Hanako (Ōta Hisa, 1868–1945) was an insignificant member of a small Japanese theatrical
troupe when she was discovered by the well-known dancer, Loïe Fuller, who after seeing
Hanako’s death scene, decided to become her impresario. Thereafter, Fuller organised
each of Hanako’s European tours and wrote for her many Japanese-style dramas that
always ended with the cruel but utterly expressive death of the protagonist. Hanako
met Auguste Rodin, the famous sculpture, at the Marseille Colonial Exhibition in 1906.
The master was fascinated by Hanako’s performance and tried to sculpt the ‘death face’
that she expressed during her death scenes. This face, with a weird expression, was
most probably a nirami, which is a type of mie pose in kabuki theatre. Rodin created
numerous busts and faces from different materials trying to capture the emblematic
moment when Hanako saw death. The present paper examines the short but interesting
period of Hanako’s Western career, focusing on her meeting with Rodin. I use their
story as a unique and symbolic illustration of Japanese artists’ efforts to transform
themselves and their art to ‘match’ the Western eye and of the ways in which the West
was looking for verification of its preconceptions of the ‘strange’ and ‘exotic’ East
in the early 1900s.
