C. Andrew Gerstle

Sometimes – haiku, flower arranging, tea ceremony – the Japanese come across as the most aesthetically refined people on Earth. And sometimes – WWII – they come across as from another planet altogether. I knew next to nothing about Japanese theater; now after reading Chikamatsu – 5 Late Plays I am a little ways down the road from nothing and have more information on Japanese aesthetics.


Chikamatsu Monzaemon lived from 1653 to 1725, and wrote mostly for the bunraku (puppet) theater (although many of his plays were adapted for kabuki). “Puppet theater” immediately evokes mental images of Punch and Judy, with hand puppets or marionettes performing behind a proscenium window, with the manipulators concealed below or above. It’s puzzling that translator C. Andrew Gerstle doesn’t provide much detail of how the bunraku theater worked mechanically. However, the book has two illustrations of performances – one of contemporary and one modern. In the contemporary illustration, the actors are positioned around the stage; each has a pair of hand puppets held overhead. This must have been very tiring in a long performance. In the modern production, the puppets are perhaps one third life size and are being operated by black-clad kuroko, apparently with their hands inserted in the puppet body. Gerstle notes that puppet theater was much more conducive to special effects than conventional plays; in fact all the plays in this volume have scenes that would be difficult to reproduce with live actors – katana decapitations, for example. (As an aside, I’ve read that some ancient Greek and Roman dramas used convicted criminals as actors, who would then be executed as part of the play. I expect it’s easier to get full cooperation from puppets).


The narrator or chanter was a very significant role; the plays have almost musical notation, indicating whether the chanter should be speaking or singing particular lines and the cadence to be used. There was samisen accompaniment matched to the action; the notation indicates standards like “ominous” or “exiting” for the music.


The plays have a five-act structure, similar but not identical to Shakespearian pacing. In particular the third act is often a “drama within a drama”, only tangentially related to the rest of the play. Each act was supposed to have a theme – “Love”, “Honor”, “Tragedy”, for example. There’s usually a supernatural element – ghosts, giant spiders, paintings that come to life, and goblins appear in the examples in this volume. A “rough-and-ready” samurai – think the Toshiro Mifune character in Yojimbo – appears as a supporting actor in two of the plays; in each case the narrator describes him, suggesting the audience needed some explanation of why an unshaven and sloppily dressed character was on stage. Gerstle notes that several of the plays have a subtext that could be interpreted as critical of the government, usually by portraying the “good old days” with implied contrast to the current situation.


Some of the plots are surprisingly familiar. Twins at the Sumida River is about twins separated at birth; Lovers Pond in Settsu Province concerns a couple that find to their horror that they are brother and sister; Battles at Kawa-nakajima has a couple from rival clans falling in love while their fathers battle. Others are more alien: in Love Suicide on the Eve of the Kōshin Festival I discovered that a mother could force her son and daughter-in-law to divorce; Tethered Steed and the Eight Provinces of Kantō involves samurai honor, mistaken identity in the bedroom, a ghost, a spectral horse, and giant spiders. Perhaps you had to be there.


The plays are a pretty difficult read. There are extensive endnotes, detailing references to kabuki and noh drama. Chinese literature, and events from Chinese and Japanese history. They would have worked better as footnotes, or even a page of text with a facing page of notes, so that the reader could pick up the references as they occurred rather than having to flip to the back to see if there are any notes on a particular page. There are numerous illustrations, both contemporary and modern; only one of the contemporary illustrations (mentioned above) shows the play performed with puppets; the other shows scenes as if they had real actors. There is a nice set of maps, illustrating contemporary (i.e., contemporary to Chikamatsu) Kyoto and Osaka (to show the theater districts where the plays were performed) and historical Japan (to show the historical settings for plays set in earlier times).


Certainly worth reading, although I suspect I only understood a tenth of what was going on.… (meer)