All Japanese

Before I get to the main attraction (i.e., Rokumeikan), let me take a moment to consider the other plays presented at the Fujigaya drama festival. The first point worth noting (as Kazusa does while reading the flyer) is that all the plays are Japanese in origin and on Japanese themes (SBF, 3:10).

This contrasts with the previous year, when (as I previously wrote) the plays seemed “designed to avoid as much as possible anything that hints of transgression … through productions that are isolated in time and place from modern Japan, and thus avoid direct commentary on contemporary Japanese society.” None of this year’s plays take place in modern Japan, but a play like Rokumeikan is certainly more relevant to contemporary Japanese society than Wuthering Heights.

What about the other two? The Bamboo Cutter is based on a thousand-year-old Japanese folktale (Taketori monogatari), also known as The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Kaguya-hime no monogatari), about an old childless couple who discover a baby in a stalk of bamboo and raise her as their own. As she grows to become a young woman, she is beset by suitors, including the emperor, but refuses them all and is eventually carried away to the moon to rejoin her people.

The Bamboo Cutter seems simply a charming tale fit for elementary school students. But as Caroline Cao points out, it can be interpreted as implicitly criticizing a father driven by “patriarchal obsessions” to seek social status for himself through his daughter’s marriage. “Had Kaguya’s father not been oblivious to her evident pain and so presumptuous of her welfare, perhaps Kaguya would have lived happily in an earthly life … away from the greed of men seeking to make a wife out of her.”¹

The Izu Dancer (Izu no odoriko) is a more modern tale, based on a 1926 short story by the famous Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata. Better known in the West as “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” the story was an early highlight in a career that eventually saw Kawabata win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

“The Dancing Girl of Izu” has been translated into English by Edward Seidensticker² and later by J. Martin Holman.³ (The Holman translation is supposedly more faithful to the Japanese, but I think the Seidensticker translation reads better as English.) The Wikipedia article for the story calls it “a lyrical and elegiac memory of early love,” but to my Western eye it’s also more than a bit creepy.

Why might I think that? Let’s look at a summary of the plot (from an anonymous contributor to Answers.com): “The nineteen year old narrator, an introspective student on a holiday from an upper class school in Tokyo, … meets and becomes infatuated with a young dancer in a traveling family of entertainers. At first he feels a vague erotic attraction to her. But when he sees her in the nude in a public bath, he realizes that she is still a [thirteen-year-old] child, still pure and innocent. This changes his feelings for her to a loving brother-like protector. He is accepted by and becomes close to the family. … At the end the narrator and the little dancer part with the promise that they will meet again. Yet we understand, as the narrator seems to realize, that this will never happen; this sweet tender moment in life has passed, and the love they feel is impossible.”⁴

(The Seidensticker version gives the student’s and the girl’s ages as nineteen and thirteen respectively, the Holman version as twenty and fourteen. I presume this is because Holman is literally translating ages written according to the older Japanese system, in which a child is considered to be one year old at birth and their age increases by one year at every New Year.)

On the one hand, one could agree with critic Mark Morris that this is a story “about cleansing, purification … [a] narrative vision that … generates impulses of release, near jouissance, by means of an effacement of adult female sexuality and its replacement by an impossible white void of virginity ….,” and see it as a worthy literary accomplishment.⁵ On the other hand, if one is familiar with the many anime and manga featuring prepubescent “waifus” worshiped for their purity and innocence then the story can be a bit harder to take.

So, how has The Dancing Girl of Izu been able to inspire at least six films, three television dramas, and (in Sweet Blue Flowers) an adaptation for the stage deemed suitable for a production by middle schoolers in a stodgy girl’s academy? Some adaptations side-step the implications of the plot by aging the dancing girl up. For example, in the 1933 silent film version, the girl’s age goes unmentioned, and the twenty-four-year-old star Kinuyo Tanaka is hard to mistake for a minor.⁶

Other adaptations age the student down, as the Fujigaya production presumably does. And some may not care, just as many people watching the anime adaptation of Sailor Moon don’t seem to care that thirteen-year-old Usagi Tsukino has a boyfriend who’s a university student.

The more interesting question is, does Takako Shimura care? I have no way of knowing. But I will repeat what I have written multiple times now, that Sweet Blue Flowers seems to implicitly endorse relationships between equals (Akira and Fumi, Orie and Hinako) relative to relationships between those unequal in age or other aspects (Chizu and Fumi, Yasuko and Fumi, and Ko and Kyoko). So from that point of view, I hope you’ll forgive me if I interpret Shimura’s reference to The Izu Dancer as a subtle hint that contemporary Japanese society still has some issues when it comes to young girls and older guys.