Chikamatsu Monzaemon

, real name , was a Japanese dramatist of jōruri, the form of puppet theater that later came to be known as bunraku, and the live-actor drama, kabuki. The Encyclopædia Britannica has written that he is "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist." His most famous plays deal with double-suicides of honor-bound lovers. Of his puppet plays, around 70 are jidaimono (時代物) (historical romances), and 24 are sewamono (世話物) (domestic tragedies). The domestic plays are today considered the core of his artistic achievement, particularly works such as The Courier for Hell (1711) and The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721). His histories are viewed less positively, though The Battles of Coxinga (1715) remains praised.

Biography

Chikamatsu was born Sugimori Nobumori to a samurai family. There is disagreement about his birthplace. The most popular theory suggests he was born in Echizen Province, but there are other plausible locations, including Hagi, Nagato Province. His father, Sugimori Nobuyoshi, served as a medical doctor to the daimyō Matsudaira in Echizen. His mother was the daughter of Okamoto Ichiku, a physician to the Echizen domain, and Chikamatsu’s younger brother later became the physician and medical author Okamoto Ippō.

thumb|Tomb of Chikamatsu at Kōsaiji temple

In those days, doctors who served the daimyō held samurai status. But Chikamatsu’s father lost his office and became a rōnin, a masterless samurai. At some point in his teens, between 1664 and 1670, Chikamatsu moved with his father to the imperial capital of Kyoto, where he served for a few years as an obscure page for a civil noble family. Other than that, little is known about this period of Chikamatsu’s life. He published his first known literary work during this period, a haiku that appeared in 1671.

In 1705, early editions of The Mirror of Craftsmen of the Emperor Yōmei announced Chikamatsu as a staff playwright. In 1705 or 1706, Chikamatsu left Kyoto for Osaka, where puppet theater was even more popular. Chikamatsu's popularity peaked with his domestic plays about love suicides and with the blockbuster success of The Battles of Coxinga in 1715, but patrons' tastes later turned to more sensational, gore-filled spectacles and cruder antics. Chikamatsu's plays fell out of use, and the music itself was lost for many of them. He died on January 6, 1725, in either Amagasaki, Hyōgo,

Reception

Chikamatsu's bunraku (jōruri) pieces, of which 24 are sewamono (domestic plays), came to be regarded as high literature in the Meiji and Taishō eras. Many have argued that his genius was "his masterful depiction of the passions, obsessions, and irrationality of the human heart." While Chikamatsu's jidaimono (history plays) were considered more important in his own time, the domestic tragedies are now "the main focus of critical attention and the more frequently performed", praised as deeply drawn in their portrayals of commoners. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703), one of the earliest domestic plays in puppet theater, was a hit that revived the fortunes of the Takemoto Theater in Osaka. While it is not considered as strong as his later play The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721), Donald Keene praised the death passage as "one of the loveliest passages in Japanese literature". Also, it was written in Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 that The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (1707) is "of considerable interest for its exploration of female sexuality and its implicit critique of the life of lower-level samurai". Rei Sasaguchi listed the same play as one of Chikamatsu's most striking bunraku works along with The Couriers of Love to the Other World.

The Love Suicides at Amijima is generally regarded as the greatest of his domestic plays, though The Courier for Hell (1711), The Uprooted Pine (1718), and The Woman-Killer and the Hell of Oil (1721) have also been praised as works "of exceptional power". The last of the three initially was not well-received, and acquired a high reputation only in the late 19th century. Robert Nichols wrote that The Almanac of Love (1715) is highly regarded. Kenneth P. Kirkwood argued that the work is somewhat thin in texture but "nevertheless reveals the playwright's skill in making a dramatic plot out of the slightest materials." In a review of Gerstle's Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays, Katherine Saltzman-Li praised the "depth of character" achieved in Twins at the Sumida River (1720) through the various allusions. though Keene argued that even they are "inferior in every respect" to the jōruri works written around the same period. Nichols listed The Courtesan's Frankincense, The Tethered Steed, and Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem-Cards as the best histories. Anne Walthall at UC Irvine said that the "vivid portrayal of interpersonal relations and individual personality [in Love Suicides on the Eve of the Kōshin Festival] provides excellent evidence why Chikamatsu's domestic plays have become more popular than his historical dramas." "Devil's Island", the second scene of the second act of Heike and the Island of Women (1719), became part of the kabuki repertory in the 19th century and today is usually performed in jōruri and kabuki as a single play.

Adaptations

Film adaptations

Kenji Mizoguchi's black and white film Chikamatsu Monogatari (literally, 'a story from Chikamatsu' but given titles in French "Les amants crucifiées" and in English "The Crucified Lovers"] is a 1954 film based on a domestic lover-suicide play by Chikamatsu called Daikyōji Mukashi Goyomi (1715).
Masahiro Shinoda's celebrated 1969 film, Shinjū: Ten no Amijima (billed in English as Double Suicide) employs cinematic techniques based on bunraku conventions and takes as its basis Chikamatsu's play The Love Suicides at Amijima.
The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1978 film)
The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1981 film)

Opera

Japanese composer Mayako Kubo's opera Osan, an adaptation of Shinjū: Ten no Amijima that premiered at the New National Theatre Tokyo in February 2005.

References in popular culture

In the fictional world of Naruto, the first ninja puppeteer is named Chikamatsu Monzaemon, a reference to Chikamatsu's puppet plays.
In the Digimon multimedia franchise, a puppet Digimon by the name of Monzaemon—an obvious homage to Chikamatsu—was one of the first characters in the original line of virtual pets.

Major works

thumb|Statue of Chikamatsu Monzaemon at [[Amagasaki, Hyogo]]

Jōruri

Kagekiyo Victorious (Shusse kagekiyo 出世景清) (1685)
The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki shinjū 曾根崎心中) (1703)
The Night Song of Yosaku from Tamba (Tamba Yosaku machiyo no komurobushi 丹波与作待夜のこむろぶし)
The Courier for Hell (Meido no hikyaku 冥途の飛脚) (1711)
The Almanac of Love (Koi hakke hashiragoyomi) (1715)
The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusen'ya kassen 国姓爺合戦) (1715)
The Uprooted Pine (Nebiki no Kadomatsu 寿の門松) (1718)
The Love Suicides at Amijima (Shinjū Ten no Amijima 心中天網島) (1721)
The Woman-Killer and the Hell of Oil (Onnagoroshi abura no jigoku 女殺油地獄) (1721)

Kabuki

The Courtesan on Buddha Plain[http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asian_theatre_journal/v017/17.1kominz.html] (Keisei hotoke no hara けいせい仏の原) (1699)

Dramatic theory

Naniwa Miyage (1738), written by Hozumi Ikan and preserving statements attributed to Chikamatsu on the art of puppet theater

Translations into English

Major Plays of Chikamatsu, translated and introduced by Donald Keene. NY: Columbia University Press. 1961/1990.
Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays, translated by C. Andrew Gerstle. 2001. Consists of:
Twins at the Sumida River (Futago sumidagawa, 1720)
Lovers Pond in Settsu Province (Tsu no kuni meoto-ike, 1721)
Battles at Kawa-nakajima (Shinsh kawa-nakajima kassen, 1721)
Love Suicides on the Eve of the Kishin Festival (Shinju yoigoshin, 1722)
Tethered Steed and the Eight Provinces of Kanto (Kanhasshu tsunagi-uma, 1724)

Notes

References

Sources

External links

"Chapter 4 – Renaissance – Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725)"
"Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu"
English translation of The Tethered Steed, translated by Asataro Miyamori and revised by Robert Nichols
"Audio book read in Japanese"