Presents a series of case studies that demonstrate the persistence of Japanese sung narratives in a multiplicity of genres over ten centuries, including the way they flourished and declined, together with factors contributing to development and change in narrative performance. Winner of the Tanabe Hisao Prize 2015 "Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative has just won the Tanabe Hisao Prize for a book on Asian music...This book purviews a wide range of narrative genres including koshiki shomyo, heike, no, puppet joruri narrative, kabuki joruri narrative (bungo-kei, ozatsuma). From the musical characteristics of each genre it extrapolates the broad character of Japanese narrative music as a whole. Particularly noteworthy is that, while defining the individual characteristics of each genre, the author provides a framework for analyzing their shared structure, pointing to their commonalities and continuities." - 33rd Tanabe Hisao Prize "Tokita's Japanese Singers of Tales is an impressive work of scholarship, and it helps to fill a crucial void in our understanding of medieval and early-modern performance traditions? Tokita explores many of the same stories and literary/performance genres as other scholars have, but her attention to the neglected musicological aspects of these things allows her to shed a new important light." - R. Keller Kimbrough, University of Colorado Boulder, Journal of Japanese Studies "Alison McQueen Tokita has produced an encyclopedic study tracing the relationships between the many forms of Japanese sung narrative that constitute a continuous tradition spanning a millennium...Tokita's work will be of great interest to musicologists, and scholars in related fields will also certainly have occasion to consult this substantive study." - Margaret H. Childs, University of Kansas, Monumenta Nipponica "Tokita's project is complex and ambitious in terms of history, narrative, and music-with much of this material being unpacked for the first time in English. (...) The volume will certainly be accessed by scholars of Japanese traditional music and performance, and used as a resource for those of us who teach Japanese folklore, literature, and drama. But I also hope that specialists in the music and oral narrative of other regions will make the effort to wade through the historical and linguistic specifics to seek insights for cross-cultural conversation." - Michael Dylan Foster, Indiana University "The volume will certainly be accessed by scholars of Japanese traditional music and performance, and used as a resource for those of us who teach Japanese folklore, literature, and drama. But I also hope that specialists in the music and oral narrative of other regions will make the effort to wade through the historical and linguistic specifics to seek insights for cross-cultural conversation." - Journal of Folklore Research, October 2017 "The book's diachronic character in structure and comprehensive and comparative perspective that covers not only Japanese narratives but also those preserved in other cultures would be appropriate for neophytes of Japanese music. Those interested in studying genres of Japanese narratives would also certainly find this book of inestimable value." - Naoko Terauchi, Kobe University