Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
The present paper discusses the way of Iwata Toyo-o’s seeing French theater; Iwata stayed in Paris from 1922 to 1925, and left detailed notes of the plays he saw. I will treat the possible influence of kabuki criticism on Iwata’s theater notes.
Paper long abstract
Iwata Toyo-o (1893-1969) is known today, under the pseudonym of Shishi Bunroku, as a novelist describing the life of middleclass people before and after WW II. Before becoming a popular writer, he studied French theater in the early 1920s. He is also known as a co-founder of Bungakuza, one of the most renowned shingeki troops.
While Iwata was in Paris, he kept the notes of about 230 stages. His theater notes give strong impression by the zeal for recording everything he saw: stage design, costume, make-up, gesture, voice-tone, besides play’s subjects, plots, and characters. Apparently, Iwata did not follow the traditional Western theater criticism found in newspaper and journal.
What made Iwata’s distinctive way of observing theater? We should keep in mind, in this regard, that he knew nothing about Western theater before he came to Paris; he was a great amateur of kabuki, and was thought to be familiar with kabuki reviews in Engei Gahō (Illustrated Journal of Stage), launched by Miki Takeji.
Iwata’s way of describing the French theater resembles to Engei Gahō’s popular column “shibai mita mama (the stage as it was seen)”; the column featured a detailed description of stage as if the reader had been placed in the theater. Interestingly, Iwata is not the one whose style of writing about Western theater reminds of “shibai mita mama.” Japanese theater amateurs who went abroad, such as Shimamura Hōgetsu and Osanai Kaoru, left the memoirs in the same vein.
Kamiyama Akira, authority of modern kabuki studies, indicates that “shibai mita mama” represented a different culture of seeing theater, which was initiated by Miki’s kabuki criticism. According to Kamiyama, they found joy in seeing details of the stage production while play’s plots and characters were set aside. My paper will analyze how Iwata, based on such kabuki’s way of seeing theater, developed his criticism of the modern French theater
Japanese theater criticism: its modernization through kabuki and Western theater