Yearning for the “West”: Osanai Kaoru and the Concept of Stand-Alone Dramas in Modern Japan

One of the founders of Japanese shingeki (“New Theater”), Osanai Kaoru (1881-1928) was a versatile and prolific writer of plays, translations, critical essays, etc., presenting various ideas critical to shingeki and modernity. Among them was his notion of dramatic texts (scripts) that were superior to - and independent of - performance. Osanai saw in the “West” shingeki's home country and requested that shingeki present theatrical productions identical to their original dramatic texts. His concept of “a-play-as-is” presupposes immediacy between texts and stage productions, bypassing performance. This “immediacy” is mediated in multiple ways. Yet not only is it unfeasible to erase “performance” completely from the equation above, Osanai's way of achieving such “immediacy” also involves complicated matters including translation, creation of the self by otherization, negotiation with the past, and a universalist/particularist aporia. This aporia remains productive for our thinking of “world literature.”