Kawatake Mokuami

Who was Kawatake Mokuami?

Kawatake Mokuami was a Japanese dramatist of Kabuki. It has been said that "as a writer of plays of Kabuki origin, he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Japan has ever known." He wrote 150 or so plays over the course of his fifty year career, covering a wide variety of themes, styles, and forms, including short dance pieces, period plays, contemporary genre pieces, tragedies and comedies, as well as adaptations of foreign stories, though he is perhaps most famous for his shiranamimono, plays featuring sympathetic or tragic rogues and thieves. For the greater part of his career he wrote under the professional name Kawatake Shinshichi, only taking the name Mokuami on his retirement from the stage in 1881.