[In this essay, Keene offers a background to Chikamatsu's creation of the puppet play The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. Keene suggests that the tragedy was innovative in its use of commoners as tragic figures, comparing the play to Western dramas including George Lillo's The London Merchant.]

In the 1880s, when the Japanese first began to examine their own literary heritage in light of their newly acquired knowledge of Western literature, the fame of Shakespeare in England, Goethe in Germany, and Racine in France induced them to search their own dramatic literature for a Japanese equivalent. The Japanese possessed a rich tradition of theater: the Noh drama, perfected in the fourteenth century, had enjoyed the patronage of the shoguns for almost 500 years, and the Kabuki theater of actors and the Bunraku theater of puppets, both developed in the seventeenth century, had enjoyed the favor not only of the commoners but of many members of the samurai class. However, even though the plays, especially those written for the Noh theater, contain magnificent poetry, no one had ever thought of the dramatists as poets, and the plays themselves had not been elevated to the rank of “literature.” The task of the playwright had traditionally been to provide suitable vehicles for the talents of the actors at his disposal, and it was usual to rewrite plays when they were revived so as to meet the demands of new actors and new audiences. The authorship of many of the best-known plays was uncertain; virtually every superior Noh play—about half of the repertory of some 240 plays—was for centuries attributed to Zeami (1363-1443), though modern scholars grudgingly give him credit for no more than 25. The authorship of Kabuki and Bunraku plays, a matter of small interest to the audiences, was complicated by the practice of having three or more dramatists collaborate in writing a single long play, each man composing several acts. There was certainly no Japanese dramatist who occupied the place of importance in his countrymen's esteem comparable to that enjoyed by Shakespeare, Goethe, or Racine.

The dramatist eventually chosen as the “Japanese Shakespeare” was Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725).¹ Chikamatsu was born to a samurai family of some distinction, though his father, for reasons we do not known, lost his position as a retainer of the daimyo of Echizen and, becoming a rōnin or masterless samurai, moved to the capital. As a boy Chikamatsu served as a page in a noble household in Kyoto. At the time the puppet theater was patronized by members of the nobility, and this may be how Chikamatsu was first introduced to this art. Eventually, he decided to make his career in the theater. It was most unusual for anyone of Chikamatsu's background to become associated with a profession that was generally despised, but he may have had no choice: his father had lost his position and income as a samurai, and Chikamatsu's service in a noble household was unlikely to lead into a means of earning a living.

Chikamatsu's first play for the puppet theater seems to have been Yotsugi Soga (The Soga Heir), written in 1683. Although the work is immature and contains some scenes that are so ludicrously exaggerated in sentiment and action as to suggest burlesque, it also contains some passages of poetic beauty that presage the masterpieces of later years. His first major play was Shusse Kagekiyo (Kagekiyo Victorious), written in 1686 for Takemoto Gidayū (1651-1714), the most celebrated chanter of the puppet theater. The function of the chanter was to declaim or sing the lines of the text, sometimes describing the scene or commenting on the action, sometimes speaking for the different characters, modulating his voice to suggest a young woman, an old woman, a fierce warrior, a child, and so on. The musical accompaniment for the chanter's declamation and singing was provided by the samisen, an instrument somewhat resembling the guitar but with a much stronger and harsher tone, which had been introduced to Japan from China by way of the Ryūkyū Islands in the sixteenth century. The puppets in Chikamatsu's day were each operated by one man, but shortly after his death the three-man puppet was introduced and is today the most conspicuous feature of the Bunraku theater. Of the three elements in a performance—the texts chanted by the narrator, the musical accompaniment, and the puppets—the most important has traditionally been the text, though the ideal is an equal balance of interest among the three.

Chikamatsu's decision to write for the puppet theater was an event of significance in the history of the drama of the world. Playwrights in other countries have sometimes written for puppets, rather than actors, but Chikamatsu was the only major dramatist who devoted himself primarily to the puppet theater. He also wrote plays for Kabuki actors, especially for Sakata Tōjūrō. His Kabuki plays written between 1688 and 1703 were for the most part intended to serve as vehicles for Tōjūrō's particular talents. In 1703, however, Chikamatsu shifted his main efforts back to the puppet theater, and although he continued to write Kabuki plays from time to time in the following years, all the works for which he is celebrated today were written for Takemoto Gidayū and his successors.

A serious dramatist faces special problems when writing plays to be performed by puppets. An actor can alter his expression at will, and if the part requires him to seem affable in one scene and menacing in another he should possess the ability to effect this change. A puppet, on the other hand, retains throughout a play the fixed expression carved into the wood of his face. Moreover, the heads are restricted to a limited number of types—good young man, bad young man, good middle-aged man, bad middle-aged man and so on—and this means that there is not much possibility of a character developing during the course of a play. As soon as the audience sees a puppet with, say, the head of a bad young man, it recognizes his basic character, and no matter what friendly words he may utter, there is never any doubt but that he is a bad man. There is reason to think that Chikamatsu found this limitation of the puppets a hindrance to the composition of his plays. One can imagine how Shakespeare would have felt if he had to choose a puppet head for his Macbeth: would it be the apparently good man of his first appearance, the bad man of Duncan's murder, or the frightened man at the banquet? Obviously, no one expression would suit all of the moods encompassed by the role of Macbeth, and in several of Chikamatsu's plays there are complex characters who cannot be pinned down as simply good, bad, frightened, or whatever. These characters demand actors, rather than puppets.

Why then did Chikamatsu shift his main efforts back to puppets in 1703? Various theories, none conclusive, have been advanced. The first and most plausible is that Chikamatsu, unlike dramatists who wrote for Kabuki actors, took pride in his texts and disliked the liberties that actors took (and still take!). The actors felt it was their privilege to change the text in any way that would improve the performance in the eyes of the spectators, even if this meant drastically changing the play. Whole acts were omitted, speeches assigned to one character were given to another, and entirely unrelated scenes were sometimes borrowed from other plays and interpolated in the work. Chikamatsu anticipated such behavior on the part of the actors; in some of his Kabuki plays he left the climactic scene a blank for the actor to improvise according to his fancy and his particular talents. But it must have been maddening, all the same, when a play to which he had devoted great care was torn to pieces by temperamental or self-indulgent actors. The puppets, on the other hand, had no egos to satisfy. Moreover, if the chanter arbitrarily changed the text he would hopelessly confuse the samisen accompanist and the puppet operators; the chanter therefore had no choice but to deliver the text as written. Today, before a chanter begins his recitation of a section of a puppet play he lifts the text reverently to his forehead and, even though he probably knows every syllable by heart, he turns the pages of the text at the appropriate places, pretending to be reading. Even if a chanter is blind he keeps up the same pretense in deference to the authority of the text. Chikamatsu may have left the Kabuki theater for the puppets because he wanted to have his plays performed as written.

It has also been suggested that the shift may have been dictated by economic reasons: the puppet theater was (and is) associated with the city of Osaka, unlike Kabuki, first performed in Kyoto. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Osaka became the commercial capital of Japan, the city of the greatest wealth, and Chikamatsu may have supposed that the theater would prosper in such surroundings. Or, as other critics have suggested, Chikamatsu may have left Kabuki because his favorite actor, Sakata Tōjūrō, had retired from the stage. In short, we do not know the reasons, but the success of the plays he wrote for the puppet theater, despite the problems that such a theater imposes, testifies to his extraordinary ability.

The play that Chikamatsu wrote for Takemoto Gidayū's puppet theater in 1703 was Sonezaki Shinjū (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki). It scored such a success that Gidayū's theater, which had been threatened with bankruptcy, entered its period of greatest prosperity, and it created a vogue for plays about lovers' suicides. The word shinjū, which I have translated as “love suicides,” means literally “within the heart.” It was used from the late seventeenth century to designate pledges of love, especially between a prostitute and a customer. The prostitute was compelled by her profession to pretend to be in love with every regular customer, but sometimes the man would demand proof that she really loved him, some objective evidence of what was “within her heart.” Initially this proof took the form of oaths, or of tearing out a fingernail or of tattooing the customer's name somewhere on her body; but oaths can be broken, fingernails grow back, and even tattoos can be removed. Increasingly painful proofs were demanded, such as cutting off the tip of a finger; but the supreme proof was a willingness to die with the man. This practice gave rise to a whole genre of plays written by Chikamatsu and his imitators.

In the fourth moon of 1703, the love suicides of Tokubei, a shop assistant, and Ohatsu, a prostitute, became the subject of gossip in Osaka. Chikamatsu, learning of the circumstances, decided to write a play about the unhappy lovers. He worked quickly, and within three weeks of the event the first performance of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki was presented by Gidayū's company. Chikamatsu's play faithfully evoked the atmosphere of the Osaka of his day, especially the licensed quarters, where men went not only for sexual pleasure but for a freedom of which they were deprived by the rigidly organized society. His hero is an ordinary young man who works in a shop that sells soy sauce, his heroine a prostitute of the lower ranks, not a grand courtesan. Chikamatsu apparently invented the villain, Kuheiji, in order to make more plausible the decision of the unhappy lovers to commit suicide; surviving accounts of the actual event indicate that Tokubei and Ohatsu committed suicide not because of the machinations of some other person but because they were tired of living. When their bodies were discovered, broadsheets were issued with the details. There was nothing edifying about the event; indeed, one account sternly ended with the words “they polluted the wood of Sonezaki,” referring to the disrespect shown by the lovers who committed suicide within the precincts of a Shinto shrine.

Chikamatsu probably possessed no special knowledge of what had impelled the lovers to die. He started with the fact of their bodies being discovered and proceeded to imagine in reverse order the sequence of events that had led to the tragedy. For most people of the time the deaths of Tokubei and Ohatsu were no more than the subject of gossip for a couple of days, until the next love suicide claimed their attention. There was nothing heroic about either Tokubei or Ohatsu, but Chikamatsu decided that their story had the makings of tragedy. Aristotle in his Poetics wrote that the hero of a tragedy must be a person better than ourselves, and this belief was passed on to the dramatists of later centuries. Shakespeare's tragic heroes are kings, princes, and generals, and if a character of a social status similar to Tokubei's had appeared he would probably have been comic, perhaps speaking a dialect or in some other way rendering himself foolish in our eyes; he definitely would not have enjoyed the privilege of dying with the woman he loved. Chikamatsu obviously knew nothing of Aristotle's theories of drama, but he was aware that he had to give tragic stature to Tokubei and Ohatsu if their deaths were not to seem merely sordid. Tokubei and Ohatsu are elevated not by their social positions but by the purity and strength of their love.

Chikamatsu created in Tokubei a hero of a kind not found in Western drama before the twentieth century. Practically the first thing we learn about him is that he has entrusted a large sum of money that he desperately needs to his friend Kuheiji. But as soon as Kuheiji appears the audience knows from the puppet head that this young man is not to be trusted, and every word Kuheiji speaks is so disagreeable that one can only marvel that Tokubei believes this man is his friend. When he confronts Kuheiji with the promissory note to which Kuheiji has affixed his seal, Kuheiji declares that he lost his seal before the date of the note and could not possibly have affixed it. We know Kuheiji is lying; worse, it is clear that he carefully planned to swindle Tokubei out of his money by falsely reporting the loss of the seal. Tokubei, frustrated and enraged, attempts to take back the money with his fists, but he is no match for Kuheiji and his cronies. In a standard Japanese historical film if a hero is set upon by twenty armed adversaries we can always be sure that he will defeat them single-handedly, but Tokubei is soundly thrashed. At the end of the act he tearfully informs bystanders that within three days he will demonstrate to the people of Osaka that he was telling the truth. It is not clear what he intends, but probably the only course of action he could imagine was suicide.

The second scene is set in the brothel where Ohatsu works. The other prostitutes are gossiping about Tokubei, and soon Kuheiji arrives, much to Ohatsu's distress. She catches a glimpse of Tokubei outside the gate and goes to him, only to be summoned back to the house. She tells him to conceal himself under the train of her outer robe, and Tokubei, obeying, crawls to the house and hides under the porch. Surely no hero of a tragedy has ever made a less dignified entrance! Ohatsu, after exchanging sarcastic remarks with Kuheiji, asks (as if to herself) if Tokubei is willing to die with her. Tokubei takes her foot, which is hanging over the edge of the porch, and passes it across his throat as a sign of his willingness. His gesture is resolute, but it is in response to Ohatsu's question; he is not leading but following. All the same, he has taken the first step towards achieving tragic stature.

Up until this point nothing about Tokubei had even remotely suggested the hero of a tragedy. Chikamatsu was surely aware that Tokubei would have to be made a more impressive figure if his love suicide was to excite the admiration of the audience. The means he chose were appropriate to the puppet drama though not possible in a conventional theater of actors: he had the chanter describe in extraordinarily beautiful poetry the journey of the lovers to the place where they will die. The journey description (michiyuki) is a feature not only of all varieties of traditional Japanese theater but is prominent in other kinds of literature as well.² The michiyuki of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the most beautiful Chikamatsu ever wrote, uses every resource of the Japanese language to convey the tragedy of the impending deaths and thereby to impart grandeur to the two people before us. Tokubei, as he walks his last journey, grows taller before our eyes. His character has not been transformed; rather, the purity and strength that have always been within him are for the first time exposed. He is no longer a pathetic figure but a man who can kill the woman he loves and then himself. Finally, Chikamatsu assures us that the lovers will without doubt attain Buddhahood. Their suicides have become the means of salvation.

It might seem that the lovers' suicides snuffed out the lives of two people just when their most admirable qualities had been revealed, but Chikamatsu believed that lovers who died together would be reborn together in Paradise. This promise of salvation may seem like a throwback to medieval tales, but the atmosphere is entirely in keeping with the times. The tragedy is caused by Kuheiji's cheating Tokubei out of his money. It would be inconceivable in a Noh play (or even a tragedy by Shakespeare) that money would control the destinies of the characters, but this is literally true of both Tokubei and Ohatsu. He cannot return the dowry money he accepted from his uncle because he has been swindled by Kuheiji. If he had the money, he could buy up Ohatsu's contract and free her from the brothel, but without money he is powerless to keep her from the arms of other men. Ohatsu presumably became a prostitute because her family needed the money, and she cannot escape the brothel unless a customer “ransoms” her. The one free act, the one act that requires no money, is to die, and the lovers die, confident that after death they will be together in Amida's paradise.

The Love Suicides at Sonezaki created a new genre of Japanese theater, the sewamono, or plays about contemporary life. The Noh plays invariably dealt with the distant past, and Kabuki plays that in fact treated recent events always masked them by pretending that the story was set in the world of some centuries earlier. It goes without saying that the authorities would not tolerate criticism of the regime, but even if the treatment was favorable, no person of consequence could be represented on the stage. Tokubei and Ohatsu, however, were so insignificant in the eyes of the authorities that their stories could be enacted without censorship. Chikamatsu insisted on the contemporaneity of the sewamono plays by mentioning currently fashionable articles of clothing, the names of shops, and even the names of his own plays (rather in the manner of an excerpt from The Marriage of Figaro being played in the last scene of Don Giovanni). He seems to have been insisting that tragedy was possible even in such peaceful, humdrum times, and he emphasizes his point by choosing quite ordinary people for the heroes and heroines of various plays. The first tragedy composed in English with a common man for its hero, The London Merchant (1731) by George Lillo, has a preface in which the author argues that plays treating people of the middle class can be just as tragic as those that deal with people of superior rank. This was the discovery that Chikamatsu made some thirty years earlier.

The success of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki did not induce Chikamatsu to abandon the variety of drama on which his reputation had been founded, plays that treated, often in exaggerated terms, the heroes of Japanese history. Indeed, his greatest triumph came with Kokusenya Kassen (The Battles of Coxinga, 1715), a play abounding in spectacular effects. But Chikamatsu is remembered today especially for a half-dozen or so sewamono, beginning with The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. Not surprisingly, the later examples of sewamono show advances over the simple plot of the first one; audiences came to expect a greater diversity of incidents and characters than those represented by the hero, heroine, and villain of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. Chikamatsu revised the play for its revival of 1719, adding a scene in which the wicked Kuheiji is apprehended, too late to save the death-bound couple. The play was apparently not performed even once between 1719 and 1955, presumably because the producers of Bunraku and Kabuki plays thought that it was too uncomplicated for modern tastes; but since its revival of 1955 it has been performed almost every year, abroad as well as in Japan, and it is now recognized as a masterpiece of Japanese theater.

Notes

1. The date of Chikamatsu's death is often given as 1724, but he died towards the end of the eleventh lunar month on what was January 6, 1725, according to the solar calendar.

2. There is an important study of the language and functions of the michiyuki in French, Michiyuki-bun by Jacqueline Pigeot (Maisonneuve, 1982).

References

Keene, Donald. Major Plays of Chikamatsu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.

Keene, Donald. Nō and Bunraku. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Keene, Donald. World Within Walls. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.