Golden Age Otokoyaku

The Visual Culture of Unforgettable Song

Unforgettable Song, an original Takarazuka production, is the story of Jane, the niece of Duke Meldrum. She becomes secretly engaged to a Scottish painter named Darmen (played by Ashihara). However, rumors that Darmen is in love with an opera singer named Melva ruin their relationship, and the two go their separate ways. Darmen goes to the front lines during the war, and Jane becomes a nurse. In the war, Darmen is injured and becomes blind. When Jane hears about Darmen’s fate, she secretly takes a job as his nurse to serve as his eyes. Jane shares the story of her lost love with Darmen, and he encourages her to write to her former fiancé. Moved by him, Jane plays a song on the piano that lets Darmen know who she is. With this, the two finally reunite.

The first Image from the promotional material is a bromide of Ashihara in one of her costumes (Figure 18). Ashihara is pictured in headshot format, dressed in a checkered houndstooth suit jacket. She is sporting the signature short slicked-back hair of the 1930s otokoyaku. While these features lend themselves to the male role she plays, the reading of her appearance becomes more complex when the viewer looks at her facial features and pose. Ashihara’s gaze goes up to the side; her lips are delicately drawn, Ashihara slightly pinches her mouth closed to make it look small and accentuate the pout created by the sharp cupid’s bow and rounded lower lip in the make-up. This slight pout and her long, downward drawn eyebrows make a feminine, sentimental expression. She tilts her head and rests her hand near her shoulder, increasing the sentimentality with a delicate pose. These characteristics, which reveal Ashihara’s femininity, seem to work against her casting as the male lead of the play. They also create a visual dissonance with her decidedly masculine styling.

In the program cover for Unforgettable Song (Figure 19), Ashihara poses differently; now, looking down, her expression reads less dreamy and demurer. Still present are the long sentimental eyebrows and perfectly shaped lips. But her pale skin, rosy cheeks, and red lips are now over-emphasized, adding a heightened sense of femininity. Ashihara is the male lead of a melodramatic romance, but in this illustration, she is reminiscent of a blushing schoolgirl. A lack of direct eye contact and flushed cheeks communicate a shy, submissive character, attributes traditionally valued in women but not necessarily in a leading man. The indirect gaze in the illustration could also be in consideration of the character who is blind since fully closed or half-closed eyes were a conventional way to communicate this aspect of the character.  The final image is a stage shot featured in Graph magazine, a Takarazuka publication, to promote the show to its readers (Figure 20). Ashihara (on the right) is alongside Sakura Hisako, the musumeyaku playing Jane. There is almost no differentiation in the makeup between the two actresses. At the same time, while their costumes indicate their roles, they have similar appearances. The conventions of Takarazuka makeup, like all theatrical makeup, serve a practical purpose. Enlarging features like eyes and eyebrows and defining the mouth make the actress’s face easier to read in a large theater. The audience can then better experience the emotions of the characters. In the case of Takarazuka, these desired aesthetics arise from the interaction of two critical phenomena that were taking shape in the 1920s and 30s: gender ambivalence and shojo (teenage girl) culture. These two phenomena are essential to our understanding of how Ashihara comes to embody Takarazuka’s ideal “man” through the implementation and manipulation of both phenomena in her portraits.