An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojo no Henge)

An Actor’s Revenge

    As one of the most famous theater play script which is coming from a series novel from Showa Period, Otomachi Mikami’s An Actor’s Revenge (Yukinojo no Henge) was produced in many different formats, such as film, TV drama, theater, traditional Japanese Kabuki, and Takarazuka Musical. To be a classical and popular story, An Actor’s Revenge has its particular attractiveness. Its particularity enables it to reach an outstanding position from many similar works since melodrama novel occupied the majority of Japanese literature market.
    Unfortunately, as same as a lot of English translation, the title of An Actor’s Revenge simply described the main story rather than focused on the variety of Japanese original. According to its original Japanese title, Henge means the change of form. However, in this story, this word implies the change of the protagonist, Yukinojo’s costume, identity, and mind at the same time. In the world of this story, the protagonist’s family was framed by a group of officers. Due to this disaster, the protagonist lost his parents and rich life and became a stepson of another family. After a few years, he changed his name to Yukinojo and became a famous Onnagata (woman role played by man actors). For revenging, he used his enemy’s daughter but finally fell in love with her, which is a familiar plot as the other classic melodramas.
    In Scott Nygren’s essay, he proposed that “Ichikawa’s film An Actor’s Revenge (1963) has long been acknowledged as an eccentric ‘masterpiece.’” Also, as Nygren said, this version became a bridge of cinema and Japanese traditional culture:
    “… through a play of apparently contradictory theatrical and cinematic style. Specifically, the film foregrounds melodrama as a style that uneasily pivots between traditional Kabuki theater and Western cinematic realism.”
    Instead of being an opposite side of Western melodrama, the Japanese Kabuki actually shares a lot of similarity with melodrama, including strong emotion, dramatic plot transition, typical (or even stereotyped) characters, and classical rivalry or argument. Rather than compare the differences from their performance, stage, and audience objectives, the Melodrama and Kabuki have more similarities from their inherent motif.
On the other hand, the unique particularity of Kabuki might be its blurred gender identification. First of all, the Onnagata is the most typical representative of this pattern, which they always showed on stage with heavy white make-up to cover up their male features. Also, from another earliler remake of An Actor’s Revenge in 1957, which the male Onnagata, Yukinojo, is played by a famous actress. The blurred borderline of gender identification added more attractiveness to this story and also offered a question to its audience, who the Yukinojo really is?