Category Archives: Japan

All Nudity Shall Be Punished (禁断の裸体)

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  • 禁断の裸体 (All Nudity Shall Be Punished)

4/18/15 (Sat), Tokyo

150418kindan1 I knew nothing at all about this play, but the poster art was eye-catching, to say the least, and a bit of research indicated that it was a famous (or infamous) show by one of Brazil’s best known playwrights, Nelson Rodrigues. It also starred the great Shinobu Terajima, who was so memorable in the film Caterpillar, and Seiyo Uchino, a well known stage actor. Tickets were hard to come by, which made me all the more curious to see it. I wasn’t able to find much information on the show, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into.   Continue reading →

Kabuki: Daemon and the Flower Palace (駄右衛門花御所異聞)

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  • Kabuki: 駄右衛門花御所異聞 (Daemon and the Flower Palace)

7/18/17 (Tues), Tokyo

This is a rarely seen drama about the real-life gangster Nippon Daemon first produced in 1761 (under the name Akiba Gongen Kaisen Banashi) and apparently drastically rewritten for Ebizo. More accurately, it has been reworked as a vanity piece for the star. A villain has stolen a precious manuscript and magical religious heirloom from a noble family in hopes of toppling it and taking over the country. The rest hardly matters.  Continue reading →

Onibaba (鬼婆)

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  • 鬼婆 (Onibaba)

7/11/17 (Tues), DVD

This singular 1964 film by Shindo Kaneto about two country women scraping out a life in the turmoil of 14th-century Japan was described to me as a horror flick, but that description doesn’t seem quite right. Horror can be easily forgotten once the thrill is over. That is not the case with this movie.  Continue reading →

The Rat Burglar (鼠小僧)

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  • Kabuki: 鼠小僧  (The Rat Burglar)

3/6/15 (Fri), film

I managed to get myself switched to an All Nippon Airways flight to New York when my United flight was suddenly cancelled. One advantage was a good selection of Japanese films, and I was surprised to see some Kabuki selections. I had avoided this particular 2003 production before since I didn’t want to spend money on Noda Hideki, who wrote and directed it. But it was a big hit, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know what was out there. And at free, the price was right.  Continue reading →

Kabuki: Bancho Sarayashiki, Kurozuka (番町皿屋敷, 黒塚 )

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  • Kabuki: 番町皿屋敷, 女暫、黒塚 (Bancho Sarayashiki, Onna Shibaraku, Kurozuka)

1/16/15 (Fri), Tokyo

Bancho Sarayashiki is based on a famous ghost story where the evil samurai Aoyama Harima, having been rejected by his young servant Okiku, tricks her into thinking that she has lost one of the family’s ten valuable Korean dishes, a capital crime. She frantically counts over and over, but only finds nine. He then murders her and throws her down a well. She comes back as a ghost to haunt him, always counting up to nine and then shrieking. That story was evidently adapted into Bunraku puppet theater, where the cruelty factor was upped considerably, and that version was then turned into a short-lived Kabuki piece.

The version this month, though, is a New Kabuki adaptation by Okamoto Kido in 1916, which takes a significantly different approach to the ghost story – for one thing, it has no ghosts. Continue reading →

On The Town (オン・ザ・タウン)

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オン・ザ・タウン (On The Town)

9/28/14 (Sun), Tokyo

At long last, On The Town reached Japan. It featured three pop stars from the super-popular music group V6 (managed by the legendary Johnny’s Office), which was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the show’s success was ensured from the minute it was announced: apparently, getting three of these guys together for this period of time is a near miracle given their sundry activities individually and as a group, and the show was sold out for the entire run before it even opened. So commercially this was a gold mine. On the other hand, this was clearly a Johnny’s crowd, with an audience that was 95% young and female. I haven’t seen such a female-heavy auditorium since Takarazuka. There was no room whatsoever for fans of Broadway musicals who may have wanted to see this Bernstein classic for the first time. It didn’t matter to this audience what they were seeing as long as their idols were there. So it pretty much establishes this show as a star vehicle, a very different approach from the US. Whether it will enter the repertory, and whether anyone would risk doing it now with normal musical actors, is an open question. Continue reading →

Noh: Tsunemasa (経政)

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Noh: 経政 (Tsunemasa)

9/14/14 (Sun), Karasumori Hachiman Shrine

This was an evening show being performed at a neighborhood shrine as part of an annual festival. I had hoped for candlelight rather than artificial lighting, especially since it’s called for in this case in the script itself, but I guess fire laws (and common sense on a wooden stage) prevailed.  Continue reading →