Tag Archives: Kabuki

Japanese Demons and Kabuki Spooky —re-post

by Christopher Agostino
(the heaviest traffic on the site these past few days are people searching for scary stuff like demon imagery, so I am re-posting one from last Halloween season  – and come see me at the Prospect Park Zoo this Sat and Sunday (Oct 27+28) to get your face painted — and I will be telling a new mix of demon tales from my storytelling show: The Eye of the Demon)
I paint a lot of demon faces this time of year, many inspired by Japanese imagery and folktales. In 2008 particularly, I put an effort into exploring new face designs based on Japanese masks and kabuki makeup. That year I was painting at the Transworld Halloween Show  for Kryolan Professional Makeup and took the approach at the event to paint horror faces based on world mask designs, as a contrast to the traditional zombies and skulls, so most of the examples here are from around that time.
     
This mask is a contemporary example of a Namahage Demon from the Akita Prefecture. It is worn for a traditional Lunar New Year celebration which sounds like Halloween in reverse, as young men wear the masks and visit people’s houses to scare their children and admonish them to listen to their parents—or the demons will come back! The parents reward the young men with sake and food. Although frightening, Namahage are said to be gods who bring good fortune, an example of the beliefs connected to spirit worship traditions in which powerful demonic spirits can become protective when they are appeased. Check out the Japanese movies Onmyoji and Onmyoji 2 for a fun depiction of demonic possession and the Ying-Yang master that has to restore the balance.
      In folktales, Japanese demons come with various descriptions. Some may be red or blue faced, with fangs, horns and one, two or three eyes. In the tale of the famous samurai Raiko and his battle with the Goblin Earth Spider, he is attacked by an army that drops out of the storm clouds, including animals that walk like men, beings with three claws and three eyes—one with eyes in its hands—and long serpents with human heads. There’s a few ideas for facepainting. At an exhibit of prints by the artist Kuniyoshi last year at the Japan Society I was very jazzed to see two illustrations of Raiko vs. the Earth Spider with imagery that has re-invigorated the way I tell and depict that tale through faces.
     
The prevalence of such beliefs within the medieval Japanese culture allowed for the growth in Edo province of “Aragato,” the style of Kabuki theater which produced the famous makeup for its samurai hero and for the ghosts and demons he would battle. The origin of Kabuki and other Japanese theater in shamanic ritual and spirit worship is evident in the hero’s ability to do the impossible because they have allowed themselves to be possessed by a powerful kami (“supernatural deity”) and thus have become hitokami (“man-gods”). Continue reading →

Watanabe No Tsuna and the Ibaraki Demon in Japanese Art

Come see me at the Kryolan Professional Makeup booth at IMATS New York, April 14 to see the painted body I’ve designed based on this image research and the story of the battle between Watanabe no Tsuna and the Irabaki Demon.

I had no idea this story was such a well known legend until I did a Google Image search of “Watanabe No Tsuna” and turned up a lot of results, many of them depictions of the battle with the Irabaki Demon. Here are a few:

Depicting the demon having recovered her arm - by Kiyotada

Continue reading →

The Legendary Watanabe no Tsuna Battles the Ibaraki Demon at Rashomon Bridge

Come see me at the Kryolan Professional Makeup booth at IMATS New York, April 14 to see the painted body illustration of this story

by Christopher Agostino

Watanabe no Tsuna was perhaps the greatest samurai of all, legendary even as a child for a strength no man had seen before. As a young man, fighting with the Heavenly Companions alongside the famous samurai Raiko, Tsuna had helped to kill Ichigumi, the Goblin Spider, throwing a giant tree down upon the back of that monstrous earth spider while Raiko fought him off in the cave beneath Kyoto castle.

One of several prints by Kuniyoshi depicting the battle

Watanabe no Tsuna had again been at Raiko’s side when he killed the Drunken Demon. Once, the Drunken Demon had once been a handsome courtier who preyed on the noble women only with his charms, but, deep in his lustful ways, as he began to drink he began to change into a true monster. He would steal the young women from the emperor’s palace, and hold them captive for his pleasure. When he grew tired of them he would eat their flesh and drink their blood to feed his demon strength. Then he kidnapped the Princess Ibaraki, and she was too beautiful to grow tired of, so he kept her alive for many years. One night in his room, perhaps to dull the pain in her heart, Princess Ibaraki joined him in his drinking and, once drunk, she tasted his feast of human sashimi. She too became a demon, though she kept her secret from the other captive maidens. When the samurai Raiko and his companions came to rescue the Princess it was fortunate that she had also drunk from the saki they had drugged to incapacitate the demon or she would have raised the alarm when Raiko came into the sleeping demon’s room and cut off his head with one swing of his sword. Tsuna saw the beautiful Ibaraki lying asleep in the demon’s bed and released her along with the other captive maidens, not knowing her terrible secret. Continue reading →

Storytelling in Japanese Art — Onmyoji and Raiko: Super Heroes Team-Up vs. More Japanese Demons

The Drunken Demon

by Christopher Agostino

I ran into a couple of old friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday in the exhibit Storytelling in Japanese Art. In an “emaki” (handscroll) illustrating the story of “The Drunken Demon” I found the hero samurai Raiko (who I know from a folktale I tell of his battle with the Goblin Spider) and Abe no Seimei (my favorite Onmyoji, or yin/yang magician)—both in the same story like a Spiderman/Dr. Strange crossover in an issue of Marvel Team-Up.

Marvel Team-Up — Twice as Many Pages! Twice as Many Thrills!

Emaki are like the original comic books or animated movies, telling a story through text and sequential illustrations. A scroll might be 30′ long, and to read it you would look at about two feet at a time, unrolling it with your left hand while simultaneously rolling it up again with your right. “The Drunken Demon” version in the exhibit was told over three scrolls from the Edo period by Kaiho Yuchiku (1654-1728). A boyish demon becomes terrible when drunk, stealing all the beautiful women. When he captures the daughter of an aristocrat, Abe no Seimei uses his powers to find where the girl is held, and the Emperor orders Raiko and his warrior companions to rescue the girl—which they do with the help of three gods disguised as men, a tree that grows across a chasm to become a bridge, some poisoned saki and a golden helmet. In the climactic illustrations, after a wild feast featuring human sashimi, the sleeping demon is depicted as filling an entire room (described in the text as 10′ tall, but illustrated as if 30′ tall) before Raiko cuts his head off, blood spraying out in a fine mist just like in the modern samurai movies like “The Warrior’s Way” (a fun one I watched last night). Continue reading →

Oshiguma ― Kumadori ― Japanese Kabuki Theatre Makeup Prints ― “Leaving an Impression”

by Christopher Agostino

The process of a Kabuki actor applying his makeup is referred to as Kumadori, meaning “taking an impression”, in the sense that the makeup pattern conforms to the inner structure of their face and the interior persona of their designated character. After the performance, the actor may then leave an impression of the makeup on a silk cloth by pressing it against their face, creating an object of art called oshiguma.

Oshiguma of Ichimura-Uzaemon

In the book Kumadori (Toshiro Morita, 1985) there is a gallery of oshiguma prints from makeup worn by the Kabuki actor Ichimura-Uzaemon. The actor explains that the tradition began in earlier times when Kabuki actors needed to supplement their income and did so by making the oshiguma after a performance and selling it to admiring fans. As the prints became prized as art objects, actors would put their makeup on just to make the print:

Ichimura-Uzaemon creating an oshiguma

“A peculiar thing about the “Oshi-dori” [sic] is that an impression taken of Kumadori after performing dynamically on a live stage, seems to come off as if the actor’s actual face was there alive on the cloth. But when an impression is taken of a Kumadori painted only for the purpose of making an “Oshi-dori”, the result is totally lacking in life. It is here we see the mystical quality of the Kumadori.” ― Ichimura-Uzaemon in Kumadori, 1985

1922 oshiguma

Ichimura-Uzaemon is part of a long line of Kabuki actors to bear that name. Kabuki is a theatre tradition that is past on through families (by birth and adoption), as evidenced in this oshiguma from 1922, which featured Ichimura-Uzaemon XV (perhaps his grandfather?). It is described in the BBC radio broadcasts of  The British Museum series “A History of the World in 100 Objects“  as linked to a specific transitional period in modern Kabuki theatre, and includes the makeup prints of three actors that were, respectively, the 4th , the 15th and the 6th of their family’s lineage within the Kabuki theatre:

“An oshiguma, or face pressing by three Kabuki actors; Ichimura Takematsu IV, Ichimura Uzaemon XV and Onoe Baiko VI created after a performance of Momijigari, or Contemplating Maples, at the Shintomiza an old style Kabuki Theater destroyed in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. They were part of the creative change in the Kabuki world when influences were continuing to open up the perceptions of the Japanese to Western ideas creating a crucible out of which emerged modern playwrights and plays”  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/7sG6iEl1SgeooiGokuePHw)

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Oshiguma . Collection of Ronald Cavaye

I came upon this wonderful oshiguma image (Nakamura Utaemon VI as the serpent of Sanuki in Nihon Furisode Hajime, May 1984, Kabuki-za. ) accompanied by a remarkable post called “Letter from London” in which Ronald Cavaye describes the experience of seeing a Kabuki performance, the ordeal it can be for the performers, and how the oshiguma is meant to capture the life force of the actor in performance―including the story behind this particular oshiguma. I have excerpted only a brief piece of his post here, and it really is worth going to the link and reading it:

“Everything about this oshiguma seems to convey that this performance was an ordeal. This actor was suffering for his art. There are no finely drawn lines of makeup here. Or rather, they may have been finely drawn by the actor in his dressing room, but here they’re misshaped and deformed by the ineluctable downward trickle of his sweat. The role is that of the eight-tailed serpent in the dance-drama, Nihon Furisode Hajime – 日本振袖始 – performed by Utaemon at the Kabuki-za in May, 1984. I saw that performance. It was amazing and I bought this oshiguma in the National Theatre in Tokyo where it was sold in aid of charity.”  http://www.kabuki-bito.jp/kabuki_column/letterfromlondon/post_197.html

Yves Klein, An "Anthropometry/Shroud"

It is a clear example of how the oshiguma is in itself a work of art, a static object that still contains the energy of the performance. The oshiguma concept inspired the work of art I generated a few years ago from my own Kabuki makeup (at the top of the post). And I wonder at the apparent stylistic connection to Yves Klein and his Anthropometries, which also capture the spirit of a theatrical action through impressing a painted person against cloth or paper (see Men Getting Women Naked and Yves Klein — Female Nudity in Art   http://wp.me/p1sRkg-ll )

And check out  Anatomy of an Oshiguma about that 1922 oshiguma, which includes this description of the medium as “make-up and sweat on silk”

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Ichimura-Uzaemon painted himself in several different character patterns for the book “Kumadori”. From left to right, these are Benkei-kuma (“Benkei’s Pattern”), Kuge-Aku (“Evil Aristocrat’s Pattern”), and Saru-kuma (“Monkey Pattern”), and look at how much his face changes from design to design—it would be hard to recognize these as all the same actor.

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