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“A
comprehensive study . . . the book appeals to those studying
theater, comparative literature, or Japanese culture.” “Spirits
of Another Sort establishes M. Cody Poulton as an erudite scholar of the
very difficult Japanese writer Izumi Kyoka. . . . The study
fills a gap in the limited English-language studies, is a significant
contribution to the field, and is a reference useful for teachers and
students alike. Alongside its translation and discussion of plays, the
study’s broad sweep traverses an impressive selection of Kyoka’s early
nondramatic fiction, essays, and biographical data. . . .
The study is . . . encyclopedic in its breadth.” “In
addition to his outstanding analyses of the plays as dramatic literature,
Poulton offers highly readable (and well-annotated) translations of three
plays. [Spirits of Another Sort] deserves an honored spot on the slowly
growing shelf of Western books about distinguished dramatists of the
modern Japanese theatre.” Izumi
Kyoka (1873-1939), though admired by younger writers such as Akutagawa,
Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, had a predilection for the richly
figurative and supernatural that seemed not only irrelevant to the
concerns of modern life but an affront to the social and psychological
realism that became the common currency of both literature and theater in
modern Japan. Believing in beauty and truth and in language’s mystical
evocation of experience, Kyoka sought for a way to reinvest the world with
a kind of magic that he felt was being lost. Although better known as a
novelist, Kyoka also wrote a large number of original plays, and his work
has continued to be adapted for the stage and screen. With the passage of
time, two divergent images of this writer have emerged: Kyoka the author
of dated Meiji melodramas, and Kyoka the eccentric genius who explored the
possibilities of language and alternate realities. How are we to reconcile
these images? Spirits
of Another Sort, the first work in any language to focus on Izumi
Kyoka’s career as a playwright, argues that the dramas reveal, in an
often unmitigated fashion, the writer’s romanticism, his belief in the
occult, his aversion to contemporary society, and his idiosyncratic but
powerful ethical and aesthetic ideals. In an attempt to create a
dramaturgy of the sacred from the dregs of the past, Kyoka’s plays
resemble the work of Maeterlinck or even Artaud. Spirits
of Another Sort is a literary-critical study that traces the development
of Kyoka’s work from the melodramatic formulas of his early ideological
fiction to the increasingly grotesque and fantastic permutations of the
original pattern in his plays of the Taisho€ era. It is important
reading for those whose interests lie in Japanese literature, theater, and
film and in cross-cultural theater and film. Published by Center
for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan |
