The Virgin's Mask (少女仮面) by Juro Kara: Plot and History

Introduction

Juro Kara (唐十郎, 1940--2024, born Yoshihide Otsuru) was one of the most influential figures in postwar Japanese theater, and The Virgin's Mask (少女仮面, Shojo Kamen) is one of his best-known plays. Written in 1969, it won the 15th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1970 and has been staged many times since.

The Angura Movement and Kara's Place Within It

To understand The Virgin's Mask, it helps to know the cultural moment from which it emerged. The late 1960s and early 1970s in Japan were a period of social and artistic upheaval, with student protests, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and the struggle against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo).

In this context, a group of young theater artists rejected both traditional Japanese theater and the Western-influenced shingeki (new theater) movement that had dominated modern Japanese stages. This movement, known as angura (a Japanese abbreviation of "underground"), produced several major figures, including Shuji Terayama, Tadashi Suzuki, and Juro Kara himself.

The Red Tent and a Play Written for Another Company

Kara founded his company in 1963 as the Situation Society; it took the name Jokyo Gekijo (Situation Theater) in 1964. Its signature was the red tent (aka tento), a portable performance space first raised on the grounds of Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku in August 1967. The red tent became an icon of the angura movement.

The Virgin's Mask, however, was not written for the tent. Kara wrote it in 1969 for another leading company of the movement, Tadashi Suzuki's Waseda Little Theater.

Plot and Imagery

The play is set in Nikutai ("The Flesh," 肉体), an underground café in Tokyo. Its owner is Kasugano Yachiyo, a legendary former star of male roles in the Takarazuka Revue, Japan's famous all-female theater company. With her obedient waiters, she rehearses the role of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights while waiting for an actress to play Catherine.

Two girls arrive: Kai, a self-described sixteen-year-old who longs to play young women's roles at Takarazuka, and a girl who looks like an old woman. Yachiyo gives Kai the role of Catherine. The rehearsals become entangled with the delusions of an insurance saleswoman who lost her family in the Tokyo air raids and the self-questioning of a ventriloquist, and Yachiyo's secret past is exposed. Among the figures in the play is Captain Amakasu, whom Yachiyo met and admired in Manchuria. At the end, bulldozers from a subway construction project destroy the café, and the sounds of wartime bombing blend with the noise of demolition.

The idea most associated with Kara, the "privileged body" (特権的肉体論, tokkenteki nikutai ron), holds that what matters on stage is the dramatic body of the performer. Nikutai, the name of the café, is the same word.

The Kishida Prize

The prize for The Virgin's Mask was the 15th, awarded in 1970. Kara later also won the Akutagawa Prize for fiction, awarded in 1983 for Sagawa-kun kara no tegami (佐川君からの手紙).

Legacy and Influence

The play has remained in the repertoire long after its first production. In June 2025, Eri Watanabe, herself a Kishida Prize winner, directed and starred in a memorial production for Kara at The Suzunari in Shimokitazawa.

English readers can find the play as The Virgin's Mask in Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays, edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie (University of Hawaii Press, 1992), together with Kara's Two Women.

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