This piece was originally published in Issue 4 of Notebook magazine as part of a broader exploration of cinematic soundscapes in their diverse sonic forms. The magazine is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world.
Growing up, I experienced stage fright—I wasn’t comfortable performing in front of an audience. I wanted to change that aspect of myself, so in high school I joined a theater group. There, I learned about various traditional Japanese art forms that focus on oral storytelling, for example rakugo and kōdan.1 My encounters with these art forms led me to benshi. I had assumed there were no benshi alive anymore, that the tradition had died out. But then, when I was eighteen, I saw a performance by Midori Sawato and was completely taken aback; it was my first encounter of actual benshi, active in the present day. The performance was captivating.
When I first met Sawato, she wasn’t taking on any apprentices. So when I was 22, I spent a year just following her work. I would go to all of her performances and be the first one waiting outside the theater, ready to carry her things to the station. I did that for a whole year, and people around Sawato started recommending that she take me on as an apprentice. That’s how I became a benshi. As Sawato’s apprentice, I wasn’t given specific lessons. Rather, I had the opportunity to see her work firsthand and learn about her ideas and approach; it was more observation than a direct learning experience.
Ichiro Kataoka. Photograph by Valerio Greco.
The actual history of benshi is not very long, since the history of silent cinema spanned only about 30 to 40 years. Nor was there an inherent benshi style that was established during that period—each benshi had their own style. My own approach is to try to accurately interpret and communicate the film. My style does not change depending on the genre—I don’t have a different approach because I’m performing with a horror film or a comedy film, although, of course, the way I emphasize things or the way I use my voice might change. My general style or approach stays the same across genres.
The most important aspect of being a benshi is creating your own scripts for each film. This involves watching the movie many times and coming up with your own interpretation. And then you think about how you can bring that to a contemporary audience. What you learn as an apprentice is how your mentor is interpreting a given film, so you can grasp how they see it, how they read the film. That’s how you learn to develop your own approach.
Over the course of the twenty years I’ve been working as a benshi, the role has shifted significantly. When I first started my career, some of the audience were of the generation that grew up watching silent films, so the programs would usually be framed as something nostalgic, catering to those who were already familiar with the art form. But nowadays, the framework has changed a lot. The work of benshi is introduced as something new, as unknown territory.
Ichiro Kataoka. Photograph by Masami Suzuki.
I work on silent films as well as more modern films. When I’m performing, I focus on honoring and respecting the film itself. For today’s audiences, simply tracing the story via my performance will often make the narrative feel a little outdated, or the themes won’t be as relevant. I try, therefore, to rewrite some of the elements of the theme or story so that it will resonate more deeply with a contemporary audience. To give a specific example, older American films often contain elements of racism. A lot of the jokes will be about Black people. Back then, there was a culture around making fun of people based on discriminatory views, but nowadays we obviously shouldn’t and can’t continue to do that. I put a lot of thought into how to present a piece as entertainment without destroying the foundation of the work, while also adapting it to our times. That is something I’m very careful about.
When performing with more modern films, I usually work on things like art house animations that don’t require a lot of sounds and have no words, as I try not to force my work onto things that do have sound. Because of this, when I work on narrating such animations, my performances require extra sensitivity and care. It doesn’t make a great difference to me whether a film is silent or not. I don’t see a significant distinction between the two kinds of film. I think this is because, as a benshi, my work involves really tuning into the kind of sound that the work holds as its essence, to try to listen, and to communicate that.
Since one of the foundational philosophies of being a benshi is that you don’t verbalize what is visible on the screen, experiencing a performance can be challenging for audience members who are blind. We don’t narrate anything that’s clear from just looking at the film, which is not the most helpful kind of narration for audience members with vision challenges. But I have received feedback from blind people that they were able to follow a film just with narration, provided it had a very clear dramatic trajectory. It’s particularly difficult, though, with genres like slapstick comedy, where so much of the content comprises visual action. Although it largely depends on the type of film, I do think that the inherent idea behind the kind of narration that benshis do is not always the most compatible with the information that blind people need to enjoy the film.
Ichiro Kataoka. Photograph by Valerio Greco.
It is difficult to pinpoint a single satisfying performance for me, but one screening that was particularly memorable was at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, with the film A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926), accompanied by several musicians. For one, I felt like the musicians and I found our groove together—it turned out very well. Another important element was the lack of subtitles. Whenever I perform abroad, we usually translate my script and provide subtitles so people can understand what I’m saying. But for this performance we didn’t use them, so people experienced purely the sounds that I was producing. Even though most of the audience didn’t understand what I was saying, they still gave really positive feedback. I felt that screening was less about the content of what I was saying in Japanese and more about how purely people were resonating with and fascinated by my sounds.
For my performances, sometimes I pick a film and sometimes I’m assigned one. When I select my own films, I might already have a copy, so I’m able to screen it for free. Occasionally, I encounter a film at a festival and feel very invested in it, so I pursue it. On the other hand, working in the film industry, I also get requests to do specific performances, such as a film festival asking me to perform for a certain film. The biggest challenge of being a benshi is the range of silent films you’re asked to work on. These could include anything from American, Russian, or Chinese silent films to Japanese ones; from period pieces like the jidaigeki format or something based on a story by Alexandre Dumas, to more contemporary films—ultimately, all kinds of historical and societal contexts. There’s an infinite number of things that we don’t know, so narrating for each film involves a lot of research, an attempt to gather as much information about it as possible. While it’s become much easier to carry out research, with the internet, the fact that there are silent films across the world, and an array of cultural contexts specific to each film, means it’s still challenging to collate all the necessary background detail.
I’ve been very fortunate to be invited to perform in various countries over the years, and I’m always delighted to promote my work and spread more awareness about benshi. My hope is that continuing this work will someday lead to people wanting to become a benshi in their own country, so that this culture can continue to spread throughout the world. At the same time, the strongest performances I’ve given are often those when I was able to forget that I was a professional performer. As a benshi, I’m always viewing things through a professional lens, thinking, “Oh, this is something I can incorporate into the performance.” The best moments for me are when I can forget all of that and just be another audience member.
Translated by Hibiki Mizuno.
- Rakugo is a 400-year-old tradition in which a seated storyteller performs a monologue with only minimal use of props. Kōdan is a similar narrative art in which a storyteller sits behind a desk and recites historic tales. ↩