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Abundance and Resilience: Farming and Foraging in Ancient Kaua'i

Julie S. Field and Michael W. Graves (eds)

At the base of a steep cliff towering some 500 feet above the coast of the remote Nā Pali district on the island of Kauaʻi, lies the spectacular historical and archaeological site at Nuʻalolo Kai. ... More

At the base of a steep cliff towering some 500 feet above the coast of the remote Nā Pali district on the island of Kauaʻi, lies the spectacular historical and archaeological site at Nuʻalolo Kai. First excavated by Bishop Museum archaeologists between 1958 and 1964, the site contained the well-preserved remains of one of the largest and most diverse arrays of traditional and historic artifacts ever found in Hawaiʻi. The house sites that are the focus of this book were built over five centuries of occupation and contained deeply buried, stratified deposits extending more than nine feet beneath the surface. The book details the work of the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa which has been compiling and studying the animal remains recovered from the archaeological excavations. The chapters discuss the range of foods eaten by Hawaiians, the ways in which particular species were captured and harvested, and how these practices might have evolved through changes in the climate and natural environment. Adding to this are analyses of a sophisticated material culture. Demonstrating that an increased preference for introduced animals effectively limited negative impacts on wild animal resources, the book argues that the Hawaiian community of Nuʻalolo Kai practiced a sustainable form of animal resource procurement and management for 500 years.Less

Accounts and Images of Six Kannon in Japan

Sherry D. Fowler

When Kannon (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) appears in multiple manifestations, the compassionate Buddhist deity’s magnificent powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This book examines ... More

When Kannon (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) appears in multiple manifestations, the compassionate Buddhist deity’s magnificent powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This book examines the development of sculptures, paintings, and prints associated with the cult of the Six Kannon, which began in Japan in the tenth century and remained strong until its transition, beginning in sixteenth century, to the still active Thirty-Three Kannon cult. The complete set of Six Kannon made in 1224 and housed at the Kyoto temple Daihōonji is an exemplar of the cult’s images. With a diachronic approach, beginning in the eleventh century, individual case studies are employed to reinstate a context for the sets of Six Kannon, the majority of which have been lost or scattered, in order to clarify the former vibrancy, magnitude, and distribution of the cult and enhance knowledge of religious image-making in Japan. While Kannon’s role of assisting beings trapped in the six paths of transmigration is a well-documented catalyst for the selection of six, there are other significant themes at work. Six Kannon worship includes worldly concerns like childbirth and animal husbandry, strong ties between text and image, and numerous cases of matching with Shinto kami groups of six.Less

Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. This book is the ... More

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. This book is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film. The book argues that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. The seven in-depth studies include a diverse array of forms (cinematic adaptation of literature, literary adaptation of film, auto-adaptation, and non-narrative adaptation) and a variety of genres (martial arts, melodrama, romance, autobiography, documentary drama). Complementing this formal diversity is a geographical range that far exceeds the cultural, linguistic, and physical boundaries of China. The directors represented here also work in the United States and Europe and reflect the growing international resources of Chinese-language cinema.Less

The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire

Christopher P. Hanscom and Dennis Washburn (eds)

This collection of essays examines the production of racial difference and its affects in East Asia under Japanese empire and the postwar geo-political order. The contributors turn to materials that ... More

This collection of essays examines the production of racial difference and its affects in East Asia under Japanese empire and the postwar geo-political order. The contributors turn to materials that demonstrate how race becomes visible or audible in the processes of inclusion and exclusion. From travelogues and records of speech to photographs, radio, plastic surgery, tattoos, postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks, these explorations of diverse media demonstrate the links between the apprehension of racial difference, the formation of social and political hierarchies, and the experience of everyday culture under an expanding bio-political realm of imperial sovereignty. By demonstrating the ways in which the politics of inclusion and exclusion worked through explicitly racialized modes of representation, this collection sheds light on affective strategies common to the creation and maintenance of subjectivity across imperial formations. It also resituates theoretical and historical discussions of race and empire within an East Asian context, complicating the history of this region in provocative ways.Less

After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta

Abidin Kusno

This book explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the ... More

This book explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the Suharto-era's neoliberal ideology of development. Analyzing a spectrum of urban agendas from waterfront city to green environment and housing for the poor, the book deepens our understanding of the spatial mediation of power, the interaction between elite and populist urban imaginings, and how past ideologies are integral to the present even as they are newly reconfigured. The book examines the anxiety over the destiny of Jakarta in its efforts to resolve the crisis of the city. The first group of chapters consider the fate and fortune of two building types, namely the city hall and the shop house, over a longue duree as a metonymy for the culture, politics, and society of the city and the nation. Other chapters focus on the intellectual legacies of the Sukarno and Suharto eras and the influence of their spatial paradigms. The final three chapters look at social and ecological consciousness in the post-Suharto era.Less

Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin'yoshu

Sarah M. Strong

Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for ... More

Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for the exceptional scope and richness of their oral performance traditions. This book provides a study and English translation of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin'yoshu, the first written transcription of Ainu oral narratives by an ethnic Ainu. The thirteen narratives in Chiri's collection belong to the genre known as kamuiyukar, said to be the most ancient performance form in the vast Ainu repertoire. In it, animals (and sometimes plants or other natural phenomena) assume the role of narrator and tell stories about themselves. Along with critical contextual information about traditional Ainu society and its cultural assumptions, the book brings forward pertinent information on the geography and natural history of the coastal southwestern Hokkaido region where the stories were originally performed. It also offers the first extended biography of Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) in English. The story of her life, and her untimely death at age nineteen, makes clear the harsh consequences for Chiri and her fellow Ainu of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the Meiji and Taisho governments' policies of assimilation. Chiri's receipt of the narratives in the Horobetsu dialect from her grandmother and aunt (both traditional performers) and the fact that no native speakers of that dialect survive today make her work all the more significant. The book concludes with a full, integral translation of the text.Less

The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature

Leith Morton

Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by ... More

Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. This is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. It examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. It also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shöyö, Japan's most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. The book devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. It also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Öshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. The final chapter analyzes the travel writing of Murakami Haruki.Less

American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

Heather A. Diamond

At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawaiʻi's multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The “edu-tainment” ... More

At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawaiʻi's multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The “edu-tainment” spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawaiʻi that few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawaiʻi. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. This book uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the SFF. The book supplies an analysis of how the carefully crafted staging of Hawaiʻi's cultural diversity was used to serve a national narrative of utopian multiculturalism while empowering Hawaiʻi's traditional artists and providing a model for cultural tourism that has had long-lasting effects. The book positions the 1989 Hawaiʻi program within a history of institutional intervention in the traditional arts of the island's ethnic groups as well as in relation to local cultural revivals and the tourist industry. By tracing the planning, fieldwork, site design, performance, and aftermath stages of the program, the book examines the uneven processes through which local culture is transformed into national culture and raises questions about the stakes involved in cultural tourism for both culture bearers and culture brokers.Less

The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

Kirsten Cather

In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. This book traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line ... More

In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. This book traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafū to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Ōshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience. The book draws on diverse sources, including trial transcripts and verdicts, literary and film theory, legal scholarship, and surrounding debates in artistic journals and the press. It demonstrates how legal arguments are enmeshed in a broader web of cultural forces. The book offers an original, interdisciplinary analysis that shows how art and law nurtured one another even as they clashed and demonstrates the dynamic relationship between culture and law, society and politics in postwar Japan.Less

The Arts of Kingship: Hawaiian Art and National Culture of the Kalakaua Era

Stacy L. Kamehiro

This book offers an account of Hawaiian public art and architecture during the reign of David Kalākaua, who ruled the Hawaiian Kingdom from 1874 to 1891. The book provides visual and historical ... More

This book offers an account of Hawaiian public art and architecture during the reign of David Kalākaua, who ruled the Hawaiian Kingdom from 1874 to 1891. The book provides visual and historical analysis of Kalākaua's coronation and regalia, the King Kamehameha Statue, ‘Iolani Palace, and the Hawaiian National Museum, drawing them together in a common historical, political, and cultural frame. These cultural projects were part of the monarchy's effort to promote a national culture in the face of colonial pressures, internal political divisions, and declining social conditions for Native Hawaiians. The book interprets the images, spaces, and institutions as articulations of the complex cultural entanglements and creative engagement with international communities that occur with prolonged colonial contact. Nineteenth-century Hawaiian sovereigns celebrated Native tradition, history, and modernity by intertwining indigenous conceptions of superior chiefly leadership with the apparati and symbols of Asian, American, and European rule. The resulting symbolic forms speak to cultural intersections and historical processes, claims about distinctiveness and commonality, and the power of objects, institutions, and public display to create meaning and enable action. The book pursues questions regarding the nature of cultural exchange, how precolonial visual culture engaged and shaped colonial contexts, and how colonial art informs postcolonial visualities and identities.Less

Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaii

Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura (eds)

This is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawai‘i. The book reexamines the past and present roles that Asians have played in the U.S. colony of Hawai‘i. It ... More

This is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawai‘i. The book reexamines the past and present roles that Asians have played in the U.S. colony of Hawai‘i. It identifies settler colonialism as the basis of Hawaiian critiques of U.S. colonialism, arguing that Asians have also played the role of settlers within the colonial framework. Contributors from various fields and disciplines investigate aspects of Asian settler colonialism to illustrate its diverse operations and impact on Native Hawaiians. Essays range from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers' claims to Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts.Less

Asian Traditions of Meditation

Halvor Eifring (ed.)

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of ... More

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of their heritage to ancient India and China. This volume brings together for the first time studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation as well as material on scientific approaches to meditation. It delves deeply into the individual traditions while viewing each of them from a global perspective, examining both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from numerous historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent. It seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of Asian schools of meditation while recognizing basic features of meditative practice across cultures, thereby taking the first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation. The book, accessibly written by scholars from several fields, opens with chapters that discuss the definition and classification of meditation. These are followed by contributions on Yoga and Tantra, which are often subsumed under the broad label of Hinduism; Jainism and Sikhism, Indian traditions not usually associated with meditation; Buddhist approaches found in Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China; and the indigenous Chinese traditions, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism. The final chapter explores recent scientific interest in meditation, which, despite its Western orientation, remains almost exclusively concerned with practices of Asian origin.Less

The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan

Michael Baskett

Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would ... More

Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would readily associate the Japanese film industry with either imperialism or the domination of world markets, the country's film culture developed in lockstep with its empire, which, at its peak in 1943, included territories from the Aleutians to Australia and from Midway Island to India. With each military victory, Japanese film culture's sphere of influence expanded deeper into Asia, first clashing with and ultimately replacing Hollywood as the main source of news, education, and entertainment for millions. This book is an examination of the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as represented in its film culture. It traces the development of Japanese film culture from its unapologetically colonial roots in Taiwan and Korea to less obvious manifestations of empire such as the semi-colonial markets of Manchuria and Shanghai and occupied territories in Southeast Asia. The book provides close readings of individual films and analyses of Japanese assumptions about Asian ethnic and cultural differences. It highlights the place of empire in the struggle at legislative, distribution, and exhibition levels to wrest the “hearts and minds” of Asian film audiences from Hollywood in the 1930s as well as in Japan's attempts to maintain that hegemony during its alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.Less

Back from the Dead: Wrongful Convictions and Criminal Justice in China

He Jiahong

Through highlighting and telling the story of some real cases of wrongful conviction, this book introduces the present situation in the Chinese criminal justice system, and makes deep analysis of its ... More

Through highlighting and telling the story of some real cases of wrongful conviction, this book introduces the present situation in the Chinese criminal justice system, and makes deep analysis of its problems and loopholes. Enlivened with a literary style, it is a treatise of critical legal study. Based on the case analysis and the empirical studies, the author summarizes the causes for wrongful convictions and analyzes the ten misleading zones that most affect this outcome. The author also provides update information about the changes and reforms as well as challenges of the criminal justice in China.Less

Bayonets in Paradise: Martial Law in Hawai'i during World War II

Harry N. Scheiber and Jane L. Scheiber

Bayonets in Paradise recounts the extraordinary story of how the army imposed rigid and absolute control on the total population of Hawaii during World War II. Declared immediately after the Pearl ... More

Bayonets in Paradise recounts the extraordinary story of how the army imposed rigid and absolute control on the total population of Hawaii during World War II. Declared immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, martial law was all-inclusive, bringing under army rule every aspect of the Territory of Hawaiʻi's laws and governmental institutions. The result was a protracted crisis in civil liberties, as the army subjected more than 400,000 civilians—citizens and alien residents alike—to sweeping, intrusive social and economic regulations and to enforcement of army orders in provost courts with no semblance of due process. Army rule in Hawai`i lasted until late 1944—making it the longest period in which an American civilian population has ever been governed under martial law. The army brass invoked the imperatives of security and “military necessity” to perpetuate its regime of censorship, curfews, forced work assignments, and arbitrary “justice” in the military courts. The authors provide a rich analysis of the legal challenges to martial law that culminated in Duncan v. Kahanamoku, a remarkable case in which the U.S. Supreme Court finally heard argument on the martial law regime—and ruled in 1946 that provost court justice and the military’s usurpation of the civilian government had been illegal. Based largely on archival sources, this comprehensive, authoritative study places the long-neglected and largely unknown history of martial law in Hawaiʻi in the larger context of America's ongoing struggle between the defense of constitutional liberties and the exercise of emergency powers.Less

Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi

ShiPu Wang

On December 8, 1941, artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) awoke to find himself branded an “enemy alien” by the U.S. government in the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The historical crisis ... More

On December 8, 1941, artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) awoke to find himself branded an “enemy alien” by the U.S. government in the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The historical crisis forced Kuniyoshi to rethink his pictorial strategies and to confront questions of loyalty, assimilation, national and racial identity that he had carefully avoided in his prewar art. As an immigrant who had proclaimed himself to be as “American as the next fellow,” the realization of his now fractured and precarious status catalyzed the development of an emphatic and conscious identity construct that would underlie Kuniyoshi's art and public image for the remainder of his life. This book offers an analysis of Kuniyoshi's pivotal works. It examines Kuniyoshi's imagery and writings as vital means for him to engage, albeit often reluctantly and ambivalently, in discussions about American democracy and ideals at a time when racial and national origins were grounds for mass incarceration and discrimination. The book also investigates the activities of Americans of Japanese descent outside the internment camps and the intense pressures with which they had to deal in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It foregrounds broader historical debates of what constituted American art and illuminates the complicating factors of race, diasporas, and ideology in the construction of an American cultural identity. The book historicizes and elucidates the ways in which “minority” artists have been, and continue to be, both championed and marginalized for their cultural and ethnic “difference” within the twentieth-century American art canon.Less

Being Political: Leadership and Democracy in the Pacific Islands

Jack Corbett

Politicians everywhere attract popular disaffection but in the Pacific the word ‘politician’ has increasingly become synonymous with corruption, graft and misconduct. But who are these much-maligned ... More

Politicians everywhere attract popular disaffection but in the Pacific the word ‘politician’ has increasingly become synonymous with corruption, graft and misconduct. But who are these much-maligned figures? How did they come to arrive in politics? What is it like to be a politician? Why do they enter, stay and leave? Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the region’s political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job. We come to know politicians as people with hopes and fears, pains and pleasures, vices and virtues. A reminder that politicians are human - neither saints nor sinners - is timely given the clamor of popular critique. The book concludes with a reminder that while we may not always like who politicians are, or the way they operate, representative government does not work without them.Less

Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives

Mark J. Hudson, Ann-Elise Lewallen, and Mark K. Watson (eds)

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it ... More

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it was Uzawa Kanako, a young Ainu activist, who signaled the necessity of moving beyond the historical legacy of “Ainu studies.” Mired in a colonial mindset of abject academic practices, Ainu Studies was an umbrella term for an approach that claimed scientific authority vis-à-vis Ainu, who became its research objects. As a result of this legacy, a latent sense of suspicion still hangs over the purposes and intentions of non-Ainu researchers. This book seeks to re-address the role of academic scholarship in Ainu social, cultural, and political affairs. Placing Ainu firmly into current debates over Indigeneity, the book provides a broad yet critical overview of the history and current status of Ainu research. With chapters from scholars as well as Ainu activists and artists, it addresses a range of topics including history, ethnography, linguistics, tourism, legal mobilization, hunter-gatherer studies, the Ainu diaspora, gender, and clothwork. The book aims to reframe the question of Ainu research in light of political reforms that are transforming Ainu society today.Less

Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand

Jim Glassman

Transnational economic integration has been described as an opportunity for all participants to achieve greater prosperity through a combination of political cooperation and capitalist economic ... More

Transnational economic integration has been described as an opportunity for all participants to achieve greater prosperity through a combination of political cooperation and capitalist economic competition. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has championed such rhetoric in promoting the integration of China, Southeast Asia's formerly socialist states, and Thailand into a regional project called the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). But while the GMS project is in fact hastening regional economic integration, the book shows that the approach belies the ADB's idealized description of “win-win” outcomes. The process of “actually existing globalization” in the GMS does provide varied opportunities for different actors, but it is less a rising tide that lifts all boats than an uneven flood of transnational capitalist development whose outcomes are determined by intense class struggles, market competition, and regulatory battles. The book makes the case for adopting a class-based approach to analysis of GMS development, regionalization, and actually existing globalization. First it analyzes the interests and actions of various Thai participants in GMS development, then the roles of different Chinese actors in GMS integration. It provides two cases illustrating the serious limits of any notion that GMS integration is a relatively egalitarian process—Laos' participation in GMS development and the role of migrant Burmese workers in the production of the GMS. The final chapter blends geographical-historical analysis with an assessment of uneven development and actually existing globalization in the GMS.Less

The Bunraku Puppet Theatre of Japan: Honor, Vengeance, and Love in Four Plays of the 18th and 19th Centuries

The plays presented here were first performed between 1769 and 1832, a time when the Japanese puppet theatre known as Bunraku was beginning to lose its pre-eminence to Kabuki. During this period, ... More

The plays presented here were first performed between 1769 and 1832, a time when the Japanese puppet theatre known as Bunraku was beginning to lose its pre-eminence to Kabuki. During this period, several important puppet plays were created that went on to become standards in both the Bunraku and Kabuki repertoires; three of which are in this book. Only a handful of complete and uncut plays are produced in Bunraku or Kabuki nowadays; included here is one. Two among the four plays in this book are examples of the much more common practice of staging a single popular act or scene from a much longer drama that itself is seldom, if ever, performed in its entirety today. Kabuki, while better known outside Japan, has been a great beneficiary of the puppet theatre, borrowing perhaps as much as half of its body of work from Bunraku dramas. Bunraku, in turn, has raided the Kabuki repertoire but to a far more modest degree. The final play in this book is an instance of this uncommon reverse borrowing. Moreover, it is an example of another way in which some plays have come to be presented: a coherent subplot of a longer work that gained an independent theatrical existence while its parent drama has since disappeared from the stage. Newly translated and illustrated for the general reader and the specialist, the plays in this book are accompanied by introductions, notes on stage action, and discussions of the various changes that Bunraku underwent.Less