The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Sarah Thompson:

Two moderately tangential remarks in response to long-ago posts in this thread:

On hefty forty-somethings as sex objects: two words: Mae West.

On zaftig Japanese car babes: I don't think the actual url ever appeared, and though I read Japanese I know little of cars. I'd guess, though, that there may be an explanation along the lines of a theory I once heard about Japanese female pop singers, who are more often cute or pretty than stunningly beautiful. Supposedly this is because a girl-next-door look is preferred, on the grounds that it makes the star more approachable as a romantic fantasy object (or, as the case may be, identification figure) for the fans.

Aha! Mystery solved, at least partly. I just remembered that there is an English translation of this scene of the play. It's in =Kabuki Plays on Stage=, vol. I (U. of Hawai'i Press, 2002).

Sure enough, there is a costume change just at this point. When Yaegakihime becomes possessed by the foxes, her costume magically changes from red to white. On the Kabuki stage, stagehands dressed in black to make them "invisible" take off the outer layer of the actor's clothing to reveal the white costume underneath.

So, what looks like sinister black-clad figures undressing a woman is actually stagehands helping a male actor in a female role make a dramatic costume change. In an anime version, probably the red costume would morph into a white one, perhaps with a glowing aura, to indicate the moment of fox possession.

But it's unusual for woodblock prints to show stage action so literally. I can't think offhand of another example.

Re: which fox term, I'd have to dig up the original script, which I don't have on hand. Sorry. Magic foxes are generally assumed to be white; shirogitsune and byakko are alternate readings for the same written word.

MD2, thanks for the tanuki reference. I've been exploring the wonderful Onmark website but hadn't gotten to that entry yet. Now I know why the tanuki in Kyoto were so pitiful looking two summers ago, and not to be seen (at least by me) this past summer. Alas!

I can't resist. Japanese print geek time!

What I find interesting is the question of whether the print illustrates a scene from bunraku (the puppet theater) or kabuki, or, I suspect, the latter disguised as the former. An actor's name-- Otani Tomomatsu, I think-- is given in one of the boxes at the upper right, next to the name of the role, Yaegakihime. So, probably live action kabuki. But why the guys in black who look so much like puppeteers? In kabuki they'd be used for things like on-stage costume changes or manipulation of props, but here they seem to be manipulating the actor as if he were a puppet.

Yoshitaki was an Osaka artist (and not a very well known one, as opposed to the contemporary Tokyo artist Yoshitoshi, who's much more famous), and bunraku is a specialty of Osaka, so maybe there was some local tradition of imitating bunraku when performing kabuki. Just a thought.

The print is from a series called Mitate Iroha Datoe, which loosely translates as "Selected comparisons for the letters of the alphabet." Well, actually, it's not an alphabet but a syllabary; this print illustrates the letter "yu." Unfortunately I can't read (offhand) the subtitle identifying this scene, so I'm not sure whether there was some kind of punny joke involving the letter "yu." Looks like it might include the word "yuurei" (ghost, spirit), presumably the fox spirits.

A common marketing device in the nineteenth century was producing prints in a set (Collect Them All!), either an arbitrary number (36 Views of Mt Fuji-- which actually has 46 prints, because it was so successful that they issued 10 extras)or a predetermined one (53 stages of the Tokaido road, 47 letters of the kana syllabary, etc.).

Roger Keyes, in =The Theatrical World of the Osaka Print=, dates this series to around 1865. For a closer date, you'd have to locate as many of the individual prints as possible and then track when those actors played those roles-- with the caveat that in a mitate series, sometimes actors are shown in roles that they didn't actually play but that the artist, or the fans who bought the prints, wanted to imagine them in. It kind of reminds me of that game of recasting favorite movies that one so often sees on line.

Hasn't anyone mentioned James Lee Burke yet? I was delighted to discover his books, since they are classic violent mystery/adventures with a distinctly leftist slant. You can get all those whizbang thrills without feeling guilty about it. I think they have sold well, too.

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