Uchino Tadashi, professor in the department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo, is one of the foremost theorists and critics in the fields of theater and performance studies in Japan today. If a scholar wants to study contemporary or postwar Japanese theater, she will be sent immediately to speak with him. He is the only person who could have written this book, and not only because it is written directly in English by the author (rather than translated by others). The book opens a new field for English language scholarship on Japan: as a side effect of reading its essays, no matter what one's familiarity with the world of Japanese theater, one emerges with a mental map of twentieth-century Japanese theater history, with a detailed picture especially of the decades from 1980 to the present.

Yet Uchino (I want to write Professor Uchino, which shows the clash of cultural performatives in itself, from the distant review voice to the personal voice of indebtedness and community) does not approach this terrain with the pretense of dispassionate observation. From the start, we learn that he is an activist in the field of theater culture, and by implication come to understand his grounded focus on the institutional and financial structures that support theater culture as well as the social contexts that emerge and are critiqued within the works. At the top of his field, indeed as a primary founder of the field of performance studies in Japan, Uchino has the power not only to view and analyze the works, not only to participate in journalistic reviewing, but also, through his work with foundations, to fund and advise them. A question that underlies this book as a whole, and emerges explicitly at certain points, is: how/why does theater matter in late capitalist society, in the context of globalization and neo-liberal notions of sovereignty? (Neo-liberal sovereignty for Uchino is theorized as a transition from Foucault's idea of a society based on discipline to a new form of sociality that involves self-censorship, as articulated by sociologist Shibuya Nozomi and cultural theorist Ōtori Hidenaga. When self-censorship fails, the body “run[s] amok.”) What should be done, and where do we stand in relation to theories of postmodernism, psychoanalytic and sociological theories, and in relation to theater history itself?

Uchino is a kind writer. His footnotes gently explain the basics for the reader not familiar with the field: what is the history of shingeki (realist modern theater) in Japan; what is Article 9 of the Constitution; what is Aum Shinrikyō's Sarin Gas Attack and the impact of the Great Hanshin Awaji earthquake of 1995? He is also an opinionated writer: none of the above explanations (even if they may have been requested by an editor) comes without Uchino's uniquely critical twist on the question or problem. The joy of this book is that no one else could have written it: it provides a partly serendipitous tour around the landscape of Uchino's mind and thinking from about 1997–2007, but in which have sedimented and ripened a prior two and a half decades of experience and contemplation about the Japanese theater scene, past and present.

Uchino Tadashi has been thinking and watching performance since his meeting with Suzuki Tadashi and participation in the preparation of the TOGA International Theater Festival in 1982, which included work by Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Terayama Shūji, Ōta Shōgo, Tadeusz Kantor and many others, or as Uchino puts it, “the entire world of post-War avant-garde all at once” (8). After his work with Suzuki, Uchino went on to study at NYU's Performance Studies program, to help found the theater journal MUNKS (his collected essays there appeared in Melodrama no gyakushū [The Melodramatic Revenge] in 1996) and later helped launch the unique journal Theatre Arts. In 2001 he published his second influential book, Melodrama kara performance e [From Melodrama to Performance] on American performance culture.Footnote ³

In sum, the strength of this book is to give the Anglophone readership access to a broadly significant field: through Uchino's very trustworthy perspective, we are able to see a field that encompasses many important and emerging young performance groups and also (not incidentally) theory, from art critic Sawaragi Noi and psychoanalyst/cultural critic Kayama Rika to theater scholars Ōzasa Yoshio and Nishidō Kōjin (alongside Slavoj Žižek, Rustom Bharucha, David Harvey, and others). We get a picture of where the Angura (undeground) and Little Theater movements stood from the 1980s to today, and how theater culture and institutions function today in relation to nationalisms, intercultural projects, and commercialism. In addition to being both kind and opinionated (passionate), Uchino is also trendy: so we have a chance to appreciate and think about the “junk body,” the “child body” (Sakurai Keisuke), the subject that snaps (kireru) or hides out (hikikomoru), the shoboi (cheap, shabby) in appropriation (in the performance experiments of Miyazawa Akio) and the “simplistic and ethnocentric” superflat theories of Murakami Takashi. (The gratingly sexual shōjo image of Murakami's Hiropon splashes across the cover, causing some to give me odd stares at cafés as I reread for this review.)

The body categories (drawing on Ishimitsu Yasuo), such as the opposition between the “fictional body” (as trained, disciplined, precise, adult) and “junk” body (untrained, undisciplined, loose, ‘child’), as aesthetic categories sometimes do, shift at times out of stable opposition, and mixed in with the ‘metaphorical,’ ‘metonymic,’ ‘textual,’ ‘grotesque’ and ‘thin’ bodies (pp. 124–129) are at times too slippery to grasp. Yet the focus on the distance between body and speech, on how “uttered words and bodies are far removed from each other” (p. 127) aptly summarizes one striking aspect of the innovative performance works of contemporary groups such as Chelfitch, and also two of my personal favorites, Yubiwa Hotel [Ring Hotel] and Mezurashii Kinoko Buyōdan [Strange Mushroom Dance Company]. The literal “map” or chart of forty groups in the contemporary performance scene (p. 159) is intriguing and also useful in navigating the space of contemporary performance.

The book proceeds not by linear argument but by a kind of episodic structure that returns to itself by circles or loops of information. It is unabashedly a “collection of essays,” and they are taken out of context, which is perhaps ironic given the close attention to performance contexts within the individual essays, and at times will frustrate the reader who approaches the it as a book expecting a unified narrative arc. The acknowledgements (p. viii) gives us the “scene” or occasion for each work's composition, which clearly shaped the issues raised within each chapter. The book reflects on theatrical structure, for example by titling some sections “Interludes,” and this structure is realized most powerfully and successfully in Chapter 1 on Brecht in Japan, where the argument is presented in a historical span over three “Acts,” with prologue and epilogue with each segment in the form of “Scene,” “Characters,” and “Synopsis.” The book reflects on issues of hybridity and intercultural production: the works described resist linearity and synthesis. The book, too, tends to allow the reader to construct an implicit synthesis rather than to provide conclusion or closure. It is itself also a performance of “hybridity”: the forces in Japanese culture today that are pushing Japanese scholars to publish in English rather than Japanese bear their own examination within the terms of globalization and late capitalist sociality that this book interrogates. (I have heard of this recent explicit push from other faculty teaching within nationally funded universities, though few have in fact realized the results.) Yet Uchino's form of mobility and intercultural perspective—as what we sometimes call a ‘comparatist’—anticipated and predated these recent trends. The Global 30 project of teaching Japanese studies in Japan to mostly Asian students in English language is another intriguing instance (in which Uchino is incidentally involved). So the book asks us to think of it as a performative and not just a constative act.

Crucible Bodies leaves one with a lot to think about and a strong desire to get involved further in critical thinking and study about contemporary Japanese performance. It also leaves one with a lot of hope for performance culture in Japan. And that in itself is no small accomplishment. From here, one imagines, the intercultural/cross-cultural community of performance can continue to build and grow.