著者

中村 哲郎

出版者

国文学研究資料館

雑誌

国際日本文学研究集会会議録 = PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE (ISSN:ISSN0387)

巻号頁・発行日

no.3, pp.55-64, 1980-02-01

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The contact of kabuki and Westerners started long ago at the end of the sixteenth century. And then after the opening of Japan to the West towards the end of the nineteenth century, the art form that the average Westerner first knew as “the theater of Japan“ was kabuki―not noh, a formalized art form with a limited audience, one for the ruling classes.However, the Western intellectuals who visited Japan in the mid-Meiji period and saw both kabuki and noh and then evaluated their quality as art forms leaned overwhelmingly towards noh, and in the twentieth century this tendency became ever more pronounced. Even within Japan, in the late Meiji periud opinions such as N atsume Soseki’s famous pro-noh and anti-kabuki stand were heard. He wrote,“I don’t hesitate to declare a performance vulgar. In contrast to this, noh can be thought of as creating a pure world separate from this everyday mundane one; it is played honestly and straightforwardly.”Thus East and West displayed a united front in this matter.In this paper the author has examined why this should have been so. In their first encounter with modern Westerners neither kabuki ―emblematic of the Edo popular arts― nor the bunraku puppet theater nor Japanes traditional music and dance gave rise to such fervent and devoted admirers as those for noh like Fenollosa or Perry. It is safe to say that, in comparison with the case of noh, there was not even one single Western intellectual in the modern age who truly loved kabuki wholeheartedly. We can probably attribute this to modern Western man, with his yardstick of individualism for judging art , finding it difficult to grasp the essence of many aspects of a riotous popular theater form like Kabuki and thereby being unable to have a genuine spiritual response to it. In this way, a substantial enconter between kabuki and modern Westerners has had to wait until recent times. It is only very recently that some Western recearchers in the dramatic arts have come to realize the fundamental character of noh and kabuki: if noh is Grecian and Apollonian , then kabuki is Roman and Dionysian.Even today a fixed attitude of disdain towards kabuki remains among a minority of intellectuals in the West, and this can be considered as one cause of the disparity that can be seen in both quality and quantity between noh research and that into kabuki in the West today and of the scanty numbers of speciali sts in Edo literature as well.