Description
Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater and its dynamic representations of medieval Japanese tales and tradition, boldly reframing Edo kabuki as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity. Challenging the common understanding of kabuki as a subversive entertainment and a threat to shogunal authority, Shimazaki argues that kabuki actually instilled a sense of shared history in Edo's inhabitants, regardless of their class.
About the Author
Satoko Shimazaki is assistant professor of Japanese literature and theater at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on early modern Japanese theater and popular literature; the modern history of kabuki; gender representation on the kabuki stage; and the interaction of performance, print, and text.
Reviews
A sophisticated, entertaining, and well-written contribution to nineteenth-century kabuki studies that both challenges the conventional wisdom of early modern theater scholarship and illuminates the splendid, ghastly world of Japanese horror. -- Keller Kimbrough, author of Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater Satoko Shimazaki's fascinating study of early modern kabuki performance reveals a new kabuki theater to us, not a cultural practice with a relatively stable body of texts at its center but a major site of social and cultural negotiation whose central feature and strength lies in its remarkable variety and adaptability. -- Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine Edo Kabuki in Transition is an extraordinary contribution to the field of kabuki studies, in both the West and Japan. Its unconventional yet comprehensive view of Edo kabuki's evolution, especially its playwriting practices, filtered through the lens of Tsuruya Nanboku IV's 1825 coproduction of his revolutionary ghost play Yotsuya kaidan and the popular history play Chushingura, is original and searching. Satoko Shimazaki's highly readable, marvelously researched study gives us both a penetrating understanding of the fluidity of Edo dramaturgy and an exceptionally thorough examination of the ghost play genre. -- Samuel L. Leiter, author of The Art of Kabuki: Five Famous Plays This fascinating book is a bold revisioning of the development of kabuki theater in Edo (present-day Tokyo)... Highly recommended. Choice
Awards
Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2016 and John Whitney Hall Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies 2018. Commended for Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History, American Society for Theater Research 2017. Long-listed for ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars 2017.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231172264
Author Satoko Shimazaki
Format Hardback
Page Count 392
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press