Katsura Bunraku and Views on the Performing Arts: Sensitivity on the Borderline between Art and Eros in the 1960s and 1970s

Katsura Bunraku and Views on the Performing Arts: Sensitivity on the Borderline between Art and Eros in the 1960s and 1970s

From the 1960s to the early 1970s, Japan emerged from its postwar turmoil and experienced an explosive expansion of popular culture with the spread of television and urbanization. Striptease theaters and pink movies flourished, while rakugo, manzai (comic monologues), song programs, and other forms of entertainment were abundant on television, and "entertainment" was consumed in the home.

Akiyuki Nosaka explains that the reason he was not interested in Harumoto (pornographic literature) during this period was because of the presence of Bunraku Katsura. In other words, his sensibility was strongly attracted to the art of storytelling as a form of entertainment, rather than to sexual expression.

Bunraku Katsura V (1892-1971) was a master storyteller who embodied the style and dignity of Edo rakugo, and was widely recognized as a "classic of the performing arts" through his appearances on television. Bunraku storytelling included amorous banter, but it was never vulgar, and the laughter and sexiness dwelled in the minute pauses and overtones of the words. For Nosaka, Bunraku's implied sexiness and understanding of human nature in rakugo was probably far more profound than the explicit depictions in Harumoto.

Nosaka's view of the performing arts was not simply a matter of taste. It is based on the social tensions surrounding sexual expression at the time: censorship, obscenity trials, and public protests. While "harumoto" became a point of ethical contention between exposure and regulation, Katsura Bunraku's rakugo was publicly tolerated as "highbrow entertainment. In other words, rakugo by Katsura Bunraku was socially acceptable as long as it was refined as an art form, even if it dealt with the same subject of sex.

Under such circumstances, Nosaka saw the true sex appeal and satirical power in the "art of storytelling" of bunraku. This was also a reflection of the time when Nosaka himself was searching for what form he should take as a writer and storyteller to confront society.

His devotion to Katsura Bunraku was an expression of his performing arts perspective, in which he saw sex not merely as a stimulus, but as a universal subject that was also pregnant with human comedy and pathos. Nosaka's gaze, which found more genuine glamour in the "pauses between words" than in eroticism, and in the "margins of the narrative" rather than in nudity, was a record of an intellectual sensitivity that explored the fine balance between the performing arts and eroticism, freedom and dignity, in early 1970s Japan.