Ichikawa's film An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojo Henge, 1963) has long been acknowledged as an eccentric “masterpiece.” In this chapter, I would like to consider the film as the site of contestatory discourses of power and gender identification, through a play of apparently contradictory theatrical and cinematic styles. Specifically, the film foregrounds melodrama as a style that uneasily pivots between traditional Kabuki theater and Western cinematic realism. As such, it invites a reconsideration of the role of Shimpa, the Japanese melodramatic theater popular between 1890 and 1920, in its relation to cinema and Japanese culture.

Shimpa derived from a form of political theater designed to promote liberal political thought prior to the 1890 establishment of the first Japanese constitution and embodied emerging middle-class values parallel to the role melodrama played in France after the Revolution. All but forgotten after the triumph of Shingeki, or Western-style realist theater, and Shingeki-influenced cinema, Shimpa marks a boundary between what later would become clearly delineated Western and Japanese traditions in both political organization and narrative representation. These different traditions came to be known as “feudalism” and “humanism,” yet both terms are sweeping generalizations that erase the complexity and contradictions within each tradition. As such, they mythologize cultural difference as a polarization of unitary transhistorical forms.