The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults

Such are the culturally cross-pollinating times in which we live, it’s via South African writer/performer Gemma Kahn that The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults enlightens Edinburgh audiences on the largely-forgotten 12th century Japanese art of Kamishibai “paper drama” storytelling.

“Once upon a time before Pokémon, before Manga, before Hentai,” scrawls Chalk Girl (Kahn’s sneeringly unspeaking, bubblegum-chewing, saucy-Japanese-schoolgirl-style-attired assistant) on her blackboard by way of an introduction to our host who narrates illustrated stories drawn on stacks of cards slid in order through a rectangular viewing frame.

Segued with Chalk Girl's sardonic witticisms and blasts of Japanese punk music, seven individual tales are told – some ancient, some modern, each by different authors/artists and each taking a funny and/or thoughtful view on a certain interval, vestige, or vice of Japanese history and culture. They range from the explicitly porn-y fantasy of a man on a train station platform, to a touchingly wordless tribute to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and the gory titular story of a feudal-era master butcher with a talent for carving human flesh.

The penultimate one, eavesdropping on the existential crisis of Super Mario, is worth the ticket price alone. Likewise at the end—neatly linking together both nationalities represented—a brief biography of Nelson Mandela, Japanese cartoon-style with a respectful flippancy, hilariously contrasts the standard hero-worshipping tone that anything about South Africa’s first black president generally tends to take.

It’s all a bit lo-fi and in need of further development, but nevertheless, it's clever, stylish, entertainingly realised and deserving of strong recommendation.