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ACTING LIKE A WOMAN IN MODERN JAPAN: THEATRE, GENDER, AND NATIONALISM. By Ayako Kano. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 322 pp.; ill. Hardcover $65.00; paper $24.95
Ayako Kano's impressive and provocative study of the emergence of the Japanese actress and the birth of shingeki (new theatre) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is in many ways two books, each foregrounding the career of a major female performer. The first focuses on Kawakami Sadayakko (1871-1946), emphasizing what Kano terms "straightening" the theatre as part of the national project of Japanese modernization. The second highlights Matsui Sumako (1886-1919) and the transformation of Japanese theatre from a primarily visual and sensual art to what Derrida calls a "theatre of logos." While certainly intertwined by the concepts of gender and performativity, the two parts have somewhat differing theoretical underpinnings and historical perspectives, so that it is possible to read and fully comprehend them separately. Although this fact does not diminish the book's considerable value, it might have been helpful if it had been promoted as a pair of related monographs rather than a single argument.
Kano skillfully intermingles meticulous research in primary sources, Japanese criticism, and Western theory. She aims to uncover "the historicity of the essentialist definition of...Japanese 'womanhood' as unchanging and continuous" in order to "move beyond the assumption of such an unchanging and transhistorical femininity" (p. 10). She does this by carefully providing evidence for her two key points: first, that in Japan "the modern formation of the category of 'woman' is closely related to that of the category of 'citizen' of the modern nation-state"; second, that in the development of modern Japanese theatre "the construction of gender and of nationhood proceeded simultaneously" (pp. 10-11). Kano deftly presents key debates that flourished during the Meiji era (1868-1912)....