Chikamatsu Monzaemon Research Articles

Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu

The vibrant merchant culture of Tokugawa Japan gave rise to many new forms of art, none more fascinating than the puppet theater, Jōruri, created chiefly by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the foremost playwright of popular Japanese drama. In this analysis of Chikamatsu's artistry, Dr. Gerstle focuses on features hitherto neglected by Western scholars the musical structure of Jōruri, integral to the form, mood, and movement of the drama. For extensive translations from the various types of Chikamatsu's dramas, Gerstle supplies the musical notations, which illuminate the sophisticated conventions of this unique and timeless artistic form. Chikamatsu's art, combining puppets, text, samisen music, and chanting/narration, encompasses three major types of drama--history, contemporary-life, and love-suicide plays--each with distinct structural features. Gerstle shows how the music of Jōruri, a mixture of the samisen and chanting/narration, supplements the texts and expresses a dramatized action or emotion through complex changes in pitch, tempo, and style of delivery. Richly illustrated with woodblock prints, this is a fascinating study, which will be welcomed by scholars of Japanese culture, literature, and musicology.

Moritsuna's Camp: An Eighteenth-Century Play from Japan's Puppet Theatre

So compelling has been Japan's distinctive theatre of puppets, known today as bunraku, that one writer in 1741 was moved to observe that puppet theatre has grown to such popularity that kabuki seems hardly to exist at all (Okubo 1959, 3). Both bunraku and kabuki survive today, kabuki clearly the more patronized of the two; but in the forty or so years following the death in 1725 of the great puppet playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the puppet theatre held a nearly vicelike grip on the enthusiasm of Japanese playgoers. New puppet plays were no sooner appearing in Osaka's two great rival theatres, the Takemoto-za and the Toyotake-za, than they would be adapted to the kabuki stage. Indeed, kabuki's indebtedness to the doll theatre today is such that if it were deprived of those plays taken from puppet theatre originals it would lose nearly 50 percent of its standard repertoire. It was during the 1760s that the golden age of the puppet theatre dipped into a decline. As leading performers and playwrights retired or died, there seemed to be little talent to take their places. The Toyotake-za also burned to the ground in the winter of 1761. It was quickly rebuilt, only to meet the same fate again in the winter of 1763, whereupon many members of the troupe left for Edo, the city that a little over a century later would be renamed Tokyo. The Toyotake-za finally closed its doors for good in the latter part of 1765, its facilities then taken over by a kabuki company. The Takemoto-za suffered the same decimation of its artists, and two years after the demise of the Toyotake-za it too failed and became

A michiyuki passage from the Taiheiki

Early forms of michiyuki‘travel sequences’ in works of Japanese literature are to be found in a few of the songs and poems in the eighth-century Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Man'yōshū. They continued to be used in general literature and, through sung entertainments such as imayō, enkyoku, and kusemai, appeared also in various forms of drama. The best examples are to be found in the medieval military tales and in the puppet plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), where the treatment of the travel sequence reaches its peak by a combination of text, music, and movement. One of the most famous michiyuki texts, however, is this passage from the Taiheiki, a fourteenth-century war tale, which describes the journey from Kyōto , the imperial capital, to Kamakura , the seat of the military government in the eastern part of the country, made by a court noble in 1331 after he was arrested for being implicated in the emperor Go-Daigo's second plot to overthrow the Hōjō military rulers.

Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The sweep of Japanese literature in all its great variety was made available to Western readers for the first time in this anthology. Every genre and style, from the celebrated No plays to the poetry and novels of the seventeenth century, find a place in this book. An introduction by Donald Keene places the selections in their proper historical context, allowing the readers to enjoy the book both as literature and as a guide to the cultural history of Japan. Selections include Man yoshu or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves from the ancient period; Kokinshu or Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry, The Tosa Diary of Ki No Tsurayuki, Yugao from Tales of Genji of Murasaki Shikibu, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon from the Heian Period; The Tale of the Heike from the Kamakura Period; Plan of the No Stage, Birds of Sorrow of Seami Motokiyo, and Three Poets at Minase from the Muromachi Period; and Sections from Basho, including The Narrow Road of Oku, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and Waka and haiku of the Tokugawa Period.

The Love Suicide at Amijima (Shinju Ten no Amijima): A Study of a Japanese Domestic Tragedy by Chikamatsu Monzaemon.

The Love Suicide at Amijima (Shinju Ten no Amijima): A Study of a Japanese Domestic Tragedy by Chikamatsu Monzaemon.