Rakugo

Rakugo, which is written with characters meaning “falling words,” is the Japanese art of the professional teller of funny stories. It is a direct descendant of the ancient art of the village storyteller, the teller of tales, and the jester employed by large households in the Middle Ages. In Japan in the 1790s, it moved into the theaters and its material today is largely a modernized version of the funny stories of the Edo period (1603–1868 CE).

Rakugo performers wear kimono and sit, kneeling on a cushion. In this sense they might be called sit-down stand-up comedians. They use no props except those that a gentleman of the Edo period might have had about him—a fan, a pipe, a handkerchief, and a tobacco pouch—although these days, pipe and pouch are not so evident. The fan, however, is used with consummate skill as a pair of chopsticks, a sake cup, a rice bowl, a teacup, or as any other object that may appear in the story, including a fan.

The mime and characterization of the Rakugo performer rival and perhaps outclass those of the Kyōgen or Japanese farce actor in subtlety and delicacy. This skill is necessary, as the Rakugo performer appears alone on the stage and, while seated throughout, plays the parts of all the characters in the story. There may be as many as a half dozen roles in one story—men, women, old, young, children, of both high and low status. Each character is marvelously delineated by the performer in face, voice, gesture, and bodily poise. A Rakugo piece is thus a short play (normally a half hour long), consisting of at least one dialogue plus narration, all parts being performed by a single actor. As an example, in July 1988 at the Minami-za theater in Kyoto, Katsura Shijaku performed Jagansō (Snake-Grass). A man goes to visit a neighbor and finds him grilling rice cakes that have been left over from a wedding. The visitor helps himself to a cutting from a strange plant. It comes from the mountains where lives an enormous snake that eats monkeys and rabbits and sometimes also hunters and hikers. After eating a human being, the snake feels unwell, so it eats some of the snake grass, which dissolves the human being in its stomach, and then it feels better.

Rakugo performance at the Sanma Festival in Meguro, a ward in Tokyo, Japan, on September 14, 2008.

Source: vera46/Wikimedia Commons.

[Page 627]The performer tells how, uninvited, the visitor starts scoffing the rice cakes and how his host, annoyed at his bad manners, bets that he cannot eat them all. After tossing them on his nose and catching them in his mouth (all of course in mime), he manages to eat all but one and returns home, humiliated at having lost the bet and at being reproved for bad manners, but also in agony from the lump in his stomach. He collapses on the bed, moaning that he only wishes that there were some way of getting rid of it. An idea comes to him! He eats some of the snake grass. Then the neighbor comes round to find out if the man is all right, and he and the man’s wife come into the bedroom to check.

...