SOURCE: "Japanese Theatre: Languages and Pilgrimage," in Pilgrimages: Aspects of Japanese Literature and Culture, University of Hawaii Press, 1988, pp. 71-90.

In the following essay, Rimer provides a historical overview of Japanese theater, focusing on three representative works of classical and modern Japanese drama.

When I first began to attend performances by Japanese contemporary theatre companies in the 1950s, I was puzzled by what I took to be a disparity between the power of the texts chosen for performance and the quality of the acting available to make those texts come alive on the stage. To see Pirandello, Molière, and Kinoshita on the stage in Japan was a rare opportunity, and yet the performances, for all their polish, seemed to lack any real natural elegance. The thoughts that follow here, in fact, have grown from that initial sense of surprise and, perhaps, of disappointment.

The first help I...