Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

[faith]

Lorenzo,
   
  The blank page is not shown to the audience in the kabuki play (I do not know about the Noh), altho' it is clearly understood to be blank, and the narration may even tell us it is blank, I would have to check the script for that.  In 30 years' watching kabuki I have never seen any actor show the
 audience the blank page, including Danjuro, who otherwise occasionally does non-standard business.  This is why one is unlikely to find a visible blank page in any kabuki woodblock prints, as someone else has mentioned:  woodblock prints are generally accurate records of contemporary onstage
 business.
   
  Altho' I have seen Danjuro play Benkei many times live, I have not yet seen the DVD to which Sarah refers.  [Do we speak of the same play?  Kanjincho is not part of a "whole play" but is an independent one-scene show which runs an hour or so.]  So I checked with a colleague who did the
 English-track commentary for the Kabuki-za DVD series and is something of a specialist on this particular play; he confirms Danjuro does not show the audience the blank page.  It is, of course, just within the realm of possibility that in some filmed version somewhere the cameraman has chosen to
 film the scene at an odd angle, modern "Cinema-Kabuki"style, in which he makes the blank side visible especially to the film audience: I have not seen such a thing, but it could happen, in which case it would be a personal (Kurosawaesque) decision by the film director, and rather a naughty one at
 that, which goes quite against the visual idiom of kabuki.  If anyone has a film like this, it is a fascinating anomaly which I would love to see!
   
  Please allow me also to point out, regarding your point of Yoshitsune looking like"a maiden dressing up," that it is standard kabuki custom to have an onnagata female role specialist play Yoshitsune in Kanjincho.  Altho' Yoshitsune is male, his dramatic incarnations tend to be on the androgynous
 side.  This is less than accurate according to what we know of the real Yoshitsune, but there are historical as well as cultural reasons for his image developing this way in dramatic narrative.  So on that score Kurosawa would be following established dramatic precedent in "feminizing"
 Yoshitsune's image... which might make it less than entirely a "lie?"  I would be happy to give you more information on this point if you like, or direct you to sources which discuss it.
   
  May I suggest you actually see the kabuki Kanjincho, on which Tiger's Tail is so closely based, before publishing about it so you will be conversant with the visual details?  Feel free to contact me offlist if you need a disc, or any further information about kabuki, which is my academic
 speciality.
   
  Best regards
  Faith Bach (D.Phil., Oxon.)     
  Kwansei Gakuin Univ.
   
   
 
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