CJS Noon Lecture Series | Against the Mystery of Kabuki Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering

"Why are we made to remember Yamada Isuzu (1917-2012) exclusively as a film star? Certainly, Yamada was an internationally renowned actor featured in films by such directors as Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Kurosawa. She also worked, as an onnagata, with topnotch kabuki-theater actors. One of the Japanese traditional theater forms, kabuki is an all-male theater, and onnagata actors play women's roles in it. Yamada performed alongside mainstream, male kabuki actors, and her performance was praised by kabuki-theater critics very highly, sometimes even described as having 'considerable presence as the leading onnagata.' Why does Yamada's outstanding stage career have to be hidden from our eyes? Behind it is a long-lasting mystery about onnagata."

MAKI ISAKA teaches Japanese theater, premodern literature, and gender studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has published on the the philosophy of premodern Japanese arts, the “New Theater” movement in modern Japan, and gender and onnagata on the kabuki stage. She is the author of Secrecy in Japanese Arts: "Secret Transmission" as a Mode of Knowledge (Palgrave, 2005) and Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater (University of Washington Press, 2016).