Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  Both kabuki and jōruri emerged in the early seventeenth century and flourished thereafter as popular entertainment. In contrast to nō and kyōgen (comic drama)—two medieval dramatic genres that continued to be staged but whose audience was largely samurai or merchant elite—kabuki and jōruri were aimed at a wide audience. Bunraku (puppet theater) consists of three elements: the puppets, music (shamisen), and chanting (jōruri) based on a text and performed by a tayū (chanter), who speaks or sings all the roles, including the third-person narration. Unlike kabuki, which originally emerged from dance, with the actor’s body and voice as the center of attention, the art of jōruri focuses on the chanter, who sits conspicuously on the side of the stage and is the undisputed center of attention. The coordination among the three elements—the actors/puppets, music, and narration—is a key to both kabuki and jōruri, but in contrast to kabuki, in which the actors are given priority, in jōruri the chanter was originally ranked above the shamisen players and the puppet operators. Indeed, the jōruri (chanting) is so important that it often is performed alone, without the puppets.

  The term kabuki is now written with three characters meaning “song” (ka or uta), “dance” (bu or mai), and “performance or skill” (ki or gi), representing the three central elements of this theatrical genre. In the Edo period the ki was usually written with the character meaning “courtesan,” giving the term a more erotic flavor. The word originally came from the verb kabuku (to lean over, to violate the rules of behavior or dress, to act wildly)—that is, to work against the established social or moral order, to celebrate a liberated lifestyle and attitude. The creation of kabuki is attributed to Okuni, a female attendant at the Izumo Shrine, who led a female company that performed dance and comic sketches on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto in 1603. According to documents, Okuni dressed as a man, reflecting the kind of “wild” (kabuki) spirit that became the heart of kabuki. The Tenshō-Keichō eras (1573–1614), when kabuki dance began, were marked by this kabuki spirit, which was taken up by the machishū, Kyoto’s new townspeople with commercial wealth, and which became one of the driving forces behind the early modern culture.

  Okuni’s kabuki dance attracted many imitators around the country and led to the rise of onna (women’s) kabuki. The courtesans in the pleasure district in Kyoto, for example, frequently gave erotic performances at Shijōgawara, on the dry riverbed at Shijō Bridge. These female kabuki troupes—one of the most famous being the Sado Island kabuki group—were so popular that they were invited to the castle towns by various domain lords and traveled to give performances in mining and port towns. The performances of women’s kabuki, mainly popular songs and dances, were mixed in with “teahouse entertainment” (chaya asobi) in which the courtesans played the shamisen, an instrument of the licensed quarters, and revealed other ways in which they entertained their customers at their teahouses or brothels. In a typical “teahouse” dramatic sketch, the female star of the troupe, dressed as a male customer and accompanied by a jester, would visit the madam of the teahouse, a male actor dressed as a woman. The cross-dressing and sex reversal gave the audience a highly erotic charge, much as Okuni had. The performances, however, were too provocative for the bakufu (government). In addition, they caused fights among the spectators for the personal favors of the female entertainers—for whom the kabuki was a means of luring customers—and resulted in the bakufu’s banning women’s kabuki in 1629.

  With the abolition of women’s kabuki, the spotlight shifted to wakashu (boys’) kabuki, which had existed from as early as the medieval period. The popularity of these elegant dances was driven by the erotic fondness at this time for male youths, and as in women’s kabuki, the young actors provided “teahouse entertainment” and played the role of women. Wakashu kabuki, however, differed from women’s kabuki in that it incorporated aspects of other genres, especially the dances (mai and komai) from kyōgen and nō drama. This in turn led to the development of buyō, a distinct kabuki dance style that merged with the earlier popular dance (odori) that had been at the heart of kabuki. The lion’s dance and other dynamic dances that revealed the physical agility of the young male actors were also incorporated into kabuki at this time. As did the performers in women’s kabuki, the young actors in wakashu kabuki sold their favors to male customers. Indeed, Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651), who became the third shōgun in 1623, was famous for his interest in the young actors and even had a kabuki troupe perform at Edo Castle. The association of this kind of kabuki with prostitution, however, proved to be too much, and in 1652, a year after Iemitsu’s death, the bakufu banned wakashu kabuki as well.

  Bowing to pressure from the theater people, the bakufu gave permission the following year to restore kabuki on the condition that the male actors shave off their forelocks (a sign of youth). The result was yarō (adult male) kabuki, which stressed realistic drama, mixed in humor, and went beyond song and dance. Nevertheless, the erotic dimension remained, and despite pressure from the authorities, kabuki continued under the guise of narrative drama to perform scenes that featured the buying of prostitutes. For example, Shimabara kyōgen—which became enormously popular and focused on a male customer, a high-ranking courtesan (tayū), and the owner of an ageya (where high-level courtesans entertained customers)—acted out on stage the customs of the licensed quarter in Shimabara in Kyoto, functioning as a kind of live guide to this area. Shimabara kyōgen created the “love scene” (nuregoto), the “prostitute scene” (keiseigoto), and the “dressed-down or in-disguise scene” (yatsushigoto), all of which became important conventions in kabuki. After Shimabara kyōgen was banned for the same reasons that onna kabuki and wakashu kabuki had been prohibited, the principal interest shifted to the performance of the older adult male actor (yarō) playing the role of a young female courtesan, thus refining the art of the woman’s role (onnagata), which became a major part of kabuki performance. Another key development of yarō kabuki, which lasted from the 1650s through the 1680s, was the transition from a single act to multiple acts (tsuzuki kyōgen) in the Kanbun era (1661–1673), a development that occurred largely under the influence of nō drama and the puppet theater.

  In contrast to the medieval performing arts, which were largely itinerant, jōruri and kabuki were usually performed at fixed locations, usually in the cities, where admission could be charged to the audience. From around the Genna era (1615–1624), the bakufu gave permission for the construction of particular licensed theaters, which led to the development of the two “bad places” (akusho): the theater district and the licensed pleasure quarters. The bakufu, whose first priority was to uphold the social order and public security, designated the “bad places” as spaces of controlled release (nagusami), where citizens’ excess energy could be channeled and where it was understood that there would be no criticism of the existing order. Those who went into these “bad places” entered an intoxicating, out-of-the-ordinary, festival-like world where the line between reality and dream was blurred. Kabuki and jōruri explored this erotic, extraordinary space while absorbing as much as it could from nō and kyōgen.

  The Genroku era was a golden time for kabuki, which played to large and enthusiastic audiences in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo. Of the two main elements of kabuki, the shosagoto (the buyō dance pieces) and the jigei (speech and mime; drama), the latter underwent the greater transformation at this time, leading to the development of highly realistic dialogue and acting styles. The three most notable actors of Genroku kabuki were Ichikawa Danjurō (1660–1704), who made his debut on the stage of the Nakamura Theater in Edo in 1673, Sakata Tōjūrō (1647–1709), who came to fame in the Osaka-Kyoto region, and Yoshizawa Ayame (1653–1724), also from Kyoto, who established the art of the onnagata.

  In the Kyoto-Osaka area, the center of Genroku culture, Sakata Tōjūrō perfected what later came to be called the wagoto (soft or gentle) style, in which a townsman falls in love with a courtesan or prostitute, is disowned, and falls into difficult straits. In Edo, Ichikawa Danjurō
created the aragoto (rough) style, which originated in the city of the samurai and featured courageous heroes, bold, masculine characters who displayed superhuman powers in overcoming evildoers. In the kabuki version of Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Battles of Coxinga, Watōnai, the warrior hero of Japanese-Chinese parentage, is an example of an aragoto role, and in The Love Suicides at Amijima, Jihei, the weak paper merchant who falls tragically in love with the prostitute Koharu, became a noted wagoto role.

  In both kabuki and the puppet theater, the status of the playwright originally was extremely low. The playwright’s name did not appear in the puppet theater script or in the advertisement for the play. In fact, Chikamatsu Monzaemon was one of the first to have his name on the advertisement (kanban) and initially was criticized for it. In contrast to kabuki, however, whose texts were not published in full until the late nineteenth century, jōruri texts were published in their entirety with the first performance, thereby making them widely available.

  CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON

  Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) was born in Echizen Province, in what is now Fukui Prefecture, on the Japan Sea side of the country, where his father, Sugimori Nobuyoshi (1621–1687), was in personal service to the young daimyō of Echizen. His father’s stipend of three hundred koku indicates that the family was upper-class samurai and relatively well off. His mother’s father was the daimyō’s doctor, with a large stipend of one thousand koku, and her family also had Kyoto connections. When Chikamatsu was fourteen or fifteen, his family moved to Kyoto, where he entered the service of several courtier families. One was that of Ichijō Ekan (1605–1672), the son of Emperor GoYōzei and the head of the Ichijō house, for which Chikamatsu worked until Ekan’s death in 1672. Through Ekan, Chikamatsu participated in courtier cultural life in the late 1660s and early 1670s. When he was in his mid-twenties, Chikamatsu began writing plays for Uji Kaganojō (1635–1711), the foremost puppet chanter of the time in Kyoto, and sometime later he started to write kabuki plays as well. As one who came from a relatively well-off samurai family, served in the households of a member of the imperial family and other culturally active Kyoto aristocrats, and then went on to work for street performers and kabuki actors officially considered as outcasts (kawara-kojiki, riverbed beggars), Chikamatsu’s experience was highly unusual in the strict social hierarchy of the day.

  Chikamatsu’s early jōruri and kabuki were written in collaboration with performers, and his later mature works were usually written in consultation with performers and managers. Chikamatsu learned his trade as a jōruri writer from Kaganojō who was almost twenty years his senior and, for unknown reasons, did not allow Chikamatsu’s name to appear as the author or coauthor of his plays. The last performer in the oral tradition that held the chanter to be the undisputed source of the texts, Kaganojō was also a teacher and the employer of Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714), the great chanter in Osaka and a crucial figure in the development of jōruri theater. In his art treatise, Kaganojō claims nō drama as the parent of jōruri and describes jōruri as fundamentally a musical drama constructed of acts, each with a distinctive musical mood: auspicious (shūgen), elegant (yūgen), amorous (renbo), and tragic (aishō). Most of the plays thought to be the result of his and Chikamatsu’s collaboration in the late 1670s and early 1680s borrowed from nō drama and other classical Japanese sources.

  This woodblock print announces the 1703 production of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, to be performed at the Takemoto Theater in Osaka. Tatsumatsu Hachirōbei (d. 1734), a noted puppeteer, is behind a transparent cloth single-handedly maneuvering Ohatsu in the opening pilgrimage scene. A special announcer sits in front of the screen advertising the play and exchanging notes with the audience. The three performers seated to the right in formal wide-shouldered attire are, from left to right, Takemoto Tanomo, the supporting chanter; Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714), the lead chanter, holding a fan in his right hand; and the shamisen player. (From NKBZ 43, Chikamatsu Monzaemon shū 1, by permission of Shōgakukan)

  The earliest work that is definitely known to have been written by Chikamatsu is The Soga Successor (Yotsugi Soga, 1683), performed first by Kaganojō and then a year later by Gidayū. This pattern of composing plays—and often rewriting them slightly—for both chanters, one working in Kyoto and the other in Osaka, continued during the 1680s. But Chikamatsu’s life changed after he began to write for Takemoto Gidayū, who was only two years his senior. Gidayū was initially an apprentice of Kaganojō and performed in Kyoto, where he probably met Chikamatsu. Gidayū then broke away from Kaganojō and established his own Takemoto Theater in Osaka in 1684. In 1685, Kaganojō provocatively moved his troupe from Kyoto to Osaka and competed for audiences alongside Gidayū. Around this time, Gidayū wooed Chikamatsu away from Kaganojō and took the decisive step of having Chikamatsu claim authorship for himself. The gap left by Chikamatsu was filled by the famous poet and novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), who in 1685 wrote two works for Kaganojō for the Osaka audience. The second work, at least, seems to have had some success, but Kaganojō’s theater burned down, and Kaganojō returned to Kyoto, leaving Gidayū, now joined with Chikamatsu, the seemingly undisputed victor in Osaka. The collaboration of Chikamatsu and Gidayū, which continued on and off until Gidayū’s death in 1714, produced a new age of jōruri writing and many of Chikamatsu’s masterpieces.

  By 1685, Chikamatsu was also writing for kabuki. In fact, his work for the kabuki theater dominated his creative energies from the mid-1690s until his final kabuki play of 1705, during which time most of his more than thirty surviving kabuki plays were produced. In this period, writers for kabuki were not highly regarded, and only a few theaters had playwrights on their staff. But Sakata Tōjūrō (1647–1709), who became a kabuki star actor in the 1690s, is known to have considered playwriting important to his success, and his relationship with Chikamatsu was one of mutual respect. From 1693 until 1702, Chikamatsu wrote almost exclusively for Tōjūrō, who became famous as the creator of the Kyoto-Osaka wagoto (soft) style of acting and focused on portraying young men of good background who have fallen on hard times. The showpiece was the yatsushi (disguise) section, in which the hero, formerly the heir of a samurai or high merchant house, is in disguise as a poor, destitute figure, having lost his position owing to either his own profligacy or the machinations of a younger brother or disloyal retainer. The climactic scene was often set in the pleasure quarter where Tōjūrō has an encounter with his courtesan lover. Sometime in the 1690s, Tōjūrō made Chikamatsu the staff playwright at his Miyako Theater in Kyoto, giving him financial security for perhaps the first time in his life. Chikamatsu’s experience of writing five-act jōruri plays with integrated plots provided the framework for his kabuki plays, which were usually in three acts made up of different scenes.

  Chikamatsu’s involvement with kabuki was crucial to his later development as a jōruri playwright. The success of the topical, one-act Love Suicides at Sonezaki in 1703, Chikamatsu’s earliest sewamono (contemporary-life) jōruri, obviously inspired by his experience in writing kabuki, was the first fruit of his maturity. In the last eighteen years of his career, he wrote about seventy-five jōruri, twenty-four of which were sewamono, in a tremendous burst of creativity after he had passed fifty. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki is a crucial landmark in both the history of Japanese theater and Chikamatsu’s own career. Its success was unexpected and restored the Takemoto Theater to profit, and it spurred other changes in jōruri drama as it strove to compete with kabuki’s live actors for audiences in theaters that sat side by side in the Dōtonbori entertainment district in south Osaka. Two changes made during this period were discontinuing the skits and interludes between acts and introducing the short one-act sewamono made up of three scenes—under the influence of kabuki practice—after a longer five-act history play.

  Chikamatsu’s twenty-four contemporary-life (sewamono) plays—conceived as one-act dramas equivalent to the intense third act of a five-act history play (jidaimono)—maintain a tight uni
ty of place and time and are usually realistic, without any of the fantastic elements of the period dramas. This temporal and spatial unity, together with the realism, has earned praise in modern times for sewamono. Chikamatsu’s more than seventy history plays, by contrast, have multiple plots and supernatural elements, often taking place over vast areas of time and space. The climactic third act of the history play, however, which is as long as many of the one-act, three-scene sewamono, is tightly structured and realistically acted. In short, the two genres are built on entirely different premises and theatrical conventions. Whereas sewamono engage with contemporary society directly through depictions of an actual incident of the time, jidaimono use complex interaction and dialogue with an array of texts from both the Japanese and Chinese traditions to portray contemporary politics. Whereas contemporary-life plays usually focus on the private lives of average folk, history pieces most often stress the individual’s interaction with the public, political sphere. Chikamatsu’s history dramas from the latter half of his career in fact present a tense balance between the private and public spheres of society, usually with the third act emphasizing the private consequences of conflict with the public world of politics.

  After the success of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Takemoto Gidayū expressed his desire to retire from the stage, exhausted by managing a theater while being its star performer as well. This made way for the debut of Takeda Izumo I (d. 1747) as the new manager, leaving Gidayū to concentrate solely on performance. Izumo came from a different puppet tradition, the Takeda Ōmi style of mechanical and trick puppets, which also competed with jōruri and kabuki in Dōtonbori. Izumo took the decisive step of inviting Chikamatsu to be the Takemoto Theater’s staff playwright. After the actor Sakata Tōjūrō retired in 1702 because of ill health, Chikamatsu left Kyoto early in 1706 to live the last years of his life in Osaka writing solely for the Takemoto Theater.