SOURCE: Leiter, Samuel L. “From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki's Female Characters.” Comparative Drama, 33 (Winter, 1999-2000): 495-514.

[In the following essay, Leiter surveys the role of women in Kabuki theater and argues that despite the persistence of patriarchal attitudes, Kabuki was surprisingly fair to and respectful of women, probably because their characters on stage were played on men.]

From 1629 to 1877, women were officially forbidden to act in Japan's kabuki theater, which—under the leadership of a former shrine priestess named Okuni—they had founded in 1603. From 1629 on, male actors, the onnagata, played women's roles. The reasons for the banning of actresses have been frequently recounted elsewhere and need not be reexamined here in detail.

At the time, Japanese urban culture was largely under the influence of Confucian ethics and Buddhist religious practice, both being antifemale systems. Whereas, despite endemic misogyny, ancient and medieval Japan had many women of accomplishment, such women were exceedingly rare during the Tokugawa period (also called the Edo period, 1603-1868). Women of the time may have been more socially and commercially active than is commonly supposed,¹ but it is clear that Tokugawa women were, by and large, second-class citizens. People were to behave in this world according to their given place in it. When the dictatorial military government, the bakufu, determined that kabuki's women had overstepped their bounds, it banned them from the stage.

In 1652, it did the same to the youths in the homosexual boys' kabuki, which replaced the women, and who were eliminated for much the same reasons. Kabuki would have died had not increasingly believable instead of merely pretty female characters begun to appear in the mature male kabuki that emerged in the 1650s and took its first important artistic steps in the following decade. At this point, kabuki witnessed a transition from gay theater to gei theater, gei being Japanese for art, including acting art. Only actors past their adolescence could perform and they were forced by law to reduce their physical attractiveness, principally by shaving off the beautifully coifed forelocks that boys wore before celebrating their accession to adult status.

The English theater, by introducing actresses, opened the door to an emphasis on the commodification of women. On the other hand, since kabuki's mature males were required to radically tone down their glamour, one might have feared that the presumably desexed kabuki was not long for this world. But kabuki not only managed to turn the new restrictions to its advantage, it also was able to guarantee that sex remained a fundamental component. Moreover, it served to commodify men as sex objects, regardless of which gender they portrayed. Eros remained primary, and the actors, while continually striving to achieve lifelike portraits of the women they depicted, were always alert to maintaining the proper level of “sex appeal” [iroke].

From the mid-seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, playwrights and actors successfully created a rich panoply of female roles and types. Sue-Ellen Case has identified two basic images in Western dramatic depictions of women, the positive, which shows “women as independent, intelligent, and even heroic,” and the misogynist, “commonly identified as the Bitch, the Witch, the Vamp, and the Virgin/Goddess.”²Kabuki has its share of bitches, witches, and vamps—its virgins are positive, not negative figures—but they are in the minority and most kabuki women actually occupy the first category. Although she overlooks kabuki, Case correctly notes that women in all-male theaters undeniably offer a gender depiction denying real women representation in favor of a fictional construct favoring patriarchal values. The appropriateness of her perspective will be apparent during the following survey of kabuki's women (many of them first created for bunraku puppet plays, later adapted for kabuki).³ I will also demonstrate that, despite the obvious persistence of patriarchal attitudes, kabuki was surprisingly fair to and respectful of women, quite possibly because the actors playing/inspiring their creation were men whose artistic status was dependent on the authenticity with which they captured the truthful essence of another gender for an audience in which women generally outnumbered men.⁴ Finally, I will describe the exploitation of cross-dressing as a dramaturgical device of this all-male theater.

I

WOMEN OF THE TOKUGAWA PERIOD.

The actual women of the Tokugawa period were the victims of a mighty patriarchy, which relegated them to a position of relative powerlessness. From the early eighteenth century, nearly every properly brought up woman was inculcated with the popularized teachings of Confucian-based moral tracts that stressed woman's lowly place, most notable of these “women's bibles” being The Greater Learning for Women [Onna Daigaku] by Kaibara Ekken (1631-1714).⁵ At the turn of the twentieth century, Lafcadio Hearn, famed for his interpretations of Japanese culture, penned this picture of Japanese women of the premodern era; many of his images resemble those in The Greater Learning for Women:

The old-fashioned education of her sex was directed to the development of every quality essentially feminine, and to the suppressing of the opposite quality. Kindliness, docility, sympathy, tenderness, daintiness—these and other attributes were cultivated into incomparable blossoming. … Her success in life was made to depend on her power to win affection by gentleness, obedience, kindliness. … A being working only for others, thinking only for others, happy only in making pleasure for others—a being incapable of unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to her own inherited sense of right—and in spite of this softness and gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to sacrifice everything at the call of duty; such was the character of the Japanese woman.⁶

The ideal for men—emulated to some extent even among commoners—was bushidô, the way of the samurai, while for women it was teijidô, the way of the virtuous woman. Similarly, the ideal of femininity was summed up in the expression Yamato nadeshiko [gentle woman of Japan]. In a society where such an ideal of femininity was worshipped, one would expect to see this image reflected in kabuki.

Case, referring to Western examples of all-male theater, says, in words that could as easily apply to Japan: “This practice reveals the fictionality of the patriarchy's representation of the gender. Classical plays and theatrical conventions can now be regarded as allies in the project of suppressing real women and replacing them with masks of patriarchal production.”⁷Kabuki women often exemplify such masks, yet the range of characters is quite wide and it is worth looking at some of them to see how they differ from or correspond to it. There are many meek and submissive women in kabuki, but there are also many that oppose their social bonds and demonstrate considerable independence of action and thought. One of the theater's functions has always been to act as a subversive outlet for people's repressed desires, and the many women who attended kabuki must certainly have wanted to see characters who transcended their own restricted lives and actions. Nevertheless, when feminine independence is expressed it is almost invariably in the form of a crucial sacrifice made on behalf of a man.

II

THE COURTESAN AS ICON.

If any kabuki character may be said to typify the ideal woman it is certainly not Hearn's compliant housewife, nor is it the virginal young miss not yet subjected to a husband's dominance. Instead it is the courtesan (keisei, among other terms), fabled in song, story, art, dance, and theater. In fact, Japan's prostitutes belonged to a hierarchically organized profession with multiple ranks and levels ranging from walk-ons to superstars. And most of these figure in kabuki, although the most respected ones are those who dominated the pleasure quarters, which appear as dramatic locales in one play after the other.

In a sense, we might conclude that there really never was a total ban on actresses because the top-ranking courtesans stepped in to fill the gap. These women, whose rise to national fame paralleled kabuki's development, created a fantasy of feminine appeal and desirability within the prototheatrical world of the quarters. There they attained skills in music, poetry, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, dance, conversation, and the like, and provided the actress-deprived public with an image of woman certainly not to be found in anyone's actual home. Many courtesans, writes Mark Oshima, were “women [of good backgrounds] who entered the licensed pleasure quarter in order to raise money for their lord or family.”⁸ They remind us of the demimondaines of mid-nineteenth-century France who, Lesley Ferris declares, “were cultivated by aristocratic backgrounds and education but impoverished by the loss of their fathers and acceptable suitors in the many wars of the Empire.”⁹ French courtesans, adds Ferris, offered their wealthy clients “intellectual and cultural amusements beyond the expected sexual liaison,”¹⁰ and so did Japan's.

Through the media of kabuki, popular literature, woodblock prints, and guidebooks that described and even ranked their beauty and accomplishments, courtesans were famous everywhere, known even by those who never set foot in the quarters. In reality, they were indentured slaves, but the social construction of them was of superbly accomplished women who were sexually available only to those with bottomless pockets and, even then, only after being wooed in an elaborate system of artificial courtship. They were on display, however, for all social classes, rich and poor, for they paraded daily, dressed and made up to the nines, while occasionally altering their walk by dragging the inside edges of their foot-high clogs in a sweeping figure eight [hachimonji]. The necessity of slightly opening the almost always-pressed together legs for this movement had powerful erotic overtones. The images they projected were replicated in kabuki by the onnagata, who expressed the courtesans' famed sense of pride, spirit, and—ironically for sellers of sex—their faithfulness to a particular lover. Since many of these so-called kabuki “emblems of femininity”¹¹ were based on actual women, even their actual names being used, their renown clearly made them the movie or rock stars of their day.

Kabuki women are constantly being sold or selling themselves into whoredom for self-sacrificing reasons, Omatsu in Mirror of the Two-Sided Paper Kimono [Kamiko Jitate Ryômen Kagami] (1768) even attempting this so that her husband can redeem his prostitute sweetheart from the quarters. Many kabuki heroes have either a prostitute mistress or one whose love they hope to gain. Although notorious in real life for their insincerity, kabuki prostitutes are typically dignified, pure of heart, deeply sincere, and faithful to the death on behalf of the man they love. The renowned courtesan Yatsuhashi in A Sword Named Kagotsurube [Kagotsurube] (1888) is so devoted to her jealous lover that when another man promises to buy her contract she reluctantly refuses her freedom, publicly insulting the man, for which he eventually slays her. An exception to the selfless courtesan is the selfish Miyokichi in Crepe Salesman Shinsuke [Chijimiya Shinsuke] (1860), whose creation is representative of the mid-nineteenth-century decline in courtesan standards.

Confucianists frowned on romantic love outside of marriage but romantic love is pervasive in kabuki, although it constantly leads to one catastrophe or another. Courtesans could not afford to fall for a client, and they could be ransomed by anyone with the price, but they were human, after all, and the conflict between love for a man who cannot afford to buy out their contract and the attempts to stifle someone who can forms the action of many dramas. When all else fails, such women often choose to commit suicide with their lover in the hope of achieving happiness in the other world. This was an act of defiance that signaled possible relief to so many stifled copycat lovers that such plays—powerful signs of theater's subversive power for the emotionally oppressed—eventually were banned.

An invariable pattern is for the courtesan to save her lover from some imminent danger of which he is usually unaware. Her only recourse is to deny him, which she must do publicly in a letter or speech of denunciation [aisozukashi], even though it breaks her heart; the woman disguises her true feelings in the interests of the presumed greater good and—like Armand Duval being rejected by Marguerite Gautier—the man remains innocent of her motives. Such scenes are extremely common, although always provided with a new twist, and an all-too frequent result is that the lover, completely misreading the woman's intentions, kills her in revenge. The example of Yatsuhashi in The Sword Named Kagotsurube, mentioned earlier, is a variation of this pattern, with the real lover being the cause for the would-be lover's rejection.

Kabuki prostitutes could also show a defiance and backbone worthy of drama's most strong-willed women, perhaps the best example being the dazzling Agemaki in Sukeroku: Flower of Edo [Sukeroku Yukari Edo no Zakura] (1713). This powerful figure adamantly refuses her services to her lover's wealthy but evil samurai rival, and castigates him in a scathingly biting putdown. Unlike Yatsuhashi, Agemaki truly does despise this suitor, and she is not killed for her defiance.

According to Yoshizawa Ayame I (1673-1729), the greatest early onnagata, the courtesan was the basis for all female-role acting. “The reason for this,” he said, “is that, since he is basically a man, he possesses, by his nature, a faculty of strong action, and he must carefully bear in mind the softness of the keisei and her feminine charm.”¹² In other words, the keisei is the antithesis of masculinity, being soft instead of hard, gentle instead of rough, delicate instead of strong. At the time, kabuki had not yet developed such important women as townsmen's wives and respectable daughters (although they were beginning to appear in the puppet theater), but many of these would before long require similarly feminine qualities, although expressed in different patterns. But the keisei clearly was the basis on which such later forms of theatrical womanhood were established. The keisei, after all, was then the most visible woman available for regular observation, most others being carefully secluded from the public gaze.

As this occurred, actors had to find ways to remain sexually interesting yet not to confuse the qualities of one role type with another. Even a virgin had to have sex appeal, so different types of charisma had to be constructed. As the onnagata Nakamura Utaemon V (1865-1940) wrote:

The distinction between a woman who has a lover and one who doesn't is a bit difficult: the virgin consistently acts with a sense of embarrassment as her fundamental quality. She keeps her head bent and eyes lowered, and she must have a full emotional complement of sexuality. For example, when the man she loves is near her, much as she seems as though she would fly to him, it would be disgraceful to appear so, yet her feelings must be completely and unflaggingly directed toward him. Her acting uses her sleeves in insinuating ways but everything is done in moderation. In the case of the keisei, this is business, so she must seem embarrassed. Instead, she acts with the sense that she takes pride in her manner.¹³

The sleeves are another source of difference between keisei and other women. Manipulation of the hanging sleeves—whose length varies according to the character type—can suggest an extraordinary range of feelings, and they are of particular use when wiping away one's tears. The keisei, however, normally dabs hers with a wad of paper always seen protruding from her breast fold; it can also serve a variety of other important purposes, such as for fanning oneself or repairing the thong on a sandal.

Closely aligned to the prostitute are the geisha, entertainers who came on the scene in the mid-eighteenth century, but did not sell sex, at least not overtly. One interesting difference between geisha and prostitutes derives from the way they hold their skirts, although today's actors often ignore the distinction. An old name for the female geisha (there were male geisha, too) is hidarizuma [left skirt], which derives from the tradition of her holding up her kimono skirt with her left hand, while the prostitute does so with her right (providing the term migizuma). Critic Tobe Ginsaku reports that the skirts open wider with the right grip, thereby being more revealing, as suits a sexual professional, while the modest left grip permits a more graceful manner of movement.¹⁵ Although their circumstances differ somewhat from those of the prostitutes, geisha are embroiled in similar love problems and, because they, too, were indentured, often face comparable situations.

III

TAKING MATTERS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS.

Like Antigone and Clytemnestra, many kabuki women are not shrinking violets but choose to take action with their own hands when the life or well-being of their husband or lover is at stake, when a family member must be avenged, when a political objective must be gained, or when the woman has been cruelly wronged. Not only samurai women but commoners also could demonstrate single-minded dedication, bravery, and resourcefulness when tragedy threatened. Frequently, they make enormous sacrifices to raise money for an endangered lover or an important cause. Or their devotion drives them to what Edo-period (1603-1868) Japanese considered ultra-heroic acts of subversion, perhaps the most fabled being performed by Greengrocer Oshichi, of Oshichi and the Fire Tower [Yagura Oshichi] (1773). She is so desperate to be reunited with her lover Kichisaburô that she commits a capital crime by banging the fire tower drum when there is no fire in order to rouse the neighborhood and hopefully bring Kichisaburô back to her. Such things were not likely to happen to the average woman in this oppressive society, of course, but she could see them enacted on the stage and understand how even she, were the circumstances similar, might rise to heroic heights.

IV

WOMEN IN DANCE.

In the onnagata's early years, roles of such power went to male-role actors while dance was the onnagata's specialty. The early dances often reflected folk beliefs in woman's fearsome sexual powers. Thus many dances—serving almost as exorcistic channels through which dangerous female energy could be dispelled—concerned the release of the central demons in the form of madness. A typical means of expressing this was through lion dances inspired by earlier sources, such as the nô play Stone Bridge [Shakkyô], in which the gentle lion of the first half, played as a young girl, goes mad and returns in all its crazed frenzy. Others allowed the dancer to play an actual maiden who is overcome by jealousy, as in the innumerable dances exemplified by The Maiden at the Dôjô Temple [Musume Dôjôji] (1753). The onnagata's dance monopoly was not successfully challenged until the late eighteenth century. But even the later onnagata dances (as well as dramas) often featured the onnagata as the anthropomorphic embodiment of unknowable forces, such as the spirits of plants and animals.

Also reminding us of the importance of females in dance are the many numbers shared with a male, such as travel dances [michiyuki], in which there is a passage of lamentation called kudoki, usually expressing the woman's love for her man. During these sections, sung by the onstage musicians, the man generally sits quietly while the woman expresses her deepest feelings choreographically. Kudoki are also found in dramas, and are the emotional highlights for females, where they may chastise someone, say farewell to a beloved, wail over a dead child, and so on. These passages are very important to the usually sedate onnagata because he can allow his emotions to rip in a musically balanced sequence replete with weeping and expressive gestures.

V

JEALOUS WOMEN.

Jealousy is the most common of a kabuki woman's unattractive traits. It is so frequently seen that there is even a term for the acting in such plays, “jealous business” [shittogoto]. One jealousy drama that should send feminists on a rampage is The Chamberlain and the China Mansion [Banchô Sarayashiki], a 1916 adaptation of a once popular Tokugawa period play, in which a jealous woman decides to test her fiancé's love by smashing one of his prized heirloom plates. He is willing to forgive her when he thinks it an accident but drowns her in a well when he discovers that she doubted his fidelity. She is so happy to learn that he is faithful that she willingly takes the plunge. Jealousy can also affect women regarding their relative status in a daimyō's inner court. One of the greatest dramas with a mainly female-role cast, Mirror Mountain [Kagamiyama] (1782, among several versions), is about just that. And in Karukaya Dôshin and the Souvenir of Tsukushi [Karukaya Dôshin Tsukushi no lezuto] (1735), jealousy is horrifically manifested when two women fall asleep while playing a board game and their hair turns into snakes that bite at one another.

VI

FEMALE PURITY INSPIRES FEMALE STRENGTH.

Jealous or not, princess or not, most young women epitomize the purity of youthful beauty and innocence. Unmarried young women may be noblewomen, countrywomen, or townswomen. From the latter two groups come those known as “daughters” [musume], while from the former come the upper-class girls called “princesses” [hime]. These maidens, coming as they do from the most protected environments, are extremely delicate, gentle, modest, and retiring. With their entire existence resting on an unsullied but tragic love, they shamelessly elicit audience sympathy. Such women are kabuki's quietest, using their sleeves and skirts to communicate embarrassment, happiness, sorrow, laughter, and the like, and so holding their voluminous sleeves that one can barely discern their hands within them.

Kabuki critics call the three most challenging of such roles the “three princesses” [sanhime], just as they similarly designate the “three wife roles” [sannyôbô] and “the three old lady roles” [sanbâbâ], although, for some reason, perhaps the sheer abundance of the field, there are no “three courtesans.” One of the reasons for these selections is that, despite their reticence and physical frailty, they express considerable independence of mind and action. In some cases their desires are so strong that supernatural forces appear to aid them. Princess Toki in Record of Three Generations at Kamakura [Kamakura Sandaiki] (1781) breaks convention by begging her betrothed to spend one night with her before he goes off to battle and, despite her having been raised with absolutely no domestic skills, determines to prepare dinner no matter what the cost. Princess Yuki in The Golden Pavilion [Kinkakuji] (1757) is so set on rescuing her lover that, when bound with ropes to a cherry tree, she becomes capable of willing the cherry blossoms at her feet to turn into rats who chew her free. The sexually naive Princess Yaegaki in Japan's Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Virtue [Honchô Nijûshikô] (1766) wishes to reach her endangered lover so greatly that magic foxes appear to help her cross a frozen lake. To convey the abnormal power of these latter two climactic transformations, kabuki has both Yaegaki and Yuki perform them in puppet theater fashion [ningyô buri], with black-robed manipulators seeming to control their movements. Critic Tsuda Rui tells us that, for the oppressed women of the day, who had little freedom of thought or action, such heroines were their alter egos, their dreams come true.¹⁵ They acted as a momentary release, a liberating force, in their overturning of convention to fight for the perfection of their love and their struggle for freedom.

Commoner girls are similarly devoted to their men, of course, as we saw with the story of Greengrocer Oshichi. Ofune, a rural girl in The Ferry at Yaguchi [Yaguchi no Watashi] (1770), substitutes her body for her lover's on an enemy sword and, mortally wounded, further aids him by climbing a tower to bang a drum and raise a siege. In fact, a considerable number of plays have women who willingly substitute their bodies for those of their loved ones. In The Memorial Service at the Bridge [Hashi Kuyô Bonji no Mongaku] (1883), a faithful wife deceives an enemy samurai into thinking he is killing her sleeping husband but she puts herself in her spouse's place.

VII

WOMEN AND THE AESTHETIC OF CRUELTY.

Because of the delicacy of the average kabuki woman, any threat to her physical or mental well-being should bring shudders, a consideration actors and writers exploited by finding ways to threaten her safety in melodramatic scenes of torture. These “Perils of Pauline”-like scenes form a crucial part in kabuki's so-called “aesthetic of cruelty” [zankoku no bi], a highly aestheticized, even fantastical world where the inherent sadism is muted by artistic techniques. In “snow tortures,” the woman is tied up and punished in the freezing cold. She invariably escapes at the last moment, just as in many Western melodramas. In the most aestheticized “torture” scene, the courtesan Akoya, in the play of that name (1732), is tested as to whether she is lying when she denies knowing the whereabouts of her fugitive lover. The test requires her to play three different musical instruments—a sort of artistic polygraph—while her interrogators determine by her playing if she is lying. No matter how conventionalized, these scenes clearly play to male fantasies of domination and aggression.

Another way to wring audience tears is to have a beautiful woman go blind from grief, forcing her to earn her living as a beggar, or be horribly disfigured by poison or a physical attack. The onnagata created a number of vivid makeup conventions to depict scarred or mutilated features, none more awful than the grotesque effect of purpled skin and drooping eye worn by Oiwa after her husband poisons her in The Ghost Stories of Yotsuya on the Tôkaidô [Tôkaidô Yotsuya Kaidan] (1825). In a heartrending moment, this once proud beauty combs her long black hair only for it to come out in bloody clumps. But because nothing is more noble than a self-sacrificing woman, what could be more dramatic than to have such a woman, renowned for her beauty, deliberately mar her own appearance? This happens in Summer Festival [Natsu Matsuri] (1745), when the married Otatsu, to prove that she can be trusted alone with the handsome young Isonojô, places a red-hot iron against her cheek, branding herself with a presumably frightful scar. “Do you still find me alluring?” she inquires.

Another form of self-mutilation, the severing of a finger, was meant as a sign of devotion, and is still practiced by the yakuza, Japan's Mafia. One kabuki example is in Scarface Otomi [Kirare Otomi] (1864) when Otomi pledges her love, while the other main example stems from a different type of devotion. In Plum Blossom Yoshibei [Ume no Yoshibei] (1796), Koume, realizing that the bitten-off pinky in the mouth of a corpse is her brother's, and that her husband must have killed him, assumes responsibility for the crime by slicing off her own digit and then committing suicide.

VIII

SEX AND THE KABUKI WOMAN.

Patriarchal attitudes are at their most rampant among women who have been raped. There are a number of situations where the rape actually comes as a pleasant surprise to the previously inhibited victim, as it reveals to her pleasures of which she has been ignorant. In The Scarlet Princess of Edo [Sakura-hime Azuma Bunshô] (1817), for example, the high-class title character has been raped in the dark by Gonsuke and is unable to forget the experience. She even gets a tattoo like the one she glimpsed on his arm, so when Gonsuke inadvertently appears before her she recognizes his tattoo, jumps into bed with him, throws away her glossy lifestyle, and willingly descends into degradation in order to be with him. Such nineteenth-century plays reflect a general social decadence among the effects of which are characters like Sakura, who—despite their fulfillment of male rape fantasies—deliberately flaunt accepted social standards and carve out individualistic lives based on their own personal needs. Such roles also give the actor an enormous range of possibilities as he goes from ultra refined to increasingly uncouth speech, actions, and appearance.

Although prostitutes are in the business of selling sex, some of kabuki's most sensually aggressive women are not prostitutes at all. Sakura's bedroom scene with Gonsuke is franker than anything that could have been viewed in the West at the time and, considering that it is played by two men, still evokes a frisson of daring today. In the classic Yoshitsune and the 1,000 Cherry Trees [Yoshitsune Sembon Zakura] (1747), the shopgirl Osato, believing that she will be marrying the supposed clerk Yasuke, boldly invites him to sleep with her. And the flirtatious behavior toward her lover of the virgin princess Yaegaki in Japan's Twenty-Four Paragons always elicits laughter because of the way her unabashed forwardness contrasts with her essential innocence.

IX

MOTHERS AND WIVES: SOCIETY'S ROLE MODELS.

Far more sedate than the women we have touched on are the wives, both samurai and commoner, but principally the latter. Their principal purpose is to support the desires—no matter how selfish—of their husbands. These often shallow and unworthy men squander their money at the brothels, but the wives—as The Greater Learning for Women instructed—show no jealousy and in every way are models of domesticity. When a crisis threatens, these quietly intrepid women do all in their power to avert it, even at the cost of divorcing their spouse or dying on his behalf.

Such characters were modeled on the townswomen of the day. They epitomize virtuous behavior, so even the suggestion of adultery carries shock value. Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) wrote three adultery plays that were later adapted from the puppets for kabuki, but in each case the woman is a passive victim of circumstances and her essential virtue remains intact. It was extremely difficult for a married woman of the time to engage willfully in adultery because her life was so circumscribed and because chastity was so highly revered. One of the few important plays written directly for kabuki and centered on adultery is the late-nineteenth-century The Kagatobi Fire Brigade [Kagatobi] (1886), in which a proud fireman's wife is unfairly suspected of infidelity, leading to attempts to clear her of the charge. Because of its late date it is possible that Western models, such as Othello, influenced this play. In general, kabuki wives exemplify fidelity, while their husbands often epitomize the double standard.

The object of a woman's sexual passion can also be illicit in other ways, and incest plays a role in several works, although usually unintended and discovered only after the act has been discovered. Here the writer's objective is to uncover the unexpected workings of karma. The Phédre-like heroine of The Gappô Crossroads [Gappô ga Tsuji] (1773), however, deliberately pursues her stepson, and only when her behavior causes her death does she reveal what really have been noble motives. No sooner does a woman seem truly lewd than the convention of “in reality” [jitsu wa] intrudes and the altruistic truth comes out.

Samurai wives are best represented by the women of the inner court known as katahazushi, a term which reflects the offcenteredness of their hairstyle. Among katahazushi heroines are some of the most dignified and tragic of characters. One of the greatest is Masaoka in Troubles in the Ôshû Ashikaga Household [Meiboku Sendai Hagi] (1777, and later versions), a governess who, to protect the child of her lord, must sit impassively as her own child is brutally slain before her very eyes. Only when she is alone can she erupt with pent-up grief. Such roles challenge the actor's emotional capacities and his ability to make the extremes his character suffers believable to a contemporary audience.

Mothers in particular strain a Japanese audience's heart-strings. One might argue that the relationships between so many weakling heroes and nurturing courtesans reflects a pervasive Japanese male fixation, but plays with actual mothers in emotionally wrenching situations are common. These include those where a mother must either react unflinchingly to the death of a child, to her parting from one forever, or to her search for a kidnapped child. Like so many other situations, the first two of these complications stem from conflicts between a character's obligations and duties under the Confucian codes and her personal inclinations. When social duty [giri] wins out over human feelings [ninjô], the audience reaches for its hankies. Still, as scholar Kintô Tamao has noticed, the preeminent mothers are tragically prevented by dramatic circumstances from openly expressing their maternal feelings, making this fundamental human relationship a victim of social ethics.¹⁶ In such a world, he thinks, the killing by Sadaka of her own daughter in Imose Mountain [Imoseyama] (1771) so that the dead girl can join her lover in the afterworld, is the ultimate expression of maternal love. Kabuki also has a Medea-like mother in Kagekiyo Victorious [Shusse Kagekiyo] (1685): Akoya, Kagekiyo's jealous mistress, murders their two sons before his eyes when the recalcitrant hero rejects her pleas for forgiveness and says the boys are no longer his.

X

FEMALE VERSIONS OF MALE ROLES.

Perhaps the most distinctive sign that kabuki is a theater of men playing women is the phenomenon of plays originally written for male-role actors being revised to accommodate the onnagata's talents. This is not the same as an actress playing Hamlet as a man; it is Hamlet conceived of as a woman, with all the attendant transformations this requires in the other characters. In Saint Narukami [Narukami] (1742), the beautiful Princess Taema visits the priest Narukami at his mountain lair in order to seduce him, thereby enabling her to end a drought by releasing an imprisoned dragon god. In Female Narukami [Onna Narukami] (1696), Narukami is a nun seduced by a handsome young lord. The most exaggeratedly masculine hero is Gongorô in Just a Minute! [Shibaraku] (1697), yet even he was transmogrified into a strange hybrid when played by an onnagata in Female Just a Minute! [Onna Shibaraku] (1745?/1746?). When the character makes her exit on the hana-michi runway, she begins to do so in the bounding male style but then, realizing that she is, after all, a woman, becomes embarrassed and runs off in typical female fashion.

It is a standard part of all onnagata roles in which the character somehow displays qualities associated with masculinity for her to constantly catch herself up short and revert to more feminine behavior. The expression of embarrassment when she realizes how far she has wandered from the actions expected of her character's gender is almost always good for a laugh. The audience's knowledge that it is actually a man playing the role only intensifies the humor. When these moments occur, the entire fabric of constructed gender behavior is illuminated and the artificiality of the onnagata's art shines forth. The most obvious examples are in the grouping of roles called female warriors [onna budô], in which the samurai heroine displays amazonian propensities. Osono in Keya Village [Keya Mura] (1786) has a scene in which she is disguised as a Zen priest, fights off a band of robbers, and battles with an enemy while holding a child in her arms. However, she sharply drops her mannishness to demonstrate ladylike bashfulness when she discovers that her opponent is her never-before-seen betrothed. Another superwoman is Hangaku in The Wada Dispute [Wada Kassen] (1736) who has to smash down a gate. The eighteenth-century actor Arashi Koroku II (dates unknown), criticized for lacking femininity in his roughhouse scene, only gained approval after first holding a handkerchief against the gate to soften the effect, and this became the standard business.

XI

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A KABUKI WOMAN SCORNED.

As we have seen, kabuki women are mainly sincere, self-sacrificing, demure even when robust, gracious, and so on. We have also noted that women can start out all these things and then descend into the mire of decadence and disgust, but with it all, such women rarely display overt evil. One of the chief ways in which women who have been trampled on become empowered is to turn into vengeful spirits after they have died. The entire world of selfish, unfaithful husbands and lovers must take cover when one of these women comes back from the other world to seek revenge on those who have wronged her.

In more earthly revenge dramas, women are mainly brave pillars of support for their retribution-seeking spouses, although they may have to commit suicide to help bring the action to a successful conclusion, as in Go Board Record of the Great Peace [Goban Taiheiki] (1706). But plays in which the living avengers are women do exist, most notably The Tale of Shiroishi and the Taihei Chronicles [Go Taiheiki] (1780), based on an actual 1723 vendetta accomplished by a pair of teenage sisters, here depicted for typical kabuki contrast as a country bumpkin and her citified courtesan sibling.

To return, though, to the depiction of women who exude viciousness: the relatively few who exist are generally confined to three types. One is the mean-spirited court women who live secluded from most men and fill out their time with intrigues and backbiting. Such murderous creatures are considered too treacherous for pure onnagata to play and are almost always cast with male-role actors to underline their uglier qualities. In a sense, this represents crossgender casting within a one-gender theater. Other distasteful women include heartless mothers-in-law and stepmothers, who appear in history plays as well as those of contemporary life. In The Double Suicide of Two Sashes [Shinjû Futatsu Haraobi] (1722) a notably brutal stepmother kicks her pregnant daughter-in-law out of the house. She has no redeeming features, but the abusive Otaki in The Kama Depths [Kama ga Fuchi] (1737) reveals as she dies that her bullying behavior was intended to drive her stepson away in order to protect him from potential disgrace. There are also some terrifically hateful women in plays of contemporary life who do not fit any particular pattern, but whose realistic meanness (like Manno's in The Ise Dances [Ise Ondo], 1796), can still rile an audience.

But pure onnagata relish the ability to play kabuki's remaining bad women, the akuba or akujo [evil women], also known as dokufu [poison ladies]. These characters, who came on the scene at the turn of the nineteenth century, took onnagata acting in a completely unfamiliar direction by their depiction of ruthless women, sometimes originating in low-class backgrounds, sometimes fallen from the nobility, as with Princess Sakura. These tough women of the backstreets, who lord it over their men are often obsessed with thoughts of revenge on someone who wronged them. They bear nicknames like “Crescent Moon” Osen, “Riverside” Oroku, “Fed Up” Omatsu, and “Scarface” Otomi; speak the slangiest of dialects; and engage in blackmail, theft, gambling, murder, and whoring. They can be calculating, cruel, and defiant, yet, like most kabuki women, beneath all the bravado and forbidden activity, they reveal a sharp streak of sentimentality that explains their behavior as being on behalf of the man they love. This was an absolutely necessary concession to audience tastes, which required such tradition-breaking heroines to have traditional redeeming qualities.

Plays featuring the akuba, especially those by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755-1829), reflected a growing tendency toward a theatricalized naturalism focused on the lives of society's outcasts, and their depiction represented a sharp move from idealization to gritty, if conventionalized, actualism; however, with an abundance of such roles, standardization set in and the akuba developed into yet another iconographic woman. Nevertheless, she represents a major step away from the excessively feminized woman of the past toward a potently independent character happy to demolish the stereotype of women as the victims of a suffocating patriarchy. And they were not simply a theatrical fiction, as there were a number of actual women who closely fit the description.

XII

CROSSDRESSING AND THE KABUKI WOMAN.

As one might expect in a form employing all-male casts—and in a culture that Leupp demonstrates was increasingly enthralled with androgyny,¹⁷ especially in the nineteenth century, when gender distinctions began to blur—kabuki has its share of characters who crossdress for purposes both of plot complications and to create a degree of sexual titillation. Such situations are relatively few, however, when compared to the proportion of them in Shakespeare. Kabuki crossdressing is mainly a matter of men dressing as women rather than the reverse. Ultimately, it is an excuse for allowing the actor to display his versatility at playing male and female versions of the same role. Crossdressing, down to hairstyles and makeup, however, did occur in actual Japanese life, although outlawed, and appears to have been a particularly effective way for nineteenth-century con men to maneuver themselves into compromising situations, which they could turn to their advantage. This device is represented in two popular plays, The Three Kichisa [Sannin Kichisa] (1860) and Benten Kozô (1862). In the first, the thief Ojō Kichiza masquerades as the stage character Greengrocer Oshichi, mentioned above, in order to facilitate his crimes; in the second, Benten dresses as a samurai maiden shopping for her trousseau in order to deceive a shopowner as part of a robbery scheme. At the climax, Benten's ruse is revealed and, to the delight of audiences ever since, he disrobes on stage and switches from demure young miss to arrogant hoodlum, his female robes loosely draped about his tattooed torso, while he retains his female hairstyle. The vision of this androgynous hybrid remains one of the most telling images of the mid-nineteenth-century fascination with the grotesque.

Men required by other plot complications that require them to dress as women include Matsuwakamaru's disguise as the courtesan Hanako in Sôta in Disguise [Shinobu no Sôta] (1854), in order to search for a family heirloom; Sangobei's in Song of Satsuma [Satsuma Uta] (1704) as the court lady Hayashi, a device to help him find his father's murderer; and, in The Courtesan and the Farce Performed at Mibu Temple [Keisei Mibu Dainenbutsu] (1702), Miyake Hikoraku, who happens to be dressed as a woman while performing a kyôgen farce and overhears a dangerous plot, which leads him to get in on the conspiracy by pretending to be his own wife.

Benten's crossdressing is part of a tradition of admittedly homosexual male characters whose gender flexibility is part of their charm. Lesbianism, however, was barely hinted at, although there is a scene in a play called Kumagai and the Fanshop [Ôgiya Kumagai] in which the handsome Atsumori, who must go into hiding, dresses as a woman and takes refuge at a fan maker's home. The fan maker's daughter, knowing him to be a man, falls in love with him, but the love scene between the two, with the man dressed as a woman, definitely conveys a touch of forbidden desire.

Kabuki also has examples of women who dress as men, most interestingly in The Female Student [Onna Shosei] (1877), written during the early years of Westernization, and inspired by a real incident. It tells of a country girl brought up as a boy whose hair is cut short in the new fashion and who, passing as a male, goes to study in Tokyo; is forced by circumstances to commit a crime; and has sex with a lout who threatens to blow her cover. When the man against whom her crime was committed discovers her sex, he blackmails her into being his mistress. Among the plot complications, another woman falls for her in her male guise but tries to drown herself on learning the truth. Other women dressed as men include Miyokichi, who dresses in a male dancer's festival costume in Crepe Seller Shinsuke, and, more dramatically, “Demon” Omatsu in Newly Published Superbandit [Shinpan Koshi no Shiranami] (1780). Omatsu is a wife who teaches fencing as a front for her activities as a crossdressed bandit leader; after being captured, she is slain by her husband, who has not recognized her in her male guise.

There are of course numerous other outstanding and unusual female characters in kabuki—some of them truly grand and heroic, others depraved and immoral—and quite a number of other ways of looking at the ways they were conceived for this all-male theater. The brief survey presented here, the first of its kind I know of in English, hopefully provides a picture of the Japanese woman's infinite variety within kabuki's severely restricted boundaries. It might also serve as a starting point for more critical and historical examinations of the ways in which, once kabuki had progressed from gay to gei, the actor grappled with the problems of female representation.

Notes

1. Gary Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 185.

2. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988), 6.

3. For reasons of space, the discussion does not cover the important category of old women. Most play titles mentioned in the text are based on the abbreviated versions by which plays are popularly known. Plays typically have at least one formal title and several popular ones, making their identification problematic. For more information on the plays mentioned, see Samuel L. Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia: A Revised Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten (Westport: Greenwood, 1996).

4. A brief, but excellent look at issues relating to the presence of the onnagata, as seen from an anthropological perspective, is in Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 53-56.

5. A complete English translation is in Basil Hall Chamberlain, Japanese Things: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971; orig. pub. 1904), 502-508.

6. Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1935; orig. pub. 1904), 396-397.

7. Case, Feminism and Theatre, 7.

8. Mark Oshima, “The Keisei as a Meeting Point of Different Worlds,” in The Women of the Pleasure Quarter: Japanese Paintings and Prints of the Floating World, ed. Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Worcester Art Museum, 1995), 101.

9. Lesley Ferris, Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 89.

10. Ibid.

11. Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton, “The Artistic Vision,” in The Women of the Pleasure Quarter, 130.

12. Yoshizawa Ayame, “The Words of Ayame,” in The Actors' Analects, ed. and trans. Charles J. Dunn and Bunzô Torigoe (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1969), 50.

13. Nakamura Utaemon V, quoted in Tobe Ginsaku, “Onnagata no Gihô to Seishin” [The Onnagata's Technique and Mentality], Kabuki 12 (1971): 140-41.

14. Ibid., 143.

15. Tsuda Rui, Edo Kabuki no Shûhen [The Environment of Edo Kabuki] (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1990), 71.

16. Kintô Tamao, “Subete Yasashii Haha Oyatachi” [All Gentle Mothers], Engekikai [Theater World Magazine] 29:2 (February 1971), 68.

17. Leupp, Male Colors, 172-178.