Traditional arts | Katsura Sunshine wants to shine the rakugo

This is the story of a Canadian who left for Japan 25 years ago and who has since spent his life on a pillow telling tall tales.

There is no doubt that Katsura Sunshine, artist name of this comedian known as “rakugoka”, would be amused by this highly caricatural biographical description; short stories to entertain and make his audience laugh, that’s his specialty. But beware, he works in a very different setting from that of a comedy show à la Just for Laughs, having embraced the codes of rakugo, a Japanese art more than four centuries old, consisting of reciting small traditional comic sketches according to very specific rules.

Alone on stage, seated cross-legged, the storyteller in a kimono has a fan and a cloth napkin as simple accessories. We could add a phenomenal memory, since he draws from a repertoire of some 300 stories, long or short, perpetuated from generation to generation, or sometimes composed by himself.

By taking the Espace Libre stage on Tuesday evening – he is also there this Wednesday and Thursday – in Montreal, Katsura Sunshine first took care to demystify his art, to which he was initiated in Japan, his home for 25 years. Usually performing in Tokyo, London or even in Broadway theaters in New York, he launched for the very first time in a French version of his show. “I’m not afraid, he assured his audience, I’m terrified! “, he specifies from the outset.

Not mastering the language of Miron as skillfully as that of Shakespeare or Mishima, he faced the daring challenge of interpreting his selection of short stories in French. Admittedly, he struggles a bit for his words; certainly, his grammar creaks a little; certainly, his accent strongly tinged with Japanese and English astonishes and detonates. But the stories still manage to run their course, featuring a child with a ridiculously long name, a young man pushed to play tiger in a zoo, or an old man who doesn’t understand why he hurts all over. A course that systematically leads to the crucial point of rakugo: an unexpected fall – the word literally means “story that has a fall” in Japanese – intended to make you laugh or smile. Even if the puns, common in these stories, were probably sacrificed on the altar of translation, the fact remains that the jokes chosen by the storyteller fulfill their role once transposed.

On the tip of my tongue

“I have a real love for French. I’ve heard several jokes in this language, and I think it works well for rakugo,” explained to The Press Katsura Sunshine, who served up a surprising reinterpretation of one of his sketches with a dialogue mixing… Italian and Chinese.

Among his most captivating stories is undoubtedly his own. Passionate about Greek comedy in his youth, he discovered rakugo in Japan. “It was love at first sight,” he recalls. However, to be consecrated “rakugoka”, an established master must agree to take you under his wing. Captivated by one of them, the Canadian had to prove his determination: “It took eight months to convince him, I was going to all his shows,” he laughs.

At the end of his training, as tradition dictates, he receives a baptismal name chosen by his master (his forms a play on words when read in Japanese characters). From then on, he began to perform in the archipelago, in Japanese, but also in the English-speaking world. Today, even if his French still needs to become more fluent, Katsura Sunshine has embarked on a very commendable undertaking: to promote rakugo in the Francophonie.

Katsura Sunshine, rakugo in French

Free spaceMay 10 and 11, 7 p.m.