• Noh: 田村、百万 (Tamura, Hyakuman)

4/16/17 (Sun), Umewaka Noh Theater, Tokyo

This was a nice pairing of shows since both, in a seasonal touch, were set in the cherry blossoms. They were also both explicitly religious and offered fast-paced kakeri (described somewhere as “anguish dances”).

I was particularly interested in Tamura since, unlike the typical laments by felled soldiers, it’s one of only three warrior pieces in Noh that are about winners. (I saw another, Yashima, just a few months earlier.) This play is also unusual among the warrior shows in that it is not about one of the 12th-century Heike battles but an event that comes several hundred years earlier. Continue reading →

• Noh （夜桜能）: 夜討曽我 (Youchi Soga)

4/5/17 (Wed), Yasukuni Shrine

The cherry blossoms were in full glorious bloom for Yasukuni Shrine’s annual outdoor Noh series this year, so the setting was magnificent. Gensho, a National Living Treasure, had played the previous night in the wonderful Saigyozakura (西行桜), but I opted for tonight since it was a play I hadn’t seen. My friend was late, so I missed the torch lighting and had to watch the opening dance from the back. Grr.

The Noh piece, Youchi Soga, has an unusual pedigree. The author Miyamasu is a contemporary of the pioneering Zeami, but while the latter went all aristocratic once the shogun took him in, the former continued to write common man’s Noh – not a genre I was even aware of. His plays apparently are nearly all genzai plays featuring living people as opposed to ghosts, with actual plots and lots of characters. A good number are about the Soga brother vendetta that also features so prominently in Kabuki.

Continue reading →

• Kabuki: 瞼の母、楊貴妃 (Memories of Mother, Yang Guifei)

12/8/17 (Fri), 歌舞伎座

The first piece, Memories of Mother (the best of the numerous English titles of this show), is Hasegawa Shin’s semi-autobiographical Shin (New) Kabuki from 1931 about a man in search of his mother. Continue reading →

• Noh: 盛久, 謀生種, 雷電 (Morihisa, The Hojo Seed, Raiden)

10/15/17 (Sun), Tokyo

Morihisa is a relative rarity that, while long on talk and short on action, proved an intriguing piece. Continue reading →

• Kabuki: 競伊勢物語 (Hade Kurabe Ise Monogatari)

9/15/15 (Tues), Kabukiza

Hade Kurabe Ise Monogatari (A Colorful Rivalry: Tales of Ise) is another convoluted but entertaining piece by Nagawa Kamesuke, the same guy who wrote the classic Meiboku Sendai Hagi (which is playing in the afternoon). The program noted that this is the 1,200th anniversary of the birth of one of the show’s main characters, Ki no Aritsune.

Continue reading →

• 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 →

•         Noh: 籠太鼓, 野守 (Rodaiko, Nomori)

7/16/17 (Sun), Umewaka Noh Theater, Tokyo

Rodaiko (The Prison Drum) is a unique piece about a woman who is imprisoned in place of her escaped husband and pressed to divulge his whereabouts. Continue reading →

• Bunraku: 加賀見山旧錦絵 (Kagamiyama)

5/20/17 (Sat), National Theatre

A rare Edo piece (puppet plays typically come from Osaka/Kyoto), this is a fuller-than-usual presentation of the Kagamiyama play going beyond the well-known Iwafuji story. Continue reading →

• 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: 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 →