Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka

by Kyōka Izumi, M. Cody Poulton (Editor)

Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) had a predilection for the richly figurative and supernatural that seemed not only irrelevant to the concerns of modern life but an affront to the social and psychological realism that became the common currency of both literature and theater in modern Japan. Believing in beauty and truth and in language’s mystical evocation of experience, Kyōka sought for a way to reinvest the world with a kind of magic that he felt was being lost. Although better known as a novelist, Kyōka also wrote a large number of plays, and his work has continued to be adapted by others for the stage and screen. Spirits of Another Sort, the first work in any language to focus on Izumi Kyōka’s career as a playwright, argues that the dramas reveal, in an often unmitigated fashion, the writer's romanticism, his belief in the occult, his aversion to contemporary society, and his idiosyncratic but powerful ethical and aesthetic ideals. In an attempt to create a dramaturgy of the sacred from the dregs of the past, Kyōka’s plays resemble the work of Maeterlinck or even Artaud.

Spirits of Another Sort is a literary-critical study that traces the development of Kyōka’s work from the melodramatic formulas of his early ideological fiction to the increasingly grotesque and fantastic permutations of the original pattern in his plays of the Taishō era. It is important reading for people interested in Japanese literature, theater, and film and in cross-cultural theater and film.

Genres: Plays, Japanese Literature

380 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Japanese profile: 泉 鏡花

Kyōka was born Kyōtarō Izumi on November 4, 1873 in the Shitashinmachi section of Kanazawa, Ishikawa, to Seiji Izumi, a chaser and inlayer of metallic ornaments, and Suzu Nakata, daughter of a tsuzumi hand-drum player from Edo and younger sister to lead protagonist of the Noh theater, Kintarō Matsumoto. Because of his family's impovershed circumstances, he attended the tuition-free Hokuriku English-Japanese School, run by Christian missionaries.
Even before he entered grade school, young Kintarō's mother introduced him to literature in picture-books interspersed with text called kusazōshi, and his works would later show the influence of this early contact with such visual forms of story-telling. In April 1883, at ten years old, Kyōka lost his mother, who was 29 at the time. It was a great blow to his young mind, and he would attempt to recreate memories of her in works throughout his literary career.
At a friend's boarding house in April 1889, Kyōka was deeply impressed by Ozaki Kōyō's "Amorous Confessions of Two Nuns" and decided to pursue a career in literature. That June he took a trip to Toyama Prefecture. At this time he worked as a teacher in private preparatory schools and spent his free time running through yomihon and kusazōshi. In November of that year, however, Kyōka's aspiration to an artistic career drove him to Tokyo, where he intended to enter the tutelage of Kōyō himself.
On 19 November 1891, he called on Kōyō in Ushigome(part of present-day Shinjuku) without prior introduction and requested that he be allowed into the school immediately. He was accepted, and from that time began life as a live-in apprentice. Other than a brief trip to Kanazawa in December of the following year, Kyōka spent all of his time in the Ozaki household, proving his value to Kōyō through correcting his manuscripts and household tasks. Kyōka greatly adored his teacher, thinking of him as a teacher of more than literature, a benefactor who nourished his early career before he gained a name for himself. He felt deeply a personal indebtedness to Kōyō, and continued to admire the author throughout his life.