Ren Saito (斎藤憐): Where Music Meets History

Introduction

Ren Saito (斎藤憐, 1940--2011) was a playwright best known for bringing jazz, history, and human drama together on stage. He received the 24th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1980 for Shanghai Bansuking (上海バンスキング, also written in English as Shanghai Vance King). The original production ran on and off for some fifteen years and reached a total of 435 performances, and the play was also filmed twice.

Early Life and Career

Saito was born in December 1940 in Pyongyang, then under Japanese colonial rule. He attended school in Japan and left the Russian literature course at Waseda University without finishing his degree.

He completed the Haiyuza Theatre training school in 1966 and that year helped found the Jiyu Gekijo company with Kazuyoshi Kushida, Makoto Sato, Hideko Yoshida, and others. In 1968 he joined Sato in forming Engeki Center 68. Both groups were part of the new small-theater activity of the 1960s.

The Jiyu Gekijo took the name On-Theater Jiyu Gekijo (オンシアター自由劇場) in 1975. It was this company that premiered his best-known play.

The Kishida Prize-Winning Work

Shanghai Bansuking premiered on January 25, 1979, at the company's Roppongi theater, directed by Kushida, and won the 24th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1980. The script was published that same year.

The title combines "Shanghai" with bansu, a show-business abbreviation of the English word "advance," meaning an advance on one's pay. The phrase suggests someone forever borrowing against his wages, which fits one of the play's central characters.

The story begins in early summer 1936. The clarinetist Hatano travels to Shanghai with his wife Madonna, having told her that they are going to Paris, because he wants to leave militarist Japan for a city where he can play jazz freely. The trumpeter Matsumoto, nicknamed Bakumatsu, loves gambling and keeps taking advances from Larry, the owner of the club Saint Louis. He falls in love with Larry's lover, Lily.

When the Sino-Japanese War begins, Japanese military pressure squeezes out both freedom and jazz. After the war, Hatano is a ruined opium addict, and Matsumoto has died on his way home from the front.

Music is central to the work: its leading characters are jazz musicians, and the cast member Hideko Yoshida released albums under the title Shanghai Bansuking (1981) and Shanghai Bansuking II (1983).

The On-Theater Jiyu Gekijo received the 1979 Kinokuniya Theatre Award as a group. The company revived the play repeatedly at venues including the Hakuhinkan Theatre and Theatre Cocoon, and toured it nationally in 1984.

Theatrical Style and Themes

Two interests recur in the titles and subjects of Saito's work:

Music and popular song: Beyond Shanghai Bansuking, he wrote about the lyricist Yaso Saijo in Canary (カナリア), and about George Gershwin in American Rhapsody (アメリカン・ラプソディ).

Twentieth-century history: Shanghai Bansuking follows its characters from 1936 through the end of the war, and other titles also point to modern history, such as Buta to Shinjuwan (豚と真珠湾, published 2007), whose title refers to Pearl Harbor.

Major Works

In addition to Shanghai Bansuking, Saito's dramatic works include:

Shanghai Bansuking (上海バンスキング) (premiered 1979) --- The Kishida Prize-winning play about Japanese jazz musicians in Shanghai.
Tasogare no Vaudeville (黄昏のボードビル) (published 1980)
Ernie Pyle (アーニー・パイル) (1985)
Tokyo Koshinkyoku (東京行進曲) (1991)
Canary (カナリア) --- Winner of the Kikuta Kazuo Theatre Award in 1997.
Haru, Shinobigataki o (春、忍び難きを) (2005) --- Winner of a Kinokuniya Theatre Award.

Saito also wrote for television, including the series Roku-wa no Kamome (6羽のかもめ, 1975), and Shanghai Bansuking reached the screen twice, in a 1984 film directed by Kinji Fukasaku and a 1988 film directed by Kushida.

Legacy and Influence

Ren Saito died on October 12, 2011, at his home in Tokyo, at the age of 70.

His best-known legacy is Shanghai Bansuking itself. In 2010, sixteen years after its previous staging, it returned to Theatre Cocoon with nearly the original cast, 31 years after the premiere.

For international audiences, the play offers a view of Shanghai in the 1930s through the eyes of Japanese musicians, and of how war closed the space they had hoped to find there.

How to Experience Their Work

To look for Ren Saito's plays, visit our script search page. Shanghai Bansuking is the natural starting point. The script was published in Japanese by Jiritsu Shobo (而立書房), which has also published many of his other plays. We could not confirm a published English translation.

Ren Saito (斎藤憐) | Kishida Prize-Winning Playwright Guide