Meiji Kabuki

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title
This book is an annotated collection of English-language documents by foreigners writing about Japan's kabuki theatre in the half-century after the country was opened to the West in 1853. Using memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters, and reference books, it contains all significant writing about kabuki by foreigners-resident or transient-during the Meiji period (1868-1912), well before the first substantial non-Japanese book on the subject was published. Its chronologically organized chapters contain detailed introductions. Twenty-seven authors, represented by edited versions of their essays, are supplemented by detailed summaries of thirty-five others. The author provides insights into how Western visitors-missionaries, scholars, diplomats, military officers, adventurers, globetrotters, and even a precocious teenage girl-responded to a world-class theatre that, apart from a tiny number of pre-Meiji encounters, had been hidden from the world at large for over two centuries. It reveals prejudices and misunderstandings, but also demonstrates the power of great theatre to bring together people of differing cultural backgrounds despite the barriers of language, artistic convention, and the very practice of theatergoing. And, in Ichikawa Danjuro IX, it presents an actor knowledgeable foreigners considered one of the finest in the world.

Samuel L. Leiter is professor emeritus of theater at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Part I: Overview
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: A Brief Survey of Meiji Kabuki
Part II: The 1860s
Chapter 3: From Japan through American Eyes (1859; 1860), by Francis Hall
Chapter 4: From Ten Weeks in Japan: "Japanese Drama" (1860), by Rev. George Smith
Chapter 5: From Japan through American Eyes (1861; 1862), by Francis Hall
Chapter 6: From the Capital of the Tycoon: "Osaca" (1862), by Si Rutherford Alcock
Chapter 7: From A Lady's Visit to Manila and Japan (1862) by Anna D'Almeida
Chapter 8: "Japanese Theaters" (1864), by Humbert Aimé
Chapter 9: From A Diplomat in Japan (1866?), by Sir Ernest Satow
Chapter 10: More from the 1860s, by Jacob Mortimer Silver, R. Mountenney Jephson, and Edward Pennell Elmhirst
Part III: 1870s
Chapter 11: From Japanese Episodes: "A Day in a Japanese Theatre" (1872), by Edward H. House
Chapter 12: From Clara's Diary: "Kabuki-the Japanese Theater" (1876), by Clara A.N. Whitney
Chapter 13: From Japan Day by Day: "The Theatre" (18