Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Theatre and Performance
Advisor
Peter Eckersall
Committee Members
Claudia Orenstein
Samuel L. Leiter
Subject Categories
Theatre History
Keywords
Soganoya Gorō; kigeki; modern Japanese theatre; Japanese comedy; kabuki; Osaka niwaka; rakugo; theatre historiography; popular theatre; self-fashioning
Abstract
This dissertation reconsiders the history of modern Japanese theatre through the career of Soganoya Gorō, a once enormously popular but now largely forgotten actor, playwright, and theatre manager who helped create the modern Japanese comic genre known as kigeki. By reconstructing Gorō’s career from playbills, programs, newspaper advertisements, reviews, memoirs, and his own often self-fashioning accounts, the dissertation argues that Gorō was central to the making of modern Japanese comedy, and that his disappearance from theatre history resulted not from his marginality but from the success with which his hybridized form came to seem natural. Gorō’s theatre combined elements of Osaka niwaka, kabuki, rakugo, and Western comedy: the improvised lightness of popular comic performance, the stylized beauty and resolution-driven structure of kabuki, verbal wit and stock characterization, and the comic framework of reconciliation. Yet because this form became popular, commercial, embodied, and apparently vernacular, it fell outside the categories through which modern Japanese theatre history has usually recognized innovation. The dissertation therefore treats Gorō not only as a biographical subject but also as a test case for the limits of canon-centered historiography. It proposes a “paradox of modernization”: when modernization remains visibly incomplete, it is easily recognized as modern; when it succeeds so fully that it appears ordinary, it can disappear from historical view.
Recommended Citation
Hibino, Kei, "The Birth of Kigeki: A Critical Biography of Soganoya Gorō, the Japanese Prewar “King of Comedy”" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6872
