Actors' Analects

Actor's Analects

Yoshizawa Ayame I in an illustration from the book Amayo no Sanbai Kigen (1693). The woodblock-printed characters on the right side are the actor's name.
Author Sugi Kuhee, Tominaga Heibee, Fukuoka Yagoshirō, Kaneko Kichizaemon
Original title 役者論語 (Yakusha Rongo)
Translator Charles Dunn and Bunzō Torigoe
Country Japan
Language Japanese
Subject Kabuki
Publication date
1776, perhaps earlier
Published in English
1969
Media type Woodblock printed bound volume
ISBN 0-231-03391-5
OCLC 8388222
792/.0952/18
LC Class PN2924.5.K3 H3 1969

The Actors' Analects (役者論語, Yakusha Rongo) is a collection of 17th and early 18th century writings on the practice and aesthetics of acting in Japan's kabuki theatre form, compiled during or around the Genroku era (1688-1704). Though not providing much direct information about the origins or history of the development of kabuki in prior periods, the works collected were written at a time when many of the standards of kabuki were being established and formalized; the work thus reflects the philosophies and aesthetics of one of kabuki's most formative periods. One of the earliest extant versions was originally published in 1776, as a set of woodblock printed books in four volumes. It is unclear whether the Analects were printed as a collection before this time, but references to the "seven writings" indicate that the works were considered together as a group, even if they were not published in such a fashion, since their creation in the early 18th century.

Some of the works collected in the Analects were also printed separately, or along with other works, such as scripts for non-kabuki plays, or various other writings on advice for actors and the like. Some of these separate printings indicate that the versions found in the collected Analects are either incomplete versions, or evolved, revised versions of the original works.

The English-language title derives from the fact that 論語 (Rongo in Japanese) is the original Chinese name for what is known in English as the Analects of Confucius.

Sections

Another, related, element discussed in this section is that of balancing fiction and reality onstage. Unlike Western theatre, kabuki does not seek to represent reality photographically, but rather to create a fantastic, larger-than-life world anchored in reality. Sugi's paradoxical statement that "the realism of a play springs from fiction; if a comic play is not based on real life, it is unnatural" summarizes this concept.
Aside from focusing solely on acting and roles themselves, this section and others also deal with the attitudes and behavior of actors in general, in regards to the audience and to their fellow actors. They advise against upstaging other actors and turning the drama into a competition; they also advise against not giving one's all due to the presence of a smaller audience. However, the Analects also caution against the opposite. Actors should not allow themselves to be entirely subsumed in an ensemble, and must strive to make a name for themselves. They must also seek to adapt every performance to the audience. This ties into another key difference between kabuki and Western theatre; kabuki never seeks to reproduce a performance exactly as it is written nor exactly as it was performed in the past. Every performance is a new creative endeavor.
In this section, he also describes a number of different types of women roles, and the approaches an actor must have towards them. He describes, for example, the fine balance in playing a samurai's wife or another warrior woman between being proficient in combat but not seeming too masculine, as well as the keen differences between the roles of a samurai's wife, a commoner's wife, and different types or ranks of courtesans.
Ayame was famously successful for playing alongside Sakata Tōjūrō, who specialized in male leads, and elaborates on many of the same points as Sugi's "One Hundred Items" and Tōjūrō's "Dust in the Ears."

References

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