Kabuki

After reading this blog entry, Pete and I decided we wanted to see kabuki. Accordingly, today we went, with three friends. (Two of them are students - I went white-water rafting with one of them - and the other I just met today.)

Kabuki is a style of traditional Japanese theatre where all the roles are played by men. There is a famous, old kabuki theatre in Ginza called Kabuki-za. Next year, this lovely old building will be torn down - apparently it's not earthquake-resilient and there are various other reasons - and relocated into a more modern complex. Thus, this year is like a 'farewell' year where each month, they play various famous or favourite shows.

You can purchase tickets for a whole session - a few hours - but we decided to see only one act. It was 1 hour and 20 minutes, so it was long enough to enjoy. Since we couldn't get reserved tickets, we lined up a short time before the show. I was disappointed that we could only get 'standing' tickets - thinking that 80 minutes is a long time to stand - but actually I enjoyed it. We were in the very back row of the theatre and we had a good view, though it was at a distance. There was a row of benches behind us, though if we sat down, we wouldn't have been able to see.

They also rent out English earpieces. It's a headphone that goes in just one ear, and during the performance they give you explanations of what's going on. You can listen to the show with the other ear. This is really good, because they don't try to translate every single word; they summarise it. Eg: "Rokusuke reveals that he lost the fight on purpose. He knew that his rival was caring for his elderly mother, and he felt that he needed this job. Rokusuke was moved by his rival's dedication to his mother."

When compared with Western-style theatre, there is a lot more emphasis on stylized movements and in creating an attractive 'picture' than in representing situations in a realistic way. According to the earpiece, if you were to take photos of a kabuki show at 3-second intervals, and looked at them, each would look like an ukiyo-e (woodblock) painting - nothing out of place, each character and item perfectly positioned.

The tale we watched was called "Keya Mura". According to the Kabuki-za website:

"The evening program begins with KEYAMURA, a play from the puppet theatre, that shows a master swordsman named Rokusuke (Kichiemon) living humbly in the countryside only to meet his fiancée, a powerful woman named Osono (Fukusuke) and goes to avenge the death of her father, his fighting teacher. The highlight of the play is the contrast between the two highly contrasting sides of Osono’s character. She is a fierce fighter on the one hand and delicately feminine when she learns that Rokusuke is her future husband."

The characters wore white facepaint and traditional costumes - kimono, samurai clothes, etc - and extras, dressed all in black, would scurry about the stage removing props etc. To the side, musicians would sing/narrate, or play the shamisen, and one guy's job was to strike the ground loudly for dramatic effect. The actors warble operatically rather than speak, and they didn't seem to have microphones; they spoke loudly, but did sound a little quiet from our vantage point at the back of the theatre. Add to that the fact that kabuki includes a lot of archaic Japanese, and I was very grateful to have the English explanations.

After the show, I realised that our Japanese friends had barely understood any of it. I asked one girl how much she understood; she said 20%. But then when I was explaining some elements of the plot, they were like "ohh! So that's what they were doing?" etc; so in fact they hadn't even understood as much as they thought they had... Overall I think it was more interesting for us foreigners, and I really enjoyed it.

After the play, we walked down to Tsukiji, which is famous for its huge fish market. The weather was lovely. The market was closed, as it was night time, but we went to one of the many sushi restaurants. I still don't like sushi... but I tried crab brains (yuck) and we got a huge tuna head (delicious).

As we left, the clerk gave us all candy shaped like sushi. Pete was rather startled to find that what looked like nori (seaweed), actually WAS nori. That's right, they made fake sushi out of sugar candy, and wrapped it in real seaweed. Hahaha...