Tragic Dramaturgy in Classical Japanese Theater

Among some 2,000 works of nō drama, probably not a single one has been more politically controversial than Semimaru. The story presents its main figure, Semimaru, as a blind orphan abandoned by his father, Emperor Daigo, and shows his sister, Sakagami, as a deranged wanderer. This “disrespectful” depiction of the imperial family offended the state authorities of imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century, prompting them to ban the performance of the play during the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the war, while postwar Japan’s “imperial democracy” was hotly debated, the accusation against the play dropped