Kabuki Plays on Stage: Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864 (Kabuki Plays on Stage, Volume 3)

By Samuel L. Leiter

Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, is the third volume in a monumental new series-the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in nearly a quarter of a century. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era.

The fourteen plays translated in Volume 3, Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, mark an extreme point in the development of kabuki dramaturgy. The plays are remarkable, even within kabuki, for their intense theatricality, gutsy individualism of character, cold-blooded and ferocious violence, realism pushed into fantasy and grotesquery, novelty for its own sake, sexual aggressiveness, and assertion of female will. The plays depict a society in extremis, the end of an era, a time often marked by unmitigated darkness and desire.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824824555
• ISBN13: 9780824824556
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Length: 414 Pages
• Weight: 2.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.4" x 10.1"