Conventional scholarship has treated Kabuki under the Tenpō Reforms mainly as an object of oppression, viewed through Tokugawa administrative and institutional history. The reforms, directed by Mizuno Tadakuni, the Chief Senior Councillor (Rōjū Shuza), pulled the discussion in that direction. Yet the relationship between early modern Edo society and Kabuki was closer and stranger than that. Move past the purely political dimension and it becomes clear how particular plays and role-types (yakugara) led to the arrest of Danjūrō VII, and what ‘collective mentality’ (shūgō shinsei) his performances stirred among the people of Edo. (He was performing under the name Ebizō at the time and is referred to here as Danjūrō VII for consistency.)

Kagekiyo breaks out

In June of the thirteenth year of the Tenpō era (1842), Torii Yōzō, Magistrate of the South Magistrate’s Office (Minami-Machi Bugyō), sentenced Danjūrō VII to banishment from Edo, beyond a ten-ri radius of about 40 kilometres. Just before the arrest, the Kawarazaki-za theatre had been staging Kagekiyo, one of the celebrated plays of the Kabuki Jūhachiban. That performance was the direct trigger for his banishment.

Playing the warrior Kagekiyo, Danjūrō VII tore through the wooden bars of his cell, shattering the symbols of authority and scattering armed soldiers in a display of fierce, stylised mie. This prison-break was the climax of the play. It offered the people of Edo a profound catharsis, a moment of release from the daily weight of oppression, at a time when they felt suffocated by the Bakufu’s controls on ordinary life. The audience projected their own grievances onto Kagekiyo’s struggle and vented, through the actor’s body, a resistance to the regime they could not otherwise express.

The Shogunate arrested Danjūrō VII and stopped the production at once, because the stage had begun to work as an instrument of political satire, rousing the collective emotions of the crowd. Inside the theatre, audience empathy and a spirit of resistance met and produced a shared, alternative value system, something the Shogunate saw as a dangerous movement threatening the foundations of its rule. The banishment of Danjūrō VII was more than a matter of one actor. It was a confrontation over the representation of power between rulers and ruled, played out through the physical space of the theatre.

Luxury and the sumptuary laws

On 16 October 1842, six months before the banishment, the Shogunate issued a sweeping set of Sumptuary Laws (Shashi Kinshi-rei). Following the pattern of the Kyōhō and Kansei Reforms, these nationwide edicts imposed strict controls on the daily life of every resident of Edo, from town officials, the town elders (machi-toshiyori), down to the poorest tenement dwellers. Their true purpose went beyond frugality. It was to harden the status order (mibun chitsujo) that lay at the core of the Tenpō Reforms.

Danjūrō VII’s private life broke these edicts openly. He kept buying extravagant miniature doll furniture (�󾱲Բ�-��ō����), lacquered and carved in bright colours, and displayed it on scarlet felt carpets in his drawing rooms, claiming the pieces were ‘gifts from anonymous townspeople’. He owned objects far above his station: a small chest (ko-dansu) worked in gold paulownia crests using the intricate shakudō nanako metal technique, elaborate iron daggers (kozuka), and finely made oak chests (karabitsu) and framed tablets.

These rules reached into the theatre as well. Convinced that ordinary props would not satisfy his audience, Danjūrō VII used real, prohibited leather and iron armour on stage, along with ancestral netsuke (coral-root carvings) and inro decorated in high-relief lacquer (taka-makie inrō). For a Kabuki actor, who stood outside the ����-��ō-��ō-����ō (samurai-farmer-artisan-merchant) order of the Tokugawa system altogether, to parade martial armour and luxuries reserved for the samurai elite counted as a grave breach of the status order. He tried to comply after the edicts, pulling down part of his residence, but his conduct was judged an intolerable departure from his assigned rank, and his home was demolished in full.

The penalties reached well beyond Danjūrō VII. Fines fell on a wide circle around him: the landlords and former neighbourhood heads (nanushi) who had failed in their duty of supervision, a Fukagawa pawnbroker who took in the doll furniture without registering it properly, and the second-hand dealers who handled his stage equipment. The crackdown shows what the Shogunate was really after. It meant to dismantle the whole consumer culture that had gathered around the actor, a culture in which people flaunted wealth with no regard for status. The message was a calculated warning, aimed at forcing the customs of Edo society as a whole back into line.

An alternative order

The suppression of Kabuki under the Tenpō Reforms was more than a question of political policy. It grew out of the satire built into Danjūrō VII’s performances and the collective mentality of Edo society that answered them. The theatre he created became a space where social cohesion cut across class and occupation. When the loyalty of the audience (hiiki) locked onto his performance, the shared values of that space produced an alternative social order, one wholly distinct from the rigid, status-based hierarchy with the Tokugawa Shogun at its top. The Shogunate imposed a ten-ri banishment precisely because it saw that this theatrical domain threatened the established logic of rule.

The arrest and banishment of Danjūrō VII was more than a punishment for luxury or for breaking regulations. It was a deliberate, forceful attempt by the state to sever the self-governing social networks that the theatre had built.

This post is adapted from Ryo Kimura, A Historical Study of Ichikawa Danjūrō VII (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2014). Read more about the author’s work at .

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Kimura Ryō, PhD, is a theatre historian of early modern Japan specialising in the Kabuki tradition, the Ichikawa Danjūrō lineage, and regional social networks. He is a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at Gifu Women’s University and a Visiting Researcher at the Toyo Bunko. The author of two monographs on Ichikawa Danjūrō VII and VIII, he uses digital humanities and regional archives to explore Edo-period cultural change.

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The walled-in town in Murakami Haruki’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2024) looks, at first glance, like a refuge. Its walls curve gently, like a binding ribbon. Social harmony is absolute. No one quarrels, no one suffers, no one ages. Residents are assigned roles and carry them out without friction. For the novel’s narrator, a forty-year-old man still haunted by the disappearance of his teenage love twenty-three years earlier, the town promises exactly what nostalgia always promises: that the past can be preserved whole, that loss can be undone. The girl he loved claimed her ‘real self’ lived inside this town, and so the town becomes the place where he might find her again.

But perfection has a price. To enter, you must surrender your shadow, and along with it your memories, your emotions, and your capacity to change. The girl is there, identical in appearance, but she does not remember him. She is a shell fashioned from yearning, someone to sit beside but never speak to. The town’s flawless surface conceals a void. Its stability costs its residents the things the narrator came looking for.

Scholars have often treated nostalgia in Murakami’s fiction as a dead end, a symptom of disillusionment and the inability to process history. The narrator initially seems to confirm these readings. For over two decades, he has been frozen in place. He keeps the girl’s letters, written in turquoise-blue ink, and her white gauze handkerchief. He rereads them obsessively, lamenting the summer when he was seventeen. He cannot see the point of being with anyone else.

What the sociologist Fred Davis calls ‘Simple Nostalgia’ captures this condition well: an unexamined, emotionally driven conviction that the past was simply better. At this level, nostalgia downplays hardship, idealises what is gone, and offers no way forward. The narrator’s retreat into the walled town is Simple Nostalgia made architectural, a timeless utopia where no one ages, no one grieves, and no one remembers.

The turning point arrives outside the town, in a modest, pre-digital library in a provincial Japanese town called Z**. The Z** Town Library is everything the walled town is not. Where the town demands conformity and the surrender of personal history, the library is intimate, unregulated, and built from one man’s private grief.

That man is Mr Koyasu, the library’s former director, who becomes the narrator’s mentor. Koyasu has also lost someone: his wife Miri. But he has not retreated into timelessness. He has woven Miri’s memory into a continuing life, and he recognises that his love for her, for all its pain, still sustains him. Under his influence, the narrator begins to do something he has resisted for decades. He questions his own memories. Was his attachment to the girl a mature bond, or a teenage infatuation he never outgrew? Was the town a sanctuary, or a prison he built for himself?

This is what Davis calls ‘Reflexive Nostalgia’, the moment when the rose-tinted lens cracks and a person starts comparing the idealised past with present reality. It is uncomfortable but also the beginning of movement.

The narrator’s deepening relationship with a woman who runs a local café pushes this further. She asks him to wait for her, just as the girl once did, and the echo forces him to ask what he has been waiting for all this time. Whether he ever really understood what it was. Past and present begin to overlap rather than oppose each other. The narrator realises he is no longer seventeen. What he wants now is something warmer and more uncertain: the gentle warmth beneath another person’s defensive wall, the rhythmic beat of a heart pulsing beneath.

This personal journey carries broader resonances. Murakami has described the tension between individuals and oppressive social structures as a confrontation with a ‘wall of the system,’ a phrase he uses in Novelist as a Vocation when discussing Japan’s education system, but which echoes throughout his fiction. The walled-in town, read in this light, becomes more than one man’s psychological refuge. It becomes a figure for any structure that holds together by keeping memory out.

The parallel with postwar Japan is hard to miss. The nation’s rapid reconstruction after 1945 delivered extraordinary prosperity, but it also involved what some historians have described as a prescriptive forgetting, an implicit agreement not to look too closely at the continuities between wartime and postwar structures. Beneath the surface of a conflict-free, harmonious, modern society lay organisational pillars firmly planted in the unexamined past. The town’s demand that residents relinquish their shadows mirrors this dynamic: peace and order, but at the cost of historical consciousness.

But the novel places its alternative in a small, handmade space. The Z** Town Library, informal, personal, managed in a pre-digital way and free from institutional oversight, might be what Murakami envisions as a ‘space for individual recovery,’ a place apart from hierarchy, efficiency, and bullying. In the novel’s logic, it is within such spaces that people can dust off their memories, let in fresh air, and begin the slow work of constructing a self that holds together across time.

In the final chapters, the narrator returns to the walled town. This time he is not seeking refuge. He says goodbye to the girl, recognising her at last as a figure the town prepared for him rather than the person he lost. And then he does something no protagonist in Murakami’s earlier variations of this story has managed. He blows out the candle and leaves. Not through the prescribed route, the pool that swallowed previous characters into nothingness, but on his own terms.

To leave the town is to accept that the past cannot be lived in, only revisited. A backward glance that steadies you for what comes next.

The narrator steps out. The wall stays. But time, at last, begins to flow again.

This post is based on Ziwei Xuan, ‘The Ambivalent Utopia: Layers of Nostalgia and Memory in Murakami Haruki’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls,’ Japan Forum. Read the full article [].

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