Matsui Sumako was born in 1886 in a Nagano farming village, the youngest of nine children; her birth name was the relentlessly ordinary Kobayashi Masako. In 1902 she followed an older sister to Tokyo, where she married Torigai Manzo, an innkeeper in Chiba, but the marriage ended after a matter of months, to be followed in 1908 by another one with Maezawa Seisuke, a Nagano landsman (whom she met while being treated for the venereal disease received from Torigai). Although their marriage did not last any longer than her first, Maezawa’s job teaching history at at the Tokyo Actors’ School was a catalyst for Masako’s interest in theater.

The Actors’ School originally turned down her application because of her flat nose, but in 1909 (after plastic surgery on her nose, a rarity at the time) she entered the playwright Tsubouchi Shoyo’s Theater Research Institute as one of its first students, taking the stage name of Matsui Sumako. Along with his colleague, a college professor called Shimamura Hogetsu, Shoyo led the emerging modern theater movement and trained his students severely. Sumako, whose education had not gone beyond junior high school, struggled when told to read Hamlet in the original for class; she scribbled Japanese transliterations into her playscript and managed to pull it off somehow. Shoyo’s adopted daughter Iizuka Kuni remembered Sumako bent over her script, nibbling on a red bean pastry in place of lunch.

Her hard work paid off in 1911 at the group’s first performance, when she was chosen to play Ophelia. Tall for a Japanese woman of the time, with a distinctive voice and a bold acting style, she immediately drew attention. That autumn she played Nora in A Doll’s House, under Hogetsu’s direction, to rave reviews (Bluestocking magazine put out a special “Nora Edition” discussing the New Woman issue). Sumako and Hogetsu had already become lovers by this time, although he was married. Their affair drew public criticism and eventually drove Sumako out of the theater group, which itself dissolved in 1913 (her position was not helped by a reputation for arrogance and high drama offstage).

Sumako and Hogetsu, who had abandoned both his teaching job and his wife, founded the Geijutsuza troupe the same year. In 1914 they opened their season with Tolstoy’s Resurrection at the Imperial Theater, translated and directed by Hogetsu and starring Sumako as Katyusha; her plaintive Katyusha’s Song [YouTube link, thought to have been recorded around 1915] became a huge pop hit, selling twenty thousand records, and thanks to her hairstyle, Alice bands are still called katyushas in Japan to this day. Other equally successful performances followed, including Salome, Monna Vanna, The Living Corpse, Oedipus, and Man of Destiny, as well as less well known plays by Japanese playwrights, and various hit records (including “In My Next Life,” with lyrics by the poet Kitahara Hakushu, which was considered obscene and became Japan’s first banned record).

In November 1918, Hogetsu died of the Spanish flu: Sumako lost not only her lover but also her main source of financial and career support. One year later to the day, after starring in a performance of Carmen, she hanged herself in the theater prop room, to be found the next morning perfectly dressed, coiffed and made up. She left a note asking to be buried in the same grave as Hogetsu, which was not done in order to spare his family’s feelings. After her death, she became the subject of numerous novels, movies, and later TV dramas.

The radio here plays an opera every Friday afternoon, and it seems uniquely appropriate that today’s performance was Carmen.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 1996
https://www.sumakomatsui.or.jp/dictionary/index.html (Japanese) Includes photos of various relevant people and places