ABSTRACT
Where else has Wilde’s Salomé been so enthusiastically received as in Japan? The first of Wilde’s works to be translated into Japanese in 1909, Salomé, has been the most popular among Wilde’s plays in Japan. This essay compares the two earliest Japanese productions of Salomé featuring two groundbreaking actresses, Sumako Matsui and Sadayakko Kawakami, to Katsuhide Suzuki’s prominent 2009 Japanese adaptation of the play. The earliest Salomé productions helped propel the Shingeki Undo, the New Drama movement that aimed at establishing modern theater in Japan and produced translated foreign plays. Even more importantly, they promoted and facilitated the acceptance of female actresses, who had not been allowed to perform since 1629 and had been replaced by male impersonators on the stage for centuries. Salomé, then, provided one of the very first title roles for modern female actresses in Japan, and it associated them with New Womanhood, as embodied by Ibsen’s Nora. The essay contrasts these revolutionary early Salomé productions with a more recent one featuring a modern female impersonator, Eisuke Sasai, which incorporated many older traditions of the Japanese performing arts, consciously looking back rather than forward in time. The comparison takes us into the heart of Salomé’s importance to Japanese theater history, tracing Wilde’s legacy in Japan and the lasting imprint it left in an international context. All three performances analyzed in this chapter transfigure Wilde’s emphasis on Salomé’s sexuality, but in different and telling fashions, reflecting the unique, historical development of Japanese theater and its relation to gender.
