AKIMOTO Matsuyo (1911-2001) was the doyenne of postwar Japanese drama and one of Japan's greatest modern playwrights. This essay examines four of her most important plays, not in the order they were written, but chronologically according to their subject matter. The Life of Muraoka Iheiji (1960) is set in the late 19th century; Mourning Clothes (1949) takes place in the immediate postwar period; Kaison the Priest of Hitachi (1964) spans the period from the end of the war to the early 1960s; and Meditation on Our Lady of Scabs (1969) concerns the mid-1960s. The common theme in all of these plays is the Japanese people's continuing (and continually frustrated) quest for salvation. This essay argues that what unites Akimoto's work is her consistent attempt to show how the Japanese, in a variety of ways and despite the vicissitudes of history—from imperialism and war to recovery and prosperity—have sought to give their lives meaning and achieve some sort of personal salvation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, KISHIDA Rio mainly focused on how the Emperor system affected Japanese women. However, in the 1990s, through collaborations with artists from other Asian countries, she extended her focus to non-Japanese Asian women who had been subjugated by Japan's colonial policy during the first half of the twentieth century. Bridging these two foci is Tsui no Sumika Kari no Yado (1988), a play about Kawashima Yoshiko, a Chinese princess in the Qing dynasty, who was adopted by a Japanese couple. This paper examines the way that women and the Emperor system are portrayed in this play, and how that contributes to our understanding of gender and nationality.

The theatrical company Bluebird is an all-female troupe that was the first in the history of the alternative theatre in Japan. “Ichidō Rei,” which literally means “Everyone, bow!” is not a personal name but the collective name for all the women in the troupe, who share the functions of playwright, director, and actress in their productions. Their creation method is very unusual. They start their works by brainstorming. “What interests you most now?” “How happy do you want to make the play?” “What do you want to do on the stage?” “What scenes do you have in mind?” Once these general matters are decided, discussion moves to the theme and plot of the play. Dialogue-making comes last and is the product of improvisation. I verified this in Itsuka mita Natsu no Omoide (Memories of a Summer Long Past, 1986), which was actually composed with this “Bluebird Method.” I conclude that this play is one of the best expressions of the main theatrical characteristic of the 1980s, when “(child's) play” was the centerpiece of plays.

Nagai Ai, a representative contemporary Japanese playwright, says that her theatre is, as it were, “conventional theatre.” By “conventional” she means not only the ordinary and normal qualities of her work, but also the traditional style or method of so-called naturalism that characterized orthodox modern Japanese theatre (shingeki), which was regarded as old-fashioned by both critics the younger generation in the 1970s and 1980s. This article points out some of the important characteristics of Nagai's “conventional theatre” by analyzing mainly three plays: Kazuo, The Three Sisters of the Hagi Family, and Hello, Mother. They depict ordinary Japanese people; the scenes are set in typical Japanese spaces of daily life; and the basic structure of each play reflects ordinary Japanese ways of life under contemporary social conditions. These characteristics function together in her plays and give her comedies allegorical touches.

The playwright Kisaragi Koharu's (1956-2000) career charts the trajectory of a woman carving out a new subject-position as a playwright and the leader of an experimental theatre company in the late twentieth century. Kisaragi is well-known for her postmodern sense of discontinuity and her “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Her incredulity was directed toward the notion of identity, and her early works contain breathtaking theatrical maneuverings of plots that reflect identity as a narrative construct. This sense of incredulity resonates with the postmodernity in Kisaragi's work, and it is also derived from Kisaragi's anxiety about her subject-position as woman, as a playwright, and as company leader, roles which had conventionally been reserved for men in the theatre up to the 1970s. Kisaragi spoke in double voices. Her dominant narratives focus on the problems in consumer society, interpersonal communication, identity formation, the dysfunctional nuclear family, and the role of art and artist in modern Japanese society. She also portrayed muted narratives under the surface that show the anxiety and despair of feminine voices that have been suppressed. Kisaragi's works demonstrates the playwright's constant endeavor to rupture and deconstruct narratives of self, modernity, and gender, creating and carving out a subject position for herself as woman playwright in modern theatre.

The 1980s were the time when “history” came to an end and “narrative” was deconstructed. Writers did not rely on the unity of plot or character but expressed themselves through the rearrangement of fragmented scenes. Watanabe Eriko's drama is an example of such an attempt.

With the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, many women playwrights such as Megan Terry, Ntozake Shange, Maria Irene Forness, and Adrienne Kennedy began to search for new forms and language for the feminist theatre. Revolting against the established masculine form of the theatre, these feminist playwrights abandoned the linear plot and consistency in storytelling, and instead brought together fragmented or unrelated episodes as a collage. In the 1980s, feminism itself came to be questioned and altered: Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein focused on the mother-daughter relationship in their naturalistic plays and received Pulitzer Prizes, while more radical (mostly lesbian and ethnic) feminists began to present their experimental work at their own community theatres by deconstructing the stark realities of their sexuality. More recently, women-of-color writers are endeavoring to bring new voices to the American feminist theatre, which I hope will help the present rigid and narrow society after 9/11 to open up, bringing forth peace to society.

As a consequence of the social changes brought about during the 1980s, a new perspective on the role of women in theatre began to emerge. Subsequently, in 1988, several Latin American women decided to join the Magdalena Project, a worldwide network of women in contemporary theatre. Female dramatists such as Griselda Gambaro (Argentine, 1928-) introduced rebellious figures such as “la hija” (the daughter) in La malasangre (1982), a play that reflects the state of human relationships during the military regime in Argentine. In this drama, the daughter is a woman who refuses to become another victim of the strong patriarchal system common to many parts of Latin America. Similarly, Colombian actress and theatre director Patricia Ariza (1946-) began to create a new female theatre addressing issues such as sexual discrimination. The creation and expansion of the Magdalena Project indicates that playwrights Gambaro and Ariza are not an isolated phenomenon, and that women are willing and ready to assume important roles in Latin American society.

OKADA Yachiyo is one of the pioneer women playwrights in modern Japan. Her one-act play A Boxwood Comb (Tsuge no Kushi) is regarded as her masterpiece. The heroine, Tsuna, is forced to be separated from her husband on account of her behavior toward her father-in-law. She meets her husband and begs to be allowed to return to their home, but he refuses her wish, respecting his filial duties. The desperate wife is driven to kill her husband and commit suicide. This play has been regarded as a tragedy depicting the yoke of the feudal family system of the Meiji era, and the heroine has always been compared with Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. This essay pursues the possibility of a totally different understanding of the play, by paying attention to the remarkable similarity to Mori Ōgai's A Half Day and the influence of Ōgai's Mask and KINOSHITA Mokutarō's Izumiya Dyehouse.

HASEGAWA Shigure (1879-1941) is known for Kyūbun Nihonbashi, Kindai bijinden, and others. Some of her Kabuki plays and dance pieces are often performed even today. Sakura-fubuki is Hasegawa's second Kabuki play, first performed by ONOE Kikugorō VI at Kabuki-za in February 1911 and much appreciated by Kabuki actors and producers. This paper points out that the play took the story from “Katsuko” in “Meiryo-Kohan” written in the Edo era, paying particular attention to the nun in the play, named Sayuri.

It is often pointed out that Midori Osaki's works treat big brother-kid sister households that are geographically separate from the parental home. Such households are considered to be still under the patriarchy with the brother functioning as the surrogate father of the sister. However, in An Apple Pie Afternoon, the brother and sister are more like accomplices. They fight repeatedly, yet the way they fight suggests that they are accomplices in their pursuit of youthful freedom and love behind their father's back. Thus their relationship is not that of oppressor and oppressed. Both of them are enjoying a temporary flight from paternal surveillance. In this way this play portrays young people enjoying their free time and conveys the happy feeling of youth.

In 1958, TANAKA Sumie wrote a play, A Woman Who Beats the Drum (Tsuzumi no Onna), in which she imitated the structure of CHIKAMATSU Monzaemon's drama, The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (Horikawa Nami no Tsuzumi). This paper concludes that Tanaka was interested in the characters and criticism of feudalism in the original play, but that she was dissatisfied with Chikamatsu's treatment of women. Thus, Tanaka emphasizes the importance of the spirit of women, and insists on the importance of breaking away from patriarchy. The play foreshadows the feminist movement in the 1960s in Japan.

The New Noh play, Fumigara, was written by TSUMURA Kimiko (1902-1974) in 1951. Tsumura Kimiko is regarded as one of the pioneers of female Noh-performers in modern times. She wrote Fumigara to perform herself. Although Fumigara is based on a famous Noh play, Sotoba Komachi, whose primary theme is the life of Ono no Komachi, the play's unique characteristic is the representation of Cherry blossom petals on the ground. When Tsumura started to write a series of her New Noh plays in 1950, her illness (tuberculosis) was so serious that she was unable to perform the plays herself. She struggled with disease, hovering between life and death. Thus, the cherry blossoms in Fumigara are used effectively as a symbol of life and death. After having recovered her health, Tsumura Kimiko performed Fumigara for the first time in 1968. With this performance she perfected her unique Noh play. She created the powerful characters of both Ono no Komachi and Fukakusa no Shōshō in the play.

This paper examines the relation between Mae West and “camp” with reference to her biography and some films in which she stars. The examination focuses on the 1930s and 1970s, two significant periods for West's acting style; in the 1930s, she appropriates performing techniques from several unorthodox entertainers of the Belle Epoque—Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay and female impersonators—in order to establish her queer acting style (which was highly theatrical in its nature, and is later described as “camp”); but in the 1970s we see a cultural phenomenon in which her images are appropriated and commodified as an icon of camp in the field of pop culture, making a contrast with her active position in the 1930s when she appropriated other acting techniques for her style. Truly, her camp becomes a kind of “pastiche” appropriated by cultural industries in the 1970s, but this brings about a situation where her camp images circulate again in the cultural market, and this consequently saves her from oblivion. This way of regaining social visibility, though following the dominant cultural order, has potential for the strategic camp associated with “queer, or gay/lesbian, politics” in the 1990s.