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SPIRITS OF ANOTHER SORT: THE PLAYS OF IZUMI KYOKA. By M. Cody Poulton. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001. xv + 346 pp.; ill. $60
Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), best known as a writer of fiction, occupies a liminal position in the hierarchy of important twentieth-century Japanese playwrights. Indeed many of his stories proved so inherently dramatic that others adapted them for the shinpa theatre (and films) where they became representative of the repertoire. But the plays he himself wrote experienced less success in the practical theatre of the Meiji, Taisha, and early Showa periods; few were produced following their publication and their unusual theatrical values only gained respect and admiration years after the author's death. Some remain unperformed. Until recently, Kyoka was little known in the West. But in 1998 Charles Inouye published The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), Japanese Novelist and Playwright, and now M. Cody Poulton presents an even more focused study in Spirits of Another Sort, where he concentrates on Kyoka's dramaturgy.
Poulton, who bases this work on his doctoral research, provides a cogent analysis and defense of Kyoka as a playwright (and of shinpa as a dramatic form). The dramatist's melodramatic, fantastical, and even bizarre plays -fourteen originals and eight adapted from his novels, all written almost entirely within Taisho-were not considered important in their day; they did not fit comfortably within the repertories of either shinpa or shingeki, the preeminent dramatic forms of early modern twentieth-century Japanese theatre. Nor might one consider them as shin (modern) kabuki, despite their use of certain kabuki conventions....