Takarazuka Time

It’s time for the cultural festival, that staple of manga and anime set in high schools. However, the point of this festival isn’t the festival per se, but the plays within it, put on by the Fujigaya drama club.

The school play is a frequently appearing element in Takako Shimura’s work. It serves as a source of, well, drama, but more specifically, is used to put the characters into situations that allow them to imagine themselves as they wish to be, or show how others perceive them. Recall, for example, the performance of Romeo and Juliet in Wandering Son, in which Shuichi envisions herself in (but does not get) the part of Juliet.¹

Unlike Matsuoka (where the drama club consists only of Fumi’s three friends), at Fujigaya the drama club is a long-standing institution (“they take it very seriously,” Akira tells Fumi) that includes at least a couple of dozen students. The three divisions of Fujigaya each put on a production: The Little Prince, Little Women, and (for the high school) Wuthering Heights. The first two are interesting if only for their titles (“princes” and “little women” being a theme here, as we’ll see), but the main focus is on Wuthering Heights (SBF, 1:74).

The play, and the casting of Yasuko Sugimoto in the male role of Heathcliff, evoke the Takarazuka Revue, an all-woman musical theater group formed in the early twentieth century (the same period that saw the creation and popularization of the Class S genre). To ensure readers get the connection, Shimura has the characters twice explicitly reference the Revue (SBF, 1:55, 1:241).²

The image of the Takarazuka Revue in Japanese popular culture is multi-faceted and shot through with ambiguity, with the Revue “the focus of heated debates about the construction and performance of gender.”³ It embodies a tension between the idea of women performing a male role for entertainment and instruction and the idea of women behaving in stereotypically masculine ways (including having women as romantic and sexual partners) as part of their core identity.

The Takarazuka Revue was founded as a corporate venture (to promote tourism and sell railroad tickets) and remains such today. It was and is motivated to conform to both popular ideals and government policy dictating the proper roles of men and women in society. The theory was that “by performing as men, females learned to understand and appreciate males and the masculine psyche [so that] when they eventually retired from the stage and married … they would be better able to perform as ‘good wives, wise mothers,’ knowing exactly what their husbands expected of them.”⁴

However, at the same time, a large part of the attraction of Takarazuka productions to their mainly female audience is the frisson of seeing women act in non-feminine ways both socially and sexually: “female fans of all ages, classes, and educational levels do not see a man on stage, but rather acknowledge a female body performing in a capacity that transgresses the boundaries of received femininity.”⁵

This history of tension and conflicting visions of women’s place replays itself in Sweet Blue Flowers. As a traditional educational institution, Fujigaya’s mission is to prepare women for their “proper” place in Japanese society. The Wuthering Heights production and other plays are intended as socially-approved entertainment and instruction suitable for students and their parents. As such, they are designed to minimize anything that hints of transgression.

That strategy is implemented in large part through productions that are isolated in time and place from modern Japan, and thus avoid direct commentary on contemporary Japanese society: Wuthering Heights in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England, Little Women in mid-nineteenth-century America, and The Little Prince in a French-influenced science-fictional setting. (See also the ubiquity of Takarazuka productions in foreign historical settings, most notably The Rose of Versailles, set in late-eighteenth-century France.)

But despite Fujigaya’s “official” intent regarding these all-girls plays, unofficially they evoke similar responses to Takarazuka productions: the students ooh and aah over the poster showing Yasuko in a glamorous pose as Heathcliff, take and exchange photographs of “Heathcliff” and “Catherine” in romantic poses, and speculate whether they’ll kiss (SBF, 1:210–11).

Like the S relationships discussed in previous chapters, this aspect of Fujigaya productions remains universally known and discussed but never officially acknowledged, let alone accepted or endorsed. Given Shimura’s love of plays as devices to drive the plot and highlight themes, we’ll undoubtedly see more of them in future volumes of Sweet Blue Flowers. It will be interesting to see whether and how these productions depart from the standard Takarazuka template.