In his superlative study of the long war Japan fought in Manchuria, then China and finally South-East Asia, and with the United States and some of Europe, Brandon describes what appeared to be the dying throes of the kabuki theatre in a striking metaphor: ‘The individual actor was like a drowning sailor caught in the powerful wake of his sinking ship’ (p. 296). Both Japan and kabuki were sinking, and the first ten chapters chronicle the stages of the catastrophe as both the country and the art rose to a zenith in 1942, and then descended to a virtual hell for all concerned in the last two years of combat. Dramatic chapter titles and frequent subheadings pinpoint clearly the evolution of both. Brandon describes censorship gradually gripping the theatre world, then requiring it to create more and more contemporary plays to endorse the propagandistic views of the government, and finally closing major theatres, forcing the great stars of kabuki to tour the provinces until – and even while – almost nightly bombings were reducing major cities and theatres to rubble.

Brandon tells a tale that has not yet been told in the West, and perhaps not yet completely understood in Japan. His pioneering work contains perceptive insights into world history and into what the militarists of the ‘Fifteen Year War’ called the ‘Japanese Spirit’. Few scholars could have approached such a project with the acuity, understanding and sympathy that Brandon brings to it. A major revelation is the vitality of kabuki as late as 1945, when it was still producing many newly written plays. Brandon dispels the illusion that kabuki was dominated by traditional plays after the late Meiji, and pinpoints the beginning of the practice to the US Occupation, when the Shochiku kabuki management established it as official policy, despite Occupation insistence that they foster democracy through new plays. The tantalizing final chapter, dealing with kabuki under the Occupation, makes one hope that Brandon will continue further with this project, delving into twentieth-century kabuki and the complex question of new kabuki plays and how they can reflect modern reality yet remain faithful to kabuki's essential aesthetic principles.