Leiter is well known as one of the foremost scholars of Kabuki. In the present volume, he offers a fascinating glimpse of the cross-cultural moment when Japan opened to the West after the Meiji Restoration (1868) and "foreigners" encountered Kabuki for the first time. Including some 40 first-person accounts dating from 1859 to 1912, the anthology comprises six chronological sections and provides a kaleidoscopic view of Kabuki through non-Japanese eyes. The individual pieces are fascinating, but the value of the anthology is greater than the sum of its parts because of the variety and depth of the individual essays and Leiter’s erudition and strong, clearly written commentary. The book is equally intriguing for the range of its authors/observers: Americans, Europeans, Australians. Who were they? Why were they in Japan? What do their impressions of Kabuki reveal about them? This brilliant book will be an invaluable resource for scholars of Japanese theater and for those interested in history, intercultural encounters, and changing cultural perceptions. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Choice Reviews

Samuel L. Leiter, a foremost scholar of kabuki, has compiled a rich trove of firsthand accounts of kabuki theatergoing in Japan during the Meiji period. The selections were written by people from Britain, the United States, and other countries who traveled to Japan during the first decades of Japan’s modernization. They offer fascinating insights into ways that the outside world viewed kabuki and the culture that produced it. Dr. Leiter’s introductory material and extensive annotations and commentary provide essential context for the accounts. Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes is a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on what has become one of the world’s most revered art forms.

Barbara E. Thornbury, Temple University

Following two-plus centuries of isolation, Japan in the Meiji Period (1868-1912) overflowed with new possibilities, stimulated partly by a nonstop stream of foreign visitors. Japan’s traditional theatre—no, kabuki, and bunraku—so different from Western theatre, garnered far more than superficial “if it’s Tuesday, it must be Kyoto” reactions. Samuel Leiter has assembled in this eminently readable book their accounts of kabuki performances. None better than he, the world’s leading kabuki scholar-translator outside Japan (he’s also a prominent critic of American theatre), to assume this task. He brings alive the excitement—sometimes, the puzzlement—in the foreign accounts. Very few of these early observers were well informed about kabuki, but their gawker-like, enthusiastic accounts provide collectively a fascinating, incipient take on a salient feature of Japan’s deeply rooted traditional culture.

John K. Gillespie, Gillespie Global Group

The combination of domestic turmoil and foreign incursions brought immense change to Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912). Kabuki, the reigning stage art, took a leading role in the political and social agendas of the period. In Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes, Samuel Leiter has gathered written accounts left by a significant number of foreigners who attended kabuki during the Meiji Period, and he has added generous and highly informative commentary. The volume takes readers into theatres over the decades of kabuki’s rapid transition from a broadly popular cultural attraction to an art forced from on high to serve new purposes and new audiences. This exceptionally valuable volume is an eye-opening and essential contribution to the study of kabuki, while also augmenting understandings of Japanese history, modernization, foreign relations, and foreign interest in Japan.

Katherine Saltzman-Li, University of California Santa Barbara

Samuel Leiter’s many books and articles have cemented his place as the foremost English language scholar of kabuki history alive today. His latest, Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes, is a fascinating and often eye-opening compilation of primary sources by a wide variety of Anglophone visitors, with Leiter’s perceptive commentary on each. Carefully edited and presented in groupings by decades, contributions include such items as journal entries, letters, reports, travel guides and random notes by Victorian ladies, diplomats, journalists and others who recount their impressions of kabuki’s theatres, entertainment districts, plays, audiences and performers. While some anecdotes have been published elsewhere, many are new and often surprising. Leiter puts each in cultural, theatrical and historical context. He not only tells us who these foreign visitors were, but generously gives their often surprising observations the benefit of the doubt, even when their comments cannot be verified by more traditional historical sources. This openness to actual lived experience (rather than being dismissive of it) is a crucial decision that may suggest fruitful avenues of research for future scholars. The book will be an invaluable resource to cultural and theatre historians of Meiji era Japan.

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei