Edo Kabuki in Transition

Samuel L. Leiter, author of The Art of Kabuki: Five Famous Plays:
Edo Kabuki in Transition is an extraordinary contribution to the field of kabuki studies, in both the West and Japan. Its unconventional yet comprehensive view of Edo kabuki's evolution, especially its playwriting practices, filtered through the lens of Tsuruya Nanboku IV's 1825 coproduction of his revolutionary ghost play Yotsuya kaidan and the popular history play Chushingura, is original and searching. Satoko Shimazaki's highly readable, marvelously researched study gives us both a penetrating understanding of the fluidity of Edo dramaturgy and an exceptionally thorough examination of the ghost play genre.

Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine:
Satoko Shimazaki's fascinating study of early modern kabuki performance reveals a new kabuki theater to us, not a cultural practice with a relatively stable body of texts at its center but a major site of social and cultural negotiation whose central feature and strength lies in its remarkable variety and adaptability.

Keller Kimbrough, author of Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater:
A sophisticated, entertaining, and well-written contribution to nineteenth-century kabuki studies that both challenges the conventional wisdom of early modern theater scholarship and illuminates the splendid, ghastly world of Japanese horror.