Question

An actor's revenge poem explanation

Answer 1

Three men — Sansai Dobe (Ganjirō Nakamura), Kawaguchiya (Saburō Date) and Hiromiya (Eijirō Yanagi) — are responsible for the deaths of seven-year-old Yukitarō’s mother and father. Yukitarō is adopted and brought up by Kikunojō Nakamura (Chūsha Ichikawa), the actor-manager of an Osaka kabuki troupe.

The adult Yukitarō (Kazuo Hasegawa) becomes an onnagata, a male actor who plays female roles. He takes the stage name Yukinojō. Like many of the great onnagata, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he wears women’s clothes and uses the language and mannerisms of a woman offstage as well. Many years later, the troupe pays a visit to Edo, where the men responsible for his parents’ deaths now live. Yukinojō brings about their deaths, then, apparently overcome by what he has done, retires from the stage and disappears. No one knows where. The events are coolly observed and sardonically commented on by the Robin-Hood-like thief Yamitarō, also played by Hasegawa.

Answer 2

In 1963, the Japanese star Kazuo Hasegawa made his three-hundredth movie, playing the same double role he did in 1935: a Kabuki female impersonator and a self-styled Robin Hood. On a stage that looks like a glittering ribbon—it outscopes CinemaScope—Hasegawa’s actor character, Yukinojo, plots his revenge on the men who drove his parents to despair, insanity, and suicide. Two of these villains, a merchant and a former magistrate, have shown up for Yukinojo’s opening night in Edo, with the ex-magistrate’s daughter in tow. She falls for the exotic actor’s androgynous charms, and Yukinojo realizes that if he wins her heart he can wreak havoc on the ex-magistrate’s household. Hasegawa’s performance as the actor is a marvel of sexual ambiguity. (He’s also charming and funny as the robust bandit.) Throughout, the director, Kon Ichikawa, succeeds in making all the world a stage, mixing theatrical and cinematic devices with earthquake intensity. Colors slice into the dark backgrounds of the nocturnal scenes like lights flashed at night through the floor of a glass-bottomed boat. In Japanese.