Making the scene with Shikitei Sanba
Making the scene with Shikitei Sanba is a scholarly work, published in 2001. The main subjects of the publication include religion in China, history, culture of Japan, and computer science. Along with this story I will present a reading of the story's performative situation, in hopes of showing a concern with the interweaving of collective memory, performance and text-based history at work in the popular texts of the time.What I am presenting today is a small part of a project to investigate the centrality of performed storytelling in the urban culture of nineteenth-century Edo.I see in the many small relationships between published texts and the cultural scene of the city an interest (at that time) in the dynamics of memory as embodied practice, history as textual reference and the impact of these two on how authors construct identities.First a caveat: I use the term "performed storytelling" and "rakugo" interchangeably, and sometimes I will also use "otoshibanashi" (ric l,,ll.¥Ji).I do this because I want to refer to the performance tradition, not just the genre of story told.In calling a variety of oneperson performances rakugo, I am following the scholarship of Mitamura Engyo (:::.B3H:lt~.1870-1952), who sees the professional performance form of rakugo in the mid-nineteenth century as having absorbed various pre-existing styles of ~ne-person performance.