of culture, yet came to have the money, the leisure, and, eventually, the cultivation to pursue artistic interests and pastimes. Therefore, both types of plays written by Chikamatsu appealed greatly to them: The history plays (jidaimono ) served as a means to teach them about the glories and complexities of the Japanese past, both in the court and in military circles, and the domestic dramas (sewamono ) provided them with a powerful glimpse into the intimacies of the world that they themselves inhabited. For modern audiences, these domestic dramas, which deal with the vicissitudes of the personal lives of the townspeople, still possess an emotional reality that is compelling. For all the differences between the urban society at the time of Chikamatsu and now, there are certain powerful similarities, which make the domestic dramas both appealing and poignant even today. In fact, Chikamatsu may have been the first major dramatist to make ordinary men and women, with all their foibles and weaknesses, the protagonists of tragic drama. A dramatist such as George Lillo in eighteenth century England attempted to do the same sort of thing in his play The London Merchant: Or, The History of George Barnwell (pr., pb. 1731), but it was not until much later that such characters were regularly portrayed in a sympathetic fashion on the European stage. For a modern reader, Chikamatsu may often seem closer to an Arthur Miller than to a Shakespeare.

As the historical dramas of Chikamatsu were always drawn from actual events in the past, so the domestic dramas, too, were taken from real events in Japanese society, often dramatized as soon after the fact as possible. In a special way, these domestic plays served as living newspapers, which presented accounts of lurid or sensational events adapted for their theatrical effectiveness. The attraction for the audience of such plays thus lay far less in the “plot” of the events portrayed, which they knew at least in outline, than in experiencing the art with which Chikamatsu reworked his material. Much ink has been spilled over the question as to whether Chikamatsu was a “realist,” in a contemporary sense of the world. The playwright himself put these questions to rest in an eloquent statement he made during the course of an interview that was published after his death. When asked about the need to create an art that would resemble reality closely, he replied that art and reality were not the same. Pure realism “does not take into account the real methods of art. Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal . . . and entertainment lies between the two.” To a modern reader, it is clear that both the artifice of the puppets and the beauty of Chikamatsu’s language (and here he most resembles Shakespeare) could lift the most banal, even sordid, “reality” to great heights of genuine pathos.

The Battles of Coxinga

Of the history plays, the only drama available in full translation is Chikamatsu’s most successful effort, The Battles of Coxinga, first performed in 1715 and undoubtedly his most popular work. The play concerns the exploits of Coxinga, a famous hero in Japanese history who was involved in the battles surrounding the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China, about a century or so before the composition of the play. His exploits had become legendary, and the play contains a number of incidents from his complex career juxtaposed and embellished to make as brilliant a series of effects as possible. Read on the page, the text seems full of bombast and arbitrary confrontations, but seen in performance, The Battles of Coxinga provides a series of striking vignettes that exploit the possibilities of the puppet stage to their fullest. It has often been said that audiences were particularly excited by The Battles of Coxinga because it dealt with the exotic Chinese scenes at a time when, because of the policies of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Japanese themselves were no longer allowed to travel abroad. Whatever the reason, the scenes of China and Chinese life presented make up in color and fantasy what they may lack in historical veracity.

The play opens at the court of the Ming emperor in Nanking. He is portrayed as a weak man, surrounded by corrupt ministers; only one, Go Sankei, argues for justice, but he cannot stop the rout of the imperial forces by the enemy Tartars. The emperor is murdered. Go Sankei manages to escape with the empress, who is pregnant with the child who will carry on the imperial line; when she in turn is killed, he exchanges his own newborn child for hers, so that the imperial line may continue. Go Sankei then sends the imperial princess off on a boat so that she can escape the battle and, he hopes, reach Japan. This first act, like the rest of the play, is filled with devices that call to mind the most outrageous Jacobean tragedies: Eyes are gouged out; babies are torn from the womb. With actors, the effect would be merely grotesque; with puppets, the results seem larger than life and quite heroic.

In the second act, Coxinga (who is half Japanese and half Chinese) is quietly fishing and thinking on the fate of the Ming court, where his father had been a high-ranking minister. When the princess drifts to shore in her boat, Coxinga and his Japanese wife decide that he should travel to China to attempt to keep the Ming Dynasty from collapse. In this section of the play, Coxinga’s speeches are a model of powerful eloquence, indeed, grandiloquence. The subsequent scenes contain a combination of battles and adventures, including a fight with a tiger that must have taxed the original producers considerably. Coxinga now begins to gather around him brave Chinese who wish to fight the Tartars as well.

In act 3, Coxinga meets his half sister, and after a complex series of maneuvers, he manages to win both her and her husband, a general, to his side. Again, the actions are, like the language employed, far larger than life. In act 4, Go Sankei, still attempting to escape the Tartar soldiers, leads the young imperial prince to a mystical mountain summit where the Nine Immortals of China look out over the destinies of the nation. Coxinga appears, and the two unite for a final victory, helped by the Immortals, who build a sort of rainbow bridge to help them escape from the attacking enemy. When the villainous soldiers rush across, the bridge dissolves and they are crushed below at the foot of the mountain. The final act of the play brings all the contending forces together. The evil minister is captured, and Coxinga and his allies are triumphant.

Described in such a fashion, the play may seem merely bombastic, but it possesses a beauty and excitement in the original that in some fashion may call to mind the effect of a play such as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (pr. c. 1587). As noted above, the play is meant to be larger than life, both in its language and as a theatrical event. At the same time, even within this heroic framework, Chikamatsu manages moments of humor and whimsy that are on a wholly human scale. In terms of high entertainment, the play is unsurpassed. Indeed, Chikamatsu’s formula for success—a mixture of the nationalistic, the exotic, and the poetic—is one that has succeeded in most cultures.

Other Historical Dramas

Most of Chikamatsu’s other historical dramas deal with events in earlier Japanese history, with stories taken either from the world of the Heian court in the eleventh century or from the medieval war period that followed. Again, bombastic generals and sophisticated courtiers are brought to life in complicated plots that allow for a full range of fantasy in setting, action, and language. Some plays use earlier dramas and expand on them. A notable case in point is that of Chikamatsu’s Semimaru, which uses the N drama of Zeami by the same title as a centerpiece and then extends the story backward and forward until a full evening of intrigue and adventure is created. Again the audience, doubtless familiar with the original drama, took pleasure less from the tale of the blind prince than from the variations that Chikamatsu played on a legend already known. Modern audiences often find these historical dramas somewhat unsatisfying because of their general and diffuse nature, in which plots and subplots often relate to each other in only the most general way. Then too, the cultural knowledge on the part of spectators that could bind these elements together has been lost, so that modern Japanese audiences are practically at as much of a loss as Western spectators or readers in catching the subtle implications of Chikamatsu’s juxtapositions.

Domestic Dramas

It is perhaps for reasons such as these that Chikamatsu’s reputation has shifted from his historical to his domestic plays, which now have taken on new value. Original audiences could take much for granted in these plays. Now, because of Chikamatsu’s faithful renderings of certain details of Tokugawa life and culture, modern viewers can savor the atmosphere of a quite different time through the means of these dramas, which, although often melodramatic and arbitrary in plot structure, contain the kind of elegant language and emotional commitment on the part of the author that make the situations powerfully touching.

The Love Suicides at Sonezaki

The first of the domestic plays, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, was written twelve years before The Battles of Coxinga. The play was evidently written to serve as a kind of interlude for a longer historical drama, and in its three brief scenes, Chikamatsu portrayed a highly poetic version of the suicide of the two young lovers. In Tokubei, the shop attendant, Chikamatsu created what may be the first modern hero—weak, vacillating, yet capable of being aroused to righteous fury. He is in love with a courtesan from the licensed quarters, Ohatsu, who works in a teahouse, actually a kind of elegant brothel sanctioned by the Tokugawa authorities. Forced to part from her by the machinations of the evil Kuheiji, Tokubei decides to “show all Osaka the purity at the bottom of my heart,” and the couple vow to commit suicide together. Their parting moments in the teahouse, filled with little touches of realism provided by the minor servants and other characters, are nicely portrayed, and the final scene, when the lovers journey to their death at the Sonezaki Shrine, is one of the most sustained examples of lyric writing in the Japanese theater. Through the device of the narrator, Chikamatsu solves the problem that has plagued all writers of realistic theater who have sought for a way for characters of limited education and insight to speak with eloquence. The great poetry is here provided by the narrator, who takes the audience both inside the thoughts of the characters (who actually say very little) and then back into the realm of philosophical, in particular Buddhist, speculation. The death of the lovers is both touching and convincing. With this play, Chikamatsu successfully created a new genre of drama, and, at least in the final scene, achieved a standard of poetic excellence that he later equaled, but never surpassed.

As his career continued, Chikamatsu went on to develop the genre of the domestic play, adding new elements and more complex plots, so that, rather than serving as interludes during longer performances of historical dramas, the domestic plays came to stand as independent and complete works in themselves. Quite often the plays were written about incidents that took place in the licensed quarters, such as The Uprooted Pine, but others dealt with adultery, murder, and piracy, even life in a Buddhist monastery.

The Love Suicides at Amijima

Chikamatsu’s greatest achievement in this genre, however, is surely his play The Love Suicides at Amijima, written in 1721, just at the end of his career. Performed countless times by puppet troupes and by Kabuki companies as well, the play has both been adapted for the modern stage and made the subject of a famous film. The Love Suicides at Amijima is often considered to be the greatest single work written for the traditional Japanese stage. Like Chikamatsu’s first domestic play, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The Love Suicides at Amijima builds its complex plot on a simple story of a weak but good-hearted man who falls in love with a courtesan and decides to die with her. In the later play, however, which is in three acts, the playwright has provided a whole network of minor characters and situations that flesh out the action and render the outcome all the more moving and inevitable. As with the other plays of this sort, Chikamatsu based his drama on a series of actual events and evidently went to considerable trouble to learn certain details of the incident before composing his text.

The earlier play, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, shows poetic excellence, but The Love Suicides at Amijima is graced as well with a certain elegiac tonality that can only be described as religious. Even the title itself in the original Japanese contains a hint of Buddhist salvation, since the place-name Amijima can be rendered as the “island of nets,” a reference to the image that depicts Buddha catching the innocent and the sinful alike in his nets to haul them up to paradise.

In the first act, Jihei, the paper merchant, is in love with the courtesan Koharu, in defiance of his wife and her relatives. There is also a villain who vies for Koharu’s affections, Tahei. Within this simple basic structure, Chikamatsu weaves a number of new elements to add emotional complexity. A mysterious samurai, who remonstrates with Jihei about his debauchery, later turns out to be his brother. Later, in the second act, Jihei learns that his wife, Osan, has been instrumental in attempting to separate him from Koharu, but in a stunning twist, he manages to persuade his wife to allow him to ransom Koharu to save her from the advances of Tahei. Jihei’s parents-in-law suddenly arrive and, shocked by his behavior, decide to take their daughter Osan back home with them. In the final act, Jihei decides to commit suicide with Koharu. He pays his debts and leads her away. As in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the language of this last act is particularly powerful. The lovers lament their fate, and, by implication, the power of the society that has forced them to part. Through the power of his language and imagery, Chikamatsu allows the pair to make a kind of transcendental spiritual pilgrimage to a realm where obligations can be cast aside, and where the two can live as Buddhist priest and nun, “to escape the inconstant world.” As the priests at a nearby temple begin their chant at dawn, Jihei puts Koharu to death, then does away with himself. His body, washed out to sea, is picked up by the fishermen in their nets.

In terms of consistency of characterization and power of imagery, The Love Suicides at Amijima remains a superb example of the possibilities of jruri. For a modern reader, the form certainly has limitations. Characters are seldom ambiguous, since the heads used for the puppets have fixed expressions which reveal the general nature of the character being portrayed. Then too, since the puppets are lifeless, the text prepared for the chanter must be strong, even strident, in order to make up for the lack of interior life in the dolls themselves. The social mores of the time, particularly those pertaining to the licensed quarters, are sufficiently removed from those of modern life to make the passions of the various characters seem overwrought and, occasionally, downright outlandish. Nevertheless, a play like The Love Suicides at Amijima still rings true, whatever the problems of historical distance, because of the power of Chikamatsu’s language and his commitment to an understanding of what were, for him, situations of genuine dignity and pathos within the context of his own society.