Onnagata

A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater

Maki Isaka

• Editorial: University of Washington Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806242
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Japanische Geschichte

Kabuki is well known for its exaggerated acting, flamboyant costumes and makeup, and unnatural storylines. The onnagata, usually male actors who perform the roles of women, have been an important aspect of kabuki since its beginnings in the 17th century. In a "labyrinth" of gendering, the practice of men playing women's roles has affected the manifestations of femininity in Japanese society. In this case study of how gender has been defined and redefined through the centuries, Maki Isaka examines how the onnagata 's theatrical gender "impersonation" has shaped the concept and mechanisms of femininity and gender construction in Japan. The implications of the study go well beyond disciplinary and geographic cloisters.

PART I

Fundamentals

Invitation to Labyrinths of Gendering

Ideology, as we know, often works this way: an appropriation of ideas from one group is made functional by another, even though their interests are in conflict. . . . The solution is of course not to push for a rigid adherence to either position [of essentialism and constructionism], but to continually problematize, and historicize, the essentialist/constructionist binary.

—LYNDA HART, “Motherhood According to Finley”

(125, 132; emphasis in original)

Introduction

A Labyrinth of Onnagata

QUATERCENTENARY kabuki theater in Japan is a “queer” theater. That is not so much to say that kabuki is an all-male theater, in which male actors play women’s roles, as to note how radically this art form has altered the connotations of the word “kabuki.” Just as with the word “queer,” the implication of which has changed fundamentally over the years, the meanings of the word “kabuki”—nominalized from a verb, kabuku (to lean; to act and/or dress in a peculiar and queer manner)—have transformed dramatically. Not only did it shift from a generic word (that which is eccentric, deviant, queer, and the like) to a proper noun (this theater), but its connotations also altered tremendously from something negative to something positive. That is, kabuki theater was born as a kabuki thing—merely another stray entertainment among many, which was considered akin to prostitution—and ended up proudly styling itself the kabuki theater. With a checkered past marked by bans, shutdowns, exile, and even capital punishment for the parties concerned, kabuki—once a theater of rebellion for the common people—is now one of four classical genres of Japanese theater that the nation proudly presents to the world, along with noh (a medieval Buddhist theater a few centuries older than kabuki), kyōgen (a theater of mime and speech that accompanies noh), and bunraku (a puppet theater), all of which are all-male theater.

Kabuki is well known for its exaggerated acting, flamboyant costumes and makeup, and unrealistic stories filled with ghosts, women who are actually birds or flowers, men who can transform themselves into toads or rats, and so on. With the aid of wires, actors playing magical foxes, supernatural samurai, or ghostly ladies-in-waiting literally fly through the air in playhouses. Kabuki is a fantasy theater. That said, unlike other genres of classical Japanese theater, kabuki appears amorphous, resisting concise definition. Some kabuki productions might remind spectators of jingju, a traditional form of Chinese theater also referred to as Peking Opera, with their highly stylized choreography and masklike faces heavily painted with bold lines in primary colors. Others come very close to straight theater, based on realistic movement and elocution. Some kabuki plays are nearly identical to its contemporaneous bunraku. Still others pay homage to noh, in terms of both dramaturgy and performance style based on dance and chanting.

One famous aspect of kabuki is its use of onnagata actors who specialize in women’s roles and are admired for their beauty and artistry. Onnagata are considered indispensable in the world of kabuki, which is clearly “male”-centric, or, more precisely, masculinity-centric. For example, at the end of a play, a protagonist performed by a male-role troupe leader sometimes uses the “three-steps” (sandan), a mobile staircase that emphasizes pictorial stage effects and amplifies the presence of the troupe’s top actor. The three-steps is reserved for male-role players (tachiyaku); when a leading onnagata (tate-oyama) does a similar performance, he uses the “two-steps” (nidan) instead, visually materializing the gender hierarchy. Likewise, since stage left (kamite) is charged with superiority compared to stage right (shimote), an onnagata seldom stands left of a male-role partner when they are dancing, except when performing a couple such as a princess and her retainer. For that matter, terminology itself is quite telling. While the initial meaning of the term “onnagata” meant “those in charge of women’s [roles],” enunciating the marked gender of the characters to be performed, tachiyaku (lit., “standing role”) is a privilege unmarked by gender. Closely related to the noh tachikata (lit., “those standing”), tachiyaku are simply “actors.” Within this masculinity-centric picture is the onnagata, the flower of kabuki.¹

With the increasing availability of DVDs and YouTube, images of internationally renowned onnagata such as Bandō Tamasaburō V (b. 1950) have been abundantly available worldwide, which further stimulates discourse on onnagata. It is no exaggeration to say that the topic of onnagata is among the most often discussed in both academic and popular discourse.

Taking a bird’s-eye view of discussions of the onnagata’s performance of femininity, one cannot help but recall the quote from Karl Marx that serves as the epigraph for Edward W. Said’s Orientalism: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”² This sentiment is echoed in a remark on onnagata’s performance of femininity in The Kabuki Theatre, a book published in the 1950s: “Yoshizawa Ayame (1673–1729), a famed player of women’s roles, wrote in his book Ayame-gusa, ‘If an actress were to appear on the stage she could not express ideal feminine beauty, for she would rely only on the exploitation of her physical characteristics, and therefore not express the synthetic ideal. The ideal woman can be expressed only by an actor.’”³ Among materials written in English, this book is one of the basics of kabuki studies in its early days, which dates to immediately after World War II and the subsequent American occupation of Japan. The quotation is well circulated in works on onnagata and beyond. The idea that onnagata’s performance of femininity is unavailable to women is nearly ubiquitous in works on onnagata today. Moreover, this remark is also a rare example of the use of Japanese performance outside the confines of Asian studies. The notion that onnagata’s femininity construction is unavailable to women has thus been attractive and influential.

The predominance of this idea is intriguing. It is understandable, for it corresponds to a current basic understanding in gender theory that gender and biological sex are not in a binding relationship. Topics relating to onnagata also speak to the contemporary phenomenon of “beautiful-boy” (bishōnen) culture. However, it is ironic that the possibility of onnagata artistry is regarded as residing in male actors alone, considering that the art of onnagata is, in both theory and practice, made possible by the very presupposition of “femininity [being] separable from women’s anatomical sex.”⁴ If onnagata’s gender performance were possible only in male actors, a rigid binding relationship would connect sex and gender, albeit in an opposite way. Onnagata artistry is never limited in such a manner, and the fixation—despite its attractiveness—has constrained the potential for the analysis of onnagata’s gender performance to contribute to our thinking on gender.

This potential is not merely possible but urgently needed. First, the purported remark of Yoshizawa Ayame in The Kabuki Theatre cannot be located in “The Words of Ayame” (Ayamegusa), an eighteenth-century onnagata treatise. In fact, the text in its entirety strongly suggests the opposite. The onnagata’s performance of femininity was not the exclusive property of male actors; rather, onnagata constructed it by approximating women through observation and training and by circulating it with women. This notion was not idiosyncratic to this specific text but rather was representative at the time it was written. Furthermore, although onnagata artistry has changed radically over its four-century history, even in recent years (that is, after the idea of considering onnagata art available only to male actors became dominant in modern times), quite a few onnagata—including major onnagata such as Tamasaburō—have left words signifying otherwise. For master practitioners, it is not so much the biological sex of a body as talent, training, and dedication to the art that matter for the performance of gender. The alleged statement, which does not exist in “The Words of Ayame,” has thus hindered effective analysis of onnagata’s gender performance in not only premodern but also modern times. In particular, what has been grossly underrated is the impact from females on onnagata’s performance of femininity. The impact includes both compatibility between women in general and male onnagata, which was materialized in history as onnagata passing as women, and female onnagata’s contributions to the art and traditions of onnagata.

PARADOX? “CROSS-GENDERING FEMININITY IN SOCIAL CURRENCY”

I earlier said that kabuki was a fantasy theater. In this theatrical space, consistent verisimilitude seems insignificant on the level of both drama texts and acting. There is no need for a butler to enter, for whatever plausible reasons, to clean up a mess on the floor. That can be handled automatically by stage assistants who may appear seemingly freely during the performance. The entrance door of a house, likewise, can simply be taken away by the assistants when more space becomes necessary for characters to interact inside the house. If a character reveals something, such as a hidden identity or an emotional state, he or she can change costume or add makeup in front of the audience, reflecting the transformation (e.g., change in emotion). Literally as well as metaphorically, deus ex machina can appear at any moment in this fantasy space of singing (ka), dancing (bu), and acting (ki), all performed by male actors. To all intents and purposes, being realistic hardly seems to be a virtue of kabuki.

Yet after female performers were legally expelled from performance activities in 1629, male actors in charge of women’s roles, onnagata, came to have much influence on how to materialize womanliness not only in the fantasy world of kabuki but also in society. Through circulation and emulation, onnagata’s theatrical gender practice even affected how women manifested femininity outside the theater,⁵ an example of gender and sex being divorced from each other. This societal phenomenon involving onnagata and women lasted explicitly until the return of modern actresses in the Meiji era and continued implicitly afterward. The modern restoration of actresses was strongly associated with new, scientific discourses that grounded femininity in women’s bodies alone and thus drastically transformed how gender was defined,⁶ yet onnagata and their methodology of femininity construction and articulation somehow managed to survive this change. Along with modern actresses, there existed in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan a specific group of female performers called “women-actors” (onna yakusha), whose performance of femininity was closely associated with male-onnagata traditions in kabuki. Although women-actors themselves became extinct soon afterward, such a phrase as “not so much an actress as a ‘woman-actor’ [imitating onnagata]” still amounted to a compliment for female actors, as playwright Enomoto Shigetami lamented as late as 1984.⁷ Even today, this is not an obsolete mind-set. In the fall of 2008, a cosmetics company released commercials featuring narration by Tamasaburō, explaining, for example, how women can be beautiful, and, as the interviewer specified, women were the target audience.⁸ The same onnagata was invited in 2011 to talk about his quest for “eternal female beauty” (eien no joseibi) at an event in Tokyo promoting healthy living in menopause, and women, this time in a particular age group, were again the target audience.⁹

As far as onnagata were concerned, fantasy did not remain inside playhouses, not to mention on the stage, for long but had a substantial impact on society. Why did actors have such an influence? Was it an example of theatrum mundi (the world as stage)? Did women in Edo-era Japan display festive womanliness in everyday life? Certainly, “Sex was perceived as subordinate to gender; females were to approximate—or bring their innermost temperaments in accord with—female-likeness.”¹⁰ This was, however, a female-likeness defined not...