Japanized Modern Dance “Bikkono Odori”(Crippled Dance) in Kawabata Yasunari’s <i>Waltz of Flowers</i>(1936)

KUMAZAWA, Masaho

doi:2022.15.1.181

The Journal of Japanese Language Literature Studies > Volume 15(1); 2022 > Article

Article

Border Crossings: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies 2022;15(1): 181-197.
doi: https://doi.org/10.22628/bcjjl.2022.15.1.181

Japanized Modern Dance “Bikkono Odori”(Crippled Dance) in Kawabata Yasunari’s Waltz of Flowers(1936)

Masaho KUMAZAWA

PhD Student, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

川端康成花のワルツにおける日本化したモダンダンス｢びつこの踊｣

熊澤真沙歩

東京外国語大学大学院総合国際学研究科国際日本専攻博士後期課程, 日本近現代文学, モダニズム研究, 川端康成文学研究。

Correspondence Masaho KUMAZAWA ,Email: kuma30857@gmail.com

Published online: 30 December 2022.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

Kawabata Yasunari’s Waltz of Flowers (1936) is a novel that was originally a screenplay for a movie in which several popular female dancers were going to perform. Although the plan to make this film was abandoned, the screenplay of Waltz of Flowers is a good example of modernist work in the early Showa period, and the subsequent novel displays the crossover characteristics that result from combining film and dance with narrative fiction.
However, in previous research on Kawabata’s work little attention has been paid to Waltz of Flowers. Instead, much critical work has been done on Snow Country (1935), which was serialized at the same time, so it must be said that there is a bias in the history of this research. To redress this deficit, this paper firstly presents the critical literature on dance in the 1930s, and emphasizes the cultural context of modern dance, as a basis for reading Waltz of Flowers. In particular, it focuses on the three dance scenes in the novel：Suzuko and Hoshie’s duet at the beginning, Hoshie’s solo dance in the middle, and “Bikkono Odori” (crippled dance) near the end. The paper argues that “Bikkono Odori” was a form of Japanized modern dance which connected the styles of Japanese modern dancers in the 1930s.

Keywords: Modern dance, Crossover, Isadora Duncan, Choi Seung-hee, Glocal

キ―ワ―ド: モダンダンス, 複合芸術表現, イサドラ·ダンカン, 崔承喜, グローカル