Henry Black: On Stage in Meiji Japan

(Paperback)

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Unique among foreigners in nineteenth-century Japan, Australian-born professional storyteller (rakugoka) Henry Black (1858-1923) enthralled audiences with his adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon and Fortune de Boisgobey. These tales, later produced as books, brought notions of European modernity to many ordinary Japanese. Black also acted kabuki roles, managed an orchestra, performed magic and hypnotism, lived with his Japanese male lover, drank heavily, and practised tea ceremony. His voice was recorded for the London Gramophone Company on the first disc-shaped recordings made in Japan. In the 1870s Black had joined the pro-democracy movement, promoting equal rights and an elected assembly. His later affiliation with the Sanyu guild of storytellers, under the professional name of Kairakutei Burakku, enabled him to promote the movements aims through his stories. He became a naturalised Japanese, and was shunned by his own family. This is the first full-length English-language account of Henry Black.Translating Blacks narrated adaptations and drawing on newspapers and diary entries, Ian McArthur demonstrates Blacks individual contribution to the modernisation of Meiji-era (1868-1912) Japan.

Reviews

Ian McArthur's first book on Henry Black, published in Japanese in 1992 under the title Kairakutei Burakku:wasurerareta Nippon saikO no gaifin tarento (Kairakutei Black: The Forgotten Greatest Foreign Talent in Japan), focuses on Henry Black himself and is written more as a historical novel, with gaps in the available sources augmented with narrative from the author's imagina--tion. By way of contrast, the present volume, based as it is on the author's 2002 PhD thesis from the University of Sydney, benefits from a rigorous academic approach. The bibliography, for example, lists 220 items. There are 120 explanatory footnotes, in addition to copious in-text citations acknowl--edging the sources of his material, and twelve pages of illustrations including photographs of Henry Black and the people around him, together with sketches from the books made from Black's narrations. Fortunately, despite its academic rigour,McArthur's training as a journalist, and his lapses here and there into colourful description, have left us with an elegantly written, absorbing text Ian McArthur's book should appeal to anyone with more than a fleeting interest in Japan's modernisation or popular culture in the Meiji and Taisho periods. Dr Ian McArthur and Monash University Press deserve to be congratu-lated for producing such an attractive, informative and eminently readable monograph. - HUGH CLARKE The University of Sydney JOSA Vol 46, August 2015

Author Bio

Ian McArthur is an educator, writer and journalist. He has been a Tokyo correspondent for the Melbournebased Herald and Weekly Times and a journalist with the Daily Yomiuri and Kyodo News. He received his doctorate in Japanese Studies at The University of Sydney and has taught Japanese Studies, where he is an honorary associate, and was the 2009 recipient of the Inoue Yasushi Award for Outstanding Research in Japanese Literature in Australia.