This lavish volume, as extravagant as the kabuki itself, is devoted to the photos of Shunji Ohkura, an artist who has applied himself to chronicling the various worlds of contemporary Japan.
Recently his collection "Tokyo X" was published (Kodansha) and reviewed (Jan. 8) on these pages. In it he perceived a "phantasmal Tokyo that had been assimilated whole by computers and transformed into a virtual city." In this new collection, he discovers a phantasmal Japan preserved through the transparent intricacies of that most populist of entertainments, the kabuki.
As Donald Keene observes in his introduction, the theater -- though it has been called a "mirror of life" in other countries -- is different in Japan. Kabuki "is less a mirror than a magnifying glass, enlarging and enhancing life to bring out to the full its color, its excitement, and its theatricality."
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