Taiki Yokobayashi (Okayama) | Toshie Ogura (Okayama) | Rachel Fagundes (Okayama)
Interview with i k i a T r o t c A i KabukInterview i h s a y a b o k o with Kabuki Y Actor Taiki Yokobayashi After driving through rice fields on tiny, unlit, dirt roads in the dead of night, circling and searching for a location that would obviously scream KABUKI FESTIVAL, I came upon Katsuga Shrine. The locals had been performing kabuki here since the late Edo period, and built a theater behind the shrine to house their annual autumn festival. Dozens of cars were clustered around it, trying to park, jostling to pass each other on the narrow inaka roads. This must be the place, I thought. As I stepped inside the little theater, I saw that it was packed to the gills. The audience, entirely comprised of (mostly older) locals, sat on rows of floor cushions facing the stage, all the way to the back of room, where latecomers stood. On stage young boys costumed as exquisite cranes whirled like dervishes, dipped and bowed and fluttered their wings around a beautiful maiden (also a young boy) dressed in brilliant red. Whispers began to circulate as the locals realized a wild gaijin had appeared in their midst, and I was excitedly ushered into a better seat toward the front.
60 Photos: Rachel Fagundes
For the next several hours I was treated to a dazzle of color and sound. A variety of self-contained scenes, and a few longer plays, were presented, broken up by intermissions where the little old ladies in the audience chatted happily with their neighbors and whipped snacks out of their bags to share with one another. Some of the scenes were dance performances with little discernible plot. Others appeared to be family dramas or historical epics, where I could mostly figure out the characters and their relationships from their interactions and costuming. Even without understanding every element of what I had just seen, I left the theater at the end of the night enchanted, and feeling very lucky to have been invited into such a traditional space in my inaka community. Almost a year later I returned with my friend and translator, Toshie Ogura, to interview one of the kabuki actors and sit in on a rehearsal for the upcoming kabuki festival. This time we entered from backstage, and found images of painted kabuki actors peering down from the walls. Every surface seemed to be covered with old posters, yellowing newspaper clippings, and playbills of past shows. Backstage was also surprisingly full of women, working on props, costumes, and equipment. On the stage itself, rehearsal was already in progress. Actors—and surprise again, a few actresses!—mostly in street clothes, rehearsed their blocking.
We were introduced to our contact, Taiki Yokobayashi, a mild-mannered young teacher by day and master kabuki actor by night, who showed us around the theater before settling into an interview. In particular, he directed us to a wall of photographs, rows upon rows of pictures of groups of children and teens in full costume and makeup, posing on stage. “This is me!” He said, pointing to one young boy, then to another, “and that is my friend, there!” He gestured to a grown man practicing on stage, and then back to the photographs, “That’s him many years ago, and this one’s his father!” And on and on, the faces go back for generations.
