The Uncanny Sounds in Kamisato Yudai’s Immigrant Ghost Stories

This article, situated within the emerging field of rehearsal studies in transnational contexts, explores how ghostliness and aurality operate as dramaturgical strategies in Immigrant Ghost Stories (2022) by Lima-born, Tokyo-based playwright and director Kamisato Yudai. The four-part play is inspired by ghost stories collected in Okinawa, Thailand, Laos and Bolivia. Drawing on my field notes as an embedded researcher in the virtual and in-situ rehearsals, Kamisato’s writings and my performance analysis, I characterize his work through the notion of dramaturgies of crossing borders involving both physical and aesthetic dimensions.

At the centre of my reading is Azuma Hiroki’s ‘tourist principle’ (2017), in which the figure of the tourist and the notion of ‘postal multitude’, a term he coins by combining Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’ with Derrida’s ‘postal’, offer a way to rethink assemblies of otherness. Kamisato’s physical-virtual rehearsal model featuring one-to-one sessions across Tokyo, Naha and Brazil, with performers and staff absent or present only via screens, resembled what Azuma calls ghostly or tourist-like meetings: uncanny yet ordinary. Resisting fixity, texts and voices migrated (in)visibly across screens, rehearsal and theatre spaces, translations and languages.

Kamisato’s dramaturgy relied on listening rather than seeing. The ghostly presence of the text emerged through sonic materiality of the rehearsal and theatre environments. The work thus transformed theatre into ‘a place of seeing through listening and doing’. In performance, spectators were unsettled by the uncanny sounds just as wars and migrations destabilise everyday lives.

I argue that this work stages an assembly of migrant and touristic ghosts that mirrors histories of colonisation, war and military presence not just in Okinawa but the world at large. In doing so, Kamisato redefines listening as a dramaturgical strategy and a political act: a mode of granting agency to (in)visible tourists and migrants and imagining new solidarities across borders.