SOURCE: Takakuwa, Yoko. “Performing Marginality: The Place of the Player and of ‘Woman’ in Early Japanese Culture.” New Literary History 27, No. 2 (Spring, 1996): 213-25.

[In the following essay, Takakuwa considers the problem of marginality and status of “other” of the Kabuki female impersonator in the closed society of early modern Japan.]

The economy of our culture can be analyzed in terms of what it has excluded in its (hi)story (histoire)—what meanings are marginalized in the textual system we inhabit. During the Edo era (1603-1867), the Tokugawa shogunate adopted a policy of seclusion in 1633 and carried it out by 1641, in order to interdict Christianity and protect home trade. Japan closed the door from then until 1854 when America forced the country to open up to foreign intercourse. It was in the course of the radical cultural paradigm shift at the turn of the sixteenth century that a woman originated Kabuki, which was developed into the most popular (and scandalous for the shogunate) entertainment representative of Edo culture for almost 260 years. Kabuki is precisely a child of the times, nurtured within the closure of Japanese culture as a result of the national policy of seclusion and exclusion of the other (strangers). Some questions arise. After Japan isolated itself from the world outside, who became the marginal other to be excluded within the economy of early modern Japanese culture? What kind of place was regarded as the margin?

In this essay I propose to consider the problem of marginality in the light of current poststructuralist theory. I shall give a brief account (récit) of what are called “historical events” until the birth of the Kabuki theater, and then focus on the place allocated to the Kabuki player and the onnagata (the Kabuki female impersonator) as “woman” and their contradictory implications as the marginal other ideologically excluded in the shogunal system of differences.

I

It was Furyu (unusually elaborated decorativeness) dancing that led to Kabuki dancing and, later, to Kabuki. Furyu dancing became very popular in the age of wars. It originated in the religious ritual whose purpose was to console the stray souls of the dead killed in the wars and see them off to the other world—outside the community.¹ People came to enjoy not simply dancing but also designing their “unusually decorative” dancing clothes and properties and making songs with clever words. It became a craze first in the then capital Kyoto after the Ohnin-Bummei disturbances (1467-1477), ushering in a century of warring states, and reached its peak in the mid-sixteenth century, involving a large group of people of different classes, including court nobles, feudal lords, and townspeople, as a dynamic outburst of people's anxiety, zeal, and energy in the period of the country at war. In an unsettled society, people faced a crisis of identity, losing their firm belief in religion, and pursued worldly, though temporary, pleasures with a growing sense of anxiety about their life so close to death.

The last and largest Furyu dancing was organized in 1604 by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), a founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, under the pretext of performing a religious service for the repose of a former ruler, the deceased Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598). Tokugawa plotted the dancing as an appeasement policy, to make a good impression on the part of the new ruler. In the previous year he had at last instituted the new but still unstable political system in the new capital Edo, the present Tokyo. At this historical moment of transition, a woman called Okuni (1572?-1620?) created Kabuki dancing, by improving her Nembutsu (Buddhist invocation) dancing as the successor to Furyu dancing. Coincidentally, Tokugawa and Okuni both launched their new enterprises in 1603, thus making Japanese cultural history.

The word Kabuki is derived from kabuku which means “leaning” or “inclination” today, but which originally meant “out of orbit,” that is, unconventional or unusual. The Japanese Portuguese Dictionary edited by Portuguese missionaries in 1603 defines “kabuki” (cabuqi) as “to conduct out of rule, or act more freely than one is allowed to,” and “kabuki-mono” as an “eccentric person, who acts more freely than one is allowed to” (17-28). At the end of the sixteenth century, the kabuki-mono designated young men with “unusual” (but perhaps fashionable) clothes and hairstyles. Some of the men wore foreign-made, expensive golden necklaces or crystal rosaries as the latest fashion and their words and behavior were “unconventional” and “eccentric” in the turbulent age before the Tokugawa shogunate finally centralized administrative power. The problem for Tokugawa was that some of the kabuki-mono were the ex-vassals or generals of a former ruler, the Toyotomi family. They acted as ideological residues and put up group resistance to the new political institution which Tokugawa keenly strove to inaugurate by means of Confucianism as its ideological basis. He came to consider their politically radical ideas and free behavior as a danger to social order and, in 1606, began regulating the kabuki-mono.

Okuni started Kabuki dancing combined with a simple play and song in 1603. She performed in male disguise as kabuki-mono, a stylish young man who wore “unusual,” gorgeous attire, crystal rosary, and swords, and flirted with the mistress of a rest-house, impersonated by a male comedian with moustache. The kabuki-mono were not yet regarded as outlaws, or rather their “freedom” was probably half envied by the townspeople in Kyoto. As an innovative entertainer, Okuni was very quick at introducing the “latest fashions” of kabuki-mono and finding new possibilities for popular heroes, who could appeal to the public imagination, in the figures of the kabuki-mono who, ashamed of “living too long,” radically dramatized their life and death. We find the identification of Kabuki as kabuku (“unconventional” inclination of life and gender) both in Okuni's masquerade as kabuki-mono and in her company's sexual role reversals. From the beginning, the Kabuki exploited the subversive power of fiction, by making a “hero” of the kabuki-mono as the marginal other who undermines social “reality,” and by transgressing the sartorial law between the sexes which seems to frame sexual “reality.”

Okuni Kabuki's popularity produced many imitators, like Yûjo Kabuki, which was played by the star courtesans in men's clothes and hairstyles under the management of large brothels. In order to regulate class and gender by way of the Confucian ethics and to set up the new social order, the shogunate displaced the houses of prostitution into small licensed quarters, for example, Yoshiwara in Edo, Shimabara in Kyoto, Shinchi in Osaka, and confined the prostitutes there in 1618. The shogunate, furthermore, banned Women's Kabuki and prohibited women from appearing on stage in 1629, on the pretext that the actresses' erotic performances and prostitution caused social disorder. From then until the Tokugawa shogunate collapsed in 1867, actresses disappeared from Japanese theater.² The shogunate also judged boy actors in women's clothes to demoralize social order owing to their homosexual tendencies and prostitution, banned Young Men's Kabuki, and ordered the closing of the Kabuki theater in 1652. The Kabuki theater was allowed to open again, however, on the condition that only grown men who shaved their forelocks perform. The actors called onnagata came to impersonate women. The onnagata has ever since performed the onna-kata (woman's part) and masqueraded womanliness on the Kabuki stage for more than 300 years. It is ironic, however, that Kabuki, which is now played only by male actors, owes its origins to a woman.

II

What position did Kabuki take within the economy of early modern Japanese culture? During the Edo era, there were two aku-sho (bad places) under the shogunate's continual surveillance: the Kabuki theaters and the brothels. The shogunate adopted the same policy of separation and confinement to facilitate and rationalize its control over Kabuki and prostitution as ethically “bad” pleasures. The theater had to be licensed to perform Kabuki. The first Kabuki theater (the Nakamura-za, licensed in 1624) and show tents were adjudged around 1635 to be too near Edo castle and were ordered to move away.³ In 1651 the shogunate collected the Kabuki theaters (the Nakamura-za and the Ichimura-za, licensed in 1634), show tents, and rest-houses in the two adjacent towns in order to strengthen its supervision over the entertainment areas. (Another aku-sho, the brothels in Yoshiwara, were also moved to the remote black-walled town Shin [New]-Yoshiwara after a great fire in Edo in 1657.) Kobiki-chô near the present Tokyo Bay developed into another theater town, while the Yamamura-za was licensed in 1642 and the Morita-za in 1660. As a result, there were the four licensed Kabuki theaters called “grand theaters” in Edo. The Yamamura-za was demolished in 1714, however, because of the scandal about a love affair between an actor and a ranking lady official in the service of the shogun's mother. After that, the number of Kabuki theaters was limited to three in Edo, and the supervision became more severe, imposing strict restraints on the Kabuki community and controlling the players' relations with the citizens. The policy of oppression was similar outside Edo, and after the Kyoho reforms (1716), only two theaters each in Kyoto and in Osaka were sanctioned as “grand theaters.” By the Tempô reforms (1841-1843), the three Kabuki theaters in Edo were again removed farther away to Saruwaka-chô, the marginal waterfront district, which was only accessible across the rivers or sea by bridge or boat. The shogunate here completed the “great confinement” of the players.

Let us analyze the shogunal policy of separation and confinement of players and prostitutes. The shogunate regarded the theaters and brothels as “necessary evils,” which, it reluctantly admitted, could be a driving force to attract people, fix population, accommodate commerce, and promote prosperity, although its political and economic motivations were against the Confucian ethics of the samurai. The players were originally strolling entertainers without regular playhouses. As wanderers, they acted as strangers outside the community.⁴ The shogunate made the players settle on the margins of the city, confined them in licensed quarters and isolated them from the citizens. As the inhabitants of the aku-sho, neither the players nor the prostitutes had citizenship. In order to establish the system of hierarchical differences expedient for the reigning samurai, the shogunate divided the people into four classes (samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants), located players and prostitutes as classless people outside the system, with only beggars further below them, and adopted the policy of hereditary separation between the classes. The shogunate also legalized a founding separation between the sexes according to Confucian ethics, which says that a man and a woman must not sit next to each other after the age of seven.⁵ It was an astute strategy for differentiation and topological demarcation as the basis of the organization of the socio-symbolic order and identities to enable the shogunate to retain its legitimacy and effectiveness.

What, then, is the meaning of the location of the theaters and brothels as the aku-sho? The “bad” places on the margin of Edo were apparently separated from the sphere of the communal life, yet still linked to it by bridge or boat—without a decidable border. We find here a contradiction represented by “the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority.”⁶ The notion of the bridge is equivocal. “As a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of the place,” the bridge “represents the ‘betrayal’ of an order,” writes Michel de Certeau, and on the other hand, “as it offers the possibility of a bewildering exteriority, it allows or causes the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of the alien element that was controlled in the interior, and gives objectivity (that is, expression and re-presentation) to the alterity which was hidden inside the limits. … Within the frontiers, the alien is already there, an exoticism or sabbath of the memory, a disquieting familiarity. It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other” (128-29). The irreducibility of “negative” heterogeneity attributed to the margin or marginal other unveils the illusion of the collective, homogeneous space of the community. The aku-sho as exterior contaminating space is “what the structure produces as an effect of interiority.”⁷ A structural necessity of reproducing the margin or marginal other to veil a central lack in the system (and in the Other), moreover, brings to light the fact that the system itself is maintained by this structure-effect.

In order to examine the “ambivalent” implications of aku-sho more closely,⁸ let us take Saruwaka-chô (theater-town) as the in-between space of everyday and noneveryday, of reality and fiction. Saruwaka-chô, the town where the three Kabuki theaters were located, consisted of the dual structures of the theatrical space: first, the fictitious space on the stage, and second, the whole town theatricalized as a large stage, in which the audience in their finest clothes were liberated from everyday logic and shared the fictive, festive time and space with the actors.⁹ A woman, born a doctor's daughter at the close of the Edo era, remembers “like a beautiful picture scroll” how fascinating playgoing was in her girlhood, including a boat trip to Saruwaka-chô. The town itself was like part of a play. Also the stage often encompassed the audience seats, involving the audience deeply in the play. All the dressed-up women in the audience changed their kimonos in the rest-houses during the intervals and appeared in disguise as different kinds of women.¹⁰ The distinctions between actor, audience, and character, between reality and fiction, were transgressed there. The fictitious space of the theater-town enabled women to break the strict sartorial law required in the reality of their everyday life. The world outside provided the illusory space of noneveryday time to the visitors (the audience) as subjects subjected to austere hierarchical disciplines. The aku-sho was the space of fiction, existing next to everyday life—in “reality.”¹¹

As seen in the old idiom “crazed for the aku-sho” (addicted to the allure of theaters or brothels), the power of the fiction of the aku-sho often enticed the citizens into losing “reason,” confounding their “real” life with “dream” and crossing the boundary between them. Surely the shogunal policy was “reasonable,” insofar as it considered the aku-sho as the space of fiction to be dangerous for social “reality,” although the system was unable to suppress or exclude it completely. Does this imply a return of the repressed in the symbolic? Ironically enough, the isolation of the aku-sho helped to produce the (seemingly unmitigated) space of pleasure as the terrain of desire and to occasion a mixed feeling of expectation, excitation, and tension to the “citizens” who went to experience the world beyond, by crossing the border between this/other, reality/fiction, good/evil, inside/outside, or validated/excluded. The aku-sho as the desire-space promises “the jouissance of transgression” by breaching the Law.¹² The world beyond endlessly seduces people into a dream of the fulfillment of desire.

III

On the other hand, there were further “ambivalent” implications of the aku-sho. The community of the players was not a liberated utopia outside the system, but another hierarchical society with rank and gender differences sustained by the family system, in which the tachiyaku (male lead) had supremacy over the onnagata (female impersonator). The players reproduced, after the shogunal strategy, a paradoxical double of the system even in the aku-sho. The “apparently outer edge of an enclosure” is neither simply external nor circular and “makes no sign beyond itself, toward what is utterly other, without becoming double or dual” (LO 100). It was by differentiation and topological demarcation that the shogunate carried out its project of institutionalizing the system of differences and circulating the proper name, meaning, and place for reappropriation within its restricted economy. The shogunate did not allow the people of classes other than the samurai their own surnames. The merchants, artisans, and farmers did not have surnames until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, although the players appropriated their stage names as unofficial surnames even off-stage. Their family names have (even today) great significance manifesting the propriety of their “patrimonial” art (performance style) proper to each family, which is taught by the father to his sons. They also designed their crests as the artistic symbols of a household and put them on their properties. Likewise, the players wore the full samurai uniform on stage on the formal occasions of announcing to the audience their succession to the “hereditary” big name. Meanwhile, the actors often wore on and off the stage clothes that were too luxurious according to the strict sumptuary legislation, which contributed to the banishment of some actors from Edo. Ichikawa Danjûrô VII (1791-1859) wore a warrior's armor, for example, when he performed Kagekiyo, the play about a Heike general with loyalty and fortitude; and so he was exiled from Edo by the Tempô reforms in 1832 “because of his extravagant way of life.”¹³ By their “out-lawed” use of surnames and clothes as the symbol of the proper to the samurai—through their citation of the meaning of the propriety of the ruling class—the players happened to present an oblique but acute critique of the meaning of power and expose the vulnerability of the symbolic order and the identities set up by the articulation of difference.

The marginalized other is not merely a powerless victim of the system. Even by “the great confinement” of the players in the aku-sho, the system could neither completely exclude (or exorcise) its other as an exterior cause of contamination nor assimilate its otherness into the category of the same. In order to take a normative position, the system itself structurally necessitated and (re)produced its “marginal” other as its “out-law”—as an effect of interiority.¹⁴ In these ambivalent positions of the marginal other—in this supplementary aspect of the structure—we find the splitting in symbolic identity revealed through a fissure in the symbolic order.

Consequently, the player's mimetic identification with the dominant class is, for the samurai alone, a “disruptive anomaly” which damages their prestigious position sustained by the articulation of difference and the circulation of the proper. By the actor's mimetic performance—by his citation and re-citation of the meaning of power, the authenticity of the samurai's canon wryly turns into a parody, which can be more realistically (and plausibly) rewritten by the more samurai-like, manly actor. Even as a member of the lowest rank abased in a hierarchical society, the player can yet replicate the illusion of power invested by the gaze of his audience on the stage and disrupt hierarchical differences. The fact that the effect of power is infinitely reproducible by citation—by the mimetic performance of the privileged class—unsettles the single normative position assumed in the system and its evaluation as the law.

The creative yet subversive power of the fiction of Kabuki as kabuku, moreover, destabilizes the seemingly fixed meanings as truth-value and suspends “reality” outside the theater. In the space of the theater, reality and fiction interact with each other and the audience's dream seems to be substantiated beyond footlights. For the audience, is there any difference between a dream woman and womanliness masqueraded by the onnagata? The onnagata is, as Mishima Yukio exquisitely puts it, “a child born of adultery between dream and reality.”¹⁵ The theatrical space visualizes “the fantasy-scene,” in which “the desire is not fulfilled, ‘satisfied,’ but constituted (given its objects, and so on); through fantasy, we learn ‘how to desire.’”¹⁶ The fictional space of the theater or that of art thus furnishes “a privileged space, a playground at the heart of the world of culture,” where grown-ups can indulge their fantasies like children; art, from a Freudian view, is “a reconciliatory factor which disguises the ‘discontents’ of civilization, thereby helping to maintain it.”¹⁷ Art provides the privileged space of fiction to produce the particular effects of signification, bestows on us aesthetic pleasure to experience “the meaning of life,” and enables us to endure the winter of our civilization and its discontents. Saruwaka-chô, the theater-town in the aku-sho, is the space of “fiction” produced on the margin by the system to validate its order regulated by the law and social “reality.” Nonetheless, theatrical surplus or an overflow of desire constituted through fantasy exceeds the circumscription of the law, discloses a lack in “reality,” and differs and defers the effects of signification.

IV

The question of marginality also leads us to rethink that of the fictionality of gendered identity as formulated in specific historical, political, and cultural contexts. In the traditional Kabuki theater, the onnagata seems to highlight various contemporary questions, because the onnagata performs marginality—both as a player allocated to a peripheral place in the shogunal hierarchical system and as an actor who plays the roles of woman marginalized as other than man in a patriarchal society of the samurai. Through his performance of marginality, the onnagata as the ambiguously gendered other transgresses the boundary between the masculine and the feminine genders, undoes dialectical binarism, and calls into question the system of differences based on the founding separation of the sexes.

What possibilities for change can be found in the marginal case of the onnagata's position as “woman” in early modern Japanese culture? The shogunal confinement of the players in Saruwaka-chô produced a closure of the exclusive community called the Kabuki society, where the communal law was more authoritative than the shogunal law, and breaking the law meant expulsion from the community. In this enclosure, however, the players reproduced the paradoxical double of the shogunal system of hierarchical differences. Its social order was similarly founded on the basis of a violent difference of the sexes (?) between the tachiyaku (male lead) and the onnagata by way of rigid division of labor and rank. The onnagata should not aspire to distinguish himself in any part to appeal to the audience on stage but try to be modest like a character of sewa-nyûbô, a chaste, wise wife understood as the exemplarity of patience, virtue, and submissiveness.¹⁸ Even today's onnagata Kawarazaki Kunitarô (1908-1990) says that the onnagata is basically the supporting role, as if women of the feudal age led their life steadfastly in the supporting roles.¹⁹ During the Edo era, there was an agreement that only the male lead could be the head of the Kabuki company. In spite of such “sexist” allocation of the onnagata to a marginal place, three onnagata, Nakamura Tomijûrô I (1720-1786), Segawa Kikunojô III (1769-1810), and Iwai Hanshirô V (1775-1847), became the heads, due to their own artistry and political abilities, and commanded the world of Edo Kabuki. There are always already exceptions, who refuse the proper place of “woman” as the secondary role defined by patriarchal discourse.

Within the Confucian system of ethics-truth, women, particularly in the samurai class, were silenced in the name of female (self-effacing) virtue and were not allowed to push themselves forward. Nakamura Kotarô (1960-), a young contemporary onnagata, says that the aka-hime (“red-princess” who always wears a beautiful red kimono and decorative headdress) is a difficult role to play because the actor has nothing to do on stage except express graceful elegance, but that her silence—her marginal performance—creates a significant atmosphere for the play.²⁰ Conversely, Yaegiri in Komochi Yamanba (1712) and Toku and Miya in Keisei Hangonkô (1752), written first as Jôruri puppet plays by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), are famous female parts for women's elocution. Imagine a woman's speech rendered by a mute puppet. Toku in Keisei Hangonkô is well known as toto-kaka (father's mother) as the role of the wise, insightful wife, who is exceptionally allowed to get ahead of her stammering husband, to take him under the compassionate wings of the maternal feminine and protect and lead him by her eloquence and wit. (Does this celebrated toto-kaka role externalize man's clandestine desire for intrauterine-time to be embraced by the eternal maternal feminine without confronting the grim “reality” regulated by the law of the father?) In the same play, Miya, an ex-tayû (the highest-ranking courtesan), judiciously talks till the samurai inspectors are blue in the face and helps a difficult situation in the brothel with her brisk elocution. Refuting the samurai's words that the keisei (high-ranking courtesan)²¹ is only an article for sale as a sexual commodity, Miya says, “Certainly she might be the article for sale, but it is only the keisei in the world that one pays to worship as if one subscribes money to gods.” Another eloquent woman, Yaegiri in Komochi Yamanba is also an ex-tayû. Though the courtesan was excluded from the citizens' community as the marginal other and bound by a harsh contract with the brothel, perhaps she had a certain freedom outside the limits imposed upon the “ordinary” woman for procreation within the family system. Even within the male-oriented power structures of a patriarchal society, the voice of woman cannot be utterly suppressed. “When it comes to situations of this sort,” Yoshizawa Ayame (1673-1729), the first eminent onnagata, puts the matter impressively, “a woman has more that she wants to say than a man.”²²

Many of the onnagata's female roles were fictional reinscriptions of such idea(l)s of “woman” as beauty, constancy, chastity, reticence, submissiveness, and devotion, in order to endorse what it means to be a (good) woman (for the social body) and confirm the symbolic identity of “woman” within a patriarchal system of signification. The onnagata's mimetic performance, his citation and re-citation of the meaning of femininity, however, engenders “disruptive anomalies,” which are unable to be defined by the classifications of ideological female stereotypes.

In Sakura-hime Azumabunshô, written by the late Edo playwright Tsuruya Namboku IV (1755-1829) in 1817, Sakura-hime, born a princess as the reincarnation of a boy lover of the priest Seigen, is sold to the brothel by her burglar lover Gonsuke “for lessons in vulgarity” to become a suitable wife for him. Seigen's ghost haunts Sakura-hime every night, and so the brothel returns her. Sakura-hime, now Fûrin-ohime, comes back as a “different” woman with vamp-like name, hairstyle, clothing, and manner. She speaks a strange, incongruous mixture of her old, pompous courtly idiom and the vulgar dialect of the prostitute. The prostitutes had to learn their specific dialect, which transformed a poor girl with rustic accents into “a woman” fantasized in the desire-space. It is language, as Tsuruya indicates, that regulates the world of prostitutes (OH 34-35). By learning their language, Sakura-hime becomes the prostitute Fûrin-ohime. Her mixed use of the languages of the princess and of the prostitute humorously yet ironically shows the “reality” that social identity as princess or as prostitute is constituted and represented in and by language. The “games of identity” are the “games of rhetoric.”²³

Besides, Fûrin-ohime's half-failed role-play as a stereotyped vamp—her failure to fulfill social identification, either as princess or as vamp—makes a parody of female stereotypes. At the beginning of the play, Sakura-hime appears a beautiful, passive, and powerless heroine who could be molded and fashioned into any type of “woman” at her lover's disposal, but she proves herself a dangerous object of desire, who brings death to her (ex-/present) lovers as desiring subjects; she “unintentionally” kills Seigen, who forces his love upon her, while she murders Gonsuke when she discovers that he assassinated her father and brother. Sakura-hime/Fûrin-ohime is both good and evil, powerless and tough, ignorant and knowledgeable, affectionate and cruel. She inhabits the system but she is also its marginal other as outlaw. The single subject-position of woman cannot be pinned down in the chimerical space of this play, in which the role of Sakura-hime is (properly/improperly) performed, of course, by the onnagata. His/her “fe-male” identity is always divided and crossed-out in the ceaseless sliding of the signifiers of “wo-man.”

The distinctions between homosexual and heterosexual desire, between love and hatred, between the sacred and the profane, between the masculine and the feminine, and even between the sexes (Sakura-hime's reincarnation from a boy to a girl) are, moreover, radically transgressed in the relations between the holy priest Seigen, his boy lover Shiragikumaru (in Sakura-hime's previous life) and Sakura-hime, between Gonsuke and Sakura-hime.²⁴ As a distinctive writer who creates the unusual Kabuki world as kabuku on the confines of reality and dream (nightmare), life and death, beauty and grotesqueness, Tsuruya calls into question the homogeneity of the psyche and the single subject-position postulated in the system to secure its order.

V

The ambivalent positions of the marginal other suspend the logic of identity based on the dialectics of binary oppositions, and thus open up a new possibility of our relation to the other as other. The encounter with the radical other sets us confronting (our inner, marginalized) irreducible heterogeneity through the detour of the traces of alterity and learning to internalize manifold differences of the other without assimilating them to the category of the same. The conditions of possibility of our sexual being with the other must be above all taken into serious consideration, for the relation to the other would not be “a-sexual” but “sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine-masculine, beyond bi-sexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality, which come to the same thing.”²⁵ In search of “the multiplicity of sexually marked voices,”²⁶ let us now set off on our (inward/outward) voyage of discovery to learn the other's “positions: scenes, acts, figures of dissemination”²⁷ in the space of this world theater.

Notes

1. Kyoko Ogasawara, Izumo no Okuni (Tokyo, 1984), p. 40; hereafter cited in text.

2. Kyoko Ogasawara suggests that the female entertainers still performed on stage at least until 1645, especially outside Edo (see her Toshi to Gekijô: Chû-Kinsei no Chinkon, Yûgaku, Kenryoku [Tokyo, 1992], pp. 196-200).

3. Yukio Hattori, Oinaru Koya: Kinsei Toshi no Shukusai Kûkan (Tokyo, 1986), pp. 50-55.

4. The players were in medieval times itinerant performers strolling from village to town and from temple gates to fairs in the shrine precincts or by the riversides, and looked down on as outcasts or marginal others. On the other hand, since their image as strangers was closely associated with the folk belief in mare-bito (supernatural guests) who disguise themselves as humble strangers, come across the sea by boat, and bring villagers good fortune if they are hospitable enough (or otherwise, bad fortune), people treated them half in awe of the unknown and the heterogeneous.

5. Similarly in Western culture, boy and girl were not differentiated by the sartorial law between the sexes, by a strange coincidence, until the age of about seven when boys were breeched.

6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), p. 126; hereafter cited in text.

7. Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” tr. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York, 1979), p. 101; hereafter cited in text as LO.

8. I use the word “ambivalent” according to Derrida's definition of “the pharmakon,” which “constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.)” (Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson [Chicago, 1981], p. 127).

9. For a discussion of the festivity of the theater-town, see Hattori, Oinaru Koya, pp. 8-32.

10. Mine Imaizumi, Nagori no Yume, quoted in Hattori, Oinaru Koya, pp. 18-20.

11. Tamotsu Hiromatsu, Henkai no Aku-sho (Toyko, 1973), p. 55.

12. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Dennis Porter (London, 1992), p. 194.

13. Toshio Kawatake, Kabuki Eighteen Traditional Dramas, tr. Helen V. Kay (San Francisco, 1985), p. 37.

14. For a discussion on the “citational” relation between the law and a counter-law (out-law) in a “parasitical” economy, see Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” tr. Avital Ronell, Glyph: Textual Studies, 7 (1980), 202-32.

15. Yukio Mishima, “Onnagata,” tr. Donald Keene, in Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (New York, 1966), p. 145; translation modified.

16. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), p. 118.

17. Sara Kofman, Freud and Fiction, tr. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge, 1991), p. 6.

18. Tamotsu Watanabe, Onnagata Hyakushi (Tokyo, 1978), p. 154; hereafter cited in text as OH.

19. Kunitaro Kawarazaki, Onnagata Geidan (Tokyo, 1972), pp. 194-95.

20. Moriaki Watanabe, Gekijô no Yohaku ni (Tokyo, 1985), p. 230.

21. Along with the role of a wise wife, the keisei role as the eternal feminine had great significance for the onnagata's theatrical performance of femininity, for both the keisei and the onnagata were “fictitious women” molded artificially as the object of the gaze and desire in the aku-sho. For a further discussion on the fictionality of gendered identity, see Yoko Takakuwa, “Masquerading Womanliness: The Onnagata's Theatrical Performance of Femininity in Kabuki,” Women: A Cultural Review, 5, no. 2 (1994), 151-61.

22. Ayame Yoshizawa, “The Words of Ayame,” in The Actors' Analects, ed. and tr. Charles J. Dunn and Bunzo Trigoe (Tokyo, 1969), p. 55.

23. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), p. 260.

24. The identity of Gonsuke and of Seigen becomes gradually ambiguous in the process of deformation of Gonsuke's face, which comes to resemble that of Seigen, and finally half of which becomes Seigen's. (The parts of Gonsuke and Seigen are usually played by the same actor.)

25. Jacques Derrida, “Choreographies,” tr. Christie V. McDonald, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 12, no. 2 (1982), 76.

26. Derrida, “Choreographies,” 76.

27. Jacques Derrida, Positions, tr. Alan Bass (London, 1989), p. 96.