ABOUT THIS BOOK

Bringing together performance studies, critical theory, and contemporary Japanese cultural studies to offer an unsettling glimpse into a global future of crisis already arriving

Slow Death examines contemporary artistic practice as a form of active engagement with the condition of “slow death”: the diffused feeling of decline with no end in sight. The theater and performance artists discussed here confront the realities of a state that is no longer tenable, rehearsing slow death’s modalities, probing its implications, and imagining possible endpoints through dramaturgy. As these artists show, the very notion of progress—whether framed as a march toward a hopeful future or a retreat into the comforts of a nostalgic past—carries an inescapable irony. Both trajectories seem equally unsustainable, rendering any prospect of radical transformation elusive. This sense of endless suspendedness emerges as a pervasive motif across the artworks discussed, such as the anticapitalist performance spaces created by Tanino Kurō and the queer feminist dramaturgy of Ichihara Satoko. Yet, as coauthors Kyoko Iwaki, Jessica Nakamura, and Corey Wakeling identify throughout, to enact slow death in performance is not to capitulate to despair but to expose its structure and, in doing so, uncover latent forms of everyday resistance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

KYOKO IWAKI is an associate professor of theater and performance studies at the University of Antwerp.

JESSICA NAKAMURA is an associate professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

COREY WAKELING is an associate professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.

REVIEWS

“Examining Japanese theater in the last decade, this remarkable book is about how to live in the time of societies’ slow unraveling. It is a bold new critical contribution and a generational statement for how to create and critically engage with contemporary performance. A must-read for understanding what’s happening in Japan and how to learn from this.” —Peter Eckersall, City University of New York

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Slow Death Dramaturgies
Chapter 1: Ghostly Realism: Matsubara Shuntarō and the Post-Fukushima Necroambient Society
Chapter 2: Scaffolding the Situation: The Trajectory of Tanino Kurō’s Performance Architecture
Chapter 3: Against Productivity: Faifai’s Reimagining Theater as Unproductive Experience
Chapter 4: Immigration and Ethics in Kamisato Yudai’s A Haphazard Stranger’s Rough Report
Chapter 5: Sokonaizu (Bottomless): Tsutsui Jun, Dead Time, and Kodokushi
Chapter 6: Activating Abject in a Super-Sanitized Society: Ichihara Satoko’s Madama Butterfly
Coda: Slow Death and Its Global Registers
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index