Maki Isaka's Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater approaches the world of Japanese kabuki theatre from the perspective of gender studies. The author focuses on onnagata—the kabuki actors responsible for playing female roles who are often, though not always, men. The book's conclusion is that onnagata, male and female alike, construct a version of femininity that is “intricate yet porous, precarious but binding, and codependent on the labyrinths of others” (ix). In short, their act of gendering follows the same logic as pedestrian performances in everyday life. As the author acknowledges in the introduction, such an investigation of kabuki’s gender impersonation is well-trod analytical ground in the years since the publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. However, Isaka makes a number of important interventions in understanding how femininity is constructed and presented on the Japanese stage as well as in society as a whole.

First, Isaka intentionally wrestles with well-entrenched academic ideas about kabuki theatre's development that, as she argues, are often incorrect, simplified, or based on false premises. For example, she points out that there is no consensus among scholars on the oft-referenced “three-stage trajectory” (17) of kabuki history, in which female roles were first played by adult women, then young boys (wakashu), and ultimately adult men. Isaka argues that this narrative of evolution—which centers around the question of imitation and the debate about whether biological woman and their femininity are relevant to the onnagata’s art—has “misinformed our understanding of onnagata artistry and helped thwart career building in this vocation by women” (18) by distancing kabuki from the imitation of women. Isaka, uniquely and importantly, goes against such readings by demonstrating that imitation is “not something to be overcome but [is] the very foundation of the methodology and techniques of onnagata” (17).

Isaka goes on to reconsider the history of onnagata performance over the past few centuries. The first chapter unpacks the gender identity of early wakashu boy actors who were known as futanarihira or “androgynous beauties” (15). Chapter 2 parses the transition between this ephemeral aesthetic of boy actors to the lifelong, highly disciplined training of adult onnagata meant to prolong an actor's beauty and femininity indefinitely. The third and fourth chapters then compare two seminal acting treatises from the eighteenth century, “The Words of Ayame” and Kikunojō’s “Secret Transmissions of an Onnagata.” Close reading these prescriptions for performing female roles, Isaka concludes that both writers describe a spectrum in which masculinity and femininity are located on the two extremes, a system that resembles the understanding of gender in twentieth-century Japan (48). Because this system imagines that male onnagata present femininity onstage by distancing themselves from their own masculinity, women were ultimately excluded from the art. Over the course of its rewriting of history, Onnagata thus narrates a development in gender performance in which “[o]nnagata transformed their gender from military masculinity to the androgynous gender and then to ideal femininity” (23). Instead of using the sex and age of actors to describe the “three-stage trajectory” (17) of kabuki, Isaka's narrative focuses on the ideological and rhetorical underpinnings of kabuki’s methodology for performing gender.

Among the most notable inclusions in Isaka's reenvisioned theatre history is the discussion in Chapter 7 of female kabuki actors such as Kumehachi in conjunction with their predecessor okyōgenshi, or theatre masters. Isaka explains her purpose in introducing this topic “is not so much to supplement kabuki historiography as to explore and expose what was made abjected and sacrificed for the sake of a system as a whole” (19). Her conclusion is that these female artists were excluded from traditional histories because they could perform believably as onnagata, a fact that was counter to the traditions of onnagata art that had been established since the eighteenth century as well as the understanding of gendered performance in Meiji-era (late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century) Japanese society (137).

The book's exploration of gender performance goes far beyond the worlds of dramatic literature and theatrical performance. Isaka covers the experience of kabuki in understudied forms of print media such as actor-critique books and playbills, extending the issues of citation, imitation, and transmission of a body of knowledge into a consideration of society at large (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 delves into questions of how the body is naturalized by examining performance techniques such as the nanba gait and “puppet-gesture” (ningyōburi). Finally, Isaka extends the book's theses about the constructed nature of gender and performance to the theatre community's tradition of adoption and the participation of onnagata in the contemporary commercial makeup business (Chapter 8).

True to its subtitle, the monograph is a labyrinth. Most of the time, the fluid and ambitious nature of the project is its strongest suit. That being said, there are moments where the book's complex structure becomes sprawling. Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater is therefore best read as a whole, allowing its central inquiry—“who is made to pay the price for establishing, naturalizing, and maintaining a system” (ix)—to find resonance among the impressive and diverse array of genres and cultural practices it addresses.