Spirits of another sort : the plays of Izumi Kyōka
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Spirits of another sort : the plays of Izumi Kyōka
(Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies, no. 29)
Center for Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan, 2001
- : cloth
Available at 25 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes translations and commentaries of three plays: Kaijin bessō, Tenshu monogatari, and Yashagaike
Includes bibliographical references (p. 324-338) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939) had a predilection for the richly figurative and supernatural that seemed not only irrelevant to the concerns of modern life but an affront to the social and psychological realism that became the common currency of both literature and theater in modern Japan. Believing in beauty and truth and in language's mystical evocation of experience, Kyoka sought for a way to reinvest the world with a kind of magic that he felt was being lost. Although better known as a novelist, Kyoka also wrote a large number of plays, and his work has continued to be adapted by others for the stage and screen. Spirits of Another Sort, the first work in any language to focus on Izumi Kyoka's career as a playwright, argues that the dramas reveal, in an often unmitigated fashion, the writer's romanticism, his belief in the occult, his aversion to contemporary society, and his idiosyncratic but powerful ethical and aesthetic ideals. In an attempt to create a dramaturgy of the sacred from the dregs of the past, Kyoka's plays resemble the work of Maeterlinck or even Artaud. Spirits of Another Sort is a literary-critical study that traces the development of Kyoka's work from the melodramatic formulas of his early ideological fiction to the increasingly grotesque and fantastic permutations of the original pattern in his plays of the Taisho era. It is important reading for people interested in Japanese literature, theater, and film and in cross-cultural theater and film.
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