Alison McQueen Tokita presents a series of case studies that demonstrate the persistence of Japanese sung narratives in a multiplicity of genres over ten centuries together with factors contributing to change in narrative performance. Narratives that were continually re-told and recycled in different versions and formats over a long period of time
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
