[In the following excerpt, Brandon examines how the joruri play Chūushingura was stolen by Kabuki actors, which seems difficult to understand considering that the two forms were originally so different, and he argues that the Kabuki performers deliberately set out to transform the play and make it particularly theirs, so that it is now the most beloved Kabuki play.]

It did not take kabuki producers and actors long to recognize that the jōruri play Kanadehon Chūshingura was a valuable stage property well worth the effort to appropriate for the kabuki stage. Even before the puppet play opened on the fourteenth day of the eighth lunar month in 1748 at the Takemoto Puppet Theater, it was the talk of Osaka. Audiences clamoring to see the exciting events of the well-known Akō vendetta made the play an instant success, and its run of two months would surely have extended through the year and into 1749 had it not been for an artistic dispute that arose between the company's chief puppeteer, Yoshida Bunzaburō, and its chief chanter, Takemoto Konotayū. At issue was the tempo at which a passage from Act IX should be chanted. Bunzaburō was manipulating the puppet of Yuranosuke while Konotayū chanted, “‘I will show you.’ In the garden just then weighted under heavy snow was a great bamboo. …” Bunzaburō wanted to have Yuranosuke rise on “I will show you,” step into his wooden clogs on “in the garden,” and cross to the bamboo grove on “just then.” To do this he needed the chanter to pause longer between phrases. Konotayū was troupe artistic director (zagashira). He felt deeply insulted that a mere puppet manipulator would question his performance. When Takeda Izumo, the Takemoto Theater owner and main author of the play being performed, did not intervene on Konotayū's behalf, the chanter left to join the rival Toyotake Puppet Theater and the production had to close.¹ Even with its run cut short, there was no question in anyone's mind that Chūshingura, as the puppet play soon came to be called by everyone, was a new masterpiece. And that made it prime material to be stolen for the kabuki repertory.

Before the year was out, a kabuki Chūshingura was playing in Osaka at the Arashi Theater next door to the Takemoto Puppet Theater.² This production failed, perhaps because it was hastily put together, but others soon followed. During the spring programs of 1749 four kabuki theaters staged Chūshingura: the Nakamura Matsubei Theater in Kyoto and the three major licensed theaters in the city of Edo—the Nakamura, the Ichimura, and the Morita. Audiences flocked to these performances, especially in Edo where one of the attractions must have been the opportunity to compare the different versions of the play.

Competition among theaters was always intense. When Edo's three theaters were all staging the same play, we can easily imagine that leading actors would have sought various ways to make their interpretations stand out from those of their rivals. We have descriptions of how Yuranosuke was played in each of the 1749 productions in Edo. Yuranosuke makes his first, intensely dramatic entrance the instant after Enya Hangan has plunged the dagger into his stomach in the act of committing seppuku. He appears at the back of the auditorium, on the rampway, or hanamichi, that leads to the stage. At the Morita Theater, the actor Yamamoto Kyōshirō

entered with large and small swords in his sash and with much gesturing of his arms. He quickly took in the situation as he reached the middle of the hanamichi and, flinging his swords away, he prostrated himself at the edge of the stage, speaking all the while as he edged gradually closer.

At the Ichimura Theater, Bandō Hikosaburō I,

dressed with long and short swords, with a lively bearing, trousers hiked up at the sides … and a riding crop pushed into his sash at the back, waited in the dressing room. Without warning, he burst through the hanamichi curtain, flung away the riding crop, yanked down his trouser hems, and leaped off of his horse. He dashed headlong to the edge of the stage. There he threw down his swords, fell back, and prostrated himself.

While at the Nakamura Theater, Sawamura Chōjūrō III

entered while tying up his trousers. Only his short sword was tucked in his sash and he carried in one hand his long sword. Midway along the hanamichi he fell prostrate to the floor.³

The moment in the play is the same. The jōruri narrative and musical accompaniment to the entrance is the same. But each actor has conceived Yuranosuke as a different man. In Hikosaburō's strutting we are given an impetuous Yuranosuke; Kyōshirō, edging closer, suggests Yuranosuke is a sensitive man who is deeply moved by the sight of his master's disembowelment; and Chōjūrō is the man of action carrying a sword ready for use.

In the same 1749 production at the Nakamura Theater, Ichikawa Danjūrō II acted the role of one of Hangan's retainers, Ōwashi Bungo, in the bravura (aragoto) style that was the speciality of his acting family. He threw out completely the jōruri concept of the part. He is described as entering the vendetta scene wearing a typically exaggerated aragoto costume—his face made up in the kumadori style of bold stripes of red and white paint—and carrying an enormous mallet with which he battered down the gate of Moronao's mansion.⁴ We can imagine that he introduced into the scene typical aragoto acting elements—powerful poses (mie), roaring challenges to the enemy, stylized flourishes of the mallet, and perhaps a battle sequence in which the outsized mallet would have been a novel and amusing weapon.

What each of the actors did may not seem particularly significant. But these examples show the pattern which kabuki, in stealing the jōruri play, would follow over the next century and more: a bit-by-bit alteration of the original puppet play so that it would better suit the nature of kabuki theater. For the fact is that while Chūshingura was a jōruri play well worth appropriating, kabuki actors never intended to perform it exactly as it was done in the puppet theater.⁵ And even seemingly minor changes in role interpretations or in the application of special kabuki acting styles would result, in the end, in quite significant changes both in the text and in the staging of the play.

When jōruri and kabuki came into existence in the early part of the seventeenth century, they were almost totally different theater arts, the one a narrative, vocal art casually illustrated by crude puppet figures, the other a dance and first-person drama in which the actor's physical presence was all-important. One was wedded to the word; one to the human figure. The narratives of jōruri were bombastic and ponderous; the dances of kabuki were gay—its earliest sketches, about visits to the brothel quarters, were both erotic and amusing. The material of early jōruri plays came from legend, myth, and history; early kabuki plays were based on scandalous doings of the day. Nobility and samurai warriors peopled the narratives recited in jōruri; rich merchants, dandies, prostitutes filled the kabuki stage. In its maturity, kabuki developed as a first-person dialogue drama in which the function of music was to underscore mood and to provide rhythmic accompaniment to entrances, exits, and fighting scenes. Kabuki dance plays were mimed to lyrics of extended songs, sung in many musical styles. Jōruri remained fundamentally a third-person narrative—as if a person were reading a novel—filled with verbal descriptions and commentary on the action. Of course the narrator (tayū) spoke or chanted the dialogue assigned to the puppet characters, yet the chanter was always an “outside” voice. He was the “interpreter” not the “actor” of the play. The small one-man puppets that were used from around 1600 until the 1730s had heads with fixed features and could not be moved in a realistic fashion. Since their expressive power was limited, the focus of jōruri performance on the vocal powers of the solo chanter was reinforced.

The original distinctiveness of the two theater forms is easy to overlook today, because later borrowings back and forth between them have moved the forms closer to each other. From today's perspective, the two arts are often interchangeably described. The confusion runs both ways. A standard American theater history text will credit the jōruri play The Battles of Coxinga to kabuki, while the Japanese National Commission for unesco will blithely list the entire kabuki repertory, with the exception of dance plays, as “classical jōruri plays of kabuki.”⁶ By what startling alchemy, one wonders, have the great kabuki plays like Saint Narukami (Narukami Fudō Kitayamazakura), Sukeroku the Flower of Edo (Sukeroku Yukari no Edo Zakura), The Ghost of Yotsuya (Yotsuya Kaidan), and Benten the Thief (Shiranami Gonin Otoko) been credited to the puppet theater? These are “pure” (junsui) kabuki plays, unknown on the puppet stage. The confusion becomes mystifying when we turn to Sakae Shioya's Chūshingura: An Exposition, the most complete analysis in English of the play and its historical surroundings. After pointing out the many misunderstandings that have plagued earlier works on Chūshingura, Shioya treats the play as if it were an original kabuki drama. The beauty of Chūshingura lies, he says, in the “peculiar Japanese form in which it is written, known as kabuki style,” adding that this is natural since “all old plays were written in that style, that being the only style for plays in former days.”⁷ He describes elements of kabuki that lend charm to Chūshingura on the stage: the wooden clappers—whose beating “may jar upon our ears” but is nonetheless primitively effective, the posturing of the actors at the finale of a scene, the intonation of the actors' speech, and the rhythmic movements of fighting scenes.⁸ No mention is made of the fact that Chūshingura was written as a puppet play, yet the text which he explicates is the jōruri text and the stage scenes he describes are from puppet performances, not, except in a few cases, kabuki at all. In spite of the obviousness of these misunderstandings, they are not exceptional.

If, then, jōruri and kabuki were so different in form originally, how was it that Chūshingura was ever stolen by kabuki actors? In order to understand this we need to discuss briefly how kabuki and jōruri had moved closer in form and style in the time prior to 1748. It is argued by Suwa Haruo and other Japanese scholars that, at least from the Genroku period (1688-1705), kabuki was regularly borrowing from jōruri. A kabuki playbook (eiri kyōgen-bon) of 1697 reads, “This text includes child roles, leading roles, sound effects (hyōshigi), jōruri and sekkyō music, dance, and dialogue, leaving nothing out … exactly as the actors speak the lines.”⁹ And it is noted that the names of “jōruri singers” occur in the text of a 1699 performance of The Woman's Narukami (Onna Narukami), and that these were musicians who played in the Satsuma geki style.¹⁰ Jōruri, sekkyō, and Satsuma geki are all types of narrative and musical styles that accompanied puppet performances. The terms can indicate either the plays or the musical style. If these references are to the former, then kabuki was undoubtedly being influenced in fundamental ways by the borrowings, for it would suggest that whole scenes from puppet plays were being taken over into kabuki. But it also may be that what was being referred to was the type of music that was played to accompany a kabuki dance scene, in which case the borrowing was less significant. We know the actors Otowa Jirosaburō and Sawamura Chōjūrō expressed disdain for acting in pieces “using jōruri” and both of them refused, as long as they could, to appear in such plays.¹¹ The implication is that kabuki plays, or at least acts in the plays, often incorporated jōruri elements. But whether this meant scenes taken from jōruri or the acting style of the puppets or the chanting of the jōruri narrative, we do not know.

It is also commonly held that Ichikawa Danjūrō I created the bravura, or aragoto, acting style in kabuki after he had seen, as a child, performances of a bombastic type of puppet play named, after its hero, Kimpira jōruri. This is based on an account in Hot-Blooded Tales of the Kantō Region (Kantō Kekki Monogatari) that describes how the chanters Izumi Tayū I and II loved to perform in a powerful style “beating time with a thick, two-foot metal rod. … The heads of the puppets were twisted off, split down the middle, and smashed to pieces, heedless of destruction. … The founder of aragoto acting, Ichikawa Danjūrō I, followed Tayū's example closely and the present Ichikawa Ebizō [Danjūrō II] continues that tradition.”¹² Until recently this passage had been accepted at its face value, but since it is an account written some seventy years after some of the events described, it is probably not to be taken literally.¹³

The form and content of kabuki plays were affected by jōruri examples in other ways. Kabuki programs gradually changed over from a variety format of independent scenes to multiact plays starting in 1664. At that time jōruri history plays were regularly written in five or six acts.¹⁴ Probably stimulated by this model and the well-known example of the five-part division of a nō program as well, kabuki playwrights developed a standard dramatic structure of four acts (this was especially true in Edo). Suwa has compared kabuki and jōruri play synopses from the Genroku period and shows that, at least in some cases, the plays done in kabuki were similar in content to earlier jōruri plays.¹⁵

At the same time, jōruri also was borrowing from kabuki. In the process it gradually moved from a predominantly narrative art to a theater form in which the narrative element is reduced in importance and emphasis is placed on enactment of highly theatrical scenes (miseba). We know that the soft kabuki acting style (wagoto) of the actor Sakata Tōjūrō and the prostitute-buying plays (keiseikaimono) he performed throughout his life were the basis for the love-suicide plays (shinjūmono) that Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) later wrote for jōruri.¹⁶ Over a period of twenty-four years Chikamatsu wrote more than thirty kabuki plays as vehicles for Tōjūrō.¹⁷ During most of this time Chikamatsu was the chief playwright of the Mandayū Kabuki Theater in Kyoto, where Tōjūrō reigned supreme as actor-manager (zagashira). Among his kabuki plays many were composed in wagoto style. The love-suicide play had a two-decade history in kabuki before Chikamatsu wrote his first jōruri play on the subject, Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki Shinjū), in 1703. Typically the hero is a young wagoto-style merchant, feckless and charming, and the woman he loves is a prostitute. In addition to the lovers' deaths, the one obligatory scene was a love scene set in the gaudy licensed quarters. Consequently, as Suwa remarks, the basic role types and scenes found in jōruri plays about commoners (sewamono), whether love suicides or otherwise, had been first established in kabuki.¹⁸

We begin to encounter evidence of direct copying of jōruri scenes in kabuki after the Genroku period. In 1714 the term chobo appears in connection with the kabuki adaptation of Chikamatsu's puppet play Annals of the Gods (Tenjinki).¹⁹ Since chobo is a special kabuki term for the team of jōruri chanter and samisen player, and is not a puppet theater term, we can surmise that it indicates an acceptance of jōruri musicians as members of the regular kabuki troupe. The following year, Chikamatsu's exceptionally successful jōruri history play The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya Gassen) inspired a rash of kabuki imitations. The puppet play ran seventeen months, from the winter of 1715 through the spring of 1717, and by that summer ten kabuki troupes had brought out their own “Coxinga” productions. This number of “competitive performances” (kyōen) was unprecedented: three kabuki theaters in Kyoto and Osaka staged productions during the third month of 1717, and in Edo the three major kabuki houses opened Coxinga productions within days of each other in the fifth month.²⁰ Whole scenes from the puppet production at the Takemoto Puppet Theater may have been taken over. This is the opinion of Ihara Toshirō when he writes that “jōruri puppet plays were first performed in Edo kabuki” in these Coxinga plays.²¹ The titles of some of the kabuki plays support this view, for they are identical with Chikamatsu's title (it was common in kabuki to alter titles to indicate some change in a well-known story), but lacking scripts we cannot say with certainty what the kabuki texts were like or how they were staged. The titles of others suggest they had little or nothing to do with Chikamatsu's drama. The Prostitute's Coxinga (Keisei Kokusenya), Latter Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya Gonichi Gassen), and Coxinga's Treasure Ship (Kokusenya Takarabune) probably were wholly new plays that merely capitalized on the hero's name. In the Nakamura Theater production, Coxinga's Treasure Ship, the role of the hero, Watōnai (Coxinga's Japanese name), was played by Ichikawa Danjūrō II in his usual blustering aragoto acting style. In the play he called himself “Soga Gorō, later known as Watōnai,” thereby linking the Coxinga story to the Ichikawa family's favorite kabuki hero, Soga Gorō.²²

It was typical of kabuki play construction in Edo to weave together several story “worlds” (sekai) in a fanciful and playful way as Danjūrō did here. Prior to Danjūrō's great success in this role, “the truth is that there had always been an antipathy to adapting puppet plays” in Edo kabuki.²³ It may be that Danjūrō found the role especially congenial because the puppet hero's superhuman feats were compatible with Danjūrō's powerful acting style.²⁴ Without any doubt aragoto acting would suit Coxinga riding the tiger in the Bamboo Forest and smashing his way through Kanki's army to reach his captured mother. It also suggests that by this time minor borrowings back and forth had narrowed the gap between the two forms to the point where wholesale raids on each other's dramatic and theatrical territory would seem feasible. We can sense the jealousy the actor Otowa Jirosaburō felt toward this rival theatrical form and his feeling of self-protection for kabuki when he said he would not appear in plays that used jōruri techniques because, “from the beginning jōruri has modeled itself on kabuki, with even the puppets imitating kabuki actors. The natural result, now that kabuki is imitating puppet movements, is the decline of kabuki.”²⁵

A major hindrance to kabuki performers who found the plays of the puppet theater attractive enough to purloin intact during the Genroku period was the fact that the one-man puppet was limited in its expressive powers; as a consequence vocal narrative still made up a substantial part of a jōruri performance. This situation drastically changed between 1720 and 1734 when new techniques for manipulating the puppets in a more human fashion were developed. Puppets were made considerably larger, until they were about two-thirds life-size; fingers were jointed down to the last knuckle; and heads were carved with movable eyes, eyebrows, and mouth. Each of the new complex puppets was moved by a three-man team of manipulators. Instead of hiding below the stage, the puppeteers now moved out in full view of the audience, carrying their remarkably lifelike doll characters in front of them at chest level. The puppets could stand, sit, kneel, and move freely across the stage just like a person, either in an outdoor scene or in a realistically built room of a house or mansion.²⁶

When the puppet was made to move like a human being, the visible behavior of the puppet characters in a scene became more like that of live actors playing a role in kabuki. This can be seen in a radically new staging approach that was used in the production of The Summer Festival (Natsu Matsuri Naniwa Kagami) at the Takemoto Puppet Theater in 1745. In place of the conventional padded puppet costume, which all figures previously wore, the young murderer Danshichi Kurobei was dressed in a real cotton kimono of the kind commonly worn in Japan during the hot summer months. All the movements of the character's body, arms, and legs showed through the thin material. As Danshichi was manipulated by the chief puppeteer Yoshida Bunzaburō and his two assistants, he was made to draw real water from a well in the murder scene. When Danshichi struggled to kill his father, both the puppets were drenched with water and their bodies and faces smeared with mud.²⁷

New plays were written to capitalize on the increased expressive possibilities of the three-man puppets. The most famous of these, often called “The Three Masterpieces of Jōruri,” were written in successive years: The House of Sugawara (Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami) in 1746; Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (Yoshitsune Senbonzakura) in 1747; and Kanadehon Chūshingura in 1748. They were composed jointly by the same team of writers for performance at the Takemoto Puppet Theater in Osaka, and they share many characteristics: they are all-day plays; their major scenes are built around a suicide or the forced killing of a beloved relative; they contain highly theatrical scenes; and their overriding theme is the demand of feudal obligation (giri) on members of the samurai class. If their texts are compared with those of Chikamatsu's jōruri plays, it will be seen that the proportion of spoken dialogue (kotoba) is much greater in this new generation of plays while the proportion of sung narrative (ji) is much less.²⁸ They are, in other words, more nearly first-person dramas than earlier puppet texts. The beautiful but very long descriptive passages for which Chikamatsu was justly praised have given way to carefully visualized actions which the puppets could now explicitly enact. To say, as some do, that these plays of the mid-eighteenth century cared nothing for the music, nothing for the chanting, but only for the puppets is, perhaps, stating the case too strongly.²⁹ Jōruri remained a unique fusion of music, chanting, and puppet manipulation. What is significant for our discussion is that the new plays placed their emphasis on aspects of performance that made the plays come ever closer to kabuki performance.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the most “kabuki-ized” of these new plays is Chūshingura. Almost alone among jōruri history plays, it contains no supernatural events. Scene after scene dramatizes what were in Japanese society recognizable people caught in understandable human dilemmas: a wife faced with an attempted seduction; a samurai provoked into carrying out a rash action; a loyal retainer offering a bribe to deflect anger away from his master; a young couple whose love brings them into disgrace; a painful death that must be endured with grace and courage; and a dozen other affectingly human situations. The focus in each scene is on the human personality of these tested and appealing people. Their nature and their emotions are conveyed primarily through the physical figure of the puppet and the words the character speak, as in kabuki.

When Chūshingura was first staged in 1748, the Ichiriki Brothel scene was produced in a radically new manner that emphasized the human personality of the puppet characters. Normally in jōruri the voices of all the characters in a scene are taken by a single chanter, but on this occasion six chanters were placed on stage. Each chanter was assigned a role, as is an actor: Takemoto Bunjitayū played Okaru; Takemoto Konotayū played Yuranosuke; Takemoto Tomotayū played Rikiya; Takemoto Masatayū played Heiemon; Takemoto Yuritayū played Kudayū; and Takemoto Shinanotayū played Bannai.³⁰ Consequently, each of the major characters in the scene had his or her own voice. The chanter “acted” the role and timed his character's speeches with those of the other chanters. There were opportunities to develop vocal interplay among characters and to create “builds” within the scene that were denied the single chanter. As we will see later, certain kabuki vocal techniques that depend upon characters overlapping their speeches were taken over in this scene because multiple chanters now could function as actors could.³¹

Indeed, the puppet premier of Kanadehon Chūshingura was indebted to previous kabuki productions of the Chūshingura story as well. In particular, puppet artists borrowed from the kabuki play The Forty-Seven Great Arrows (Ōya Kazu Shijūshichihon) that was first staged in 1726 in Osaka at the Arashi Sanemon Theater and was revived in the same city at the Ichiyama Theater in 1746. In the following year the actor Sawamura Chōjūrō III (known earlier in his career as Sōjūrō I) made a deep impression on audiences with his brilliant portrayal of Yuranosuke in a revised version of the play at the Nakamura Kyūtarō Theater in Kyoto. This production included the Ichiriki Brothel scene and it is reported that Chōjūrō's “movements and vocal inflections were exactly copied” by the puppet manipulators and chanters at the Takemoto Puppet Theater when they took over this scene for the 1748 Kanadehon Chūshingura.³² Once Kanadehon Chūshingura opened, however, it eclipsed all earlier versions. It became the “standard” version against which all others were measured.

Let us now look at the manner in which kabuki stole from the puppet play and some of the major changes which were made in the purloined original. To begin with, the full puppet play, in all its eleven acts and eighteen scenes, was taken over more or less intact. The standard kabuki text today consists of the same number of acts and scenes (with the notable exception of dance additions which will be discussed later). In performing the play on the kabuki stage, actors took the lines of dialogue of the puppet script while the chobo team of jōruri chanter and samisen player, installed on the left side of the stage, sang and chanted narrative sections of that text. Actors copied the movement sequences, blocking patterns and gestures which had been worked out in puppet performance, and their timing was matched to the musical rhythms and the vocal patterns of the chobo team.³³ In short, the intent was to perform a puppet play using live actors. But even if the kabuki actors had wanted to reproduce the puppet production exactly, they would not have been able to, for in the last analysis the human actor and the inanimate puppet figure are not the same, Kawatake Shigetoshi notes that because of this fundamental difference, even jōruri samisen music and the chanting were altered when they were taken over into kabuki.³⁴

And as we have seen, from the first kabuki actors deliberately set about to change the original. Although Chūshingura is one of the few jōruri plays that has regularly been revived in anything near its all-day form, it also has consistently been cut up into shorter versions the better to fit into the kabuki program. As the years passed this tendency became more pronounced. For example, although Acts VII and X were staged apart from the rest of the play in 1763 at the Araki Yojibei Theater in Osaka, and at the Kawarazaki Theater in Edo an 1804 version was made up of Acts V, VII, and IX, during those early years it was more usual for the play to be performed complete or at least up through Act IX or X. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, parts of Chūshingura were being shoehorned into a kind of concert program made up of independent plays that had become usual in kabuki at that time. Typical of this kind of program was the staging at the Shintomi Theater in Tokyo in December 1883 of the first four acts plus the last act of Chūshingura followed by an unrelated three-act domestic play, Kawauchi Mountain (Kawauchiyama).³⁵ It was considered important to vary mood, tempo, and artistic qualities throughout a day's program, but it was not considered necessary to continue any one story throughout.

These attitudes are reflected in the three-part program that was commonplace in nineteenth-century kabuki: the “first piece” (ichibanme) was a history play in four or more acts; a “between-the-acts” (naka maku) dance play followed; and the “second piece” (nibanme) was a domestic play in one, two, or three acts. The midsummer production at the Meiji Theater in 1895, for example, followed this format. Kanadehon Chūshingura (Acts I, III, IV, and VII) comprised the historical first piece; a dance play called The Valley Battle (Hazama Gassen) was the middle piece; and the program closed with a three-act domestic second piece with the fanciful title of A Gallant Night-Blooming Cherry in the Licensed Quarter (Otokodate Kuruwa Yozakura).³⁶ It can be argued that precisely because the plays on such a program were not related they were likely to contain greater variety of characters and scene types, and hence greater artistic variety, than even the most skillfully made all-day play. A close parallel can be found in the standard arrangement of five independent plays in the nō program and, in the West, our juxtaposing varied types of musical compositions in a concert of classical music. So strong is the feeling for an appropriate “atmosphere” in kabuki that a bright dance piece may be added to conclude the day's program on what is considered the proper celebratory note, thus making a four-part program. It is not unusual in contemporary productions of Chūshingura to drop acts so that the day's performance can conclude with this kind of unrelated dance number.³⁷

In another variation, several scenes from Kanadehon Chūshingura might be used as a point of departure for the composition of a new work. The production Chūshingura from Beginning to End (Maemote Chūshingura), at the Kawarazaki Theater in 1833, consisted of twenty-two scenes, few of which bore much resemblance to the puppet original. It in turn contained a dance scene that inspired the playwright Kawatake Mokuami to write another version, Collection of Beautiful Pictures of Chūshingura (Chūshingura Keiyo Gago). He converted each scene of the original script into a dance scene, so that the play was performed as a dance from beginning to end. Just as Danjūrō II earlier had put Soga Gorō into the Coxinga story, actors and playwrights now took characters from Chūshingura and melded them with stories already in the kabuki repertory, often with startling results. In an 1828 production Honzō's delicate daughter Konami was transformed into a fierce aragoto figure to star in A Female Wait a Moment (Onna Shibaraku). The god Fudō, another aragoto hero, appeared in the fifth act of Chūshingura in 1836. Yuranosuke and other Chūshingura characters appeared in several versions of The House of Sugawara. There were kabuki versions of Chūshingura in which Kudayū and Yuranosuke commit seppuku and in which Kampei and Bannai reverse roles as lover and comic villain. The thief Sadakurō was the central figure in an eleven-act play tossed off by Tsuruya Namboku IV in 1821; near the end of the play, Sadakurō even takes Okaru as his wife!³⁸ Interesting as these and other such plays are, they are too far from the original Chūshingura to concern us here. Instead, let us return to the changes that were made in performances that purported to be of the puppet play.

Several “kabuki” scenes were added to the jōruri play. The most extensive is the fugitive travel scene (michiyuki) written by Mimasuya Nisōji, the staff playwright of the Kawarazaki Theater for the 1833 production mentioned above. It is a dance scene accompanied by kiyomoto music. The author kept the dozen or so lines of Kampei and Okaru from the original jōruri text and reworked the scene to include three long sections of elegant dance—in which the lovers prepare to flee—and two contrasting fighting sequences between Kampei and the comic villain Bannai. Before this, kabuki performances of this scene had followed jōruri staging.³⁹ It is a popular scene and is included in most kabuki performances of Chūshingura today. The deeply emotional quality of the jōruri scene is transposed by the dance into gentle, wistful images of two young people in love: viewing the spring scenery, looking down the distant road, embracing fondly, helping each other prepare for the journey, walking hand-in-hand through the flowers. When Kampei tries to kill himself and Okaru stops him, their struggle for possession of the sword is shown in beautiful slow-motion dance. The fight between Kampei and Bannai's fighting chorus (yoten) is also dance (shosadate). Eight or ten chorus members are dressed alike in colorful costumes covered with pink, red, and white flower designs. They carry blossoming cherry branches as weapons. They form geometric groupings on stage: they make single, then double lines through which Kampei gracefully weaves; they attack in twos and in fours; they flip in somersaults; they do cartwheels; they stand in formation on each others' backs; they strike at Kampei with their branches tracing pink arcs through the air; and in defeat they are whirled, tripped, and made to fall on their bottoms in unison. The lovers' dance, the spectacular fighting movements, the massed musicians seated in view on stage, the music itself, the bursting color of the spring setting—all contribute to create a special kind of kabuki beauty—elegant, brilliant, stylized—that is completely unlike the puppet performance.

The jōruri text also contains a dance scene, the bridal journey (Act VIII). In it Honzō's wife Tonase and daughter Konami travel to the home of Yuranosuke in preparation for Konami's wedding to Rikiya. This is sometimes performed in kabuki. But the Kampei-Okaru dance scene is far more popular (perhaps partly because it occurs about where the naka maku dance piece should in the all-day program whereas the jōruri dance scene seems too late in the play). Sometimes both dance scenes are performed, and a production of Chūshingura at the Kabuki Theater in 1959 included a third as well—a comic dance that showed a strutting Heiemon pursued by a swarm of bees. The latter rarely has been performed since it was created in 1791, and its revival in this generation is a good indication of how important dance scenes are in kabuki.⁴⁰

Short dances and songs are also inserted in the Ichiriki Brothel scene to create an appropriately lively mood. A group of maids and several comic male geisha dance to entertain the supposedly drunken Yuranosuke. Music is provided by the standard kabuki offstage (geza) musical ensemble. Its bright rhythmic sound is quite unlike the heavy, “thick” sound of the jōruri samisen. In a reverse case of borrowing, current puppet performances of the Ichiriki Brothel scene often add this music, played on a kabuki samisen, to create the now well-known kabuki flavor for the scene.⁴¹

Kabuki productions of Chūshingura developed battle sequences choreographed from the more than two hundred cutting, piercing, parrying, and avoiding movements of swords and other weapons that are part of kabuki acting technique.⁴² The dance battle in the fugitive travel scene is one of these. Even more spectacular are the battle scenes created for the final act of the play, the vendetta, that are only hinted at in jōruri performance. The act is picturesquely set in midwinter and at midnight. White snow blankets the ground, rocks, trees, and rooftops. Alternately, a pale moon shines through the clouds and swirling snowflakes engulf the groups of largely silent combatants. In the most elaborate productions this act has five scenes. Without breaking the action, the scenes come into view and disappear on the revolving stage, one of kabuki's most effective stage machines. In the first scene, Enya Hangan's loyal retainers mass before the gate to Moronao's mansion to begin the assault. (Danjūrō II's aragoto style of smashing down the gate is, alas, lost and not seen in performance any longer.) In the second, Hangan's men fight through various rooms of the mansion seeking Moronao without success. In the third, the action moves to the garden, where, in the falling snow, the retainers of Hangan meet those of Moronao in a series of spectacular sword fights. The bravest of Moronao's defenders dies falling from the garden's stone bridge into the waters of a pond. In the fourth, dawn is near and the men are desperate to find Moronao. Fighting continues into another part of the garden where Moronao is discovered hiding in a charcoal hut. He is dragged out, given the opportunity to commit seppuku with Hangan's dagger, and beheaded. In the fifth scene, Hangan's retainers, led by Yuranosuke, gather at Ryōgoku Bridge to celebrate their victory.⁴³

The different natures of kabuki and jōruri are sharply contrasted in this act. There is a splendid virtuosity and boldness to the human actor's movements in the interlocking sequences of hand-to-hand combat and sword fights which even the three-man puppet cannot begin to match. On the other hand, long passages of narration in the jōruri conjure up vivid verbal images lacking in the kabuki: warriors “clamber up to the rooftops, their lanterns bright as stars”; Hangan's retainers “cry out rejoicing, as the blind turtle finding a floating log or the eye gazing upon the flower that blossoms but once in three thousand years”; and when Moronao is found “they all flash with courage as a flower sparkles with the dew.”⁴⁴

New comic sequences have been created for kabuki performances in addition to the humorous scenes already in the jōruri text. In the bribery scene that opens Act III, actors in the mid-1800s worked out a kind of vaudeville turn for Bannai that is almost obligatory in current performances.⁴⁵ The situation is as follows: Bannai is talking with Moronao when word comes that Wakasanosuke's retainer Honzō is seeking an audience with Moronao. Bannai has a fit of anger because Wakasanosuke insulted Moronao in the opening scene at Hachiman Shrine. So he coaches his ruffian followers to whip out their swords when he gives the signal “ahem” and to slice Honzō through. They rehearse the routine three or four times, as often as the audience finds it amusing. When Honzō arrives—carrying with him expensive bribes—Bannai's attitude immediately changes. But he inadvertently says “ahem” and the ruffians raise their swords. Bannai hastily calms them and is forced to apologize to Honzō. The routine is repeated; again, the number of times depends upon how skillful the actor playing Bannai is in amusing the audience. Adding this sequence creates a problem with the original scene. Bannai must take stage during the “ahem” routine, but he cannot do this with his master Moronao beside him (Moronao is the central figure in the bribery scene in jōruri). So Moronao is cleverly placed inside a closed palanquin where he cannot be seen but is still present, and his lines, such as “If I am with you, who could object?” are given to Bannai. In the past, Honzō has appeared on horse back in puppet performances, matching the narrative which says, “he has arrived at the mansion on a swift horse,” but this is not done in kabuki.⁴⁶

By the addition of such sequences and by being cut from serious scenes, Bannai has been built into one of kabuki's major comic roles.⁴⁷ Perhaps his funniest sequence is the derisive challenge to Kampei in the fugitive travel scene that begins, “Your stupid master, Enya Hangan. …” The speech in the jōruri text consists of just two phrases; in kabuki the speech has grown to thirty-two phrases. It is spoken in a vocal technique called nori—literally “riding” the rhythm of the jōruri samisen. Each phrase, marked by a comma in the translation, is fit into an eight-beat musical measure. Although the content of the speech is funny, its delivery is equally important, as in a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. The speech is a delightful acting tour de force when it is precisely and rhythmically spoken and is accompanied by stylized gestures and exaggerated facial expressions. In fact, the vocal and physical patterns are so exact that anyone can remember it all quite easily after attending several performances. Nori is a jōruri vocal technique, but the jōruri version of Chūshingura does not use the technique for Bannai here. In this case it was a kabuki addition.

The Ichiriki Brothel scene contains a striking example of inserted kabuki humor. Heiemon has drawn his sword to kill his beloved sister Okaru, but he is moved by her pleas and cannot strike. He falls back weeping. In a puppet performance, Heiemon immediately goes on to relate to Okaru the story of the death of their father and of Kampei. And the two of them weep bitterly. But in kabuki a charming scene intervenes between the attempted killing and Heiemon's pathetic narrative. First, Heiemon lowers his sword and motions to Okaru to come close to hear his explanation. But she refuses, thinking he still intends to kill her. They quarrel, as brother and sister might do. She insists that he put away his swords. With much grumbling he does so. When she complains that she is frightened by his fierce face, he complains that “I can't help that, this is the face I was born with.” She makes him turn his back to her, and as he poses, muttering testily, “What a nuisance,” she at last feels safe to approach. She moves the swords far away and kneels beside him, saying, “Brother, dear, what is it you want?” Only now does Heiemon relate the awful account of Kampei's death. There is a friendly, affectionate humor to this scene. It appeals especially because of the contrast between it and the typical jōruri weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that follow, when Okaru learns of Kampei's suicide.

The original focus of jōruri on the chanted or sung word is still noticeable in mature jōruri performance. So too does the early emphasis upon the physical expressiveness of the actor's body continue today to affect the way kabuki plays are performed and organized. Actors can, of course, saddle a kabuki performance with absurdities in their quest to show themselves off in interesting ways. Actors have a terrible penchant for playing multiple roles in kabuki. Chūshingura is a favorite play in this regard because of the many excellent and varied roles that are spread through the long day's performance. It was a commonplace from the beginning for actors to play two or three roles in Chūshingura. It was a credit to the actor's versatility to be able to carry off the feat of portraying five or six characters. Examples of this are numerous. Chūshingura at the Kado Theater in Osaka in 1863 boasted Onoe Baisha in six roles, Kataoka Gatō in six roles as well, and Kawarazaki Gonjūrō in five.⁴⁸ As early as 1802 Ichikawa Danzō IV played seven roles in Chūshingura, a record that has been equaled a number of times but never, to my knowledge, surpassed.⁴⁹ In his seven roles in an 1828 production, Bandō Minosuke appropriated for himself the choice parts of Moronao, Yuranosuke, Hangan, Kampei, Kampei's father, Sadakurō, and Honzō.⁵⁰

An actor could play several roles in one scene by wearing and discarding in rapid sequence special quick-change (hayagawari) costumes. Actors especially came to enjoy playing the thief Sadakurō and Kampei's father, whom he kills, in the highwayman scene (Act V), using quick-change. In a 1961 production, Jitsukawa Enjaku III (then Enjirō) changed from Sadakurō to the father and back again to Sadakurō without leaving the audiences' sight. And it was done in a perfectly natural way. His father, Enjaku II, and Danzō IV often used quick-change in this scene so that they could play not only Sadakurō and Kampei's father, but Kampei as well—three roles in this short scene.⁵¹ Scenes came to be rewritten to accommodate the needs of quick-change, especially to prevent the simultaneous appearance on stage of two characters which one actor might be playing. One of the most drastic cases was when, due to the illness of other actors, Bandō Mitsugorō was forced to play both Hangan and Yuranosuke in Hangan's suicide scene in the summer production of 1803 at the Nakamura Theater in Edo. By using quick-change, Mitsugorō as Hangan was able to exit into an inner room to commit suicide and then moments later appear on the hanamichi as Yuranosuke rushing to meet his master.⁵² The audience was deprived of seeing Hangan's suicide and the moving scene between master and retainer could not take place, but at least the production did not have to be cancelled.

Although quick-change is a theatrical trick, it need not be detrimental to an honest performance. The related practice of several actors dividing one role, however, is an absurdity that has no artistic justification. Yet, in performances today one is more likely than not to see Yuranosuke acted by, say, Matsumoto Kōshirō in Hangan's suicide scene and by Onoe Shōroku in the Ichiriki Brothel scene. Or Okaru will be played by Nakamura Utaemon in early scenes and by Onoe Baikō in late scenes. Even Bannai will be played by different actors in consecutive scenes. No attempt is made by the actors to interpret the role similarly, or even to look alike.

The overriding emphasis upon the person of the actor in kabuki is usually attributed—by Japanese commentators—to the desire to show off the actor's “physical attractiveness” (nikutai miryoku). Undoubtedly a high degree of narcissistic egoism is involved in the kabuki acting profession. Yet, there is, it seems, more to it than this. Kabuki acting style is legitimately based on using the physical possibilities of the human body. Its aesthetic of performance is centered on projecting human character and feeling through the total physical form. Centering in the abdomen and the pelvis (koshi), the actor uses breath control (ki) and deliberate phrasing of movements with exactly delineated pauses (ma) to create a powerful image of control on stage. The aims of these techniques are, in fact, not dissimilar to the focusing, centering, and breath control practiced in aikidō—literally the “way of breath control”—and other Japanese martial arts. The fundamental posture of the kabuki actor on stage is one of repose. From this basic state of rest, which nonetheless contains within it great power, the actor moves outward in a limited number of clear-cut, sharp, and highly expressive actions. These actions may be of the arms, or stamps and cocking of the legs, or a sudden violent facial expression, or they may be combined. The significant fact is that they arise out of the power center of a settled, almost rigid torso, and when they occur they are perceived as radiating out from that powerful center.⁵³

This is a very different concept of acting from that followed by the Western actor, who uses face and hands in great detail, but separated from the torso. And it is almost exactly opposite to the way the puppet moves in jōruri performance. Because the puppet is inanimate, as soon as it ceases to move it becomes completely inexpressive; it is then just an assemblage of wood and cloth, paint and strings. Therefore, the speaking puppet is in virtual nonstop motion: a hand gesture, a cock of the head, raising the eyebrows, settling the torso, looking over with the eyes, shifting the direction of the body, moving the head, adjusting the kimono, and so on, to match the dialogue or narrative from the chanter. In this sense, the movement sequence of the puppet is more like real life than the centered repose of the kabuki actor on stage. Kabuki repose is not the way people act in “real life,” but represents a stylization of life. In brief, the jōruri movement pattern is continuous, detailed, even fussy, while the kabuki movement pattern is occasional, large in scale, clean, and strong.

When Chūshingura is performed by kabuki actors it is natural that their well-defined acting style would shape the dramatic material to suit that acting style. In many places details of puppet actions have been stripped away to fit the kabuki concept of performance. Two lines before the end of the jōruri text, the narrative describes Rikiya drawing his sword and killing Yakushiji and Bannai, lopping off the latter's legs with a single blow. This action is never performed in kabuki. Instead, the kabuki play will end with Yuranosuke and the massed retainers standing before Ryōgoku Bridge in a powerful group pose (hippari mie) as the curtain closes, or else moving in a silent procession down the hanamichi and out of sight. It is also common to cut lines from the jōruri text in order to free the actor for physical expression. An example that is often cited is Nakamura Nakazō I's portrayal of Sadakurō in a performance in 1766. In the jōruri text, Sadakurō has the largest number of speeches of any character in the highwayman scene, but Nakazō cut every line and acted the role completely in mime. His performance created a sensation and actors have followed this kata, or pattern, of playing the role ever since.⁵⁴

Similarly, the gate scene which follows Hangan's suicide has been extensively reworked so that the actor playing Yuranosuke is able to give physical rather than verbal expression to the character's surging emotions. The basic action of the scene is simple: Hangan's retainers rush on to defend their deceased master's mansion, but they are intercepted by Yuranosuke and persuaded to retire. In jōruri this is accomplished directly: Yuranosuke takes out the bloody dagger with which Hangan has killed himself and explains that they will now gain vengeance. The retainers are overjoyed. They shout their agreement and retire to fight another day. But in kabuki, Yuranosuke gives the retainers no explanation of his intentions. He forces them back through his glowering physical presence and his threat to commit seppuku if they do not obey. He then poses in a fierce stance (mie) in which he glares them down. They go off unconvinced but cowed. The scene in jōruri ends with the retainers' exit; in kabuki, the conclusion of the scene may take up to fifteen minutes to perform and consists of a two-part solo mime by Yuranosuke. The first part is accompanied by jōruri singing, “The suicide blade, red with blood, cries out for revenge. … Burning tears take his heart, tears … falling … falling … falling.” During this Yuranosuke takes out Hangan's suicide dagger, licks his master's blood as an oath, gestures cutting off Moronao's head, and prepares to depart. In jōruri the accompanying narrative passage occurs in the previous scene, when Yuranosuke is prying the dagger from Hangan's death grip. The change in kabuki is effective. Because Yuranosuke is alone on stage he can express his deep emotions more extensively in mime than he can while under the watchful eyes of the shōgun's envoys in the jōruri version.

The second part begins with Yuranosuke crossing slowly from the main stage toward the hanamichi, the rampway that leads through the audience to the rear of the theater and is a unique feature of the kabuki stage. He does not speak, there is no narration. This seemingly simple cross is a major challenge for an actor. In silence and deep in thought, Yuranosuke takes one tentative step, then another. Three times he pauses and turns back, looking remorsefully at the mansion that is receding from view. Each thoughtful pose (omoiire) expresses a different combination of emotions: anguish at his master's death, chagrin that he arrived so late, sadness at leaving the mansion, fury at Moronao, determination to carry out the secret revenge. The melancholy cawing of crows is heard in the distance. A temple bell tolls. He reaches the hanamichi and there, overcome by grief, slips to his knees. He bows deeply toward the site of Hangan's death out of respect. He rises and begins to leave, stops, and turns back for one last glimpse of the mansion. Then, as music resumes, he strides with increasing determination off the hanamichi and out of sight. This marvelously effective closing sequence relies wholly on the actor's powers of physical expression and projection. We should note that this long, mimed sequence accurately expresses Yuranosuke's psychological state; it is not a case of self-indulgence by the actor. Because Yuranosuke cannot reveal his secret plan, his emotions remain repressed, and these repressed emotions sustain the scene through to its end. If he spoke out as he does in jōruri, the emotional tension he feels would be released and the scene would quickly end, as it does in jōruri. It is said that the basic acting kata for Yuranosuke in this scene was set by Nakamura Utaemon III in 1809 and was carried down into this century by Danjūrō IX. Before Utaemon's kata, it was usual for Yuranosuke to pose center stage, as in jōruri, as the curtain was closed in front of him.⁵⁵ The actor who thought of moving the narration about the blade to this scene was Onoe Kikugorō I (1717-1783). The kabuki version of the scene is now often performed in puppet productions as well.⁵⁶

Similarly, kabuki actors have changed the dramatic import of the sequence in the Ichiriki Brothel in which Rikiya delivers Lady Kaoyo's secret letter to Yuranosuke. This has been done by adding a few short lines of dialogue and by emphasizing mimed expression. The scene in jōruri is brief and to the point. Rikiya meets Yuranosuke, passes him the letter, and reveals its contents: “The enemy Moronao's petition to return to the country has been granted. Soon he will depart for home. She says that all the details are in her letter.” And Rikiya leaves. In kabuki the scene is expanded to hint at, rather than tell about, the conspiracy. The whispered conference between father and son takes place at a garden gate that is placed on the hanamichi. This forces Rikiya to cross the long distance from the gate to the room where Yuranosuke is pretending to be drunkenly asleep and then cross back again, and Yuranosuke must follow. While crossing neither speaks. Rikiya shows his anxiety and alertness to danger by stopping several times and looking about. He crosses through the gate, kneels, and keeps watch on the road behind him. Yuranosuke approaches slowly, staggering drunkenly this way and that, covertly searching for spies that might be watching. Rikiya says only, “Soon, soon our enemy …” before Yuranosuke cuts him off by singing a snatch of a nō song. Yuranosuke staggers in a circle as he sings, once more looking about. Rikiya realizes his indiscretion; he covers his mouth with his hands and peers into the darkness in the opposite direction. Finally, when Rikiya firmly grasps the hilts of his swords and turns to leave, Yuranosuke calls him back saying enigmatically, “Be careful while passing through the quarter.” Rikiya covers the hilts of his swords with his kimono sleeves and folds them out of sight against his breast. Then he delicately dances down the hanamichi and off. From Rikiya's actions we understand that Yuranosuke's message was, “If you walk proudly like a samurai you will be noticed and our plan will be discovered, so hide who you are and what you are doing.”

What was a straightforward expository scene in jōruri has become a scene of delicately masked motives in which physical actions and reactions express unspoken meanings. Cutting off Rikiya's line, preventing an explanation of the letter, singing the nō lyric to throw any observer off the track, and hinting that Rikiya must deport himself in a surreptitious manner all add to the suspense of this short, but indelible, moment in the play. Again, we can note that these are not gratuitous changes based on the whims of the actors. They are excellently chosen means to convey the sense of secrecy and conspiracy which lies at the heart of the scene.

The mie, a strong physical pose, is unique to kabuki theater. There are hundreds of different mie, but typically the actor plants his feet in a firm position, sets his torso, cocks his arms outward, rotates the head, and freezes motionless for several seconds. The actor draws all of his energy inward, centers it in the motionless body, and in that “frozen moment” projects the full force of his character's physical presence out to the audience. In the strongest of mie, one eye is crossed over the other (nirami) for added force. The mie is then relaxed and the scene continues. The mie is used for those moments of highest dramatic tension in a scene. It is a remarkable acting technique. Rarely in world theater has motionlessness been used so effectively. (By way of contrast, the puppet, in the same moment of high emotion, will continuously shake its head; it dare not be motionless.)

Many high points in Chūshingura are expressed through mie. As the fiercest character in the play, Moronao shows his contempt for Wakasanosuke at the conclusion of the Hachiman Shrine scene by striking a mie, one leg forward on the steps, his arms whipped outward and then pointing at Wakasanosuke. His face contorts into a vicious sneer and he glares at his rival. In the Pine Room scene Moronao caps the taunts of his “tadpole” speech with an unusual seated mie: he leans back on his haunches, arches his back, points malevolently at Hangan with a fan held in his right hand while his left hand circles overhead and strikes the floor with a slap, cocks his head, opens his mouth, and crosses one eye over the other. The mie that Yuranosuke uses to stop the rampaging retainers in the gate scene is more restrained: he stands with feet together, draws himself up straight, runs his right hand up the edge of his vest, locks his head forward, and poses. Bannai has several mie, his bent knees and exagerated head movements creating a comic effect. Kampei is a refined young hero (nimaime), so his mie during the group battle in the fugitive travel scene are small in scale and delicate.

It is a common staging technique to conclude a kabuki scene with characters posed in a group mie (hippari mie) as the curtain is closed. Chūshingura is staged with a number of these curtain tableaus. The Hachiman Shrine scene ends with Moronao and Wakasanosuke (and sometimes with Hangan as well) holding mie poses. We see Hangan clenching his fists and posing, surrounded by provincial lords, as the curtain closes on the Pine Room scene. The curtain tableau of the Ichiriki Brothel scene is especially elaborate: Yuranosuke mounts the steps and flicks his opened fan overhead; Okaru follows him, kneels by his side, and places her hands on his sash; Heiemon hoists the nearly dead Kudayū onto his back, plants his left foot forward, cocks his head, and poses. Each holds motionless as the curtain is closed. The effectiveness of the mie is heightened by the sharp sound of wooden clappers (tsuke) beating two or three times on a board placed on the stage floor. The curtain, as well, is opened and closed to sharp, penetrating clacks of another set of wooden clappers (ki or hyōshigi). Words, as a rule, do not support the mie, but aesthetically pleasing sound effects do.

Special curtains and the hanamichi are staging devices that help place a unique stamp on kabuki performances. When the main kabuki draw curtain is pushed open to begin the fugitive travel scene, we see behind it another light blue curtain (asagi maku). A phrase of music plays in the background as we look intently at the blank curtain. Then, one clack of the ki is heard as a signal. The blue curtain is released at the top and it falls to the ground. In an instant is revealed the full scene of Mt. Fuji—with acres of cherry trees bursting in bloom, and the lovers, Okaru and Kampei, posed with their faces hidden behind a straw hat. The audience feels an instant rush of excitement, which would not occur with a usual slow-moving curtain opening. At the end of the scene the draw curtain is pulled directly into the path of Bannai, who is running to catch Okaru standing on the hanamichi. He bumps into the curtain, spins around, bumps it again, spins again. Then with a good-natured laugh, he grabs the curtain in both hands and runs it closed himself. The main curtain is closed behind Yuranosuke when he moves onto the hanamichi in the gate scene. Since the mansion is no longer visible, the audience gives its full attention to Yuranosuke now kneeling in the midst of the audience. Isolating the character in this way, called acting “outside the curtain” (maku soto), is reserved for the single most important solo moment in any play.

One of the appeals of the hanamichi is that it encourages a feeling of intimacy by placing the character among the spectators. This is certainly true of Yuranosuke's scene on the hanamichi just described. Placing the conspiracy scene between Rikiya and Yuranosuke on the hanamichi heightens that feeling. When Okaru stands on the hanamichi in the rendezvous scene to tell of her errand, her youth and vulnerability seem more apparent. On the other hand, a sense of spectacle and sweeping action results when a group moves swiftly into a scene or out of it along the hanamichi. Bannai's fighting chorus marches on in a colorful parade, and then runs off pell-mell in terror when Kampei defeats them. Tadayoshi's exit in the Hachiman Shrine scene is turned into a formal procession: he walks down the steps of the platform on which he has been seated, stops center facing the audience, flicks out his sleeves, turns, crosses the width of the stage, and moves with deliberate steps down the hanamichi, followed by a dozen or more provincial lords and retainers walking at the same measured pace.⁵⁷ This is followed by equally deliberate mime sequences in which Hangan, Wakasanosuke, and Kaoyo, in turn, ask Moronao's permission to leave. There is no jōruri narration. There is no dialogue. The only sound is the slow beating of two drums and piercing notes of the flute from offstage kabuki musicians playing stately “Departure” (“Sagariha”). Why is this ten-minute scene, played without words, so effective? It is not difficult to see that we, as spectators, are encouraged to pay unusually close attention to the mimed actions precisely because they are not given a verbal explanation. We concentrate on what is happening because of the silence. And we are asked to interpret the actions ourselves. This is fundamentally different from the jōruri style of theater where the meanings of actions are constantly explained in the narrative and the spectator is not required to infer meaning for himself.

Another way to identify the different approaches of jōruri and kabuki to staging Chūshingura is to note some short jōruri sequences that have not found favor with kabuki actors. Here are three examples. First, Hangan's retainers in the vendetta are described in jōruri narration as killing Moronao as follows: “They leap and jump excitedly in the air. … Ecstatic with joy they even dance. … All together they strike the head, they bite it, weeping with happiness.” The bloody head of Moronao is then washed and placed on a stand before a table dedicated to Hangan's spirit. A second example is from the Ichiriki Brothel scene. Heiemon is described in the jōruri narration as follows: “drawing his sword, he instantly leaps up, slashing Kudayū in strokes two and three inches long, until no part of his body is left uncut.” The third example occurs in Hangan's suicide scene where the narration tells us that when Kaoyo views her husband, “she clings to his dead body, wailing, heedless of everything.”⁵⁸

What these passages have in common is that they describe intense emotional outbursts and actions that are violent, even grotesque. Normally, none of the actions described here are performed in kabuki, and by comparison the parallel kabuki scenes are models of restraint. In kabuki Hangan's men in the vendetta comport themselves with dignity. They do not leap for joy, nor bite Moronao's head; in fact, we do not see any retainer touch the head until it is wrapped in a white cloth. Heiemon does not use his sword on Kudayū; he does not even draw it. And although Kaoyo does weep in grief, she does so quietly, without approaching, let alone embracing, the corpse of Hangan. A high level of emotionalism is appropriate in the art of the puppet theater; it is through the infusion of powerful emotions that the puppet figures are brought to life. But it would seem that kabuki shies away from jōruri's extreme of emotional expression in favor of the actor projecting a physical image of control and stylized beauty through which the emotion, though still intense, is filtered.

Certain kabuki language and vocal forms have been written into the script for Chūshingura over the years, and a number of these can easily be identified in performance. A line of dialogue will be divided among several characters to show that they share the same thought. Usually the final phrase of the line is spoken in unison. In Hangan's suicide scene all the retainers feel as one when they say:

RETAINER:
We, Lord Hangan's retainers, beg permission to see our master …
ALL Retainers:
… one last time.

Or in the gate scene when they respond to Yakushiji's taunts:

RETAINER:
Do you …
ALL Retainers:
… hear that?

The vendetta concludes with a longer sequence of interconnected lines in which all the speakers share the same thoughts and feelings. The technique is called “passed-along dialogue” (watarizerifu).

YURANOSUKE:
Deep concerns like drifted snow, melt in the clear of day …
RIKIYA:
… at last our long awaited, vengeance is achieved …
GOEMON:
… together with the clearing, of the morning clouds …
AKAGAKI:
… at the cock's crow announcing, dawn of a new day …
TAKEMORI:
… our hearts filled to overflowing, rise with the rising sun …
GOEMON:
… as we go together to …
ALL:
… our Lord Hangan's grave.
YURANOSUKE:
Shout victory together! Victory!
ALL:
Victory!(59)

It is easy to see why lines like these do not appear in jōruri texts. A single chanter would find it difficult to make the vocal distinction between the characters which the technique requires. And the single chanter cannot speak a unison line. Neither can he deliver the rapid, overlapped lines that are designed to “raise up” (kuriage) emotional tension between two characters, as in the “Your hand! My hand? Yes, your hand!” sequence between Moronao and Hangan in the Pine Room scene that has been added to kabuki performance. As wonderfully effective as these three short lines are in boosting the emotional temperature of the confrontation, the sequence would be unnatural in jōruri. (Only in a scene staged with multiple chanters, like the Ichiriki Brothel scene, are lines divided in jōruri.)

One of kabuki's most beautiful vocal techniques is heard when characters speak dialogue composed in phrases of seven and five syllables (shichigochō). Narrative sections in jōruri, and songs in nō drama as well, are commonly written in lines of seven and five syllables, but because they are accompanied by music and are chanted or sung, the spectator in the theater is scarcely aware of their metrical pattern. However, in kabuki the passages of shichigochō are a part of the dialogue and are spoken in a gently rhythmic fashion that makes the seven-five metrical pattern clear to the listener. The great nō actor Zeami advised performers in the fourteenth century that strictly adhering to a regular seven-five syllable count would make a poem monotonous, and it is usual for shichigochō in kabuki to contain some irregular phrases of four, six, or eight syllables. Shichigochō is used for important sequences of passed-along dialogue in Chūshingura. One of the major objects of the technique is to give the speeches a formal beauty. The final lines in the vendetta just quoted are in shichigochō. When Heiemon speaks tenderly to Okaru in the Ichiriki Brothel scene, his speech is also in shichigochō: “Once you were a samurai, now a courtesan; combing out your silken hair, while the world has changed; precious sister how pitiful; totally unaware of the life you left behind!”

Improvisation is an important aspect of kabuki performance. But performers in jōruri cannot ever improvise because the timing of samisen, chanting, and puppet movement must be predetermined. In Chūshingura we find many improvised sections indicated in the kabuki text by such terms as: “ad-lib” (sutezerifu); “appropriate business” (yoroshiku atte); “improvised business” (iroiro atte); and “actor's choice” (mitate). Nine such directions are found in the Ichiriki Brothel scene alone. The maids and the male geisha fill the time it takes them to come on or go off stage with a constant stream of adlibbed chatter. Yuranosuke ad-libs lines such as, “I'll be back, girls. Don't go away. I'm going into the garden for some air”—really, anything he wants to say—to cover his cross to Rikiya at the gate on the hanamichi. Later with Okaru he keeps up a continuous, low-key flow of ad-libbing while he goes up the steps into the room and out through the curtain to see the brothel owner about her contract. When Heiemon draws his sword and Okaru flees onto the hanamichi, the printed kabuki text contains a few lines of dialogue followed by the stage direction “the actors ad-lib.”⁶⁰ It is expected that the actors will make up the necessary lines to fill the time it takes Okaru to rise, cross through the gate, pick up Heiemon's swords, carry them out of reach, and return to kneel beside her brother. Okaru and Heiemon ad-lib in half a dozen other places in the scene as well (although this is not indicated in the text), usually to fill junctures between sections. One example occurs when Heiemon realizes Yuranosuke's intention to kill Okaru. In the printed text, he says simply, “Please forgive me,” as he turns to the interior of the room and bows to Yuranosuke. In performance, however, Heiemon, tremendously excited, pours out a torrent of words, something like, “Indeed, forgive me. How could I have thought that my master. … Ah, it is too much. I was wrong, terribly wrong. Yes, I was. Forgive me, please. Forgive me. What a happy moment, dear sister. Wait until I tell you. Ah, just wait. It is such a splendid thing. It is. Your life, dear sister. You see. …” Simultaneously, Okaru ad-libs her uncomprehending reactions.⁶¹ Ad-libbing is extremely effective in such a situation. Heiemon is agitated and Okaru confused, so the rapid, overlapping lines correctly express their state of mind. But it is difficult to carry off. Sutezerifu has to continue without hesitation or break to keep the scene moving forward; yet at the same time it should be casual, “throw away” patter that will not call attention to itself. One person's speech should meld perfectly into another's, neither cutting it off nor leaving a gap.

Bannai's “ahem” routine was once an ad-lib section, and it is usually called sutezerifu, but in fact it is now no longer actually improvised on stage as the lines in the situations just described are. Similarly, when Okaru tells Heiemon that his face is frightening and he replies that he can't help it because it is the face he was born with, these are sutezerifu lines that actors once created and theoretically they could be changed by actors today. In both cases, however, the lines worked so well they became traditional and are now rarely altered. The songs and dances which the maids and male geisha perform for Yuranosuke in the Ichiriki Brothel are “actor's choice.” That is, the actor can decide which song or dance he will do. But once the choice is made, the scene is rehearsed and set (the maids also adlib chatter between the set numbers).

The kabuki text of Chūshingura also indicates numerous places in which the actor is to improvise appropriate actions—poses (mie, kimari, or omoiire), reactions, and other stage business. At the conclusion of the fugitive travel scene, while Bannai is chasing Okatu and Kampei, the text reads, “during this Kampei and Okaru act as they wish.”⁶² In the gate scene some of Yuranosuke's mime is described in detail. Still, within the dagger sequence and during the cross to the hanamichi, the text twice indicates the actor is to improvise “appropriate business.”⁶³ Battles are rechoreographed according to the needs of each production and this is indicated in the play text. The danced battle between Kampei and Bannai's fighting chorus will change, production by production, but in any case it is complex and made up of a score or more of movement sequences. The stage direction merely reads, “there is a dance battle as appropriate.”⁶⁴ Heiemon's attempt to kill Okaru and her responses are laconically indicated by the direction “there is an appropriate stage fight between the two.”⁶⁵ What we see on stage, however, may be Okaru falling back, Heiemon striking three times, Okaru dodging, Okaru rising and pushing Heiemon, Heiemon falling back and recovering, Heiemon raising his sword, Okaru throwing paper in his face, Heiemon falling back, and Okaru fleeing. These, and many other improvised scenes in Chūshingura, are all kabuki additions.

Over the years perhaps as much as one-third of the original jōruri chanting and samisen instrumental music has been replaced by kabuki styles of music. It is standard in kabuki performances for exits, entrances, and fighting scenes to be accompanied by the light-sounding nagauta samisen, nō drums and flute, the large kabuki drum (ōdaiko), and various gongs, bells, and other instruments played offstage right (and hence known as geza, or “offstage right” music).⁶⁶ We have noted before that when Tadayoshi leaves Hachiman Shrine and Hangan, Wakasanosuke, and Kaoyo take leave of Moronao in pantomime, a dignified and somewhat suspenseful mood is created by geza drums and flute playing “Departure” (“Sagariha”). This musical pattern is taken from nō and is associated in the audience's mind, through long use, with the appearance or the departure of an imperial aristocrat. Offstage nagauta singers establish the atmosphere of the Gion licensed quarter as the curtain opens on the Ichiriki Brothel scene by singing the well-known courtesan's song “If You Play in the Flowers” (“Hana ni Asobaba”). The melody from this song, usually called “Dance Melody” (“Odoriji Aikata”), is played by the offstage geza samisen throughout the scene: when Heiemon appears, each time the maids and the male geisha rush on or off stage, quietly in the background under the dialogue, and for the closing curtain tableau. Yuranosuke's exit in the gate scene is accompanied by the melody “Farewell” (“Okuri Sanjū”), played solo by the lead samisen player in the geza.

In some performances the importance of this music is highlighted by bringing the samisen player onstage. After the curtain has been closed behind Yuranosuke, the right corner is pulled back to allow the drummers and flute player in the geza to see Yuranosuke through the slits cut in the scenery and to give the samisen player room on stage. He places his foot on a stool, rests the samisen on his raised knee, and begins to play. He starts with an elaborate introductory passage, rather like a cadenza in a concerto, which the audience invariably applauds. Only then does Yuranosuke begin his exit accompanied by the samisen and the unseen drums and flute.

In the vendetta almost all jōruri music has been replaced by offstage kabuki melodies and rhythms associated with fighting: members of Moronao's household flee across stage to “Triple Beat” (“Mitsudaiko”) on the large drum; “Searching Melody” (“Shirabe Aikata”) is played by the samisen as Hangan's retainers hunt for Moronao; samisen play “Ghastly Melody” (“Sugomi”) during slow individual combats; and drums, flute, and samisen combine to play the lively “Chūya Aikata” during rapid group sword fights. These songs, melodies, and rhythmic patterns are part of the geza repertory of more than five hundred musical selections that are appropriate to one or another scene type, character type, or situation and may be called on, as desired, when Chūshingura is being performed in kabuki.⁶⁷

Kiyomoto music accompanies the fugitive travel scene from beginning to end. Kiyomoto is one style of kabuki dance music (other important styles are katōbushi, tomimoto and tokiwazu).⁶⁸ Music and the lyrics for this scene were composed for the 1833 kabuki production and have been used ever since. The group of ten or more kiyomoto singers and samisen players sit on stage on a raised platform in full view of the audience. Although technically a narrative style of music, kiyomoto is noted for its sweet, melodious, and somewhat voluptuous sound, and hence it is especially appropriate for a dance scene between young lovers. Kiyomoto music is never heard in jōruri. Because offstage nagauta-style songs and melodies and kiyomoto dance music are heard in addition to the usual heavy, emotional jōruri music, the kabuki performance of Chūshingura encompasses a much wider range of mood than does the puppet performance of the play. Overall, the atmosphere is considerably lighter. It is interesting to note that the scene which is considered the most “jōruri-like” in kabuki performances does not use kabuki music at all. This is the scene of Hangan's suicide, the most serious scene in the play. The most suitable musical accompaniment for the preparations for Hangan's death, the suicide, and the mourning by Yuranosuke and Kaoyo is the original jōruri chanting and its somber samisen accompaniment.

In the Pine Room when Moronao confronts first Wakasanosuke and then Hangan we can see several processes working together to create a scene that is different in many respects from the jōruri original. Although the kabuki version of the Pine Room scene follows the jōruri text in general, there are many changes. Wakasanosuke takes as his own line the narrative comment that he wants to “cut in half that damned Moronao,” and Bannai and Moronao both are given additional lines as they try to mollify the furious Wakasanosuke. Moronao's wonderfully funny comment, after Wakasanosuke departs, “A sword in a fool's hand makes the wise man cautious,” is a kabuki addition. In kabuki, Honzō is not shown reacting with relief that Wakasanosuke is safe. Instead Moronao ad-libs a humorous bit in which he continues to bow obsequiously long after Wakasanosuke is gone. After Hangan's entrance, most of the short lines of narrative describing his and Moronao's actions are cut, and during their confrontation most of the jōruri samisen music is replaced by the geza stick drum (taiko) playing measured, suspenseful beats of nō-style “Slow Dance” (“Jo no Mai”) behind the dialogue.

The major kabuki alteration occurs at the scene's climax. At the point where Hangan is called a “tadpole” a number of wholly new incidents are added that postpone the moment when Hangan draws his sword. First, Moronao expands on his taunting speech: he sneers that Hangan looks like a toad because his eyes are bulging so; he calls Bannai to come and look at the ridiculous sight; he strikes Hangan on the chest with his fan; he laughs that Hangan is a “samurai toad”; he pulls back and poses in a fierce seated mie. Next, Hangan responds and the two challenge each other in a kuriage sequence of short lines:

HANGAN:
Then from the beginning, do you mean the insulting words you have said?
MORONAO:
Oh, I mean them. And if I mean them, what do you intend to do?
HANGAN:
If you mean them …
MORONAO:
If I mean them …
HANGAN:
Ahh!
[HANGAN:]
Surya, saizen yori no zōgon wa honshō de oiyatta ka?
[MORONAO:]
O, honshō da. Honshō naraba, omiya, dō suru no da?
[HANGAN:]
Honshō naraba …
[MORONAO:]
Honshō naraba …
[HANGAN:]
Mū!

This can be compared with the jōruri original, which is shorter and does not contain a kuriage sequence:

HANGAN:
Then your insulting words, just now, you can't mean them.
MORONAO:
You are tiresome, tiresome. And if I mean them, what will you do?
HANGAN:
I'll do this …
[HANGAN:]
Surya, ima no akugon wa, honshō yo na.
[MORONAO:]
Kudoi, kudoi. Mata, honshō narya, dō suru?
[HANGAN:]
Kō suru …

At this point in the puppet play Hangan draws his sword and strikes Moronao; the kabuki scene is far from over, however. Hangan starts to draw his sword, but Moronao pulls back shouting furiously that he must stop or his house will be ruined. Hangan pauses. Moronao leans against Hangan's sword hilts, goading him again and again to draw, to kill him. Hangan apologizes, but when Moronao insultingly ignores him, he again reaches for his sword. There is another kuriage sequence, “Your hand! My hand? Yes, your hand! This hand …,” that concludes with Hangan apologizing a second time. Gloating in his victory, Moronao says he will instruct only Wakasanosuke. He tears up Kaoyo's letter and throws it in Hangan's face calling him a “provincial barbarian.” He deliberately flicks first one trailing trouser leg in Hangan's face then the other, and he turns to leave. Hangan plants himself firmly on Moronao's trousers, jerking him to a stop. They exchange a third kuriage sequence, “Is there something you want? What I want is. … What you want is? … You!” At last Hangan whips out his sword and strikes Moronao, trying to kill him.

These added incidents are utterly gripping and they are true to kabuki performing style in that they depend upon the actor's physical expressiveness, as well as voice, for their effectiveness. In the final moments of the scene, Honzō and a number of provincial lords rush on to restrain Hangan. Honzō's speech in the jōruri text and Hangan's scream, “I'll cut you in two, damn you Moronao! Hands off, Honzō! Take your hands off me!” are cut. Instead, the scene ends on a curtain tableau: Hangan is surrounded and held tightly in a circle of restraining hands. His grasping fingers slowly clench. His chest heaves in anguish. The curtain is run closed while the geza drums and flute furiously play “Fast Dance” (“Haya Mai”). The final words of the jōruri narration are sung during the curtain, but in the din they are scarcely heard. In all, more than forty lines of text have been added or altered and a dozen new units of action added in kabuki performance of this act.

In considering the changes which kabuki actors and writers and choreographers have wrought in Kanadehon Chūshingura over the years, it is necessary to recognize the particular point of view from which such changes have been made. Through the first three hundred years of its history, kabuki was a contemporary theater form. It was simply “theater” in the Japanese context, always striving to be up-to-date. In spite of a strong tendency for acting families to develop and preserve their unique acting styles, such as the aragoto style of the Ichikawa family, each production was intended to be unlike any previous production. Even when a well-known play was performed, the aim was not to produce a “faithful revival,” as a Westerner might assume, but rather to see what interesting variations could be rung on a familiar theme. It is this approach to kabuki drama which accounts for the fact that the most popular plays exist in many versions. There are more than a score of versions of the often-performed dance drama Dōjō Temple (Dōjōji).⁶⁹ The aragoto-style play Wait a Moment! (Shibaraku) exists in countless versions deriving from the more than two hundred and twenty productions that the play has had since it was created in 1697 by Danjūrō I.⁷⁰

While it is true that plays taken over from jōruri tend to be more unchanging than “pure” kabuki plays, nonetheless the prevailing inclination to make each kabuki production different affects these plays as well. The kabuki actor was happy to steal Chūshingura from the puppet theater, but he considered himself a creative as much as an interpretive artist, and if the original was worth taking in the first place it was worth the application of his creative imagination as well. For a rough parallel in American arts, we have to turn to the jazz musician. Working within a known musical idiom with other artists equally familiar with that idiom, he can improvise at will. And he would certainly consider it a sign of creative failure were he to perform a composition twice the same way. Today, of course, kabuki has become a classic theater form. Present-day actors rarely improvise, even in so-called ad-lib sections. When they perform Chūshingura they will reproduce the acting kata and follow the texts of scenes as they were developed by actors of the last century. But during the one hundred and fifty years—from 1750 to 1900—that kabuki remained a dynamic and changing theater form, kabuki artists constantly reworked Chūshingura, and in the process they ever more completely “kabuki-ized” their stolen jōruri prize.

Chūshingura is perhaps the most beloved kabuki play in the repertory today. It is performed, in full or shortened versions, in most theater seasons. Its famous scenes are known even by those who have but a nodding acquaintance with Japanese theater. And the best of the changes which have been created for kabuki are now so firmly identified with the play that they are often borrowed back in puppet performances. This is the best evidence, should any be needed, that far from being arbitrary or frivolous, most of the kabuki changes have served to increase Chūshingura's effectiveness as a theatrical work.

Notes

1. Kawatake Shigetoshi, Nihon Engeki Zenshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), pp. 479-480.

2. Ihara Toshirō, comp., Kabuki Nempyō, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1956-1963), 3:30.

3. Ibid., p. 41.

4. Toita Yasuji, Chūshingura (Tokyo: Sogensha, 1961), p. 234.

5. For a detailed study of another example of kabuki borrowing, see Stanleigh H. Jones, Jr., “Miracle at Yaguchi Ferry: A Japanese Puppet Play and Its Metamorphosis to Kabuki,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 38 (June 1978): 171-189.

6. Oscar Brockett, The Theatre: An Introduction (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), p. 307; and Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, Theatre in Japan (Tokyo: Ministry of Finance, 1963), pp. 85-169.

7. Sakae Shioya, Chūshingura: An Exposition (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1956), p. 228.

8. Ibid., p. 230.

9. Suwa Haruo, Genroku Kabuki no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1967), p. 65.

10. Takano Tatsuyuki, ed., Genroku Kabuki Kessakushū (Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1939), 1:158.

11. Shuzui Kenji, Yakusha Rongo (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku, 1963), p. 110. Also in English, in Charles J. Dunn, ed., and Bunzō Torigoe, trans., The Actors' Analects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 112.

12. Watsuji Tetsurō, Nihon Geijitsushi Kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), p. 407.

13. As Watsuji points out, several events—separated in time by not less than sixty-two years—have been brought together in the single description, casting doubt on its accuracy. The stage debut of Danjūrō I was in 1673, while Danjūrō II took the name Ebizō in 1735. (Ibid., pp. 408-411.)

14. Suwa, Genroku Kabuki, pp. 43-46.

15. Ibid., pp. 55-64.

16. Chikamatsu's first kabuki play was probably written in 1684, by which time Tōjūrō had already played the important wagoto role of Izaemon at least five times. (Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō 1:132.)

17. See Takano Masami, Chikamatsu to Sono Dentō Geinō (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1965), pp. 93-101, for titles and dates of Chikamatsu's kabuki plays.

18. Suwa Haruo, Chikamatsu Sewa Jōruri no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1974), pp. 28-29.

19. Kawatake, Nihon Engeki Zenshi, p. 610.

20. Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō, 1:467-479.

21. Ibid., p. 473.

22. Kawatake, Nihon Engeki Zenshi, p. 517.

23. Ibid., p. 611.

24. Ibid., p. 517.

25. Shuzui, Yakusha Rongo, p. 110; and Dunn, Actors' Analects, p. 112.

26. Kawatake, Nihon Engeki Zenshi, p. 477.

27. Kawatake Toshio, A History of Japanese Theater, II: Bunraku and Kabuki (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1971), p. 50

28. Dialogue (kotoba) is not always delivered in a spoken style. Vocal technique can move through iro to ji in kotoba sections. See William P. Malm in the preceding chapter.

29. Kawatake, Nihon Engeki Zenshi, p. 481.

30. Otoba Hiromu, ed., Jōrurishū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), 1:337. The chanters also divided minor roles and narration among themselves.

31. It was not unknown for a secondary chanter (waki) to be on stage with the chief chanter (shite) in the early 1700s. See, for example, pictures in Ando Tsuruo, Bunraku: The Puppet Theater (New York: Walker/Weatherhill, 1970), figures 77 and 80. The Battles of Coxinga contains one line, in Act IV, that is divided between the two chanters (see Shuzui Kenji, ed., Chikamatsu Jōrurishū [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966], 2:278-279, or Donald Keene, trans., Major Plays of Chikamatsu [New York: Columbia University Press, 1961], p. 254).

32. Kawatake Shigetoshi et al., eds., Engeki Hyakka Daijiten (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1960), 1:413.

33. Kawatake Shigetoshi believes that the 1749 kabuki productions of Chūshingura mark the first time a jōruri play was done more or less intact in kabuki (History of Japanese Theater, p. 51). Ihara cites a description of the 1748 production of Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees at the Nakamura Theater to suggest it was the first: “In doing this new play, the chanter Sengatayū, the shamisen player Tsuruzawa Tomokichi along with two others, and six puppet manipulators led by Kiritake Monjūrō, were invited from the Takemoto Puppet Theater in Osaka [to guide] rehearsals” (Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō, 3:10).

34. Kawatake, Nihon Engeki Zenshi, p. 610.

35. See, for example, Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō, 3:533; 5:316, 326, 339, and 357; and 7:292.

36. Ibid., 7:467.

37. An example is the March 1967 program at the Kabukiza in Tokyo. The matinee performance consisted of Acts I, III, and IV of Chūshingura followed by the dance play Black Hill (Kurozuka), while the evening performance consisted of Acts V, VI, VII, and XI of Chūshingura followed by The Lion Dance (Renjishi).

38. These and other examples of kabuki versions of Chūshingura are described in Toshikura Kōichi, “Kanadehon no Hoka no Kabuki Kyakuhon,” Engekikai 20, no. 12 (November 1962):50-53. Dates of Chūshingura performances, casts, and commentary for the 1800s can be found throughout Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō, vols. 6 and 7.

39. Toita Yasuji, Kabuki Meisakusen (Tokyo: Sogensha, 1959), 1:279.

40. Kabukiza Program (February 1959), p. 15.

41. This can be heard on the King album Chūshingura (KHA 55-56, 1976).

42. Bandō Yaenosuke, ed., Tachimawari no Kata to Yōgo (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Gekijō, n.d.), 3 vols.

43. Current productions draw upon scripts of a number of plays from the nineteenth century for dialogue and sequences in these scenes. See Toita, Chūshingura, pp. 233-234.

44. Otoba, Jōrurishū, pp. 378-380.

45. Uchiyama Mikiko, “Kanadehon Chūshingura no Enshutsu no Keifu,” Engekikai 20, no. 12 (November 1962):119.

46. Onishi Shigetaka, “Bunraku no Chūshingura,” ibid., p. 139.

47. Bannai's appearance in the last act, the vendetta, is usually cut in kabuki performances.

48. Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō, 7:110.

49. Ibid., 5:316, 335, and 435; and 6:23, for example.

50. Ibid., 6:185.

51. Toita, Kabuki Meisakusen, p. 282.

52. Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō, 5:335.

53. See James R. Brandon, “Training at the Waseda Little Theater: The Suzuki Method,” The Drama Review 22, no. 4 (December 1978), especially pp. 33-35 and 40, for a contemporary Japanese director's comments on the nature of kabuki acting.

54. Toita, Kabuki Meisakusen, p. 38; the scene ends with Sadakurō speaking a single line, “Fifty gold pieces.”

55. Uchiyama, “Kanadehon Chūshingura,” pp. 118-119; and Ihara, Kabuki Nempyō, 5:435.

56. Toita, Kabuki Meisakusen, pp. 280-281.

57. The hanamichi exit is a recent kata. More often, perhaps, Tadayoshi's procession will exit stage left. See ibid., pp. 5 and 278.

58. Otoba, Jōrurishū, pp. 380, 349, and 318.

59. The vendetta is rarely the same in any two productions. The concluding lines of the play also may be quite different from one production to the next.

60. Toita, Kabuki Meisakusen, p. 69.

61. From performances at Toyoko Hall, February 1961 and the Kabukiza, March 1967.

62. Toita, Kabuki Meisakusen, p. 24.

63. Ibid., p. 35.

64. Ibid., p. 23.

65. Ibid., p. 68.

66. William P. Malm, Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1959), pp. 225-226, lists the major geza instruments.

67. See William P. Malm, “Music in the Kabuki Theater,” in James R. Brandon, William P. Malm, and Donald H. Shively, Studies in Kabuki (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978), pp. 144-159, for a detailed discussion of the function of geza music.

68. Malm, Japanese Music, pp. 188-199.

69. Iizuka Tomoichirō, Kabuki Saiken (Tokyo: Daiichi Shobō, 1926), pp. 459-466.

70. Kawatake Shigetoshi, Kabuki Meisakushū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1936), 2:961-977, lists 210 productions from 1697 to 1936.