The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo by M.W. Shores (review)

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• The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo by M.W. Shores
• Alex Rogals

THE COMIC STORYTELLING OF WESTERN JAPAN: SATIRE AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN KAMIGATA RAKUGO. First Edition. By M.W. Shores. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xviii + 261 pp. Hardback, $99.99.

Expanding upon current Western scholarship on the seated traditional comedic performing art, rakugo, M.W. Shores’ The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo provides the first English-language history of the Osaka-based Kamigata rakugo (a [End Page 440] form of comic story telling) tradition. Shores’ goal is to dispel the prevailing myth that Kamigata rakugo is an inferior second to its more popular Tokyo-based brethren. Drawing on historical research and his role as a participant/observer under the tutelage of Kamigata rakugoka (rakugo performer) Hayashi Somemaru IV, Shores provides a compelling argument for how social and cultural distinctiveness plays a major role in understanding the evolution, reception and humor of Kamigata rakugo.

Cultural history plays a starring role in Shores’ approach, and he identifies Kamigata rakugo’s center, Osaka, as a culture defined by its merchant class. In the first chapter, Shores provides a brief history of the Osaka area, as well as the circumstances by which it became premodern Japan’s economic hub. While the merchants of the Edo era (1600–1868) were the lowest class in the Tokugawa shogunate’s enforced social strata, Shores positions Osaka’s distance from the shogun’s capital of Edo (now Tokyo) as a driving force for the creation of a culture very much defined by merchants and those who worked for/with them. As such, the chōnin (townsmen), play an equally vital role for Shores, as their tastes and social mobilities were quite different from those of the samurai, whose ubiquitous presence defined Edo culture. Shores posits this distance has characterized the Osaka merchant and his familiars, both past and present, as easygoing, frugal, and enterprising people.

Chapter Two provides a history of Kamigata rakugo and illustrates how comic storytelling traditions as far back the Heian Period (794–1185) served as precursors to the form. Shores draws attention to the fact that outdoor performances comingled with variety-act street performances to establish the tradition of Kamigata storytelling. This, in turn, became a primarily outdoor affair, as well as an event which storytellers (at first) and their rakugoka successors drew on a variety of artistic skills. This outdoor, variety-act format, Shores argues, was in direct conflict with Tokyo-based rakugo traditions, which prefer a performer telling an unembellished story. Shores posits this may be the reason for why Kamigata rakugo has been traditionally viewed as inferior. This chapter also provides brief biographies of some of Kamigata rakugo’s founding fathers and emphasizes how difficulty in finding an indoor performance space (an official Kamigata rakugo performance space was not established until 2006) further contributed to Kamigata’s signature style. As performers were required to capture the attention of passerby spectators, the ability to innovate and provide something original was of paramount concern for Kamigata rakugoka.

Chapter Three examines primary differences between Kamigata and Tokyo rakugo. Shores builds on previous chapters through pointed [End Page 441] examples of Kamigata rakugo stories that reinforce his assertions about the primary role of merchant culture in Kamigata rakugo narratives. He identifies stock characters, all of whom are either merchants, working for merchants, or related chōnin. Shores also highlights the important role of strong female characters in these stories, as well, and notes that another prevailing feature of Kamigata rakugo is how all its characters have individual agency not typical of the Tokyo traditions. Central to these freedoms is that Kamigata rakugo is more hade—that is to say loud, showy, flamboyant–than its Tokyo counterpart. Shores notes that this can be seen not only in the varied talents of the rakugoka, but also in the use of musical accompaniment and singing, in flashy kimonos worn, and in wild gesticulations of performers that were (and are) deemed too inappropriate in Tokyo traditions. This embracing of hade, Shores proposes, has mistakenly been characterized as low-class, when in...