Legend of the 47 Ronin and All their Friends and Relatives and Acquaintances, Parts VII-XI

We're all about the culture over here in Japan. So far, we've been to see bunraku puppet theater, noh theater (good for all of your "Who's On First?"-style comedic skit needs), a ryokan, numerous onsen, and a Maid Cafe. All of these classic Japanese cultural touchstones have been extremely well attended by Japanese people, if not enthusiastically so: Jenn has informed me that most of the crowd at the noh theater slept through it. The point is, people here make an effort to experience culture! Even if they find it stultifyingly boring, they go anyway, usually dressed in kimono, because that's just what you do.

In contrast, American Culture is a rather sketchy thing. For most Americans, culture is one of those things that happens to other people: sure, sure, there are art museums, operas, concerts, movie theaters, and malls. The thing is, most of these are also available in other countries, and the average trip to an American art museum or classical music concert will be a showcase of European works with a smattering of American and "world" (i.e., everywhere else) exhibits. They have art museums, operas, concerts (we've seen four punk bands and four ska bands in the last few months), movie theaters (usually playing American movies), malls, and KFCs here, too. I'm not saying there are no uniquely American art forms, but when was the last time you went to a jazz club or an improv comedy show because that's just what you do? [/tangent]

So, in order to gain a deeper understanding of Japan and Japanese people, Jenn and I attended a kabuki performance earlier this week. In the end, we confirmed what we had known pretty much all along: Japanese people are crazy.

(A quick side note: with this blog post, I'm walking on some familiar territory that hopefully will stay a few steps away from Shameless Rip-Off Land. Dave Barry already covered kabuki pretty thoroughly in his masterwork of cross-cultural dialogue. I will attempt to stray from stealing from him too much; I got over my wanting-to-be-Dave-Barry phase shortly before I resumed wanting to be a pirate.)

The play that we saw was called Kanadehon Chūshingura. Actually, technically, that's not true; our show began at 4:30, and we found out upon buying our programs that we had signed up for the second half of a series of selected acts from Kanadehon Chūshingura. The people we had seen pouring out of the theater at 4:15 were just getting out of the first half, which started at 11 a.m. Clearly, we were in for the long haul. Even more incredible is the fact that this was a 4:30 show on a Tuesday and there wasn't an empty seat in the theater.

Kabuki represents a very specific, highly stylized part of Japanese performance tradition involving period costumes, painted faces, and exaggerated poses:

Specifically, the goofy part of Japanese performance tradition. If they got a dozen more people on stage at once, it would have been a full-fledged ska concert.

Actually, "goofy" has some historical accuracy; the word kabuki has its etymological roots in the verb that translates as "to be out of the ordinary," and the aesthetic of kabuki dress and manner is based on a 16th-century group of itinerant, oddly-dressed thugs who posed as samurai and acted in an outrageous, eccentric fashion (sort of like theatrical productions by the SCA or Klingon Hamlet, if you will).

Klingons were actually on my mind pretty often during Chūshingura; the plot, based on actual historical events with the names and era changed (yes, like Law and Order!), concerned a group of samurai who seek to avenge their lord who was made to commit ritual suicide by the unscrupulous actions of a rival nobleman. I found the focuses of the various acts to be really interesting from a narrative perspective: it's a basic revenge story at its core, so I expected approximately a Kill Bill-type story arc, where we see the conspirators arm themselves, make their way to their target, and surmount one obstacle after another in their relentless pursuit of their goal. Here's a summary of the acts that we were able to see:

• Act VII: The head samurai diverts suspicion from the revenge conspiracy by hanging out with geishas all day and pretending to get tanked. Meanwhile, the play's comic relief tries to get the protagonist to let him join the conspiracy, and the protagonist tries to kill a geisha who overhears their plotting.

• Act VIII: Dancing.
  
  
• Act IX, which resolves most of the plotlines of the ancillary characters that we've been listening to for hours: Not performed.
  
  
• Act X: The conspirators take time off from their busy schedule to construct an extremely elaborate test of loyalty for the merchant from whom they bought their weapons. Hey, even insatiable engines of vengeance need to have some fun, right?
  
  
• Act XI: They storm the castle, kill the evil dude and live happily ever after.

The ending diverges slightly from the historical events: the original conspirators didn't so much "live happily ever after" as "kill themselves." But after 11 hours sitting in theater seats, the management knew that there would probably be a riot if they kept too close to the facts (especially since sake and beer were sold in the lobby).

The highlight of the production was probably the kid they got to play the merchant's 4-year-old son, mostly because I was able to understand his lines (like "お父さん！こわい！", "Dad! Scary!"). Also, he looked as bored as most of the audience. B+.