73 - Modern drama

Summary

The "discovery" of drama as a literary genre was part and parcel of Meiji Japan's program of nation building. By 1886 the theater reform movement had coalesced into the Society for Theater Reform, an organization comprised of powerful government officials. The most trenchant critic of the Society, however, was Tsubouchi Shoyo, whose stature as a literary critic was eclipsed by a lifelong devotion to the theater. Writers and critics in the Meiji era agreed that the literary status of the dramatic script would have to be raised before a serious, modern theater could be created in Japan. The rhetoric of modernity resolved itself into two forms of verbal expression: monologue and dialogue. By the early decades of the twentieth century, various literary styles and movements had flooded into Japan from Europe. Naturalism may have had the most immediate shock value, but European Symbolist and Expressionist theater also influenced the course of modern drama in Japan.