century, transforming in the process from a popular to a classical theater. This shift is not so surprising considering the changes wrought in every sector of society with the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the advent of the Meiji period, a period that ushered in modernization, Westernization, and a new emphasis on the natural sciences. Mainstays of Edo kabuki—such as the onna- gata 女方 (actors who specialize in women’s roles), the primacy of the actor over the written text, and, during the nineteenth century at least, the extremely graphic and convoluted stories—were antitheti- cal to the new enlightened era. Two recent studies examine the arc of kabuki from its beginnings in the early seventeenth century to the present, questioning how scholars have interpreted the dynamic role of kabuki in society, the changes in audience reception, and the inno- vations in acting during the Edo period. Maki Isaka addresses the evolution of the onnagata through the lens of gender identity, while Reviews 231 Satoko Shimazaki explores the ever-changing performance text of kabuki. Modernization introduced a valorization of the written text and, with it, an anxiety over origins: the original written source of a play (Shimazaki’s focus), and the original site of a performance role (Isaka’s focus). Imitation—the transmission of both performance text and per- forming roles from one actor to the next in a lineage—was now consid- ered second best, a copy. For the (male) onnagata , this new valorization of texts meant questioning the very basis of his performance: he could never “be a woman,” after all. For the performance texts themselves, this valorization meant an assertion that only one written version of a play, the so-called original, had merit and was part of the canon. This kind of essentialism was the antithesis of kabuki performance, which had long resisted any constraints. In Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki , Isaka offers “a case study of how gender has been constructed and naturalized, defined and redefined, theorized and practiced” (p. 15). She uses the onnagata as her example and follows the evolution of the art of the onnagata via the his- torical records of some of kabuki’s most renowned onnagata perform- ers, from Yoshizawa Ayame 芳沢あやめ (a man, 1673–1729) through Ichikawa Kumehachi 市川久女八 (a woman, 1846?–1913). Isaka’s con- tribution is primarily not in the discovery of new material but in a new analysis of material already available in other sources. Her approach enables her to successfully situate onnagata within current discourse on gender identity. As a theater specialist, I found the framing of the argu- ment in the vocabulary of gender studies to be at times irksome, but I am nevertheless grateful for the new insights offered into the art of role- play in traditional theater forms. Isaka turns her attention first to the evolution of the art of per- forming a woman on stage from its inception in early kabuki, which was performed primarily by women ( okuni kabuki 阿国歌舞伎 ) and prostitutes ( yūjo kabuki 遊女歌舞伎 ), to female impersonation in the young-boy troupes ( wakashū kabuki 若衆歌舞伎 ) to the emergence of the onnagata in male-only performances ( yarō kabuki 野郎歌舞伎 ) fol- lowing the government edict banning women’s and young boys’ kabuki troupes. The reader may be familiar with the works of Katherine Mezur, Hattori Yukio 服部幸雄 , and Gunji Masakatsu 郡司正勝 , which trace the onnagata acting method to wakashū 若衆 (young boy) female 232 Reviews impersonations.1 Isaka does not dispute the connection: many of the boy actors drifted over to the male-only troupes to become onnagata performers after the wakashū troupes were disbanded. In fact, Isaka agrees with Mezur that neither the wakashū troupes, albeit performing contemporaneously with female actors, nor the onnagata performers of the men’s troupes modeled themselves on the early female actors. Isaka, however, does see a distinction, which these other scholars do not, between wakashū and adult men performing onnagata . Orig- inally, the term wakashū referred to the younger member of a male- male patronage relationship in the samurai class. Even when the term no longer referred primarily to a samurai relationship but rather to adolescent performers on a stage, wakashū were still performing for the seduction of men. Theirs was an evanescent role by its very nature, with an intentionally androgynous allure. Wakashū were called futanarihira 二業平 (androgynous beauties) by some after the ninth-century love poet Ariwara no Narihira 在原業 平 , who was known for an almost feminine emotiveness in his poetry. Isaka notes that the term futanarihira was in vogue during the early seventeenth century and that wakashū (as well as the early onnagata ) were “bound by this aesthetic” (p. 27). She refers to a popular kyōka 狂歌 (humorous verse) by Nakarai Bokuyō 半井卜養 (1607–1678): “If you think it’s a woman, it’s a man, Mannosuke”(p. 27). The onnagata of the early eighteenth century could no longer rely on such boyish charm. What had once been the seductive art of beau- tiful boys intent on attracting male sponsorship underwent a notable, albeit gradual, shift when the “transitory” aspect of the attraction was removed. These onnagata had to create an enduring art of femininity based on the observation of actual women. The works of two promi- nent eighteenth-century onnagata — The Words of Ayame ( Ayamegusa 菖蒲草 ), by Yoshizawa Ayame, and Secret Transmissions of an Onnagata ( Onnagatano hiden 女形の秘伝 ), by Segawa Kikunojo I 初世瀬川菊之 丞 (1693–1749)—are devoted to precisely this dilemma. They present onnagata as creating what Isaka terms “the constative” of women (p. 38), a concept that seems to refer to the universal features of women. 1 Katherine Mezur, Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Kabuki Female-Likeness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Hattori Yukio, Edo kabuki no biishiki 江戸歌舞伎 の美意識 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1996); Gunji Masakatsu, Gunji Masakatsu santei shū 郡司 正勝刪定集 , 6 vols. (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1990–1992.) Reviews 233 Isaka argues that this construction of femininity involved a natural asso- ciation between onnagata and actual women. In fact, the onnagata of the eighteenth century considered it the greatest of compliments to be able to pass as a woman off-stage in the presence of women in society. They did not deny their male sex but rather used it as a starting point from which to construct a second identity, a feminine ideal appealing to men and women alike. Here, Isaka offers a corrective to earlier inter- pretations of Ayame’s treatise that suggest Ayame believed only men could portray women on stage (p. 7). After all, once the performance practice of the feminine (the art of the onnagata ) was established, the sex of the actor was extraneous. According to Isaka, the misreading of Ayame, in particular by foreign scholars during the 1950s, is what led to the mistaken conclusion that the art of femininity constructed by onna- gata was an inheritance from androgynous wakashū and was never con- structed from observation or imitation of actual women. In “Femininity in Circulation” (chapter 5), Isaka elaborates on the ways in which the onnagata not only followed women’s behavior but even initiated fashion, creating a dynamic of influence that flowed in both directions. The impact of the onnagata on society can be seen in the eager attendance of women at sideshow impersonations of the onnagata stars and women’s consumption of the ubiquitous acting cri- tiques ( yakusha hyōbanki 役者評判記 ). Women in Edo society could thus perform and imitate the gender of “woman” by following the lead of the onnagata . Isaka’s claim that Edo women copied the gestures, manners, and style of the onnagata in order to perform what was, after all, the gender associated with their sex is entirely believable consider- ing that the Tokugawa patriarchy had already issued rules for how to be a woman in Onna Daigaku 女大学 , a Confucian treatise on women’s education. Since guidelines for the presentation of virtuous woman- hood were already being taught in the home, it was not a big leap for women to imitate yet another presentation, that of the onnagata style so popular on stage. In this way, femininity as defined by onnagata cir- culated in Edo during the eighteenth century, quietly demarcating what it was to be womanly and making it possible for the emergence of female onnagata , who themselves could construct the same femininity. The social concept of gender and the construction of femininity changed during the Meiji period to one that presumed sex to be the natural determination of gender. In the Edo period, by contrast, gender 234 Reviews identity had been seen as malleable. Isaka tells us that the claims of class distinction were far more significant during the Edo period than the binary of male and female. During the Meiji period, however, with the rush toward Westernization and the emphasis on the natural sci- ences, the so-called actress question became so consequential that one stated objective of the Theater Reform Society (Engeki kairyōkai 演 劇改良会 ), formed in 1886, was the replacement of (male) onnagata with actresses.2 The challenge for the onnagata of the Meiji period was to distinguish their art from the simple impersonation of women or risk erasure. Subsequently, onnagata found it expedient in principle to reject female onnagata from their profession in order to survive. This exclusion allowed men to claim exclusive possession of their art: the creation of a sublime and transcendent femininity, not to be found in any actual woman. Isaka stresses that the expulsion of female onnagata during the Meiji period, coming after a short period when women per- formed on the kabuki stage, was the direct result of the historic social changes in the nineteenth century and not the result of any belief in the innate inability of women to perform the constructed roles of either men or women. In her final chapters, Isaka delineates the debut and demise of the female onnagata during the mid- to late nineteenth century. Women continued performing even after bans on prostitutes’ troupes ( yūjo kabuki ) in the early Edo period, performing as theater masters ( okyō- genshi お狂言師 ) for wealthy daimyo patrons who were not allowed to visit the theater or, alternatively, acting in fringe theaters. One nineteenth-century example, Ichikawa Kumehachi I, began as a stu- dent of a renowned theater master and then moved on to become an onnagata performer on the kabuki stage when the changing economy at the close of the Edo period caused a loss of patronage. She was rec- ognized by Ichikawa Danjūrō IX 九世市川團十郎 and received the stage name Ichikawa from him. As Loren Edelson notes, the Ichikawa family went on to patronize all-female kabuki troupes.3 Kumehachi performed during a fleeting window of time before female onnagata were no longer welcomed on the main kabuki stage. 2 Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 6. 3 Loren Edelson, Danjūrō’s Girls: Women on the Kabuki Stag e (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Reviews 235 The art of the kabuki onnagata was thus neither a static creation of the seventeenth century nor exclusive to males but rather a perfor- mance art that evolved in relationship to changing perceptions of the relationship between sex and gender in Japanese society as a whole. The compliment of being “more womanly than a woman” given to present-day male onnagata stars, such as Bandō Tamasaburō 坂東玉三 郎 , is a relatively new phenomenon, sparked by the cultural shifts of the nineteenth century. Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost , by Satoko Shimazaki, takes a different route to understanding nineteenth-century changes. Her interest is in the performance text of kabuki, including the cultural energy surround- ing the theater via the outpouring of booklets and woodblock prints of the actors. Certainly one of the book’s most attractive features is the large number of eye-catching illustrations, which Shimazaki art- fully analyzes. Shimazaki’s main point is that scholars head down the wrong road when they elect to study kabuki as a canon with identifi- able authors and texts—in other words, as equivalent to the texts of Shakespeare’s plays. She attributes this wrong turn both to the prior- ities of nineteenth-century Meiji oligarchs, who were intent on iden- tifying a Japanese tradition that could stand up to the new influx of Western culture, and to the post-1945 thrust toward modernization. By following the changing nature of the Edo-era performance texts, Shimazaki identifies a societal shift from a shared, communal identity to a modern, subjective one that was already underway during the first half of the nineteenth century. Shimazaki’s work focuses on the 1825 opening performance of Tsu- ruya Nanboku IV’s 四代目鶴屋南北 Eastern-Seaboard-Highway Ghost Stories at Yotsuya ( Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan 東海道四谷怪談 ). Shima- zaki argues this performance of Ghost Stories at Yotsuya is illustrative of the fluidity that characterized Edo kabuki performance and is evi- dence of a major shift underway in the creation and reception of plays during the nineteenth century.4 Nanboku made the idiosyncratic deci- sion to stage this play alongside the well-known popular play The Trea- sury of the Loyal Retainers ( Chūshingura 忠臣蔵 ). As Shimazaki notes, 4 For translations and a discussion of nineteenth-century kabuki plays, see Kabuki Plays on Stage , vol. 3: Darkness and Desire 1804–1864 , ed. James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002). 236 Reviews neither Ghost Stories at Yotsuya nor The Treasury of the Loyal Retainers was a set production based on an authoritative written script. Rather these plays were only loosely bound by the sekai 世界 (lit. world) of the fourteenth-century epic The Chronicle of Great Peace ( Taiheiki 太平 記 ).5 Over the course of its seasonal run, a historical play ( jidai mono 時代物 ) evolved from its original sekai characters and scenes might be added, successful scenes prolonged, and unsuccessful scenes deleted altogether. Moreover, the literature that arose surrounding the per- formance, like present-day anime fan fiction, might depict entirely imagined scenes of the author’s own invention that would never be performed or that might prove the inspiration for a new scene for a play. Shimazaki suggests that this fluidity of kabuki performance and the manner in which the seasonal kabuki calendar came to dictate the cultural events of the early Edo period are more suggestive of the sprawling grounds of a Shinto festival than of theater as we know it today. Shimazaki opens with a lively introduction replete with refer- ences, not only to the traditions and conventions of the theater (for which she is a mine of information) and to the lineage of the actors and their acting styles, but also to the industry around the theater intent on seducing the audience with playbills, woodblock prints, and spin-offs of the kabuki plays in popular booklets dense with graphic depictions. She conjures up the streets of old Edo with a Proustian-like reference to the smell of new playbills: Produced cheaply, often in a rush, freshly printed playbills had a particular odor that came from the low-quality ink used to print them—a mixture of fermented persimmon juice and the soot produced when sesame or rapeseed oil is burned. For theater aficionados, this was the smell of the new theatrical season. (p. 2) In chapter 1, “Presenting the Past: Edo Kabuki and the Creation of Community,” Shimazaki argues against earlier assumptions regard- ing the Tokugawa government’s attitude toward kabuki and its place in Edo society. In his seminal essay “ Bakufu versus kabuki ,” Donald Shively presents Edo-period legal documents to suggest a govern- 5 The use of sekai characterizes all Edo-period kabuki plays, from the Edo period through the present. A sekai is a dramatic world or theme with a well-defined set of char- acters and actions, usually derived from well-known historical events or legends. Reviews 237 ment constantly at odds with kabuki and forced to rein in its excesses through censorship of material critical of the government and various sumptuary laws.6 Shimazaki contends, on the contrary, that kabuki played an essential part in early Edo society and an officially sanc- tioned one at that. Kabuki was necessary to forging a community iden- tity across classes: “From the seventeenth century, Edo kabuki served to rewrite samurai history as a publicly shared present, forging a con- nection between elite and commoner culture” (p. 93). At the very least, this explanation puts to rest the niggling question of why the govern- ment was so lax in enforcing the many laws enacted. The fact that the three major kabuki theaters were “licensed and given land in a central location in the city” (p. 32) further supports Shimazaki’s claim. Shima- zaki makes an interesting comparison here to Shakespeare’s theater, which was relegated to the outskirts of London. Shimazaki’s main argument, however, draws on the performance history of the plays themselves. Early Edo kabuki was performed in two parts: a historical drama ( jidai mono ) and a “contemporary” drama ( sewa mono 世話物 ) that featured lesser characters of the same sekai but in a contemporaneous setting. This structure means that plays of loyalty and revenge initially created to attract the footloose samurai class came to extend their reach through the contemporary drama to all classes and denizens of Edo, who recognized their own spaces in the shops and byways performed on stage. In other words, the past was presented in the present in order to create a shared cul- tural space for a wider audience. The appeal to a wider and more diverse audience, and not as a tactic to slip past government censors (who in any case seemed to look the other way), is the reason that Edo kabuki drew continually upon sekai from the samurai past. The kabuki theater, both in its calendar of events and in its presentation of a seemingly shared past in the present, functioned as the center of cultural production for the new city of Edo, held together by shared samurai values. Shimazaki synthesizes material from playbills and vari- ous types of illustrated popular fiction of the Edo period, such as story booklets ( kibyōshi 黄表紙 ), humorous booklets ( kokkeibon 滑稽本 ), short fiction ( yomihon 読本 ), and acting critiques ( yakusha hyōbanki ), 6 Donald H. Shively, “ Bakufu versus kabuki ,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 18.3–4 (1955): 326–56, doi: 10.2307/2718437; reprinted in A Kabuki Reader: History and Perfor- mance , ed. Samuel E. Leiter (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). 238 Reviews among others, to buttress her case for the visibly assertive role kabuki played in creating the Edokko 江戸っ子 (lit. child of Edo) mystique. Her analysis of the familiar character Sukeroku 助六 is especially tell- ing. In Sukeroku, Flower of Edo ( Sukerokuyukari Edo sakura 助六所縁 江戸桜 , an Edo play), Sukeroku is the disguise for Soga Gorō 曽我 五郎 , one of the renowned Soga brothers of twelfth-century history, out to avenge his father. Apparently, however, the Sukeroku character first made his appearance in a Kyoto double-suicide play as Yorozuya Sukeroku 万屋助六 , a dandy come to visit his lover Agemaki 揚巻 at a Shimabara 島原 brothel. In the Edo play, Sukeroku wears a sleek black robe like the robes worn by Tokugawa government officials, but with a flashy purple headband (reminiscent of his earlier appearance in the Kyoto play). Shimazaki notes that this fashion sense became all the rage. Here we see the slipperiness of the kabuki character transformed from a Kyoto lad to a dashing samurai with a weighty past who swag- gers about the streets of Edo, a character attractive to samurai and commoner alike. In chapter 2, “Overturning the World,” Shimazaki develops her main argument that the nineteenth century was a time of transition for kabuki and that this transition was most notable in the works of the century’s greatest playwright, Tsuruya Nanboku IV. The role of kabuki as the center of cultural production for a new city held together by samurai values was to change. To make her argument, Shimazaki uses Nanboku’s unusual combination of The Treasury of Loyal Retainers with his new play Ghost Stories at Yotsuya in an 1825 summer perfor- mance. The accepted scholarly view of this pairing, based on exhaus- tive examination of scripts of the plays, is that the new contemporary play was inserted to undercut the professed samurai values of loyalty and revenge celebrated by the older and more established play—in other words, to parody samurai values. Shimazaki challenges this view by invoking contemporaneous critical commentary and woodblock prints as well as references to acting techniques and special effects in order to illustrate how fluid the performances actually were. For example, Nanboku in particular enjoyed adopting special effects from the edgy tent theaters into his plays. In a 1783 production of The Treasury of the Loyal Retainers at the Ichimura Theater 市村座 , the actor playing the evil Sadakurō 定九郎 Reviews 239 decided to dress in a single-layered kimono of black silk and had his face and body painted white—a combination that conventionally signified a particularly handsome hero. He wore an unshaven-samurai wig ( sakaguma [ 逆熊 ]), rolled up the sleeves of his kimono and tucked up the hem to expose his thighs, and carried a broken umbrella in his hand. (p. 139) He was also soaking wet, having poured a bucket of water over his head back stage to simulate rain. “Having just committed a brutal murder, he pauses nonchalantly to wring out his kimono and wipe the rain- drops from his hair, all the while giving the audience a good look at his dripping body” (p. 139). Thus, in place of a ragtag, disreputable for- mer retainer, a new iroaku 色悪 (sexy bad guy) was born. Although The Treasury of Loyal Retainers was an old standby, the performance of the play had already changed significantly by 1825 to meet the demands of a nineteenth-century audience eager to find themselves in the story of samurai revenge. The earlier assumption by scholars that Ghost Stories at Yotsuya was simply a parody of the values iterated in The Treasury of Loyal Retainers is clearly too simplistic when the acting and perfor- mance texts are taken into account. Nevertheless, the pairing of Ghost Stories at Yotsuya with The Trea- sury of Loyal Retainers was decidedly revolutionary in that it turned the expected revenge play cycle on its head. There was no reassurance at the close that Tokugawa society would return to normalcy or that all involved in the revenge plots would be reintegrated into that soci- ety. What was undermined then was far more systemic: theater’s long established role in investing Edo with a sense of identity and commu- nity. The overriding importance of the sekai collapsed into the perfor- mances of two virtually independent plays, the second offered in the kizewa 生世話 (raw contemporary) style of Ghost Stories at Yotsuya with characters from the back alleys and prostitution quarters rather than the wives and lovers of the great samurai families. Of course, as Shimazaki notes, this breakdown was already under- way by 1825. The major theaters in Edo had been forced out of the city center and were suffering economically, no longer able to commit to yearly contracts for actors. Actors had begun to sell their services to several competing theaters, even appearing in more than one of the annual opening ( kaomise 顔見せ ) performances. It was also at this moment, with society descending into disarray, that female onnagata 240 Reviews began to appear on the kabuki stage. Actors, male and female, were for hire and the sacrosanct kabuki calendar was no longer the major cul- tural defining point of the year. In chapters 3 and 4, Shimazaki moves on to the significance of the new kizewa play, represented by Ghost Stories at Yotsuya , and the near ubiquitous presence of a new heroine (or antiheroine) of nineteenth- century kabuki: the vengeful female ghost. Unlike the revenge plot of The Treasury of the Loyal Retainers , there is nothing restorative in the private revenge of a jealous female ghost. Shimazaki argues that this effect is exactly what was sought: “the female ghost was a natural choice for Tsuruya Nanboku IV in planning a production centered on a figure unbound by ordinary social mores” (p. 150). With her lack of moorings, the female ghost became a site of subjectivity for a society in transition. “Oiwa’s [ お岩 ] female body—stained from the start by a history of blood—was the perfect counterpart to the sekai centered on the preservation of feudal order and male honor; her body was capable of serving as a structuring principle in an age when conventional sekai no longer meant what they once had”(p. 190). According to Shimazaki, the role of female ghost was played not by onnagata but by male-role actors. Since nineteenth-century female ghosts underwent various hideous physical transformations before dying and returning horribly disfigured to the delight of the audience, such roles were deemed appropriate only for male-role actors. This casting suggests the beginning of a shift toward the stylization of the sublimely transcendent feminine ideal that was to become the hall- mark of modern kabuki onnagata performers. Shimazaki situates the female ghost amid cultural and literary tropes associated with jealousy. She argues that Oiwa’s actions in Ghost Stories at Yotsuya , as she paints her face and brushes her hair before her mirror, are feminine down to the last detail. She is not just any ghost; she is a female ghost, transforming in front of her own mirror as clumps of her hair fall out. By the Edo period, the trope of the jealous woman out of control, complete with images of her blood and uncon- tained hair, was well established. As early as the eleventh-century Tale of Genji , the Lady Rokujō 六条御息所 , like Oiwa, is unaware of her own jealous rage until she is physically exposed by the smell of burning poppy seeds in her hair. Shimazaki argues that during the Tokugawa period the actual transformations of jealous women into snakes found Reviews 241 in medieval Buddhist tales gave way to a metaphorical use of serpent imagery to connote an inner state of fragmentation and chaos: hair in coils and standing on end, for example, or an unraveling obi. “Snakes increasingly came to be invoked as figures for something that existed within the human body—for what we might now describe as a sub- conscious desire” (p. 176). Internalization of the snake imagery was eventually replaced by the notion of a ghost ( yūrei 幽霊 ) within the body that might emerge upon death if not appeased. Because women were the ones seen as susceptible to jealousy, yūrei were female almost by definition. Shimazaki mentions only in passing The Legend of the White Snake ( Baishe zhuan 白蛇傳 ), a Ming-era favorite in Chinese opera from Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) Stories to Caution the World ( Jing- shi tongyan 警世通言 ). The reader might wish for more than this cur- sory mention of Chinese influence. Most intellectuals during the Edo period were conversant with Chinese stories, wrote in Chinese, and incorporated Chinese stories into their own literary dabbling. To what extent can we see this interest in the female ghost as part of the larger embrace of things Chinese? The Legend of the White Snake is only one of many fantastic stories that made their way to Japan, and it would seem only natural for an up-and-coming playwright like Nanboku to appro- priate such eye-catching images, especially considering the imperative to draw an audience. Shimazaki’s evocative account, from Ghost Stories at Yotsuya , of Iemon’s 伊右衛門 creepy encounter on the evening of the Tanabata 七夕 festival with a lovely woman (who is in fact the ghost of his wife Oiwa) has its parallel in the Chinese tale’s encounter of the white snake in her human form with her lover-to-be at a similar festival. In chapter 4, Shimazaki explores the ramifications of the ghost who died during pregnancy or childbirth ( ubume 産女 ). Like the yūrei , the ubume was already a trope by the nineteenth century and was per- formed by male-role actors. Initially, in early Edo-period kabuki, the ubume appeared in a side plot, striving to guarantee the survival of the child in her womb and return him to the household. In other words, initially, she was featured more as a loyal member of the household who sacrifices in order to restore the samurai household to its past glory. In the works of Nanboku and his cohort of playwrights, how- ever, the ubume is no longer a loyal servant of the house but a fright- ening ghost intent on jealous revenge. Shimazaki offers a particularly 242 Reviews fascinating reading of a woodblock print by Keisai Eisen 渓斎英泉 (1790–1848) in which a ghoulish Oiwa emerges from the water with her baby in her arms when Iemon pours water over the consecration cloth during a ceremony for the deceased pregnant mother and child (p. 195). In other words, Nanboku and others appropriated the preg- nant ghost, as well as the female ghost, for their own ends. Shimazaki argues that one of these ends is to suggest a new subjective identity in opposition to the communal identity of the earlier period. These ghosts offered a path to the depiction of interiority on the kabuki stage. Shimazaki concentrates on the central importance of the perfor- mance text to kabuki, but she concedes that the newly acquired author- ity of the printed text is probably what allowed kabuki’s preservation and even its success from the Meiji period onward. The ambiguity and iconoclastic nature of early kabuki was threatening to the moderniz- ing efforts in Meiji Japan, and it was thus critical to characterize kabuki performance as “traditional” theater with a particular written text. As was the case with its reification of the onnagata , kabuki transformed itself from within in order to survive. Isaka’s Onnagata and Shimazaki’s Edo Kabuki in Transition are both important additions to the growing library of kabuki studies. The easy dialogue with both Japanese and Western scholarship throughout both books, as well as the authors’ engagement with various popular literary genres on the periphery of the theater, expands our context for understanding kabuki. Isaka’s work straddles two areas: kabuki studies and gender studies. This perspective may prove a stumbling block for some in theater studies but ultimately opens up the art of the onnagata to more in-depth analysis. Shimazaki’s work is almost too rich in the kind of details that will delight kabuki lovers, so it requires some effort on the reader’s part to navigate the line of argument. Both books are well worth the effort.