INTERVIEW: Katsura Sunshine breaks barriers with art of Rakugo
Photo: Katsura Sunshine performs in his Rakugo show. Photo courtesy of Russ Rowland / Provided by JT PR with permission.
Katsura Sunshine has brought his Rakugo storytelling show to off-Broadway’s New World Stages, where it is currently playing an extended run through April. Rakugo, for the unbeknownst, has been a traditional form of storytelling in Japan for 400 years, and Sunshine is believed to be one of the only non-Japanese practitioners of the art form.
Sunshine, originally from Canada and now based in New York City and Tokyo, did not wake up one day and become a Rakugo storyteller. He had to submit to a master in Japan and undergo a long and arduous training process.
He underwent this three-year apprenticeship, according to press notes, and not only learned the power of storytelling from his master, Katsura Bunshi VI, but also had to be completely subservient, even cleaning his master’s house.
“I went to Japan 21 years ago, and at the time I was interested in Japanese noh and kabuki, the traditional theater,” Sunshine said in a recent phone interview. “And having lived there for about five years where I could speak some Japanese I was first introduced to this art of Rakugo, and I just saw it in a small restaurant actually the first time I saw it and just fell immediately in love with it. It’s something that hasn’t really been performed widely outside of Japan because you’re basically stationary, and it depends on language. You have to know Japanese to kind of get it, but then I apprenticed to a master for three years, cleaned his house, did the laundry, was with him every waking hour as was the tradition.”
After that apprenticeship, he started to perform the stories abroad to an international audience, and he was surprised by the results. The tales he told — most of them quite funny — were seeming universal in nature.
“I think it’s because they’re 400-year-old stories, and the stories have kind of passed the test of time,” Sunshine said. “Japan a couple hundred years ago and Japan now are really different, yet these stories are still understandable and very, very funny and relatable. And so because it passed the test of time. I think it can travel beyond borders and beyond languages and beyond cultures. It’s when I realized people abroad appreciate the stories just as much as people in Japan did, and it made me want to do it here in New York.”
During a performance of Rakugo, Sunshine sits in a stationary, center-stage position — wearing a kimono and backed by a simple set. He leans forward toward the crowd and begins the tale-telling. This might not seem like a typical night at the theater, but New York audiences have been enraptured.
“People are really interested and engaged, and the audience is just fantastic,” he said. “It has been a dream come true to perform off-Broadway.”
During his apprenticeship days, his relationship with his master was an instructive, helpful one, but Sunshine made no qualms about it: he was terrified.
“It’s a very strict and traditional art form,” he said. “When he actually accepted me as an apprentice, out of 800 professional storytellers in Japan, I was the only non-Japanese at the time, but there had been one before me. A hundred years ago there was an Australian who did it, but it was kind of an unprecedented thing. And that had its advantages, and it had it its disadvantages. The language barrier was tough because in Japan there’s so many levels of politeness according to your hierarchical stature vis-a-vis the other person, and if you just go in normal working life, teaching at a university or that kind of thing, you can get away with one sort of set of polite forms. And nobody will really ask you to go further than that, but once you’re in the storytelling world, because it’s a very traditional world … you have to speak in such different ways. It’s like learning a new language.”
Sunshine remembers his master telling him not to talk until he learned proper Japanese, so for six months, he kept quiet while in public. Still, despite the rules, he was appreciative of the experience with Bunshi.
“He basically treated me like he would any other Japanese person, so I was glad to be treated strictly in that way, that he wasn’t making exceptions for me,” Sunshine said. “But it took a lot of catching up in a way.”
Sunshine likens the actual art form of Rakugo to playing jazz music. When musicians begin performing jazz, they usually have a repertoire of standards, and they make on-the-spot selections at each concert — all based on the atmosphere of the music hall and the mood of the crowd. It’s similar with Sunshine’s off-Broadway show.
“I’m changing the stories every night,” he said. “It’s a bit tough for the audience to keep track of if they’re going to come back and see it, so we made it simple. And I’m doing a completely different show every month. … The way it works is the first half of a set is like stand-up comedy, so an introduction, and you’re telling a few observational humor jokes and self-deprecating humor. And you talk a little bit about the specific culture that might relate to the story.”
The second half deals with a specific story that has been passed down through the generations from master to apprentice. These are often comic in nature, but occasionally they can be quite serious or even scary.
“For instance, in November, I did a ghost story,” Sunshine said as one example. “It’s a really famous story, but it’s a ghost story. It’s not a barrel of laughs once you get into the atmosphere of ‘The God of Death,’ and so that was more of an atmospheric story. Even though my introduction would have been comical, once I got into the story, it got more serious.”
Still, a hearty laugh is usually only a few seconds away.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Katsura Sunshine’s Rakugo is now playing New World Stages in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
