Henry Black, rakugo and the coming of modernity in Meiji Japan

Abstract

The Australian-born storyteller (rakugoka) Henry (Kairakutei) Black lived in Japan between 1865 and 1923. During those years, he affiliated with the San’yū school of storytelling, and performed kabuki roles, conjuring, and hypnotism. His achievements include the adaptation of the modern European detective and sensation fiction novel genres of Mary Braddon and Charles Dickens, as well as possibly Charles Reade and Alexandre Dumas, to the Japanese yose stage. In the process, Black participated in the Meiji debate over reform and the meaning of modernity. Stenographic book (sokkibon) versions of Black’s narrations show that he presented audiences and readers with characters and settings which combined European and Japanese characteristics in stories which served as prototypes of the new Meiji nation-state. His narrations also served as blueprints for survival in an age of rapid change. Black’s entertaining and instructive narrations reveal how he and his contemporaries interpreted Meiji reforms and their impact. They are a social historian’s tools for mapping the development of the literary sensibility and intellectual history of the Japanese.