Word: kabuki
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...Japanese equivalent of American country and western. Traditional Japanese music, marked by delicate use of microtones, refined textures and free rhythm, was downgraded during the drive toward Westernization. But it remains popular, especially with older people and in the provinces, and is preserved in the Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki theaters. "We never had a national traditional music," says Toyama. "It was strictly apportioned by classes: the courts, the samurai, the merchants each had their own. But everyone can participate in the Western system." Although some composers like Toru Takemitsu have lately attempted to synthesize traditional music with Western styles...
...Kabuki was never like this. Nor, for that matter, are Saturday nights in bathhouses, or other traditional, some say less wholesome, Japanese diversions. Except for signs, which have Japanese subtitles under larger English words, there are few distinctly Japanese things about the park. Explains an Oriental Land official: "You simply have to give our Japanese patrons a magic sense of being in Orlando or Los Angeles right here." Just two of the park's 27 restaurants sell Japanese food, and they serve only sushi (raw fish with rice) and bento, a sort of Oriental box lunch. Tempura is nowhere...
...master overwhelming odds. Modern incarnations of this nonpareil (out of, say, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene or Robert Stone) have become increasingly antiheroic, their designs questionable and their morality ambiguous. But the trials they must endure, the plot of their quests, remain much the same, as formal and stylized as kabuki or an Elizabethan sonnet...
Enjoyable as Kabuki is, it has elements that Westerners may find difficult. The musical accompaniment-voices, flutes, drums and three-stringed plucked instruments called shamisens- is of real but recondite beauty. Performances are long, running close to four hours. And there is the language barrier as well...
...such problems are small considering the art form's exquisite grace, its awesome dramatic power and delicate beauty. In Kabuki, there is a world of meaning in the sweep of a fan, the cast of an eye or the crook of a finger. What is outlandish about a song-dance-skill like that? -By Michael Walsh