SOURCE: Ortolani, Benito. “Kabuki.” In The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, pp. 153-99. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Ortolani provides a critical overview of Kabuki's historical and socio-political development, its use of supernatural elements, and its major figures and works, including the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon and the play Chūshingura.]

BACKGROUND OF KABUKI AND JōRURI

The history of Edo's theatrical splendor under the Tokugawa regime (1603-1868) has been the subject of several studies by Japanese and western authors, especially since World War II. The wealth of information available makes it possible to reconstruct a rather accurate picture of the complex and fascinating kabuki and jōruri worlds. Especially important are those studies that relate these genres to the phenomenal development of the new middle class in Edo and Osaka, the big Japanese cities that shared with Kyoto, and eventually took over from it, the leadership of theatrical fashion.

All authors agree that kabuki and jōruri are the typical theatrical expressions of the Tokugawa culture as it developed in the urban milieu, where the merchants played the main role in their fluctuating and ambiguous position of energetic economic leadership in the face of socio-political oppression. The large theatres supplied the townspeople with the only places for regular gatherings where “their” world could be collectively celebrated—a showplace for their economic success, their licentious fantasies, and daring fashions, as well as for the venting of their veiled criticism of forbidden topics and of their masked aspirations for social recognition.

When the Tokugawa world collapsed, kabuki and jōruri kept alive a memory and nostalgia for a past that was rapidly disappearing and dissolving into a new westernized society. Just as bugaku remained alive at the price of crystallizing into a theatrical monument to the aristocratic court society of the Nara and Heian periods; just as the nō paid the same price of crystallization to preserve the taste and refinement of the Ashikaga samurai society; just so did kabuki and jōruri become a frozen monument to the tastes and moods of the Tokugawa merchant middle-class.

A) POLITICAL BACKGROUND.

Kabuki was born as an explosion of lust for life and extravagance celebrating the end of over a century of political chaos, interminable civil wars among ever-changing alliances of feudal lords, ever-recurring devastations, reprisals, and death, under an all-pervading feeling of fear, instability, and insecurity. Peace resulted from the successful leadership of three generals who managed to bring the divided country under a unified, iron-handed, military rule. The two leaders who had started this unifying process, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, did not achieve a lasting peace: it was only Tokugawa Ieyasu who stopped the bloodbath and quieted social unrest. He is the creator of the system that succeeded in maintaining peace and stability for two and a half centuries—and at the same time determined the parameters of development of the unique Tokugawa society, thoroughly isolated from the rest of the world, and extraordinarily punctilious in its control of a hierarchical organization of each aspect of public and private life.

The theatre was no exception. Probably in no other epoch or place in the world has the theatre been the object of so many decrees of the supreme authority, of abolitions, restrictions, and regulations affecting every detail: regulations prescribed sites of theatre construction, the materials permissible for constructing the roofs of theatre buildings, the areas in which actors were allowed to live and move freely, access by the actors to the theatre's boxes, the kind of clothes the actors were allowed to wear and the precise type of hat they were ordered to wear whenever outside their territory, permission regarding the performance of certain types of dances within kabuki presentations, permission for theatres to operate following major scandals, including minutiae which may appear embarrassing to a modern reader, such as prohibiting female impersonators from using public facilities reserved for ladies.

The Tokugawa castle in Edo became the nucleus of the largest metropolis of Japan. Edo, the present day Tokyo, functioned as the actual capital of the empire. In the grounds now occupied by the imperial palace in Tokyo, the Tokugawa rulers set up their court, completely independent from that of the emperor, who was left undisturbed and powerless—a nominal ruler in a nominal capital, Kyoto. The fortress of Tokugawa power was surrounded by the quarters of a permanent army of hundreds of thousands of samurai and their families—a continuous austere and oppressive reminder of the military dictatorship that dominated every aspect of Japanese life. It was outside the gloomy atmosphere of those barracks-lined quarters, and precisely in the colorful and lively off-limits red light districts, that Edo was to become the new theatre capital of Japan. As far as theatrical life is concerned for Japan, Edo eventually became, and Tokyo still is, the counterpart of Paris for France, London for England, and New York for the United States.

The establishment of the Tokugawa order did not happen without protest among the samurai themselves and without the appearance of opposition groups, among which the kabuki mono provide a most interesting occurrence—very much like the British “punk” phenomenon of the seventies and early eighties. They acquire a special meaning in the context of the study of kabuki's background, because they explain the general association that both audiences and government had with the word kabuki at the beginning of the Tokugawa era. The verb kabuku, used since the middle ages with the meaning of “to slant,” or “to tilt,” had acquired, by the beginning of the Tokugawa era, a slang usage for any anti-establishment action that defied the conventions and the proper rules of behavior. The kabuki mono were therefore people who expressed their anti-conformism through a series of protests against the established order, which ranged from highly unusual ways of dressing to shocking hairdos and extravagantly decorated, enormous swords, and up to four-foot-long tobacco pipes. Like today's motorcycle gangs they would roam the streets and oftentimes engage in acts of violence and riots, flaunting their revolt against all conventions and decency, by performing such acts as playing the flute with one's anus.¹

The bulk of kabuki mono was formed of masterless samurai, but youngsters of important samurai families, even of daimyō, had joined the gangs, in some cases giving a definite political color to violent actions with potential revolutionary implications, and warnings of allegiance to traditional Tokugawa enemies. The execution of a kabuki mono in 1612 by a Tokugawa officer provoked the assassination of the officer by the kabuki “brothers” of the executed youth. The ensuing search by the authorities led to the discovery of a secret document with 500 signatures of kabuki mono which included sons of important daimyō. It is no wonder that Ieyasu acted swiftly and executed a large number of the dangerous rebels who were trying to subvert the very foundation of his new order. The fashion of rebellion against convention was adopted, in addition, by a group of court nobles in 1607 who then also received the name of kabuki mono: in women's clothing they entered the innermost quarters of the residence where the ladies of the imperial court lived and violated the sacred taboo of a place where men were strictly forbidden, right in the heart of the imperial palace. The scandal ended with the execution of the culprits and the exile of the complacent ladies.

To the Tokugawa regime kabuki meant subversion and heresy, something immoral and dangerous, but in the folk mentality the daring and sometimes heroic behavior of a few major kabuki mono leaders became the stuff of legend which was celebrated in songs, tales, and on the stages of the very first kabuki shows, while their eccentric fashions became popular all over Japan, even in the remotest villages.

In their obsession for providing political stability and avoiding at all costs a return to chaos, Ieyasu and his immediate successors enforced a strict policy of social stability, which in many ways affected the very life and development of the theatre. The new social order and the ethical values upon which it was built became the reference frame for all plays, making it necessary for western readers to study this frame of reference to understand the plays. Of course, many elements belonged to already widely accepted principles and to an already existing social status quo; new, however, were the enormous stress placed on the unconditional loyalty to superior authority, the thoroughness of the indoctrination, and the rigidity of the application of the principles at all costs and at all levels of society.

The Tokugawa took over from the old Chinese Confucian theories—adapted for their purposes of imposing a samurai dominated structure—the division of society into four classes: warrior-administrators (samurai), peasants (nōmin), artisans (kōjin) and merchants (shōmin)². The hierarchy was not based on intelligence, preparation, wealth, or capacity, but determined by the interests of the dominating samurai class. The farmers provided the bushels of rice, that is, the income of the samurai; the artisans made swords and other weapons, the vital companions of the military class. Principles that may be considered unrealistic and reactionary even for seventeenth-century Japan were made to prevail—such as the absolute predominance of a military aristocracy that was useless and ill-prepared for peace purposes and the idea that, at the bottom of the social pyramid, below the farmers and the artisans, were the merchants, deemed a non-productive class making profits on already finished products without producing any themselves. Outside the four classes that made up the quasi-totality of the population remained the small but rather important groups of the old court nobility (kuge) around the emperor in Kyoto, which now was reduced to purely ceremonial functions; the shaji, that is, the clerical officials of Buddhism and Shinto; and, at the bottom of the social pyramid, the outcastes (semmin) among whom were such despised categories of people as prostitutes and kabuki actors.

B) SAMURAI AND KABUKI.

The social classes were far from constituting homogeneous groups. Many kabuki and jōruri plays present the distress of samurai fallen in disgrace and living among merchants, often concealing their true identity. To the samurai belonged such different people as the most powerful man in the country, the Shogun himself, powerful and rich feudal lords, high state employees and poor foot soldiers, who hardly had anything more than their pride and their swords. There was a complicated hierarchical ranking among the feudal lords, the government employees, and so forth. Hierarchy pervaded all classes, including the outcastes and the underworld. It was impossible to escape from it, as much as it was impossible not to belong to some group which would be held responsible for the actions of each of its members; thus were created the premises for such frequently seen extreme dramatic situations as where individuals are torn between contrasting allegiances, and are painfully conscious of the consequences of their actions for the whole family or group. The highpoint of this system of “collective responsibility” was introduced by the Tokugawa governor in Kyoto with a 1603 law which divided all citizens into groups of ten, and made all ten responsible for any crime committed by any member of that group.

From the very beginning the government of the Shogun adopted a policy of suspicion and restrictions against kabuki.³ The same characteristics that had given the name kabuki to the kabuki mono must have influenced both audiences and government to identify the new show by the same term. In the eyes of the shogunate early kabuki was another form of rebellious non-conformism, perverse in its eroticism, transvestism, outrageous costumes, and hybrid mixture of religious elements with licentious contents. Moreover, in its initial phases, kabuki became a source of frequent riots involving outcastes, townspeople, and, to the dismay of government officials, also samurai. The petty samurai, deprived in the peaceful society of any meaningful military function, were among the first to fill their idle time by constant attendance at both kabuki and puppet shows, although in disguise because of the off-limits locales at which such entertainments took place.

Besides the several ranks of samurai in the active service of either the Shogun or of about two hundred daimyō existing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, hundreds of thousands of rōnin (masterless samurai) became an unexpected element of social mobility within the apparently unshakable stability of the system. The long wars had multiplied the number of samurai deprived of a lord, and therefore of an official position and a steady income. Many rōnin were forced by necessity to take jobs considered unworthy of a samurai, and concealed their shame under a false name—a popular situation in kabuki and jōruri plays. Among such rōnin were the famous forty-seven samurai who dared to challenge the authority of the Shogun in order to revenge the death of their master, and who became national heroes of a sort, inspiring the most famous play in the puppet and kabuki repertoire, the Chūshingura. An unproven but persistent tradition presents a rōnin, Nagoya Sanza (previously a samurai in the service of the Christian daimyō Gamo Ujisato) as the lover and main collaborator of the famous dancer Okuni, the legendary founder of kabuki. The historical truth about Nagoya Sanza will probably never be established, but if not Sanza, certainly other masterless samurai joined the outcastes in the despised occupation of kabuki actor. This explains the origin of illustrious samurai family names (such as Nakamura, Ichikawa, or Onoe) for dynasties of kabuki actors, in spite of the official laws that deprived outcastes of the right to a family name.

C) PEASANTS AND KABUKI.

In the official hierarchy of the Tokugawa society the peasants were ranked after the samurai, a tribute to their economic importance in an agricultural society which still recognized a bushel of rice as the measure of wealth. The peasants constituted about 80٪ of the total population, alone carried the burden of taxation, and, in the great majority of cases, lived in a state of quasi-servitude to the land and the feudal lord, without the right to move away from their fields or choose a different occupation in the cities. Peasants in general did not occupy a position of importance in kabuki plays and had very little to do with the organization of the kabuki world. However, the reality of a lively amateur kabuki in several rural centers, and, even more, of the puppet theatre in numerous villages has been underestimated and almost completely neglected by non-Japanese scholars, who obviously have been more impressed by the rich historical materials about the major performers and the large theatres of the major cities. In general, the heroes of the kabuki world are chosen from among the samurai and merchants, and the lowly peasants are presented as narrow-minded, petty, cowardly, and comically foolish.

D) MERCHANTS AND KABUKI.

The Tokugawa peace favored an enormous increase in trade and the development of organized production of large quantities of goods required by cities that ranged among the world's most populous of the time. Wealth accumulated in the hands of merchants. They created a tight capitalistic system, favored by the traditional idea that only land could be taxed, leaving the enormous profits of trade tax-free. Some merchants, especially those who secured monopolies of vital products, could compete in wealth with the most powerful daimyō. Many samurai ended up owing money to the bankers of the new economy, which was rapidly shifting from its agricultural foundation to money and credit transactions. Socially inferior in the official society, the merchants found in the “floating world” of the red light districts—glittering with tea-houses, kabuki theatres, and every type of entertainment—an island where social distinction did not count and only cash decided the issues. No wonder then that rich merchants spent enormous amounts of money as generous patrons of that world. Wealth attracted all kinds of artists, who transformed the red light districts into the very centers of a new, colorful, highly original culture, evidently much more worldly than the one which gave birth to the nō. The greatest novelist of the Tokugawa period, Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693, who also wrote the jōruri play Koyomi, The Calendar) made life in the red light districts the main theme of his masterpieces. The masters of ukiyo-e wood-block prints multiplied the images of celebrated kabuki actors and women of pleasure. In no other nation's dramatic literature—nor in that of Japan in other periods—do brothels and courtesans appear in so great a number of plays, obviously mirroring the new cultural importance of the red light districts in which actors and theatre buildings were confined by law. Success in the arts depended now no longer on the samurai, but on the favor of the rich merchants and the ticket-buying townspeople who frequently visited the red light districts. Accordingly, playwrights, actors, musicians, puppeteers, painters, and all other providers of entertainment created a world of fantasy to please the taste of the new patrons. Even the samurai world was projected on the stage in the light of that fantasy, and appeared quite different from the somber reality of daily military life and from the sophisticated understatement of Zen-inspired simplicity that had characterized the nō; a gaudy, colorful immediacy of overstatement became typical of kabuki and jōruri.

Both nō and kabuki are unique and genuine expressions of the Japanese spirit and culture. They mirror, however, taste and ideals of different social classes, in profoundly different environments and epochs.

E) OUTCASTES AND KABUKI.

The word gei jutsu today has the meaning of “art” with all its metaphysical and “dignified” implications. During the Tokugawa period, however, it was used—without any aura of dignity or respect—to indicate the performances of professional entertainers, sometimes with a meaning equivalent to “tricks.” Actors formed a special group among the outcastes, and are referred to in several Japanese sources together with the other groups of outcastes such as eta, semmin, and hinin. This sociological bias is extremely important to understand the history of kabuki. The actors were called kawaramono (people of the riverbed) or, with a sense of contempt, beggars of the riverbed (kawara kojiki). They were submitted to humiliating restrictions of movement and places where they were allowed to live, of people they could mix with, and were even forced to wear a wicker hat as a sign of their despised profession whenever they left their territory. The habit of naming actors and prostitutes together in all official documents originated in the real connection between the two professions at the beginning of kabuki. Wealth, success, and fame, connected with a respectable moral life, did not change the social stigma of one's being a “beggar from the river bed” even when “squatting on brocaded mats,” but these attributes did establish the premises for changes which slowly took place after the Tokugawa period. A stigma kept hanging over kabuki actors for a long time, even after they were officially “emancipated” at the beginning of the Meiji period.

With great popularity a few successful performers reached yearly incomes comparable to the astronomical figures paid to movie stars nowadays. They could afford an extremely luxurious life, and were the object almost of a cult, comparable to the delirium of rock fans for superstars like Elvis Presley or, more recently, Madonna. Kabuki fans would fight for a sign of their idols' friendship, send expensive presents, and mourn their deaths with incredible manifestations of public grief. The process of advanced westernization eventually swept away most of the social stigma. Famous kabuki actors are now in a position comparable to stars of other show business genres. The Japanese government has bestowed upon a few kabuki actors the official recognition as “living cultural treasure,” a great honor reserved for the best masters of the major traditional arts.

F) THE OFFICIAL MORALITY.

The Tokugawa rulers did not challenge the position of Buddhism as the dominant religion of the masses. As a matter of fact they themselves were mostly pious followers of the Buddha. Kabuki and jōruri heroes usually take for granted one or another of the Buddhist beliefs, though they often express a rather superficial and diluted faith, comparable to the nominal Christianity of many characters in nineteenth century western melodrama or opera librettos. The sources and standards of morality became ever more definitely separated and independent from the declining religious spirit, both in real life and on the stage.

Worldly preoccupation with political and social stability convinced Ieyasu and his successors to adapt and constantly inculcate doctrines of Confucian origin; these were not only those regarding the division into four social classes, but also those concerning the hierarchy of values in the five fundamental human relationships. Traditional samurai ethical principles, such as individualistic integrity and honor (ichibun) and “pride” (iji), which allowed and even imposed a change of allegiance or rebellion when the sovereign went against “the will of heaven” (ten-mei), were thoroughly suppressed in favor of unconditional loyalty and blind obedience to the superior authority. This exaltation of loyalty to the sovereign above all was fostered as contributing to intellectual stability, a necessary foundation of social and political stability. The “official” morality became Confucian, based on the obligations between sovereign and subject, father and child, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, and friend and friend—in the given order of importance. Over and over again loyalty to the constituted authority, that is, the Shogun, was stressed as the supreme virtue, superior even to filial piety. The authority of a husband over his wife was subordinated to parental authority over a daughter, even after marriage. Innumerable situations, complications, and climaxes of kabuki and jōruri plots can be understood only from this perspective and hierarchy of moral values which praised as virtuous such actions as the killing of one's own son to save the life of a feudal lord's son; the selling of a wife to a brothel to raise the money necessary to prove the husband's loyalty to the lord; parental intervention in separating husband and wife against their will for any reason thought sufficient by the wife's father; and suicide for any one of a number of reasons related to the service of the feudal lord and his interests.

The long peace threatened to soften the traditionally strict military discipline of the samurai. Many Tokugawa scholars and teachers expressed their concerns in writings which codified for the first time the long-practiced unwritten code of the ruling class. While the crisis menaced the purity of the samurai tradition, the once exclusive samurai values gradually became the values of the new elite of merchants and, surprisingly, also of the outcastes and the underworld. Commoner heroes of the stage like the otokodate observed the samurai code more faithfully than the samurai themselves, as exemplified in the famous confrontation between the legendary otokodate Sukeroku and the samurai Ikyū in the play which takes the name from the former. The world of the stage did not at all challenge the ethical code. On the contrary, it measured everything according to the code, praising its triumph and demonstrating the inevitable ruin of those who did not behave according to it. The situation in which the hero must choose between painfully conflicting duties is not presented as a criticism of the ethical system, but as a tragic climax in which the sacrifice of life is often expected.

G) POPULAR BELIEFS AND THE SUPERNATURAL.

The importance of the ritualistic substructure in the beginning kabuki has been largely neglected by the scholarship.⁴ What the common people believed and were concerned with was very different from the purity and depth associated with the western image of Buddhism (especially Zen), and from the stately elegance and dignity associated with the official Shinto ritual at major shrines. Whether or not expressed in Buddhist terminology, seventeenth-century Japanese people were still very seriously concerned—like their fourteenth-century counterparts—with the mysterious and nebulous “other dimension” surrounding the realm of their experience and inaccessible to human beings. The populace was in real fear of the inhabitants of that world, who could willfully cross the barrier into our space at any moment and suddenly cause any kind of change in the course of human life. Shinto kami and Buddhist holy “saviors” (the bodhisattva) as well as the benevolent souls (tama) of the departed—either already successfully absorbed into an anonymous “corporate Ancestor” or still in the process of reaching that eventual state of peace—were supposed to live in that “other dimension.” More directly menacing inhabitants of the “other dimension” were the dangerous onryō, the revengeful ghosts of people who met violent death, generally at the height of obstinate unfullfilled passions, and countless spirits of animals and lesser ‘powers’. In one word, this “other dimension” was the same realm that had nourished the world of kagura and those nō plays with ghosts and supernatural beings, and that had given shamans such an important role in both Shinto and Buddhist rituals. The very first documented example of kabuki, the performance of Okuni as related in the Kunijo Kabuki Ekotoba,⁵ c. 1614, is to be interpreted according to the scheme of a shamanistic ritual of tama-shizume, that is, of appeasing a dangerous revengeful onryō. The shamaness is the miko Okuni herself, who has traveled from her home shrine of Izumo to the capital, and now performs her specialty on the nō stage of Kyoto's Kitano shrine, famous for the tama-shizume rituals. The onryō is the spirit of the recently deceased Nagoya Sanzaburō (often abbreviated as Sanza), who lived from c.1575 to 1604, the eccentric, anti-conformist rōnin who, because of his outlandish behavior in defiance of the Tokugawa regime, had become a legendary kabuki mono, and who also had been Okuni's lover. The important kami of Izumo is the divine power operating through Okuni's appearance to liberate the faithful from the dangerous onryō. The scheme of the ritual consists in an opening conjuration of the onryō by the shamaness; the establishment of communication between shaman and onryō when the ghost responds to the conjuration and appears from the middle of the audience to enter on stage; the discovery of those grudges which motivate his vindictive anger (in Sanza's case, his untimely death in a brawl); and finally the pacification and eventual removal of such grudges, thereby allowing for the transformation of the onryō into an appeased tama ready for its absorption into the “Corporate Ancestor.” From the Kunijo kabuki ekotoba we might well conclude that Okuni, the founder of kabuki, was basically a professional shamaness, and that the very first kabuki performances were, in their essential content and dramatic structure, very similar to typical shamanic rituals to appease revengeful ghosts.

The importance of the basic scheme of folk ritual for kabuki continues in a number of later plays during the Genroku period kabuki, in plays adapted from the nō, and in a remarkable group of early nineteenth century plays, the kaidanmono, which revived audience interest in seeing revengeful ghosts enacted, and preying on popular shamanic beliefs still very much alive among kabuki audiences. In general, the bridging of the gap between the world of our experience and the “other dimension”—where divine powers, friendly and revengeful ghosts, and strange animal spirits influence the human condition—is essential to the determination of the course of events in numerous kabuki plays from the very beginnings of the form to the present repertory.

Supernatural powers are believed to have been decisive in the formation of kabuki super-heroes such as Yoshitsune, who performed astonishing deeds in a state of kamigakari or possession by a divine power. The super-hero is no longer just a valiant man, but becomes a hito-kami, or “man-god,” who has the power of defeating legions of villains and appeasing powerful onryō. In some cases at least the actors who performed the role of such super-heroes were perceived by the audiences as possibly possessed by a god or a spirit: a famous example is the case of Ichikawa Danjūrō I playing the role of the god Fudō Daimyōjin in the play Tsuwamoto Kongen Soga, when the audience threw coins on stage. These were actually offerings to the deity who was deemed present on the stage and capable of bestowing blessings in return. This belief seems to be at the root of the special religious cult formed by Danjūrō's fans, and the continuing unique position of the Ichikawa Danjūrō line in the kabuki world. Also, the aragoto style started by and associated with the line has been considered by such scholars as Gunji Masakatsu and others to derive from the representation of the divinely possessed superhero capable of “liberating” the innocent oppressed from the clutches of villains or evil spirits. The costume of such hito-kami or man-gods has details that are traced back to shamanistic paraphernalia rather than to the armour of warriors.⁶

In conclusion, it would be difficult to understand many of kabuki's more idiosyncratic components if its connections with the worlds of the supernatural and shamanism were to be forgotten by audiences and scholars.

HISTORY OF KABUKI: AN OVERVIEW

The history of kabuki is usually divided into five major periods which span the years from the very first performances around the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present time.

A) PERIOD OF THE ORIGINS.

Although the first documented mention of kabuki odori (kabuki dance) appears in 1603, it is clear that the dance had been around since at least the last years of the sixteenth century. All authors agree that this entertainment developed from the furyū tradition, especially from a furyū adaptation of the nembutsu odori. The word nembutsu stands for the repetition of the prayer Namu Amidabutsu (often translated as “Homage to Amida Buddha”) which was very popular in the Amidistic sects of Mahayana Buddhism. A dance to propagate the use of this prayer was developed by a number of famous Buddhist missionaries at least as early as the tenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century the nembutsu dances had become a popular entertainment with all sorts of embellishments, fancy dresses, and use of props. Okuni's nembutsu went far enough in the direction of an outrageous mixture of sacred and outlandish elements that it deserved the name kabuki. She dressed in Portuguese pants, with a foreign style hat, or used men's clothes, even sometimes wearing a cross hanging from her neck. She mixed the nembutsu with profane popular dances and did not refrain from mimicking the daring looks and actions of the kabuki mono of her days.

Borrowing from the nō the idea of having ghosts appear on the stage, Okuni substituted for the ghosts of famous historical heroes that of a recent folk idol, the kabuki mono Nagoya Sanza, who had been her lover and been killed in a brawl a short time before. Sanza's ghost would appear on the stage from the audience and dance with Okuni, re-living the eccentric kabuki-like exploits of his lifetime. These also included scenes of sexual innuendo with the lady of the tea-house and of explicit voyeurism in a bathhouse, notorious for employing sexy young girls to attract young customers.

The great success of this first form of kabuki (usually called Okuni kabuki) inspired groups of prostitutes to expand in imitation of Okuni's kabuki odori, making out of the sensual dances an instrument to advertise their services. The exotic three stringed instrument called the shamisen, which was to become identified with kabuki and jōruri music, was introduced at this time. Comical scenes featuring the clowning antics known as saruwaka, and comical soliloquies with pantomimes, became very popular, as did the use of women playing men's roles and vice-versa. The costumes were extremely elegant and, especially in the bathhouse scenes (furoagari no asobi), very revealing. Exoticism was also evident in the props, such as the long pipes loved by the kabuki mono and the tobacco-box (smoking was a novelty imported from the “foreign barbarians”), the rare imported tiger or leopard furs, and so on. This type of performances was called onna kabuki (women kabuki) or yūjo kabuki (prostitute kabuki).

Success was enormous with the city audiences, and a number of daimyō even invited famous courtesans and their troupes to their castles, sometimes in very distant regions of Japan, to celebrate special occasions. The shogunate, from the very beginning highly suspicious of this entertainment form, at least as early as 1608 began to issue decrees against kabuki, calling it a “national disturbance” of morality. The final decrees of 1629 are considered to have ended the onna kabuki, and were occasioned by the scandal of important daimyō indulging in playing the host in their castles to entire troupes and by a riot in Kyoto during which samurai from rival groups stormed the onna kabuki stage, leaving many people dead and the stage completely destroyed.

The prohibition against the courtesans appearing on the stage left the field free for troupes of young boys, the wakashu, who already had performed either as part of onna kabuki or in their own wakashu kabuki shows before the prohibition. The wakashu were boys between eleven and fifteen; that is, before the gempuku ceremony in which the forehead was shaven as a sign of coming of age. Their business was no different from that of the female prostitutes.⁷ The wakashu shows brought into kabuki some new elements, such as the juggling and acrobatics known as hōka, and the tight-rope walking called kumo mai. Under the influence of a number of nō and kyōgen masters, who had lost the possibility of working in their field because of political reasons and had joined the wakashu kabuki troupe led by Kanzaburō, the wakashu developed kyōgen-like scenarios for relatively well developed comical plays. Under the protection of the Shogun Iemitsu, who often summoned Kanzaburō and his boys to the castle for his pleasure, wakashu kabuki prospered and was widely diffused, but caused the same problems as the onna kabuki. As soon as the protector Iemitsu died, his successor prohibited the wakashu kabuki in a definitive way in 1652, taking occasion from a series of scandals involving the wakashu, such as a double suicide of the wife of a daimyō with a wakashu, and a serious riot between two daimyō over the favors of wakashu in Osaka.

The prohibition of the wakashu kabuki was overcome through the shaving of the maegami (front hair), which made the boys officially yarō (adult men), but deprived them of what was considered one of the most enticing features of their sex-appeal. Moreover, the prohibition of the most blatantly erotic scenes, songs, and dances forced the actors to develop the dramatic element of their shows, a development reenforced by the contributions of the nōgaku actors. Although remaining in popular use, the now suspicious name kabuki was officially dropped in favor of monomane kyōgen zukushi. This phase marks the beginning of yarō kabuki as at least partly spoken drama in the realistic manner of kyōgen.

As a consequence of the tremendous fire in Edo in 1657, entire sections of the city, including its seven large theatres, were destroyed. Only four theatres were rebuilt, this time following criteria to serve the new dramatic requirements, with wider stages which incorporated the old hashigakari; by 1668, the first hanamichi had been built, and became a feature which was to become typical and essential to every kabuki stage. Around the same time, in 1664, the first plays in two acts, and soon afterwards in three and four acts, appeared, and programs were extended to a whole day of performance. For the first time the draw curtain (hikimaku) was introduced and large elements of décor (ōdōgu), which at the time appeared very realistic, became usual. The development of the dramatic element, combined with the prohibition against the appearance on the stage of women and with the realism that had characterized kabuki from its beginning were conditions that created the phenomenon of the onnagata, or female impersonators. They were, of course, necessary to perform such favorite plays as those set in the tea-houses of the red light districts, and to execute the dance element in the performances, which was never completely abolished; the latter soon flourished again, building on the dance traditions of the wakashu who had in the meantime grown into yarō.

The shaving of the front hair had marked the end of the acting career of the wakashu when they turned fifteen. The new regulation requiring every actor to shave his front hair regardless of age made possible a life-long career as a performer. This new situation allowed the time necessary to develop mature talent and truly professional skills, unthinkable in young boys. A system of role-type specialization was established, and became more and more specific and complex as required by the growth and diversification of the plays. Actors became known by the name of their specialty, as wakaoyama for the roles of beautiful young woman, tachiyaku for the main male roles, yakkogata for the servant roles, dōkeyaku for such comical roles as the master of the brothel, and katakiyaku for villains.

B) GENROKU KABUKI.

Strictly speaking, the Genroku period covers only 16 years (1688-1703). The great fame of this highpoint of Tokugawa culture in the arts, literature, and theatre gave the name of Genroku to an undetermined, but much longer, period of time extending into the 1740's. To the Genroku culture belong such famous poets as the master of haikai poetry, Matsuo Bashō; the greatest among Japan's novelists, Ihara Saikaku; a score of the most admired ukiyo-e painters, and Japan's most celebrated dramatist, Chikamatsu Monzaemon. During this time the “floating world”⁸ achieved those characteristics that made it a symbol of the townspeople culture. Kabuki and jōruri were so deeply a part of this period that, to the present time, they essentially reflect its glories and its limitations, and are often considered as its synthesis.

The dramatists of the early Genroku period, although still apprentices in the craft of putting long plays together, already faced the difficult task of providing enough materials for day-long performances in at least ten major theatres in the three largest Japanese cities. They coped with an ingenuity that at times betrays their inexperience, finding subjects from every source they could: traditional myths, folk legends, episodes of Japanese history, and the scandal of the day such as the latest amorous adventures of celebrities among the courtesans, and vendettas and the double suicides that had stunned the gossipy red light districts. We know the contents of many of these plays because of the exhaustive outlines contained in the two volumes of the Collection of Genroku Kabuki Masterpieces (Genroku kabuki kessaku shū). The general impression is that of rather complicated, melodramatic plots hastily and arbitrarily put together, with the generous use of fantastic interventions by spirits and gods mixed with realistic scenes. Webber finds in “this jumble of ill-conceived fantastical melodrama” five “primary plot patterns, namely the house-strife pattern, the revenge pattern, the onryō pattern, the keisei pattern and the hito-kami pattern.”⁹

The keisei (courtesan) pattern expands on the favorite yūjo-kai (whore-buying) scenes, a favorite since the onna kabuki time, and adds the many unhappy consequences of ill-fated love affairs in the red light districts. The house-strife (oie-sōdō) pattern makes free use in a frequently historically inexact way of the conflicts regarding succession to power in a feudal house: the rightful heir is usually in distress at the beginning of the play but eventually succeeds in achieving his inheritance despite the usurpations of the villain. The revenge-pattern had its most famous example in the later Chūshingura. The onryō pattern, however, which gave the structure to the first known Okuni play, can be considered in some cases a variation of the revenge pattern on a surreal or suprareal level, when the angry ghost takes the vendetta into his own hands and torments the object of his revenge, appearing in his own terrifying shape or as an animal or an insect.¹⁰ Both the onryō and hito-kami patterns open kabuki plays to the sphere of the “other dimension,” the superhuman and the spectacular: in the hito-kami (man-god) pattern either a man is elevated to the sphere of a half-god, thus suddenly displaying superhuman and invincible powers, or a god appears disguised as a man, with the same result of deciding in a spectacular way issues that no human could solve.

The actual plays are difficult to summarize because of a maze of characters, subplots, complications, and climaxes. The preference for an apparently religious resolution featuring divine intervention is evident. Although almost buried in secular materials geared solely to entertain, this deus ex machina resolution fulfills the important function of providing a reassuring ending, which was a must for the Genroku audience. The obligatory optimism of the early Genroku was soon to end: in Chikamatsu's later plays a highly poetical, complex outlook on the variety of possibilities in interpreting the human tragedy marked a much deeper and more mature dramaturgy which, however, belongs primarily to the realm of the jōruri world.

The importance of the actor in kabuki has been recognized by most theatre historians, who do not hesitate to attribute a high priority to the contributions of the great performers. Genroku kabuki saw the flourishing of strong personalities, who established the main roles and styles which became standard in the kabuki world. Sakata Tōjūrō (1647-1706), a legendary star of the Kyoto-Osaka area, became the paragon of the wagoto style, that is, the gentle, soft (wa), romantic hero, as opposed to Ichikawa Danjūrō (1660-1704), the legendary champion of the aragoto style, the oversize, supernatural, rough (arai) hero, especially loved in the Edo area. Both artists are the subject of much Japanese literature, with many episodes illustrating their unique artistic contributions to the establishment of the highest standards in the art of kabuki performance, their exceptional popularity and eccentric way of life, and the incredible manifestations of grief by fans at their death. The kumadori make-up created by Danjūrō for his aragoto roles has remained a symbol of kabuki to the present time.

Also belonging to Genroku kabuki is Yoshizawa Ayame (1673-1719), the most famous onnagata, whose principles and sayings were summarized by the actor/playwright Fukuoka Yagoshirō in the often quoted Ayamegusa (Words of Ayame).¹¹ From Ayame derive the codification of the teaching and the practice of extending the impersonation of a woman to the actor's private life, in an effort to achieve true realism on the stage. This tradition was followed to the extremes of wearing female clothes all the time, carefully concealing the fact of being married and having fathered children, and even tacitly being allowed to bathe in the women's section of the public bathhouse, a practice which was prohibited in 1842.

The onnagata excelled in dance plays, developing high skills such as the quick change of costumes later called shichi-henge (seven transformations) which made out of the onnagata art a complex and unique achievement in theatre history; the actor achieves and sustains the feminine grace and sensuality of a lightly flowing rhythm in spite of the extraordinary requirements of resilience and strength to perform in incredibly heavy costumes and wigs. The onnagata became the wonder of even the professional female entertainers who were influenced by the actors regarding the latest fashions and sophisticated manners for use in their own profession.

During the Genroku period the present distinction between “historical plays” (jidaimono or period pieces) and “domestic plays” (sewamono) began, as well as the practice of merging the characteristics of both genres in one.

In 1699 began the publication of the yearly Yakusha kuchi jamisen, which contains a critical evaluation of the plays and actors of the year. It was in three volumes, one for each of the three major centers of theatre activity, Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. This unique example in the history of theatre criticism continued for almost three hundred years, providing a treasury of information having no parallel in the West.

The first two decades of the eighteenth century were marred by unfortunate events for kabuki: the tragic death in Edo of the barely forty-four year old Danjūrō at the hand of a fellow actor in 1704, and the death of Tōjūrō in Kyoto two years later deprived the two kabuki capitals of their greatest stars. The scandalous affair in 1714 involving the handsome kabuki actor Ikushima Shingorō and Lady Ejima, a lady-in-waiting to the mother of Shogun Ietsugi led to the closing and dismantling of the Yamamura-za (thereby reducing to three Edo's functioning kabuki theatres) and a stiffening of censorship of the content of the plays, with the elimination of the popular themes based on events from real life. The 1722 ban on the shinjūmono, the double suicide plays, further limited kabuki from capitalizing on the sensational contemporary scandals which had been among its chief box-office attractions. Moreover, succeeding to the great generation of giant star-actors was a generation of imitators, who were concerned with repeating the patterns originated by their famous predecessors, thus starting a trend of standardization that greatly dampened the spontaneous vitality of early kabuki.

All these elements together made kabuki especially vulnerable to the competition of the triumphant puppets. The best playwrights had been alienated from kabuki by the arrogance of the actors, and jōruri had succeeded in securing the collaboration not only of Chikamatsu, but also of Takeda Izumo (1691-1759) and Namiki Sōsuke (1695-1751), who were probably the two best craftmen in the dramaturgic structuring of plays Japan ever had. The puppets scored enormous success with plays which ranged from Chikamatsu's masterwork Kokusenya kassen (The Battles of Coxinga) in 1716, to the two great mid-century works, Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (The Secret of Sugawara Calligraphy, 1746) and Yoshitsune sembonzakura (The Thousand Cherry Trees, 1747), and, in 1748, the all-time greatest box-office success, the Kanadehon chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers). The kabuki had no choice but to adapt these plays, and in so doing absorb from the puppets, along with their dramaturgy, a number of important scenic and technical elements, as well as the use of the jōruri chanter and music, and the imitation of certain stylized dance movements.

C) GOLDEN AGE OF KABUKI IN EDO.

The revitalization of kabuki drama through the adaptation of jōruri masterpieces opened the way to a complete victory of kabuki over the puppets, to the point that by 1780 there was no theatre left in Japan presenting daily jōruri performances.

During this time Edo reached a high point of cultural activity, in which even the samurai began to participate in the development of kabuki music. The increased wealth of powerful merchants meant generous patronage and effective leadership in developing the culture of a city that had become the largest in the world. A long period of peace and the transformation of kabuki into a recognized art form had softened the hostility of the authorities. It was known to everybody that some samurai indulged in shamisen music and were playing with the kabuki orchestra concealed behind the box at the side of the stage. While vocal and shamisen music had become the object of serious study, dance reached a highpoint of sophistication with the development of the shosagoto, dance plays which not only involved the performance of onnagata but also involved male roles.

With the flourishing of great plays, of new and more sophisticated music and singing, and with great progress in the quality of dance Edo kabuki developed into a mature form of total theatre. Famous actors again gave splendor to the stage: in Edo Ichikawa Danjūrō II (1689-1758) and Danjūrō IV (1712-1778), Nakamura Nakazō I (1736-1790) and Matsumoto Kōshirō IV (1737-1802) brought the acting skill to a new plateau. Theatre architecture and stage decor made great progress with the introduction of an underroof that improved acoustics, and the building of traps that made possible the lifting and lowering of an entire stage set, while the first revolving stage as a permanent feature of the theatre was built in the Nakamura-za in Edo; the date, declare several related sources, was 1793, at least a century before its counterpart was “invented” by Karl Lautenschläger for the Residenztheater in Munich (1896).¹² The roofed, nō-like stage was now replaced, at least in some theatres, with a frontal stage occupying the whole width of the theatre. …

KABUKI AND JōRURI PLAYWRIGHTS

The social position and the modus operandi applying to professional playwrights attached to kabuki and jōruri companies were very similar. Many playwrights wrote for both genres, and oftentimes the plays written for one genre were adapted for the other.

In kabuki the first playwrights were the actors themselves. During the earliest period, Okuni is probably to be credited with the original adaptation of the structure of a mugen nō (consisting in the conjuration of a ghost, its appearance, a dialogue between shaman and ghost, and the appeasement of the ghost through the workings of the shaman) to her extravagant new show; moreover, she put the ghost of a recently deceased notorious kabuki mono in the place of traditional ghost-heroes as the protagonist of her play.

The additions/developments by the onna kabuki and wakashu kabuki were such revue-style numbers as chorus-girl line-ups, erotic dances, the yūjo-kai (buying a prostitute) scene in the tea-house, the furoagari (bathhouse) scene, and the saruwaka kyōgen (comical antics scenes), all of which hardly required the efforts of a professional playwright, but did utilize the skills of actors who adapted their experience in a number of other performing arts, such as kyōgen and furyō, to the requirements of the new entertainment.

A professional playwright became necessary with the development of full length plays in the yarō kabuki, when the revue-style entertainment was severely curtailed by the shogunate and kabuki was renamed monomane kyōgen zukushi. The first playwrights' names appearing on kabuki programs—as distinguished from those of the actors—are Miyako Dennai of Edo and Fukui Yagoemon of Osaka in the 1661-62 season.

As a member of the company, the playwright was not esteemed on a high literary level, but was rather employed as an artisan at the level of the backstage helpers. His task was that of putting together plots and dialogues conceived as “vehicles” for the actor. Rather than stressing the dramatic structure and the value of the play in itself, kabuki playwriting strictly followed the function of suiting the star's whims. This was one of the major reasons why the best playwrights turned to the puppets, where—without the interference of the actors—their script would be performed unchanged. The method of putting the scripts together was mostly via a collaboration between the main playwright (tatesakusha) and his assistants, who would take care of minor scenes or even entire acts not considered central to the action. The final approval of the text belonged to the main actor of the company, who would freely introduce the modifications he wanted for his histrionic purposes.

It would have been far from the concern of kabuki playwrights to publish their playscripts for readers. Texts of kabuki plays began to be published only after the Meiji Restoration, towards the end of the nineteenth century, at the same time as the phenomenon of independent men of letters becoming kabuki playwrights emerged in Japan.

The social status of the professional playwright was also reflected in his earnings, which were on a level with those of a costumer, and far below the earnings of an actor.

The first playwright given credit as such in the program of a kaomise kōgyō (“face showing performance,” the important annual show at the beginning of the theatre season introducing the company for the year) was Tominaga Heibei (fl. 1673-1697) in 1680. Heibei started his career as an actor but changed to playwriting. Eight of his plays remain, all of them belonging to the oie-mono (great family strife) genre, which deals with the succession to the inheritance of a daimyō family, usually usurped by a villain, and eventually restored to the rightful heir. This genre provided popular situations that fostered the development of certain roles; among these were the situation of the weak young lord in distress, his “golden hearted” courtesan/mistress sacrificing herself to help him out of his misery, the faithful retainer giving his life for the young lord, the cruel villain plotting the ruin of the innocent, and so on.

The dramatization of contemporary events was forbidden, but the kabuki artists not only found a way around the prohibition via the transparent, but face-saving, transferral of the action to a past period of history, but also made out of “disguise” a most entertaining and quite sophisticated characteristic of kabuki playwriting. The game of building plays and roles on two levels, obvious and concealed, became an essential esthetic factor, always leaving a sense of double-entendre, typical of drama in periods of strict censorship. Parallel to the process of placing contemporary events in the past was the transferral of the old to the new, offering to the actor the possibility of modernizing and bringing within the realm of actuality historical figures and legendary heroes. The appearance on the stage of the typical contemporary Edo dandy type, the otokodate Sukeroku, was seen by the Genroku audience both as a celebration of the latest fashions in the red light districts and as the transparent revival of the famous medieval hero Soga no Gorō seeking to take revenge on his father's murderer. While the middle-class otokodate's triumph over the wicked samurai Ikyū pleased the mostly middle-class audience, the true identity of the historical samurai hero reenforced the Tokugawa values of samurai ethics and superiority. There was always a layer that satisfied the censorship, and one that satisfied the audience at large in a subtle, always face-saving, and shifting game. The taste for the game of double identity was highly appreciated by the Edo audiences. It was also extended to the interpretation of the choreography of climactic multiple mie, when the final tableau would represent, besides the obvious positions of the actors relative to each other as a result of the action, a beautifully arranged symbolic picture, such as a crane, (symbol of long life and prosperity), a suggestion of other animals, trees, or of natural phenomena which were transparently meaningful to the Edo audience. The Japanese words for the “dual identity-double meaning” game are yatsushi and mitate—an esthetic key to the appreciation of both playwriting and performance.

CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON

The recognized master of playwriting for the jōruri and kabuki stages is Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). Western scholars recognize Chikamatsu's greatness and sometimes use the appellation “the Shakespeare of Japan” when describing his position in Japanese playwriting. Unfortunately, however, they have dedicated a very modest amount of solid research to his life and work.¹⁴ The western neglect represents a sharp contrast with the plentiful literature in Japanese on every aspect of Chikamatsu's work.

Chikamatsu spent all his life in a country that had been completely sealed off from any meaningful foreign presence. His literary activity occurred at a time completely dominated by the new Tokugawa order and was primarily spent in writing plays for the puppets, aiming at the favor of an audience that was gathering in the red light districts for the specific purpose of being entertained. His premises are therefore quite different from those of contemporary European playwrights, and his frame of reference should always be kept in mind for a fair understanding of his art.

Chikamatsu's life illustrates the peculiar situation of floating mobility for the rōnin, the masterless samurai who neither had a position with the shogunal government nor was at the service of a daimyō. We do not know where he was born. Several villages in the vicinity of Kyoto claim the honor of being the birth place of Japan's greatest dramatist. Born as the second son of the minor samurai family Sugimori, he was first called Nobumori, a name he changed to Chikamatsu, possibly because of the Chikamatsu temple where he stayed for some time before dedicating himself to the theatre. We know very little about the years of his youth beyond the tradition of his staying at the Buddhist monastery where he probably learned the religious doctrines he shows such knowledge of in his plays. Surviving documents prove that from at least his nineteenth year he was in the service of a Kyoto nobleman, Ogimachi Kimmochi (1653-1733), who held a high rank at court and was known as a writer of puppet plays for the chanter Uji Kaga no jō. This seems to be Chikamatsu's first contact with the world of the puppets. The influence of Chikamatsu's highly educated employer is usually considered decisive for the young dramatist in the development of his theatrical talents; it probably also figured strongly in providing Chikamatsu with the high degree of literary and classical knowledge which are at the foundation of his plays. The death of his protector and employer placed before Chikamatsu the necessity of finding work. It was at this time that he decided to “step down” socially and join a theatre company as playwright. Chikamatsu's direct personal experience of the different worlds of the samurai, the nobility, the clergy, townspeople, and kabuki and puppet artists gave his genius an unusually wide background within the limited Genroku society.

Japanese experts have not found evidence to establish which was Chikamatsu's first play, nor do they know how many plays he wrote for either kabuki or jōruri at the start of his career. Most probably he began as an assistant to the main playwright who was considered the author of the play. None of the approximately forty texts Chikamatsu wrote directly for kabuki has survived, but we know the contents of about twenty of them. Their usual theme is similar to those in the works of Tominaga Heibei; that is, an oiemono plot of struggle within a daimyō family with built-in scenes involving courtesans and the colorful red light districts. While Heibei had stressed intrigue and plot, Chikamatsu developed the psychological and poetical insight into the struggling, complex human heart, a trait which appeared in its full maturity in his double-suicide plays, the shinjūmono. There, perhaps in its highest tragic expression, we find the classical conflict of Japanese drama between the feelings of one's heart (ninjō) and the severe duties of feudal ethics (giri).

Chikamatsu's work is usually divided into four periods, the first being that of his early kabuki contributions, from the unknown time of his debut to about 1684. The most famous play of this period, according to some authors, is Fujitsubo no onryō, a play attributed—but not unanimously—to Chikamatsu. The play scored a great success because of an effective coup-de-théâtre, the on-stage transformation of Lady Fujitsubo's ghost from a wisteria flower into a snake.

The first great success of Chikamatsu as a playwright for the jōruri came at the beginning of his second period; the play, Shusse Kagekiyo (Kagekiyo Victorious, 1684), marks the end of the crudely structured puppet plays of the ko jōruri (old jōruri) and the beginning of the shin jōruri, the new kind of puppet plays that led the way to the series of masterpieces which made jōruri a formidable competitor of kabuki. The innovation Chikamatsu introduced into the primarily narrative ko jōruri was the use of kabuki's dramatic structure and living dialogue.

As Chikamatsu collaborated with the great kabuki actor Sakata Tōjūrō, between 1684 and 1705, he wrote a number of kabuki plays, which extended into the third period (1703-1724). From 1705, however, he began to write exclusively for the puppets, and moved the following year to Osaka as staff playwright (tatesakusha) of the Takemoto-za, managed by Takeda Izumo I (?-1747), in which the famous chanter Takemoto Gidayū (1651-1714) was active. The genre of puppet plays for which Chikamatsu became especially famous, the shinjūmono, debuted with his Sonezaki shinjū (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki) in 1703. The event that prompted Chikamatsu to write it occurred just one month before the performances began. Other famous love-suicides plays are Shinjū mannensō (The Love Suicides at the Women's Temple, 1708), and Shinjū ten no Amijima (The Love Suicides at Amijima, 1721). These outstanding examples of shinjūmono show three different spiritual attitudes to self-inflicted death in the souls of the protagonists. The oldest play interprets death as a simple escape to paradise; the second presents a darker sense of doubt about the afterlife; and the third stresses the sense of death as a specter affirming the preciousness of life.¹⁵

Love Suicides at Amijima belongs to the last and final period of Chikamatsu's activity, which is usually dated from the death of Gidayū in 1714 to Chikamatsu's death in 1725. Another well known work of this period is The Battle of Coxinga (Kokusenya kassen), a very complex play that combines heroic and fantastic elements with moving love elements and an obligatory happy ending, after touching sacrifices in the name of the Tokugawa ethics.

Chikamatsu's puppet plays were written with a deep poetic feeling for the intricate ambivalence of the human heart. The multifaceted characters were difficult for the puppets to interpret adequately; at the time they were changing in size and complexity of manipulation, requiring slower timing in the dialogue and more explicitly “black-and-white” role characterizations. As a consequence, Chikamatsu's plays were soon replaced by new dramas tailored for the new needs.

Although Chikamatsu remains as the literary giant of Japanese playwriting, his successors, especially Takeda Izumo II (1691-1756) and Namiki Sōsuke (1695-1751) succeeded in bypassing the master's technical skill in dramatic structure, and producing the most successful and famous of all Japanese plays, Kanadehon Chūshingura.

THE CHūSHINGURA

Among all Japanese plays the most translated and commented on by non-Japanese scholars is Kanadehon Chūshingura.¹⁶ Literally kanadehon means “copybook of the Japanese syllabary,” which stands for “model, standard”; and chūshingura means “storehouse of loyalty.” The play has been, however, translated with many different titles, such as The Forty-seven Models of Loyalty, The Forty-Seven Samurai, The Forty-Seven Ronin, and The Treasury of Loyal Retainers.

The authorship of this complex eleven-act drama is shared by three playwrights. Scholars are not able to determine with certainty who wrote which part. Although the name of Takeda Izumo II is almost always mentioned first, contemporary scholarship accords to Namiki Sōsuke credit for the general organization of the play. The weaker acts are usually attributed to Miyake Shōraku, who has the reputation of a hack. Credit for the effective style of the major part of the play is given to the creative and talented playwright Takeda.

Chūshingura dramatizes an episode of loyalty to a feudal lord even beyond his death and at the cost of the retainers' own lives. It summarizes all the elements of both the jidaimono and sewamono because it mingles its characters on the level of the great samurai families and on that of the red light district brothels. It is one of the most transparent examples of the “disguise” technique of transferring a sensational event of the present to the past; in other words, it presents one of those forbidden topics which could only be performed under assumed names and in the setting of a non-Tokugawa period. The play's extraordinary success is also attributed to the combination of the subject matter with the timing of its appearance. Within the drab reality of the rather meaningless and dull samurai life following a century of peace under the Tokugawa police state, the news of the vendetta carried out on the fourteenth day of the twelfth month, 1702, by forty-seven rōnin to avenge the honor of their feudal lord, the daimyō Asano Naganori (1667-1701), spread like fire. It was like a sudden rediscovery of the reality of those samurai ideals that had been preached endlessly, and also had penetrated the world of society's lower strata as a recognized code of morality.

The leader of the long planned and successfully realized vendetta, Oishi Kuranosuke, placed the severed head of the villain Kira Yoshinaga on the grave of the defunct lord, and gave himself up to the police, together with the other forty-six rōnin. The shogunate punished the slaying with death, but in recognition of their noble motives the defendants were given the honor of committing suicide by seppuku. The forty-seven avengers became national heroes and were referred to as gishi (righteous warriors) rather than as plain rōnin. The subject matter was immediately picked up by playwrights, and a number of kabuki and puppet plays were written about it. Chikamatsu also wrote a puppet play on the subject, Kenkō hōshi monomiguruma (The Sightseeing Carriage of the Priest Kenkō), followed by a sequel, the still preserved one act play Goban Taiheiki, and introduced most of the slightly changed names which were later used in the more successful play by Takeda, Namiki, and Miyoshi.

Most of the many plays that were actually written on the subject are no longer extant. The single masterpiece, Kanadehon Chūshingura, seems to have capitalized on all the possible theatrical situations that such an involved and emotionally rich subject could offer. The variety of backgrounds, shifting from the palaces of the powerful to the brothels and the shrines, as well as the country spring and winter outdoor scenes, are effectively used to underline the highlights of the plot developing over eleven acts and occupying an almost impossibly long performance time. While not reaching the poetic individuality and refined psychological insights of Chikamatsu's mature dramatic masterpieces, Chūshingura succeeds in providing melodrama at its best, with sharply defined black-and-white characters, highly emotional heroic sacrifices of personal honor and life, clear-cut conflicts, highly theatrical battle scenes, and the eventual punishment of the villain, followed by the final triumph of both official governmental justice and personal ethics, through the heroes' honorable death.

GEIDAN: ACTORS' MEMOIRS

Among the important sources for the study of kabuki are numerous memoirs of actors (geidan, or talks about the craft of the actor). They contain precious insights drawn from episodes of famous actors' stage careers, as well as advice to younger fellow actors on how to acquire special skills, and general principles about artistic training. These memoirs were generally transmitted only to a restricted number of members of the family, as was the case for Zeami's and Zenchiku's treatises on the secret tradition of the nō. In recent years, however, especially since World War II, even in the secretive nōgaku world a number of famous performers became willing to make their “talks-on-art” public, thus providing wide audiences with published geidan by such great nōgaku artists as Kita Roppeita (Roppeita geidan), Umewaka Manzaburō (Manzaburō geidan), and Nomura Manzō (Kyōgen no michi).

Kabuki- and jōruri-related geidan by famous actors from the Genroku period to the present are by far less systematic and less theoretical than the classic treatises on the nō; they are rather fragmentary and occasional, and aim at instructing about specific acting problems or at recording episodes which illustrate specific accomplishments, rather than at speculating about the ultimate nature of art.

The most famous among kabuki-related geidan is the Yakushabanashi (also known as Yakusha rongo and translated as The Actors' Analects), which collects seven major pieces by different authors of the Genroku era.¹⁷

The first piece, Butai hyakkajo (One Hundred Items on the Stage, by Sugi Kuhei, the teacher of the famous kabuki actor Sakata Tōjūrō I), opens the series as a general introduction to such problems as the lowering of contemporary artistic standards, the feelings an actor has to bring to a role, the need for teamwork among actors, and so on. The writings that follow in this collection develop in more detail the items touched upon by Kuhei.

The second short treatise, Gei kagami (Mirror for Actors, by Tominaga Heibei) is a very important source of information for the history of pre-Genroku kabuki. Its four short chapters outline simple dramatic sketches of successful early kabuki shows which reflect the atmosphere of the red light districts, where the subject of male and female prostitution is taken for granted as a background for humorous situations.

The best known among the seven pieces is the third, the already mentioned Ayamegusa (Words of Ayame), set down by Fukuoka Yagoshirō as a guide for the onnagata, to be kept in the highest secrecy. Yoshizawa Ayame (1673-1719) is considered as the model and the great master of onnagata. His teachings and memoirs fill twenty-nine chapters, which contain, among many other pointers, the often quoted advice to the onnagata to behave in private as he does when performing on the stage. The Ayamegusa is also important as a source of information about Ayame's life and his artistic career, and, in general, because of the many details on how to achieve the best artistic results when performing as an onnagata.

The fourth and fifth pieces, the Nijinshū (Dust in the Ears, written down by the playwright Kaneko Kichizaemon), and the Zoku nijinshū (Sequel to Dust in the Ears) collect a number of episodes and sayings about and by the great Sakata Tōjūrō and other famous kabuki actors of the Genroku period. What Ayame did for the onnagata in the Ayamegusa, Tōjūrō did for the male lover's roles in the Nijinshū.

The sixth treatise, Kengaishū (The Kengai Collection, recorded by Somewaka Jūrobei) expands on the personality of Tōjūrō, his excellent intuition as an actor, his respect for his fellow performers, his collaboration with Chikamatsu, and his skills as a manager.

The Analects' last piece, Sadoshima nikki (Sadoshima's Diary), contains information about the life of the actor Sadoshima Chōgorō (1700-1757), followed by the Shosa no hiden (The Secret Tradition of the Kabuki Dance), which consists of eleven short items of practical advice on how to perform kabuki dance. …

Notes

1. Webber, The Essence of Kabuki: A Study of Folk Religious Ritual Elements in the Early Kabuki Theatre, 76, and passim for further information on the subject. See also Jackson, “Kabuki Narratives of Male Homoerotic Desire in Saikaku and Mishima,” 464, for an interpretation of the verb kabuku as “to bend forward” and “to be aberrant,” with clear suggestion of the strong homosexual component present in the kabuki world from its very beginning.

2. Ortolani, Das Kabukitheater: Kulturgeschichte der Anfänge, 24-31.

3. Shively, “Bakufu versus Kabuki,” 326-356.

4. The above quoted dissertation by Webber, The Essence of Kabuki. …, is the first systematic study of the subject in English.

5. Webber, Ibid., 93-98, gives an English translation of the document, the title of which she reads Kunijo kabuki eshi. A German translation is to be found in Ortolani, Das Kabukitheater: Kulturgeschichte der Anfänge, 69-74.

6. Webber, Ibid., 191.

7. Ortolani, Das Kabukitheater. …, 108-117.

8. Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, gives an excellent picture of ukiyo, the “floating world” of the red light districts.

9. Webber, The Essence of Kabuki. …, 130.

10. Webber, Ibid., 130-131.

11. Dunn and Torigoe, tr. The Actors' Analects contains both the Japanese text and the English translation of Ayame's treatise.

12. See the paragraph on “Theatre Buildings, Stage and decor,” for further information on the subject.

13. Ernst, The Kabuki Theatre, 127.

14. In English, after Keene's pioneer work of translation and introduction of Chikamatsu's major plays in 1961 no major book-length study was dedicated to him until the recent Circles of Fantasy: Conventions in the Plays of Chikamatsu by Gerstle.

15. Gerstle, Ibid., 152-153.

16. The literature in Japanese about the play is enormous. In English, a recent abridged kabuki acting version is in Brandon, Chūshingura: Studies in Kabuki and the Puppet Theatre, while Keene's translation of the original jōruri text remains the best suited for reading.

17. See an English translation in Dunn and Torigoe, trs., The Actor's Analects.