Wondrous Brutal Fictions and Publishing the Stage will together expand and enrich the scholarly conversation on the theater of Tokugawa-period Japan and its interfaces with various genres of literature and the visual arts. The former volume consists of translations by R. Keller Kimbrough of seventeenth-century sekkyō Footnote ¹ and ko-jōruri (old jōruri) preceded by an informative and insightful introduction. It will be of great interest to scholars specializing in early-modern Japanese literature, history, and religion, and would lend itself to inclusion in reading lists for both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses. Publishing the Stage, edited by Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki, gathers together a wide-ranging assortment of papers on the symbiotic relationship between theater and publishing in Edo- and early Meiji-period Japan, all presented in March 2011 at an interdisciplinary conference held at the Center for Asian Studies of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Its eleven essays (seven written in English and four in Japanese) will be of use not only to scholars in the fields of Japanese literature and performance but also to historians and specialists in art history.

The subtitle of Wondrous Brutal Fictions characterizes its contents as both “tales” and texts drawn from “theater.” This points first to how storytelling and visual performance intersected in these predecessors to jōruri and second to their status as (supposed) transcriptions of performances that read much like fiction without a theatrical pedigree. Kimbrough's well-written translations provide easy access to a hitherto missing (in English) link between, on the one hand, medieval setsuwa and otogizōshi and, on the other, the kanazōshi, ukiyozōshi, and jōruri of the early Edo period. One imagines assigning the book or portions thereof to students about to dive into Saikaku's fiction or Chikamatsu's jōruri in order to locate them within the evolution of literary and theatrical genres and to shed light on their religious elements. These narratives both possess a folksy charm on their own and demonstrate the extent to which, for example, Saikaku's stories and Chikamatsu's dramas represented a sophisticated departure from their recent predecessors. With their combination of gruesome torments worthy of the Grand Guignol and floods of tears, the narratives in Wondrous Brutal Fictions make Saikaku's bloodiest vendetta tales and the crescendos of sentiment in Chikamatsu's love-suicide plays seem restrained by comparison. These early works also help explain later Edo audiences' apparent taste for plentiful helpings of both violence and sentimentality.

Kimbrough's introduction describes the development of sekkyō over the course of the seventeenth century and its eventual merging with jōruri, offering strong evidence of its popularity and the emotional responsiveness of audiences to its depictions of suffering and cruelty. Initially a sort of lay Buddhist preaching, sekkyō became a theatrical genre when Ōsaka Yoshichirō introduced the use of jōruri-style puppets. Illustrated texts proclaimed as faithful transcriptions of sekkyō and ko-jōruri were published from the 1620s onward. These came to be known as shōhon, “true texts,” a designation that emphasizes their supposedly accurate reflection of performances in these genres, but the texts do not contain stage directions and give little indication of what performances were like. (One wonders especially to what level of detail their lengthy and elaborate michiyuki and their more complicated acts of violence, such as the extraction of a liver from a live victim in Amida's Riven Breast, were given visual representation.) Shōhon illustrations represent imagined scenes rather than staged productions, and often conflict with the content of the texts they accompany.

Despite the fact that “sekkyō” literally means “sutra explanation,” the Buddhist elements of the genre are far simpler than what this implies. Judging by Kimbrough's introduction and the content of the tales he has translated, sekkyō are generally limited to depictions of the workings of karma, the efficacy of prayer, the powers of the buddhas and bodhisattvas both to reward and to punish, and the transfiguration of human beings into buddhas and deities after horrific suffering. Moreover, as Kimbrough explains, their most conspicuous religious element, the framing of narratives as describing the origins of famous Buddhist icons, disappeared as the genre came to more closely resemble ko-jōruri. Other aspects of these works examined in the introduction include the motif of self-enslavement as an act of filial piety, the genres' strong female characters, and the fact that despite the miraculous powers on display elsewhere in these narratives, female characters are often allowed to suffer spectacular victimization unaided by divine intervention, which Kimbrough interprets as a means for these characters to dump their karmic burdens all at once.

Kimbrough's translations occasionally draw on other versions of the narratives in question to fill in lacunae in the originals. Such instances are duly noted, as are assorted differences among the various versions of the stories involved. The translations are followed by a glossary and two useful appendices, the first containing brief entries on major sekkyō chanters, the second describing the available editions of each work translated.

Publishing the Stage opens with an editors' introduction that, making reference to the essays that follow, provides a broad overview of the relationship between theater and print culture from the early Edo period through the nineteenth century. Of especial interest is its comparison of the histories of jōruri and kabuki in print, with shōhon of jōruri frequently published and widely read, whereas written versions of kabuki plays were generally kept from the public. As becomes clear in the volume's essays, the relative insignificance as reading material of kabuki scripts contrasts with kabuki's great importance as a source of material for various genres of art prints and illustrated texts.

Janice Shizue Kanemitsu's opening essay examines the Kinpira jōruri subgenre of ko-jōruri, which enjoyed brief but intense popularity in the mid-seventeenth century. Kinpira jōruri featured a cast of Heian-period Minamoto generals and their retainers and proliferated, Star Wars-like, through the creation of sequels and prequels produced to meet audience demand. Atypically for the Kamigata-centric Japanese puppet theater, Kinpira jōruri originated in Edo and then spread to western Japan, its diffusion aided by a publishing industry for which jōruri libretti proved a mainstay.

The second essay in the volume, by Hioki Atsuko, provides a detailed history of the evolution of the Chūjōhime tale both in print and as a sekkyō-jōruri, demonstrating that the theatrical version transformed the narrative and heavily influenced subsequent printed versions. The essay by Katherine Saltzman-Li examines the wide variety of kabuki-related texts produced during the Edo period, including scripts meant for kabuki practitioners, publications marketed to kabuki fans, and works that blended the characteristics of professional- and fan-oriented materials, offering a backstage view of kabuki techniques to a curious public. Saltzman-Li credits the emergence of this third category to social and creative interaction between kabuki practitioners and writers of popular fiction and poetry, as well as to a confluence of interests on the part of publishers who wanted to sell more books and kabuki professionals who hoped to boost ticket sales.

Yamashita Takumi brings us an engaging overview of writings about the kabuki theater by Western visitors to late-Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. An especially noteworthy episode is British diplomat Rutherford Alcock's account of how he waited until a visit to Osaka to take in a kabuki performance, in order to avoid causing scandal in Edo, the shogun's capital, by associating himself with this too-plebeian form of entertainment. An excerpt from another work demonstrates the willingness of Swiss politician and writer Aimé Humbert to judge Japanese theater primitive on the basis of very flimsy knowledge thereof. (Apparently either unaware of Chūshingura or else including it among those plays he dismissed as “an indigestible blend of history, mythology, and burlesque fantasy,” Humbert wrote that Japan's political circumstances rendered historical drama “impossible” there [p. 84].)

Matsuba Ryōko's essay on the publication of illustrated books depicting actors from Edo reveals that such publications, first issued in 1700, focused primarily on the actors themselves rather than on the content of the plays in which they appeared. The evolution of a kabuki star system is further elucidated by Yamashita Noriko. Her essay examines late-Tokugawa actor prints that playfully linked poems of Japan's Thirty-six Poetic Geniuses to particular characters in kabuki and fiction, as well as with kabuki actors both living and dead. These prints often showed actors in parts they never actually played onstage, thus demonstrating that they were more concerned with casting the actor thought to be best suited to each role than with representing actual kabuki performances.

Akiko Yano introduces readers to the work of (apparently amateur) late-Tokugawa artist Ryūkōsai Jokei and his writings on how to realistically portray actors and their movements onstage. Ryūkōsai, like other Kamigata artists, evinced an interest in anatomy and the nude human figure, and recommended adding clothes appropriate to the role in question onto a sketch of a naked (except for a fundoshi) actor. Yano discusses the Japanese and Western precedents that may have inspired this approach.

In his contribution to this volume, Andrew Gerstle treats a number of issues important to understanding the interplay of page and stage in the Tokugawa era and the celebrity culture surrounding kabuki, using the early nineteenth-century Kamigata actors Arashi Rikan I and his rival Nakamura Utaemon III (referred to henceforth by his alias Shikan) as case studies. Gerstle demonstrates the importance to kabuki actors of haikai and kyōka poetry as modes of publicity and, adding to his earlier scholarship on the social function of artistic pursuits and that of Eiko Ikegami, writes of the role played by the salons in which such poetry was produced as egalitarian social spaces where actors' de facto status as celebrities and culture heroes trumped their extremely low de jure standing within the Tokugawa status-group system. In a similar vein, he gives examples of Kamigata publications in which actors are cast as aristocrats and emperors through poetry and images. One of these examples goes so far as to label a portrait of Arashi Rikan I as that of “our beloved Emperor,” thus symbolically overturning the official hierarchy that placed actors near the bottom of society. Gerstle's essay goes on to examine the clash of personalities and performance styles reflected in letters written by Rikan to Shikan and his producer, in which Rikan condemns his rival for introducing flashy Edo-style dance sequences to the Osaka stage after a stint in the shogun's capital, and for stealing his audience by means of these and aggressive advertising, thus threatening the survival of Rikan's more restrained style of acting. Gerstle concludes by advocating further scholarly exploration of the Kamigata-style kabuki that Rikan practiced and defended, which has been largely overlooked in favor of the Edo-style kabuki that came to supersede its rival in the twentieth century.

Adam Kern's essay critiques kabuki-centric interpretations of Edo-period popular culture that present various print genres referencing kabuki as either reflective of or constructing kabuki. Kern posits this as a distorted and simplistic view of Edo-pop's complex interplay of a wide range of cultural forms. As a remedy and a heuristic device he proposes a page-centric reading of theatrical comic books, applying his method first to pictures and illustrated texts depicting fantasy casts of actors brought together on the same stage, then to an example of those kibyōshi that used kabuki references for the purpose of political satire. He finishes with an examination of self-reflexivity in Edo-period theater and print genres such as kibyōshi, arguing for the validity of a page-centric interpretation of mie (dramatic poses by kabuki actors) as reflective of the freezing of dramatic moments in printed images in media such as ukiyoe and illustrated fiction.

Robert Goree introduces us to the whimsical blending of stage and page in Kyokutei Bakin's Yakusha meisho zue (1800), a parody of the illustrated gazetteer genre pioneered twenty years earlier by Miyako meisho zue, which offered an encyclopedic overview of Kyoto's famous places. Bakin's parody, illustrated by Utagawa Toyokuni, depicts the theatrical world as a series of fantastic landscapes with, for example, a portrait of an actor posing next to a cherry tree covered with noses rather than blossoms. The image is a visual reference to a pun on his reputation as both a “flower (hana) of Edo” for his acting prowess and as “The Nose (hana) of Edo” for the prominence in his face of this feature. Inferring Bakin's reasons for producing such a book, Goree notes that it glorifies Edo as Japan's current cultural capital while turning the tables on its rival by making use of the conventions of a genre developed to celebrate the Kamigata region. He asserts that by dealing with the risky topic of kabuki within the template of the officially approved illustrated gazetteer genre, Yakusha meisho zue would have been protected from the heightened censorship that typified the aftermath of the Kansei Reforms.

Jonathan Zwicker's closing essay traces the emergence in early to mid-nineteenth-century Japan of a discourse positing kabuki as a local example of the universal phenomenon of theater, which, as such, could be appreciated by foreigners, such as Dutch visitors to the Osaka theater district. Zwicker contrasts this internationalizing impulse from late in Japan's period of national isolation with its near opposite many decades after that isolation had ended: the prominent novelist, playwright, critic, literary scholar, and translator of Shakespeare Tsubouchi Shōyō's insistence from the 1910s onward on the particularity of Japanese theater and the inability of Western scholars to understand it properly. Zwicker connects Shōyō's stance to a subsequent “withdrawal into particularity and difference” (p. 223) in interwar thinking about Japanese culture that had the effect of hampering the consideration of Japan's cultural phenomena in a comparative context.

Each of these volumes holds the potential to greatly enhance both professional scholars' and students' understanding of Edo-period culture by broadening their view of the larger context from which individual genres, texts, and artworks emerged. The translations in Wondrous Brutal Fictions will go a long way toward curing instructors of undergraduate courses of the greatest-hits approach to Edo-period literature toward which they are forced by the paucity of translations of lesser-known texts. They also promise to fill out the knowledge base of specialists in the period who do not have the time to read a significant sample of sekkyō and ko-jōruri in the original. Furthermore, by familiarizing readers with texts and performance traditions that purveyed religious themes as popular entertainment, both Kimbrough's translations and his introduction will also serve to counteract any tendency by scholars to compartmentalize the religious and the secular when examining cultural products of the Edo period. By turning their attention to the interaction of early-modern kabuki and jōruri with other media, the essays in Publishing the Stage complement scholarship focusing on scripts, staging, and performance styles. Quite varied in terms of both approach and topic, together they have the effect of challenging received ideas and complexifying thinking about early-modern Japanese culture with regard to, for example, the hegemony of one medium, genre, performance style, or region over others. In this way, and through their wealth of detail regarding a wide variety of performance traditions, images, and texts, they will significantly contribute to any reader's understanding of the wonderfully tangled web of Edo-period popular culture.