ABSTRACT
When Hasegawa Shiguré wrote her first play for a Tokyo newspaper contest in 1905, the richness and vitality of Japanese theatrical performance not only sustained traditional dramatic forms but also encouraged experiments in the more realistic dramatization of contemporary problems and situations. The performance arts at the turn of the century included a standard repertoire of Kabuki plays staged and acted almost as they had been for two hundred years, new melodramas (shimpa), modern plays (shingeki) strongly influenced by western theater, and productions of translated works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov. But within this variety, Kabuki still dominated; its familiar plots, lush costumes, stunning make-up, and extravagant style secured the form's popularity against serious competition from newer kinds of drama. Intellectual writers famous for their prose but amateurs in the world of Japanese performance attempted fresh plays for the Kabuki theater, dramas that reflected their interest in the unified structure and theatrical realism of the West. The most famous of the literati who participated in the revision of popular Japanese drama was the critic and scholar Tsubouchi Sh y (all names are given according to Japanese convention, surname first). His academic study of western drama and translations of Shakespeare's complete works transformed Tsubouchi (1859– 1935) into an innovator who championed reform in Kabuki action and characterization, and a pioneer in the development of modern drama in Japan. It is not surprising then that he was the judge for the Yomiuri newspaper contest that prompted Hasegawa to write Kaich ’on (The Sound of the Morning Sea). More remarkable is that the dean of literary critics in the almost entirely male realm of Japanese theater recognized the emerging talent of a woman in her twenties with little formal education and no pretensions to the aesthetic conventions of western drama. Hasegawa Shiguré's work was striking, despite its flaws, because it expressed, for the first time within the dramatic structure of the Kabuki theater, the emotional conflicts of women in a patriarchal society.
