Onnagata

In an all-male kabuki play, there are always male actors who plays as female characters also known as onnagata. They are required to dress and act as females in the stage plays. Throughout the play, they spoke in high voices and used feminine gestures. Onnagata actors also appeared to look like females by making themselves look smaller compared to the other male actors. Onnagata actors received training when they were young and would even act feminine outside of the kabuki stage plays. Because their acting were so good, many male and female audience were mesmerized by them similar to Masuyama. To Masuyama, Mangiku, an onnagata actor, is more feminine than females in real life. He compares the onnagata actor to a group of chorus girls who were “rough-skinned, sprawled about like animals in the zoo, threw bored glanes at him, but he never felt so distinctly alien as in Mangiku’s dressing room; nothing in these real women made Masuyama feel particularly masculine” (298). It seems that Masuyama doesn’t think the chorus girls are any different from him even though they’re women but Mangiku, who’s a male, is different from both him and the chorus girls.



To me the line, “An onnagata is the child born of the illicit union between dream and reality” is that an onnagata actor is on the borderline of dream and reality. This is because the way an onnagata acts is more like a fantasy of how women should act but in reality, they are men acting as women. For me, an onnagata seems so unreal with his smooth and elegant movements even outside the stage plays. The reason why it is “illicit” is because an onnagata is just so good at their role that even male audiences are attracted to them. This is very similar to Masuyama’s feelings toward Mangiku’s on page 296. “Mangiku’s body, when he had removed his costume, was delicate but unmistakably a man’s” (296). Based on this quote, it seems to me that even though Masuyama was captivated by Mangiku’s feminine gestures and actions (who is almost like a dream-like female), Masuyama came back to reality when he saw Mangiku’s naked body. It’s undeniable that Masuyama was captivated by Mangiku’s feminine beauty on stage but he was still captivated after seeing the other’s naked body. “Strangely enough, however, this spell was not broken even by close observations of Mangiku in the dressing room” (296). Although he remembers that Mangiku is indeed a male, Masuyama’s image of him didn’t disappear. It may be due to Mangiku’s feminine actions and gestures outside the plays that kept Masuyama’s image of him alive.



Question: Why did the narrator in The Izu Dancer lie about going back to school when in fact he ran out of money?