Alison McQueen Tokita presents a series of case studies that demonstrate the persistence of Japanese sung narratives in a multiplicity of genres over ten centuries together with factors contributing to change in narrative performance. Narratives that were continually re-told and recycled in different versions and formats over a long period of time served to build people's sense of a common identity over space and time. The elements of variation and change relate to the move away from oral narrative to text-based performance, and from a simple narrative situation with one performer to complex theatrical narratives with dancers, singers and other musicians. Tokita includes substantial musical analysis and exploration of theoretical issues, as well as documentation of important performance traditions, all of which are extant.

Alison McQueen Tokita is Professor and Director of the Research Centre for Japanese Traditional Music at the Kyoto City University of Arts, and adjunct Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at Monash University. She has published widely on Japanese narrative music, and is currently working on naniwa-bushi. In recent years she has researched the role of the piano in East Asian musical modernity. She is co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music (2008), Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia, and Outside Asia: Japanese and Australian Identities and Encounters in Flux.

Contents: Preface; Singing the story: continuity and change in Japanese performed narratives; Musical Buddhist preaching: koshiki shomyo; Heike narrative: the musical recitation of The Tale of the Heike; Dance and narrative: kowaka and no; Joruri and the puppet theatre; Sung narratives and kabuki dance: bungo-kei joruri; Sung narratives and kabuki dance: nagauta and ozatsuma-bushi; Epilogue; References; Index.