SMT 10 (3) pp.

297–309 Intellect Limited 2016

Studies in Musical Theatre

Volume 10 Number 3
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/smt.10.3.297_1

DAVID CHANDLER
Doshisha University

‘We are all one Grizabella’:

Prostitution, theology and
the cult of Cats in Japan

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Cats has been extraordinarily successful in Japan since its first performance in Tokyo Cats
in 1983. Although the Japanese have responded warmly to the purely entertaining Andrew Lloyd Webber
aspects of the musical, from the beginning they have been encouraged to find a deep T. S. Eliot
meaning in it, too. This meaning is centred on Grizabella, called an ‘old prostitute’ in Japan
the Japanese translation. This article reviews the evidence for identifying Grizabella translation
as a prostitute, the way this has only slightly registered in western criticism, the prostitution
cultural factors which may have affected her explicit identification as a prostitute
in Japan, and the elaborate interpretative apparatus Japanese critics have erected
around the cat elevated to the status of a ‘sacred prostitute’ by Masayuki Ikeda,
Japan’s most influential commentator on Cats. In conclusion, it is suggested that
this study shows how even carefully ‘cloned’ musicals can develop distinctly different
meanings despite the systems of controls designed to produce uniformity.

Millions of Japanese have seen Cats. The Shiki Theatre Company, founded
in 1953, owns the performance rights to the Japanese version of the show
and Cats has been a standard part of their repertoire since its first perfor-
mance in Tokyo on 11 November 1983. They have staged it in nine major
Japanese cities, often in overlapping productions, and by the end of 2006

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David Chandler

1. This appears to be the Japanese Cats had been performed over 6500 times and become the
the only occasion on
which the introductory
most successful theatrical work ever staged in the country (Osanai 2007: 5).
lines (‘Remark the Though now overtaken by The Lion King, it remains Japan’s second favourite
cat ..’) were printed piece of theatre. As the London and Broadway productions were magnets for
before the Grizabella
poem. In both the tourists, including many Japanese, while the Japanese productions have been
British and American almost wholly supported by Japanese nationals, it is possible more seats to
editions of Cats: The see Cats have in fact been bought by the Japanese than any other people. It
Book of the Musical
the introductory lines is easy to understand their affection for the musical, as it fits readily into the
are omitted, and in category of kawaii, or ‘cute’, that has become so significant a part of Japanese
the original British
musical they were sung
popular culture. It is worth noting, for example, the astonishing success of
separately. the Hello Kitty brand in Japan and wherever Japanese popular culture is
embraced – Hello Kitty being an anthropomorphic cat, created in 1974, with
deliberately British elements. Similarly, in the early 1980s the photographer
Satoru Tsuda created an enormous fad for his photographs of Nameneko or
Namennayo cats (marketed abroad as Perlorian Cats): cats dressed in clothes,
apparently involved in human occupations. But though the cultural situation
was ripe for a kawaii musical full of dancing and singing cats, the Japanese
reception of Cats is complicated by the fact that much deeper meanings have
been found in the show – significantly deeper and more specific meanings,
arguably, than have been located in it elsewhere. These meanings have been
increasingly bound up with the identification of Grizabella as a prostitute.
This is, first of all, a matter of translation, or mistranslation. To allow the
reader to quickly get to grips with this, here is Grizabella’s introduction in
the Broadway version of Cats followed by a literal English translation of the
equivalent passage in the Japanese musical:

[Grizabella:] Remark the cat who hesitates towards you

In the light of the door which opens on her like a grin
You see the border of her coat is torn and stained with sand
And you see the corner of her eye twist like a crooked pin
[Demeter:] She haunted many a low resort near the grimy road of
Tottenham Court
She flitted about the no man’s land
From ‘The Rising Sun’ to ‘The Friend at Hand’
And the postman sighed as he scratched his head
‘You’d really had thought she ought to be dead’
And who would ever suppose that that was Grizabella
the Glamour Cat[?]
(T. S. Eliot 1983: n.p.)1

Grizabella: Look at this miserable me

Who is drawing nearer
Hesitant and at a loss
With a torn coat
And a twitching cheek
Shaking off tears
While smiling.
Jemima: Hanging around in the downtown
An old prostitute
Through dingy backstreets
She wanders around

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 ‘We are all one Grizabella’

People surrounding her look with disdain 2. All the Japanese

material in this
‘Is she still alive?’ article was originally
‘Eh, Grizabella, that former – ’ translated by Yoko
(Asari 1983: n.p.)2 Mori; her translations
have, in some
instances, been
The erasure of references to specific London places is consistent throughout corrected and revised
the Japanese Cats, but the explicit identification of Grizabella as a prostitute by Kaori Ashizu and the
here represents the most significant alteration from the London and Broadway author.

shows – of which, in scenic, musical and choreographic respects, the Shiki

production is a facsimile. The change is hard to miss, for in the supporting
literature, including the illustrated programmes which have, from the begin-
ning, included a cat-by-cat guide to the show, and, in more recent years, the
Shiki Company website, Grizabella is consistently labelled a shoufu, a flat,
neutral word equivalent to English ‘prostitute’ (without the ambiguity of, say,
‘whore’).
The present essay is a study of this Japanese (mis)translation, its cultural
grounds and consequences. I examine the evidence for identifying Grizabella
as a prostitute, the way this has only slightly registered in Anglophone criti-
cism, the cultural factors that may have affected her identification as a pros-
titute in Japan, and the consequent interpretative apparatus that Japanese
critics, in collaboration with the Shiki Company, have built around the show.
In conclusion, I suggest this study shows how even carefully ‘cloned’ musi-
cals can develop distinctly different meanings despite the systems of controls
designed to produce uniformity.

GRIZABELLA AND PROSTITUTION IN THE ENGLISH CATS

What evidence does the English Cats offer for Grizabella being a prosti-
tute? T. S. Eliot’s unpublished fragment concerned with Grizabella consists
solely of the few lines beginning ‘She haunted many a low resort’. While
this description does not absolutely preclude an association with prostitu-
tion, only a very simplistic and moralistic view of the world would identify
any female haunting ‘a low resort’ as a prostitute. On the basis of the frag-
mentary poem alone, one could more readily conclude that Eliot was think-
ing of the cheap gin houses which used to proliferate around Tottenham
Court Road and identifying Grizabella as an alcoholic in a feline line of
descent from those sad and desperate women Hogarth famously depicted
in Gin Lane.
The preceding lines, adapted from Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’,
offer something slightly more substantial though. The original passage from
that poem reads:

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, ‘Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin’.
(1969: 24)

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David Chandler

3. In Eliot 1983, the first On these lines, Rick Rylance is very apropos:
two lines and last two
lines are run together
to produce a six-line Many professional commentators, and thousands of undergraduates, call
poem. this woman a prostitute for no reason that is explicit in the text. The profes-
4. The shorter, British sionals are perhaps led by a knowledge that Eliot used Charles-Louis
version of the essay Philippe’s 1901 novel of Parisian low-life Bubu de Montparnasse as a source,
simply states that ‘only
the last eight lines but close readers have no such excuses. The woman may be putting out
were written as TSE the milk or the cat – which appears later – and her apparent dishevelment
thought her history too is no different in tone from anything else seen by this jaundiced observer.
sad for children’ (Eliot
1981: 9). This shorter (2000: 104)
version was used in the
Broadway programme.
The critical tradition here is akin to Coleridge’s ‘chain without a staple’ ([1817]
5. In 1982, Basil Bunting 1983: 266): as more and more critics have described the woman as a prosti-
declared it ‘absolutely
wrong’ to interpret
tute, it has become hard to think of her as anything else and any new state-
her in this way (cited ment of the case can be supported by older ones. In fact, as Rylance suggests,
Burton 2013: 232). when you trace the chain back to where the staple ought to be, there is no
6. One can legitimately staple: only an assumption that Eliot was importing certain details from Bubu
ask whether Lloyd de Montparnasse. Nevertheless, these lines have picked up an association with
Webber himself was
inclined to, or able prostitution that cannot be dismissed as wholly irrelevant to their adapted
to, play it. He does use in Cats. It is worth remembering that Trevor Nunn, who put the English
not come across as Cats together, studied English Literature under F. R. Leavis at the University
someone likely to find
inspiration in the idea of Cambridge. It is highly likely that he would have studied T. S. Eliot and in
of Grizabella being a doing so he could well have encountered this reading of ‘Rhapsody’.
prostitute, and was
‘deeply offended’ when
Beyond the musical itself, there is the longer version of the essay, ‘Apropos
he discovered Tim Rice of Practical Cats’, that Valerie Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s widow, prepared for the
had spent three hours American version of Cats: The Book of the Musical (1983). This includes the
with a prostitute on
their 1970 trip to the statement:
United States (Rice
1999: 230). ‘Grizabella the Glamour Cat’ is an unpublished fragment of which only
the last eight lines3 were written because TSE realized she was develop-
ing along the lines of Villon’s ‘La Belle Heaulmière’ who fell on evil days
and he felt it would be too sad for children.
(V. Eliot 1983: 8)4

François Villon’s ‘Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière’ (‘The Lament of the

Beautiful Helmet-maker’) is the lament of an old woman, often interpreted
as a prostitute, for the loss of her beauty and power over men. Valerie Eliot’s
comment stops well short of suggesting her husband ever thought of describ-
ing a prostitute cat for children, but her hint regarding what he might have
written (but didn’t) allows another literary association with a prostitute. As
with the lines adapted from ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, it must be empha-
sized that we are dealing here, even more indirectly, with a tradition of inter-
pretation which may very well be misguided – it is by no means clear that the
‘Belle Heaulmière’ is a prostitute.5
In the English Cats, identifying Grizabella as a prostitute amounts to a
highbrow parlour game, one the vast majority of the Cats audience were
neither intended to, inclined to, nor able to play.6 One has to tease out fugitive
literary associations and then insist on their maximum significance to make
her anything more than what the musical says she is, a lonely, faded ‘Glamour
Cat’. Few critics have felt an inclination to do so. As far as I am aware, none
of the reviewers of the original London production viewed Grizabella as a
prostitute. Critics of the Broadway production, perhaps influenced by the

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 ‘We are all one Grizabella’

bolder juxtaposition of the ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ lines with the 7. The most detailed
discussion of the
Grizabella fragment in the American show, were the first to catch a whiff question – if it is
of prostitution. Clive Barnes saw ‘a Mary Magdalene concept of a whore’s a question – has
rebirth’ (Barnes in Hanan 2001: 108) and Frank Rich remarked, incidentally, been made by
Kathryn Lowerre,
Grizabella’s ‘ratty, prostitute-like furs and mane’ (Rich in Hanan 2001: 112). who persuasively
If these comments left room for ambiguity, Stephen Holden’s later, pass- associates Grizabella
ing mention of ‘the ruined prostitute Grizabella’ in the New York Times for 3 with the Victorian
trope of the ‘fallen
July 1983 (1983: 15) did not. Holden may have had the additional benefit of woman’ (Lowerre 2004).
Valerie Eliot’s comment about ‘La Belle Heaulmière’ to influence him, but his Lowerre implicitly
accepts that this is a
remains very much a minority interpretation. To Kurt Gänzl, Grizabella is broad and ambiguous
simply ‘a bedraggled slut of a tabby whose beauty has gone’ (1986: 1072) – class, though: only
which is surely as far as anyone can go in this direction on the basis of the the most prudish
and judgemental
musical alone. The majority of critics and audiences have been content to Victorians would have
categorize Grizabella as Ben Macpherson does in his detailed analysis of the stigmatized every
overall narrative dynamics of Cats: ‘[b]edraggled, solo, outcast’ and represent- ‘fallen woman’ as a
prostitute.
ing ‘[e]xclusion from social acceptance’ (2014: 66). The story, such as it is, does
not require anything more.7

THE JAPANESE (MIS)TRANSLATION: CULTURAL FACTORS

The highbrow parlour game on offer in the English Cats is far removed from
the bald identification of Grizabella as a prostitute in the Japanese show. The
Japanese translator, Keita Asari, former general director of the Shiki Company,
possibly investigated the traditions of critical commentary pertaining to
‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and ‘Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière’, but it
is far more likely, in my view, that he was simply influenced by the comments
of the New York critics quoted above, especially Holden’s. As I have personally
experienced on hundreds of occasions, the Japanese are extremely – exces-
sively – reluctant to trust their own interpretation of an English text and will
gratefully, often uncritically, seize on any help they can get. They also tend to
revere any intellectual authority who has been somehow institutionally sanc-
tioned, and New York Times critics would certainly fall into that category. Thus
the ex cathedra nature of Holden’s description of Grizabella as a ‘ruined pros-
titute’, though I find its brutal transformation of obscure possibility into basic
fact disconcerting, might very well have been read by Asari as clarification of
a point obvious to western readers even if not explicit in the text. Seeking to
replicate that kind of obviousness in Japanese, I conjecture, he simply named
her a shoufu: an extreme though far from unique example of a translation
sweeping away deep layers of ambiguity. In other words, the initial difference
between the Japanese Cats and the English Cats most likely emerged, acciden-
tally, from a position of excessive trust in English language criticism.
Despite this, though, the Japanese Grizabella retains a good deal more
ambiguity than Holden’s. This is because Japanese ideas about prostitution
are almost studiously vague. Prostitution has, technically, been illegal in Japan
since 1958, but as Seiko Hanochi says, ‘The Prostitution Prevention Law was
riddled with loopholes and permitted the development of a whole variety of
forms of prostitution and trafficking’ (2001: 142). It is remarkable, for exam-
ple, that the sale of oral and anal sex remained legal, as it was not judged to
be intercourse. Anyone living in a major Japanese city knows the sex industry
is huge, visible, and for the most part tolerated, and any number of
commentators have agreed with Stephen Mansfield that ‘No other country
in the world offers the sheer variety of sexual services found in Japan’ (2003).

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David Chandler

8. Graphic depictions Whereas Europeans or Americans are likely to have a clear idea of what they
of sex acts can be
found in magazines in
judge prostitution to be, and whether they think it moral or permissible, the
every neighbourhood Japanese tend to be uncertain about definitions, morality and permissibility.
‘convenience store’ and Had Grizabella been presented to London or Broadway audiences as, explicitly,
no attempt is made
to place these out of a cat prostitute, there would surely have been controversy; indeed, it is almost
reach of children. impossible to imagine such a decision being made on commercial grounds, or
the T. S. Eliot estate allowing such a show, based on children’s poems, to go
ahead. But in Japan there was no controversy and Asari presumably reasoned
his audience would accept prostitution, non-judgementally, as a basic, albeit
shadowy, part of the fabric of urban life. The Japanese are also much more
comfortable than westerners with having children exposed to highly erotic and
sexual material;8 Asari seemingly reasoned, correctly, that identifying Grizabella
as a prostitute would not threaten the family-friendly appeal of the show.
Given ‘the sheer variety of sexual services found in Japan’, it is not surpris-
ing that many words have come into use to describe the women who perform
them. The majority of these are euphemistic, akin to ‘escort’ or ‘call girl’ in
English. But Asari chose one of two words regularly used in the upmarket
media and scholarly literature to describe such women; both are routinely
translated as ‘prostitute’. Baishunfu is more legalistic and associated with crim-
inality; shoufu, Asari’s choice, is more neutrally precise, the word an ethnog-
rapher, say, would generally choose to use. A shoufu makes a living by selling
her body.

CATS AND JAPANESE CRITICS

As noted above, the Japanese have been strongly encouraged to find deeper
meanings in Cats – to trace profundity behind what, on the surface, may
appear kawaii and fun. The Shiki Company has been behind this. In the early
years, the programmes contained an essay by Shinsuke Ando (1932–2002), a
professor at Keio University in Tokyo, specializing in medieval English litera-
ture. He eagerly combatted any notion that the Old Possum poems were just
light verse:

[I]s Old Possum’s Book a world of pure ‘nonsense’, different from The Waste
Land? By no means. In fact, profound ‘sense’ is hidden in the marvelous
wordplay. The ‘sense’ is probably ‘salvation’, a subject that attached itself
to him [Eliot] throughout his life, and a theme related to Christian theol-
ogy. The composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, having loved to read this book
since childhood, could not have missed this hidden ‘sense’, this ‘theol-
ogy’ harbouring very subtly in [Eliot’s] fable. The composer of Jesus Christ
Superstar, in a way, created a fine ‘Messiah’ by transforming the world of
‘nonsense’ into that of ‘sense’, and making the theological ‘sense’ hidden
in the poems the theme of the entire musical Cats.
(1983: n.p.)

An apt contrast can be made with Michael Walsh’s statement about the
same poems in the major Anglophone study of Lloyd Webber: ‘Eliot’s [Old
Possum] poetry may not have been very deep – its metaphysical point was
that, in the end, cats are much like you and me – but there was some amus-
ing social commentary running through it’ (1997: 119). Or the view of Frank
Rich, the leading New York critic, that ‘If there is a point to Eliot’s catcycle, it is
simply that “cats are much like you and me”’ (Rich in Hanan 2001: 111). The

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 ‘We are all one Grizabella’

difference, of course, is that Walsh and Rich are simply considering the words
on the page, while Ando reads them as an integral part of Eliot’s complete
corpus of poetry. Ando’s approach here, perhaps encouraged by the musical’s
inclusion of bits of Eliot’s non-Possum poetry, has had enormous influence in
Japan and led to the assumption that the seriousness of the musical, rather
than being superadded to the Old Possum poems, was clairvoyantly drawn out
of them by Lloyd Webber.
Ando offered Japanese audiences an understanding of Cats as a ‘theologi-
cal’ work concerned with the salvation of an ‘old prostitute’. There is perhaps
a general suggestion that such a cat would be in particular need of salva-
tion, but the significance of Grizabella’s putative profession is left open, or,
rather, the audience is left to ponder it for themselves. For over two decades,
it appears, the interpretation of Cats in Japan did not advance beyond this
point. But in his 2007 book, Musicals in Progress, Shin Osanai – a critic with
a background in journalism, who has since become an Associate Professor at
Senshu University, Tokyo – made a significant move towards a more holistic
reading of the musical. Arguing, rather tendentiously, that all Lloyd Webber’s
earlier musicals (up to Sunset Boulevard of 1993) are ‘stories of ascent’, he finds
the Grizabella narrative ‘a typical “story of ascent” […that has] even been
made into a drama of religious salvation’ (2007: 9). He confidently catego-
rizes Grizabella as ‘the most shabby prostitute cat’ (2007: 7), apparently trust-
ing entirely to the Japanese translation, and reads the musical as a kind of
Cinderella story, but an unusual one:

it is not an ascent of a woman with beauty, talent and spirit, like normal
Cinderella stories; it is a story of a dirty prostitute cat (the poorest)
getting to the highest place, so the contrivances needed to make it
convincing are essential. Without them, the sudden ascent would look
like nothing but pre-established harmony.
(2007: 9)

Osanai elaborates an interpretation of the musical based on these ‘contriv-

ances’, dividing the songs into three distinct groups and arguing that the over-
all structure is pregnant with meaning:

The process – starting with a withered melody representing earth and

aging, jumping in light and merry songs, and moving through mysteri-
ous space – aesthetically supports the ascent to the highest place of the
most miserable presence.
(2007: 12)

His interpretation draws much of its momentum from Grizabella’s supposed

prostitute status: the ‘process’ is that of the fallen sinner reaching the sacred
sphere. It is all very ingenious but, to this reader, quite unconvincing, paying no
attention at all to the history of Lloyd Webber’s composition or to Anglophone
commentary.
In 2009, a far more significant and influential study appeared in the form
of Masayuki Ikeda’s book Neko tachi no butōkai – Eliot to Musical ‘Cats’ (The
Ball of Cats – Eliot and the Musical ‘Cats’) (2009). It is no exaggeration to
say that most Japanese with a special interest in Cats now tend to view the
musical through the lens of this cheaply priced study (in 2009, it retailed for
¥700, or about £5). Ikeda, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo who

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David Chandler

describes his field as ‘Comparative Basic Culture’, had in fact published an

earlier book on Cats in 1999, Neko tachi no butōkai – Musical ‘Cats’ no nazo
(The Ball of Cats – Mysteries in the Musical ‘Cats’). That earlier book was a
fairly straightforward account of the T. S. Eliot background to Cats, which
had apparently developed from Ikeda’s Japanese translation of Old Possum’s
Book of Practical Cats, published in 1995. Although again accepting, without
question, that Grizabella was an ‘old prostitute’, it did not offer an overall
interpretation of the musical. By contrast, the 2009 study, a greatly expanded
and revised version of the earlier book, brought out by a different publisher
and much more widely promoted, pursued a holistic reading of Cats in which
Grizabella’s assumed status as a prostitute is given enormous significance.
The central argument in the 2009 book involves such a tendentious twist
that it is better to quote Ikeda at length than attempt a paraphrase:

From the start, the role of Grizabella, the beautiful cat, has been that of
a ‘prostitute cat’. Why did Eliot try to depict a ‘prostitute cat’ in his unfin-
ished poem? Moreover, it is strange that a female cat is a prostitute. In
order to understand more about the presence of Grizabella that Eliot
shaped, let’s digress a bit and think about what a ‘prostitute’ is. Needless
to say, a ‘prostitute’ is someone who sells her body and sex for money –
someone who sells physical pleasure to men.
However, ‘sex’ is originally the very activity in which a man and
woman foster love, share the pleasure of life and love-making, and
conceive another life. Moreover, sexual intercourse, through the pleas-
ure of man and woman, is supposed to bring primitive healing of the
soul and release of the body. But ‘prostitution’, in which ‘sex’ is traded,
is actually very far from the true pleasure of the soul and the body, for
both male and female. In fact, the trade of ‘sex’ hurts human souls, and
sometimes destroys them.
Therefore, it can be said that Grizabella has hurt her soul and body by
‘sex’ and repressed her life. She is a female cat who has lived with such
an ineffaceable past. How can she become clear of her awful past and
turn over a new leaf? It seems that the Eliot themes contained in this
musical are atonement for the root of misfortune and salvation. If so,
how is salvation possible for those who have been despised as whores?
It is said that ‘prostitution’ has always been part of human society
throughout history. At the same time, it has been considered one of the
original sins of humanity, and has been condemned or concealed in the
history of religion in Europe.
But how are salvation and resurrection possible for the bodies and
souls of many women who have had no choice but to sell their bodies?
The story of Grizabella’s salvation and rebirth in Cats is also connected
to this issue of the nature of human life and sex.
In the lives of human beings, ‘sex’ is supposed to be the most spir-
itual thing. However, nothing has been more disgraced and degraded
than ‘sex’. Grizabella is the very character who has, through ‘sex’, both of
these two opposites – that is, ‘the degraded’ and ‘the sacred’.
Her existence is both ‘degraded’ and ‘sacred’ at the same time. She
has been humiliated by others, but she also heals others. Because of this
dualism of hers, she can be called a ‘sacred prostitute’. It can be said that
she has been living through this torn dualism of life and sex.
(2009: 89–91)

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 ‘We are all one Grizabella’

Coleridge’s ‘chain without a staple’ again seems apropos. The extraordinary

flow of this argument descends from (in my view) untenable suppositions
about Eliot’s intention. That he intended ‘to depict a “prostitute cat” in his
unfinished poem’ is never argued but just assumed, or rather insisted on, by
means of the Japanese ‘translation’. And then Ikeda’s line of reasoning seems
to have been something like this: Eliot was a great, philosophical, Christian
poet; if he evoked a picture of an unhappy prostitute he must have had some
deeper purpose; that purpose can be discovered by examining the overall phil-
osophical thrust of his poetry and (loosely) Christian ideas about prostitution.
And the chain keeps growing as one assumption is smoothly coupled to the
next. The extraordinary climax of the argument is that the putative dualism
Grizabella represents between degraded sexuality and spiritual love becomes,
in the musical, a ‘myth’ of the modern condition and Eliot’s spiritual answer
to it: ‘Grizabella’s salvation and rebirth are none other than the story of salva-
tion and the rebirth of the Jellicles and of us human beings. We are all one
Grizabella’ (2009: 92).
Ikeda does seem to accept that there is no question about the complete
absence of any sort of redemptive, ‘we are all one Grizabella’ suggestion in
Eliot’s fragment on Grizabella the Glamour Cat. But here he has recourse
again to the clairvoyant Lloyd Webber introduced to the Japanese in 1983.
Lloyd Webber and Nunn took the lines, not as they appear on the page, but
as they might be interpreted if taken as the quintessence of Eliot’s thinking:

The qualities Eliot always had as a poet were religiousness (atonement

and salvation) and a sense of the tragic (repentance and despair). In that
sense, it seems that the presentation of the fourth theme of this musical
[‘journey to salvation and rebirth through prayer’] is the very theme of
life which Eliot had originally.
Therefore, I cannot help but think that this musical is a piece of
work in which the will of Eliot is inherited by Lloyd Webber and Trevor
Nunn et al. As the original poems are nonsense verses, Eliot deliber-
ately obscured the meanings of expressions and avoided religiousness,
but they [Lloyd Webber and Nunn et al.] managed the feat of scenting
out the poet’s religiousness and sense of the tragic flowing through the
bottom of the original [book], and made it into a musical of miracle.
(2009: 44)

The metaphor of Indra’s Net found in Maha-ya-na Buddhism may give the
western reader some help digesting such a view, which is a natural extension
of Ando’s. In the image, every pearl in an infinite net reflects every other pearl.
In the same way, the argument would go, every Eliot poem reflects all other
Eliot poems.
Is Ikeda’s interpretation of Cats interestingly different from those of west-
ern commentators or just plain wrong? Opinions will vary on this, depend-
ing on the reader’s understanding of, among other things, the relationship
between criticism and art and criticism and scholarship. But different academic
standards must be factored into any larger view of cultural differences. Older
Japanese professors are, in general, unhappy with the idea of peer review
because it raises the possibilities of criticism, conflict and unpleasantness that
Japanese society tries hard to do without, not to mention the alarming pros-
pect of younger scholars faulting older scholars’ work. Professors are, for the
most part, trusted to get things right; in many cases they can be generously

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David Chandler

9. For a fascinating funded to undertake research year after year while avoiding any sort of critical
anthropological
study of the academic
scrutiny of that research. So Ikeda’s ideas were, very likely, never tested in an
profession as it has environment where they were likely to be contested.9 Nor are they presented
developed in Japan, see in a dialogic form: he does not disagree with anyone else’s interpretation of
Poole (2010).
Cats, nor, remarkably, does he quote or cite a single piece of English language
10. 2009 was, arguably, commentary. His book is a personal meditation, occupying a self-referential,
something of a turning
point, for it saw the exclusive space. Nor did its publication prompt debate or serious review. While
launch of the Japanese these things may be red flags for western scholars, only someone who has
Ministry of Education’s spent much time working in Japanese universities is likely to appreciate quite
ambitious ‘Global 30’
(G30) project designed how irrelevant they would have seemed in Japan, at least until very recently.10
to internationalize The success of Ikeda’s book cannot be explained simply by its escaping
Japanese universities
so as to improve
serious evaluation, of course: clearly Japanese fans of Cats like his interpre-
their global rankings, tation. Importantly, his ideas have been officially sanctioned by the Shiki
which were judged Company, who, since March 2011, have featured an essay by Ikeda on their
discomfortingly low.
The STAP stem cell website by way of introduction to Cats (Ikeda 2011). Ikeda’s academic author-
scandal of 2014 was ity as a specialist in Cats is thus used to help ‘sell’ the musical just as this sort
seen as a national of endorsement presumably helps sales of his book. In this way, his theo-
embarrassment and
further accelerated ries have become part of the Japanese experience of the musical. In my
efforts to make own experience of teaching Cats in Japan, lazier students writing on Lloyd
Japanese academics
more accountable and
Webber’s work, unable or unwilling to develop their own ideas, now almost
open to international invariably resort to a garbled account of atonement, prostitution and dualism
(i.e. western) standards. taken, without acknowledgement, from Ikeda. It is also my experience that
the students concerned, when questioned, are unable to explain these ideas,
suggesting that Ikeda’s book ultimately serves to mystify Cats, giving it the
air of a cult object. Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable passage in his book
concerns Ikeda’s attempt to solve some ‘serious problems’ facing young people
in modern Japan by telling them about Cats and how the musical shows ‘the
way of salvation through love and blessing’ (Ikeda 2009: 180).
But can Cats, the work Cameron Mackintosh announced to the world
as the ‘first English dance-musical’ (Anon. 1980), go on supporting the great
burden of meaning Ikeda has placed upon it even in Japan’s culture of disa-
greement avoidance? A meaning that relies so much on a questionable trans-
lation? Perhaps not. In a more recent study of Cats for an academic journal,
Shogo Mitsutomi, professor in the English Department at Fukuoka University,
raises a question that has not bothered many people outside Japan: ‘Why is
the musical Cats difficult to understand?’ He reviews Osanai’s theory at length,
but rejects it, while paying generous tribute to Ikeda’s study: ‘After I saw Cats,
though I was moved, I was having cobwebs in my head, and reading this book
[Ikeda’s] blew the cobwebs away and I could understand the musical better’
(2013: 256–57). Yet it is reasonably clear, from reading Mitsutomi’s essay, that
these ‘cobwebs’ were not so much generated by the musical itself as by pre-
existing assumptions that Cats had a serious message to impart – assumptions,
that is, fostered precisely by earlier commentators like Ikeda. According to
Mitsutomi, any interpretation of the serious theme of the musical must be
able to explain why Grizabella gets chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer,
and his essay has a certain importance, not because it explains the matter,
but because he insists that Ikeda and earlier Japanese commentators have
failed to explain it. Indeed, Mitsutomi is a bit like the child in the story of ‘The
Emperor’s New Clothes’:

It is true that, if Grizabella, who suffers from being abused and despised
because she is a prostitute, gets chosen, it matches the Eliot-like theme

306   Studies in Musical Theatre

 ‘We are all one Grizabella’

of ‘death and resurrection’. For the audience, too, the musical becomes
more easily understandable if a cat who committed a sin in the past gets
saved and her soul resurrected, as it makes the salvation [theme] more
prominent. But then it looks like Grizabella is saved just because she
was a prostitute. If we think the other way around, is it because they are
pure and innocent that Jemima or Sillabub do not get chosen? Do they
have to be sullied to be chosen?
(2013: 258)

In one sense, perhaps, the answers to Mitsutomi’s questions can be found in

the Sermon on the Mount; but in another, the pertinent one here, Grizabella
is obviously chosen because it is her presence in the musical that justifies the
whole salvation apparatus: she cannot be left stumbling around in the shad-
ows while a frisky young kitten dances up to the Heaviside Layer. In so far as
Mitsutomi reaches any conclusion, it is this: ‘We can only think that there is a
premise from the start that she [Grizabella] does get chosen’ (2013: 259). It is a
remarkable comment on the Japanese reception of Cats that he represents this
as a hard-won, rather disillusioning conclusion.

CONCLUSION: CLONING AND MUTATION

On the occasion of a 1994 Christmas lunch, Lloyd Webber told David Lister
he ‘had learnt one vitally important thing from [Robert Stigwood], “that it was
possible to clone a show”’ (Lister 1995). Reporting the conversation, Lister
went on to state:

And clone he [Lloyd Webber] does. Every theatre around the world
which takes a Lloyd Webber show is also contracted to take the origi-
nal West End director, designer and sets. Never will you read about an
interesting new production of Cats or Phantom. The prospect of differ-
ent interpretations and different designs bringing out different nuances,
different performances, whole new meanings – the very stuff that
pumps adrenaline for most playwrights, composers and producers – is
an anathema to Sir Andrew. To him, his shows are like paintings. Once
completed, they hang forever as the artist created them.
(1995)

Lloyd Webber has become strongly associated with the idea of the ‘cloned’ show
and Cats, in particular, has been repeatedly pointed to as a point in theatrical
history when economic and cultural conditions combined to produce a sort
of branded musical suited to almost endless reproduction around the world.
There is no question that the Japanese Cats is, in most respects, an accurate
clone. There is equally no doubt that most Japanese theatregoers believe it
to be one and value it as such, desiring authenticity. But what this essay has
shown, I hope, is that while it is easy enough to clone and control the visual
and musical aspects of a show, it is much harder to ensure accurate replication
of the book and lyrics, especially when they are translated into such a very
different language as Japanese (and, as I understand, not then re-translated
into English for approval in London). And when differences in the words
accumulate significance through the encounter with different cultural attitudes,
different traditions of interpretation and different systems for creating
and circulating knowledge, the end result, the meaning theatregoers extract

www.intellectbooks.com   307
David Chandler

11. I am greatly indebted from the work, may end up far removed from that envisaged by its creators.
to Yoko Mori for help
in locating Japanese
The result in this case is particularly revealing, in that it came about, I suggest,
materials and largely by accident – an unsought but quietly momentous change, like the
translating them. I am mutations often found in cloned animals.11
grateful for additional
assistance from
Kaori Ashizu of Kobe
University and Soni
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Chandler, D. (2016), ‘“We are all one Grizabella”: Prostitution, theology and
the cult of Cats in Japan’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 10: 3, pp. 297–309,
doi: 10.1386/smt.10.3.297_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
David Chandler is a professor in the English Department at Doshisha
University, Kyoto. With a background in English Romanticism, he has also
published widely on opera and musical theatre, including edited books on
Alfredo Catalani and Italo Montemezzi. He has contributed the chapter on
Andrew Lloyd Webber to the Oxford Handbook of the British Musical.
Contact: English Department, Doshisha University, Imadegawa-Karasuma,
Kyoto, 602-8580, Japan.
E-mail: [email protected]

David Chandler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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