This book is an annotated collection of English-language documents by foreigners writing about Japan's kabuki theatre in the half-century after the country was opened to the West in 1853. Using memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters, and reference books, it contains all significant writing about kabuki by foreigners-resident or transient-during the Meiji period (1868-1912), well before the first substantial non-Japanese book on the subject was published. Its chronologically organized chapters contain detailed introductions. Twenty-seven authors, represented by edited versions of their essays, are supplemented by detailed summaries of thirty-five others. The author provides insights into how Western visitors-missionaries, scholars, diplomats, military officers, adventurers, globetrotters, and even a precocious teenage girl-responded to a world-class theatre that, apart from a tiny number of pre-Meiji encounters, had been hidden from the world at large for over two centuries. It reveals prejudices and misunderstandings, but also demonstrates the power of great theatre to bring together people of differing cultural backgrounds despite the barriers of language, artistic convention, and the very practice of theatergoing. And, in Ichikawa Danjuro IX, it presents an actor knowledgeable foreigners considered one of the finest in the world.

About the Author

Samuel L. Leiter is professor emeritus of theater at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Reviews

Samuel L. Leiter, a foremost scholar of kabuki, has compiled a rich trove of firsthand accounts of kabuki theatergoing in Japan during the Meiji period. The selections were written by people from Britain, the United States, and other countries who traveled to Japan during the first decades of Japan's modernization. They offer fascinating insights into ways that the outside world viewed kabuki and the culture that produced it. Dr. Leiter's introductory material and extensive annotations and commentary provide essential context for the accounts. Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes is a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on what has become one of the world's most revered art forms.

-- Barbara E. Thornbury, Temple University

Following two-plus centuries of isolation, Japan in the Meiji Period (1868-1912) overflowed with new possibilities, stimulated partly by a nonstop stream of foreign visitors. Japan's traditional theatre-no, kabuki, and bunraku-so different from Western theatre, garnered far more than superficial "if it's Tuesday, it must be Kyoto" reactions. Samuel Leiter has assembled in this eminently readable book their accounts of kabuki performances. None better than he, the world's leading kabuki scholar-translator outside Japan (he's also a prominent critic of American theatre), to assume this task. He brings alive the excitement-sometimes, the puzzlement-in the foreign accounts. Very few of these early observers were well informed about kabuki, but their gawker-like, enthusiastic accounts provide collectively a fascinating, incipient take on a salient feature of Japan's deeply rooted traditional culture.

-- John K. Gillespie, Gillespie Global Group

The combination of domestic turmoil and foreign incursions brought immense change to Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912). Kabuki, the reigning stage art, took a leading role in the political and social agendas of the period. In Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes, Samuel Leiter has gathered written accounts left by a significant number of foreigners who attended kabuki during the Meiji Period, and he has added generous and highly informative commentary. The volume takes readers into theatres over the decades of kabuki's rapid transition from a broadly popular cultural attraction to an art forced from on high to serve new purposes and new audiences. This exceptionally valuable volume is an eye-opening and essential contribution to the study of kabuki, while also augmenting understandings of Japanese history, modernization, foreign relations, and foreign interest in Japan.

-- Katherine Saltzman-Li, University of California Santa Barbara


Awards
Winner of Outstanding Academic Title 2023.



Book Information
ISBN 9781666926781
Author Samuel L. Leiter
Format Hardback
Page Count 438
Imprint Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Publisher Lexington Books
Weight(grams) 767g
Dimensions(mm) 237mm * 157mm * 30mm