Understanding 'GeGeGe no Ge': Fantasy, Feminism, and the Supernatural in Eri Watanabe's Theater | Kishida Prize Play Analysis

Introduction

Eri Watanabe (渡辺えり, also known under her earlier name Watanabe Eriko) is one of the most distinctive and important female voices in modern Japanese theater. Her Kishida Kunio Drama Award-winning play GeGeGe no Ge (ゲゲゲのげ) is a wild, exuberant, genre-defying work that drew on Japanese supernatural folklore, feminist consciousness, and sheer theatrical inventiveness to create something entirely new. Written and performed in the 1980s, the play emerged during a period of tremendous creative energy in Japanese theater and stands as a landmark in both women's theater and the broader landscape of contemporary Japanese drama.

The title itself is a playful allusion to GeGeGe no Kitaro (ゲゲゲの鬼太郎), Shigeru Mizuki's beloved manga and anime series about a ghost boy who mediates between the human and yokai (supernatural creature) worlds. By evoking this cultural touchstone while transforming it -- replacing "Kitaro" with the bare syllable "ge" -- Watanabe signals her intention to take the familiar world of Japanese supernatural folklore and make it strange, personal, and politically charged.

Historical Context

The 1980s were a transformative decade for Japanese theater in general and for women's theater in particular. Japan's economy was booming, cultural confidence was high, and the arts were experiencing an explosion of creativity and experimentation. In theater, the previous decades' avant-garde movements had broken down old hierarchies and opened space for new voices, and women playwrights were beginning to claim that space with unprecedented boldness.

Before the 1980s, Japanese theater had been overwhelmingly male-dominated. Women had been present as performers -- most notably in the all-female Takarazuka Revue -- but female playwrights were rare, and those who did write for the stage often felt pressure to conform to male-defined aesthetic standards. The emergence of Watanabe and her contemporaries represented a genuine revolution: women writing, directing, and performing work that expressed specifically female experiences and perspectives.

Watanabe founded her own company, Universal Gravitation (3○○, later renamed), which became a vehicle for her distinctive theatrical vision. Unlike some of her contemporaries who worked in the minimalist mode that was becoming fashionable, Watanabe embraced maximalism -- big casts, elaborate staging, physical comedy, musical numbers, and a kitchen-sink approach to genre that threw together realism, fantasy, folklore, and social commentary with reckless abandon.

Plot and Structure

GeGeGe no Ge is not a play that can be easily summarized in conventional plot terms. Its narrative structure is deliberately chaotic, weaving together multiple storylines, time periods, and levels of reality in a way that reflects the play's thematic interest in the interpenetration of the everyday and the supernatural.

At its core, the play deals with the lives of women -- their bodies, their desires, their frustrations, their power -- seen through the lens of Japanese supernatural folklore. Yokai, ghosts, and other supernatural beings populate the stage alongside contemporary women, and the boundaries between the human and spirit worlds are constantly dissolving and reforming. The supernatural elements are not mere decoration or metaphor; they are treated as genuinely present, creating a theatrical world where the rules of ordinary reality are suspended and anything becomes possible.

Watanabe's structural approach is accumulative rather than linear. Scenes pile upon scenes, characters multiply, and the energy builds through sheer theatrical abundance rather than through conventional narrative tension. The effect is closer to a festival or carnival than to a well-made play -- a deliberate choice that connects the work to Japanese matsuri (festival) traditions and their association with the temporary suspension of social norms.

The play incorporates physical comedy, song, dance, and direct address to the audience, refusing to stay within any single theatrical register. This genre-mixing is itself a political act: by refusing to conform to established formal categories, Watanabe challenges the hierarchies of taste and value that those categories encode.

Thematic Analysis

The Supernatural as Feminist Space

One of the most brilliant aspects of GeGeGe no Ge is its use of Japanese supernatural folklore as a space for feminist exploration. Japanese folklore is rich with female supernatural figures -- from the vengeful spirits of wronged women to the shape-shifting fox-women (kitsune) to the mountain witches (yamanba) -- and these figures often embody forms of female power, desire, and rage that are suppressed in everyday social life.

Watanabe recognizes that these supernatural female figures represent a cultural archive of suppressed female experience. The ghost who returns to haunt the living is often a woman whose desires were denied in life; the shape-shifter who deceives men is acting out a fantasy of female agency in a patriarchal world; the mountain witch who lives outside society has achieved a freedom that domesticated women can only dream of. By bringing these figures onto the contemporary stage, Watanabe gives theatrical form to the rage, desire, and power that Japanese women have been taught to suppress.

The supernatural is thus not an escape from reality in Watanabe's theater but an intensification of it. The yokai and ghosts that populate GeGeGe no Ge are expressions of real female experiences -- desire, anger, grief, joy, rebellion -- amplified to supernatural proportions.

The Body as Theatrical Site

Watanabe's theater is emphatically physical. Bodies -- especially female bodies -- are central to her theatrical language. In GeGeGe no Ge, bodies eat, drink, sweat, fight, dance, transform, and occupy space with an exuberance that challenges the decorous containment expected of women in Japanese society.

This physicality is political. In a culture that socializes women into physical restraint and modesty, Watanabe's celebration of the unruly female body is itself a form of protest. Her characters take up space, make noise, and refuse the physical self-effacement that Japanese social norms often demand of women. The supernatural transformations in the play -- women becoming monsters, ghosts, or animal spirits -- extend this physical liberation into the realm of fantasy, suggesting that the female body contains possibilities that social convention cannot contain.

Folklore and Cultural Memory

Watanabe's engagement with yokai folklore also raises questions about cultural memory and its relationship to contemporary life. The yokai of Japanese tradition are not merely fictional creatures; they are embodiments of cultural knowledge about the natural world, the boundaries of human experience, and the forces that lie beyond rational understanding. As Japan has modernized and urbanized, these figures have been increasingly relegated to children's entertainment and nostalgic kitsch.

GeGeGe no Ge reclaims yokai as figures of genuine cultural and psychological power. By bringing them into a contemporary theatrical context and connecting them to the lives and experiences of modern women, Watanabe argues that the supernatural folklore of Japan contains wisdom and energy that contemporary culture ignores at its peril. The yokai are not relics of a superstitious past but living cultural forces that can illuminate and transform the present.

Comedy and Subversion

The play's comedy is central to its political force. Watanabe uses humor -- physical comedy, verbal wit, absurdist situations, bawdy jokes -- not as relief from serious themes but as a weapon against the social and aesthetic hierarchies that constrain women's lives and women's art. Laughter in GeGeGe no Ge is liberating because it breaks the spell of propriety and decorum that keeps disruptive energies in check.

The play's humor is also democratic. Unlike the refined comedy of literary theater, which often depends on cultural knowledge and aesthetic sophistication, Watanabe's comedy is broadly accessible, drawing on physical gags and universal human absurdities that can be appreciated by audiences across educational and class lines. This accessibility is itself a feminist gesture, refusing the equation of seriousness with exclusivity that characterizes much of Japan's high-cultural theater tradition.

Production and Performance History

GeGeGe no Ge was originally performed by Watanabe's company with Watanabe herself in a central role. Her performance -- commanding, physical, funny, and emotionally powerful -- was integral to the play's impact. Watanabe is a large woman by the standards of Japanese theater, and her physical presence on stage was itself a challenge to the aesthetic norms that favored slender, graceful female performers. She used her body as a theatrical instrument with a confidence and authority that were revolutionary in the context of Japanese women's performance.

The play's original production was characterized by its energy, its visual inventiveness, and its refusal to be contained within any single aesthetic category. Reviewers struggled to describe what they had seen, resorting to lists of genres and influences that inevitably failed to capture the work's unique character. This resistance to categorization was part of the play's power -- and part of what made it a worthy recipient of the Kishida Prize.

Legacy and Influence

GeGeGe no Ge and Watanabe's broader body of work have had a lasting impact on Japanese theater. Her demonstration that feminist themes could be explored through popular, entertaining, and theatrically exuberant forms -- rather than through the earnest, didactic modes that had characterized much earlier feminist theater -- opened new possibilities for subsequent generations of women theater-makers.

Her rehabilitation of supernatural folklore as serious artistic material also anticipates broader trends in Japanese and global culture. The contemporary fascination with yokai, visible in manga, anime, film, and art, owes something to artists like Watanabe who insisted on the continued relevance and power of these traditional figures.

For international audiences, GeGeGe no Ge offers an introduction to a side of Japanese theater that is rarely visible abroad: the raucous, physical, genre-defying work of women artists who use the stage as a space for liberation and transformation. It challenges narrow conceptions of what Japanese theater looks like and what it can accomplish.

Conclusion

GeGeGe no Ge remains a vital and inspiring work -- a play that demonstrates the power of theatrical imagination to transform cultural material, challenge social conventions, and create new forms of expression. Eri Watanabe's achievement was to show that the supernatural folklore of Japan, the experiences of contemporary women, and the exuberant possibilities of theatrical performance could be woven together into a work of art that was at once entertaining, politically charged, and aesthetically revolutionary.

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