"The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum" played by Shinkawa Hiroya

Shinkawa Hiroya's excellent performance in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum

This play was first appeared as a film by Mizoguchi Kenji, one of the greatest directors in the Japanese film history.  Afterwards, it was adapted as a play on the stage by the Shimpa (New Theatre Group).  Some of Taishu-engeki (Popular theater) tropes transformed it as their own.  I recently saw one of the adaptations played by a very popular theater trope and was severely disappointed because of its shallow interpretation of the tragedy. They presented Kikunosuke as a heroic figure; as a result, Otoku’s sufferings would not transcend all cruel, absurd surroundings and thereby makes them as the sublime. 

The plot is as follows:

Onoe Kikunosuke, a heir of a prominent Kabuki families, has been spoiled and does not know how  harshly he is criticized by the Kabuki fans.  He senses that something is wrong with his performances, and that is why he is playing around with women who flatter him.  Otoku, the baby-sitter for Kikunosuke’s baby brother, is the first person who tells what people really think of Kikunoske’s performances.  Appreciating her honesty and encouragement, Kiku eventually falls in love with her, and wants to get married with her.  However, his parents reject Otoku as his wife.  Kiku is expelled from the family and goes to Osaka to join a local theater trope (a second class Kabuki trope). Some months later, Otoku comes to Osaka and they live together.  After the death of the trope chief, however, Kiku has to travel with other minor traveling tropes and becomes more miserable and poorer.  Otoku, getting really ill, is worried not about her own poor health but Kiku’s career as an actor; she visits Fukusuke (later Nakamura Utaemon), Kiku’s close friend who happens to come to an Osaka theater. She begs him to mediate Kiku’s reconciliation with his father.  With Fukusuke’s support, Kiku goes back to the major stages in Tokyo. Otoku declines to go with Kiku, but promises him to come to Tokyo after some months.  However, she never comes to Tokyo to join Kiku.  A year later, Kiku, now on the stage of Osaka’s prominent theater as a successful actor, hears the news of Otoku’s death.

I take this film as one of the feminist films; the female character, as in Mizoguchi’s other films, is portrayed as a strong woman who reaches the state of the sublime in the end despite of, or because of, their suffering caused by the absurdly patriarchal, cruel, and feudalistic Kabuki society.  Otoku, at a first glance, seems to be a really tragic figure, who goes through discrimination of the hierarchy of Kabuki world.  On the contrast, Kikunosuke, her husband, totally spoiled by the society as a true heir of one of the greatest Kabuki families, has not understood the quality of her suffering; he remains as a weak character till the end. Mizoguchi’s camera explicitly presents how careless and carefree he is, in many scenes.  

I saw Shinkawa Gekidan (theater trope)’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum at Asahi Gekijo (theater) in Osaka last October (2009).  I was greatly impressed by the performance of Zacho (the chief of the trope), Shinkawa Hiroya.  The script is a little different from Mizoguchi’s, but he specifically focuses on the contrast between Otoku and Kikunosuke and their different attitudes toward art; he especially stresses her selfless devotion to Kikunosuke’s artistic talents, her tolerance of the suffering.  It is in her masochistic acceptance of the suffering that transcends her into a really tragic figure. One of the scenes presenting the contrast between two figures, which is not in Mizoguchi’s script, is the noodle vender’s scene.  As Kikunosuke does not notice that they are totally broke, he asks Otoku why she does not order another bowl of noodle.  His personality is not as strong as Otoku’s. He has been too spoiled to understand the real world.  In Mizoguchi’s film, such contrast between two major characters is seen in the scene of a cheap inn scene.   

Hiroya eloquently and successfully presents Otoku not as a victim but as a tragic (in its real sense) figure.

The following photo shows Hiroya's dance as a female impersonator.