Kawatake Mokuami

Kawatake Mokuami

 orig. Yoshimura Yoshisaburo

(born March 1, 1816, Edo, Japan—died Jan. 22, 1893, Tokyo) Japanese playwright. He apprenticed with the kabuki playwright Tsuruya Namboku V and became chief playwright of the Kawarasaki Theatre (1843). He was noted for domestic plays that featured ordinary townspeople and picaresque plays that portrayed the lives of thieves. After 1868 he wrote historical plays that emphasized factual accuracy and pioneered the production of domestic plays that described the modernization and Westernization of early Meiji period society. He retired in 1881 but continued to write dance dramas. He wrote more than 360 plays, and his works account for half the current kabuki repertory.