Chapter 4--Renaissance--CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON (1653-1725)
We are still
in Kyoto, where Japanese literature has been from its beginnings a thousand
years earlier, but now in a much more stable environment than Chomei's,
as we enter "The Floating World" of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868). I
choose Chikamatsu because he is the greatest dramatist of this Tokugawa
Period, probably of Japanese literature--and that's where the literary
action is in this period. Chikamatsu is even sometimes called the
"Japanese Shakespeare," though he is certainly not that. He has nothing
of the range through comedy, tragedy, and history of Shakespeare, or of
Shakespeare's language complexity (but, then, neither does anyone else
in world literature). No, once the Japanese discovered Shakespeare
in the late 19th century, Shakespeare himself became the Japanese Shakespeare,
so that you can no doubt see as much Shakespeare in Tokyo as in London
or New York any given year (certainly more Shakespeare than Chikamatsu).
But, Chikamatsu did write 130 plays (to Shakespeare's 37), and, as Shakespeare
is the quintessential Elizabethan, Chikamatsu may be seen as the quintessential
representative of the Genroku period (1688-1703), the Japanese Renaissance
period which comes about 100 years later than the Elizabethan period in
England, and has much the same character, as Tokugawa Ieyasu, after his
victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, established the Tokugawa bakufu,
absolute political control, much as Henry Tudor did in England after his
victory at Bosworth Field in 1485. In each case, the period of civil war
was over and a strong royal (shoganate) family was clearly in control,
so that, after this period of stability had been in place about a hundred
years, it generated, in each case, a middle-class urban environment in
which the arts, particularly literature, and particularly dramatic literature,
began to flourish.
And flourish
they did. Chikamatsu's contemporaries include Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693),
an important writer of middle-class fiction, and Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)
the great haiku poet (judged by most to be Japan's greatest poet), and,
since the Tokugawa bakufu endured longer than the Tudor monarchy did, lasted
for 268 years, it finally included such writers as the great comic novelist,
Jippensha Ikku (1766-1831), whose Hizakurige has been called
the Japanese Huckleberry Finn-- with its rascally Edoites
traveling down, not the Mississippi River, but the Tokaido Road from Edo
to Kyoto, living by their wits--and it culminates in the high Edo period,
just before Perry arrives in the "black ships" and opens up Japan, which
some lovers of things Japanese see as the period of high vitality and values
in the life in Tokyo (Edo), particularly in the pleasure quarters, the
world that Kafu gives such a realistic picture of in his largely autobiographical
fiction, the most charming Japanese "world" of them all--Japan just before
it is transformed by the West.
But Chikamatsu
himself did not live to see any of that--just its beginnings in Kyoto--for
he was a dramatist in the early Tokugawa, or Genroku, period, when Japanese
theatre, mature in the Edo period, was first being revolutionized.
The three great classical forms of Japanese drama are the Noh, the Kabuki,
and the Bunraku. The Noh had been developed as largely aristocratic
theatre, with Buddhist themes, in good part by one family of actors and
playwrights--primarily Kaname, the father, and Zeame, the son--contemporary
with Chomei in the medieval period, and offers an almost religious theatre
experience. But the other two developed as part of this middle-class,
secular Renaissance--this floating world with the geisha activity, and
hedonism, at the center. Chikamatsu wrote plays about middle-class
characters with domestic love problems--a merchant falling in love with
a geisha and ruining his life, until the only way out seems to be a double
suicide--after which the lovers expect to spend eternity on the same lotus
leaf, a strange kind of religious hold-over in this distinctly secular
world. Two of his most famous plays follow this plot, as if coming
out of the daily newspaper--the early The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
(1703), and the late
The Love Suicides at Amijima
(1721), which are sometimes compared with Shakespeare's early and late
love- suicide plays Romeo and Juliet (1596) and Antony
and Cleopatra (1608), (I did it myself when I took my first course
in Japanese literature in 1973), but the style in Chikamatu is middle-class
realism--in which he and his contemporaries are about a hundred years ahead
of developments of realism in the West, as if the stories are copied from
contemporary domestic experience.
Chikamatsu
wrote many of his plays for the kabuki theatre, which had developed into
a substantial enterprise much as the London professional theatre had in
Shakespeare's time, and, as Shakespeare's company built the Globe theatre
based on their success in drawing a paying audience that would justify
the investment, so the kabuki, with its revolving stage, hanamichi, and
highly stylized costume, make-up, and acting conventions developed a popular
base that supported building theatres and training acting companies in
a tradition that still exists today, often in the same places in those
great cities of the period, Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo. It, too, was
popular theatre, catering to the groundlings, and, again as Shakespeare's
theatre was, was primarily an actors' theatre (Chikamatsu worked with the
famous kabuki actor, Sakata Tojuro, much as Shakespeare must have worked
with Richard Burbage). But then the last twenty years of his career
Chikamatsu wrote almost entirely for the bunraku, or puppet, theatre, which,
though it had a somewhat longer historical development, now became a popular
theatre in these cities, particularly Osaka, competing with the kabuki
for the same audience and some of the same resources. Chikamatsu's
reason for prefering bunraku was probably that, while the maker of the
puppets, and the trained puppeteers are certainly also important artists
involved in the production of a puppet play, when it comes to the dynamics
of performance, all is in the service of the playwright's script, which
is most highly honored. Though each has its own traditions in music
and dance, the plays the two theatres were doing were often the same plays,
but, as Chikamatsu came to write for the most part for the puppet theatre,
he developed a critical theory for the special qualities of the experience,
and has a famous essay setting out the aesthetic advantages of that theatre.
Perhaps nowhere else in the world has puppet theatre been more important,
in fact, as adult theatre, nor, in its modern variations, more highly developed.
If we take
as perhaps his most representative play, at least among those available
in English translation,
The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, it
is typical in being a contemporary domestic tragedy. Tokubei, the
young hero, is in love with the prostitute, Ohatsu, and, still single,
but in rejecting a wife-to-be his family has picked, is sacrificing his
middle-class, domestic future for her. In the later play, The
Love Suicides at Amijima, on much the same plot, Jihei is betraying
his wife, Osan (who is the most interesting character in the play--one
reason it is seen as a more mature play than
The Love Suicides at
Sonezaki). Both heroes promise to reform, but are obviously
too weak--hardly heroes in any sense except their devotion to their love.
Death is the only way out--double suicide with Ohatsu for Tokubei, or,
in Jihei's case, with Koharu--leaving Osan to pick up the pieces.
These double-suicide plays came out of actual double-suicides, but were
so popular that they provoked others, until the Tokugawa government forbid
the use of shinju (double suicide) in the title, for the death itself
was romanticized in highly sentimental terms, the poetry of that passage
known as the michiyuki (lovers' journey). The most famous
one is the one in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, which Donald
Keene calls "one of the loveliest passages in Japanese literature," a hundred
line lyric in a largely prose drama, as performed by the puppet theatre
narrated in good part by a skilled reader. I will give Ohatsu's closing
lines, shortly before the double suicide:
So, in this mundane world we still have touches of the Heian period lyric, and medieval Buddhist belief.It's strange, this is your unlucky year
Of twenty five, and mine of nineteen.
It's surely proof how deep are our ties
That we who love each other are cursed alike.
All the prayers I have made for this world
To the gods and to the Buddha, I here and now
Direct to the future: in the world to come
May we be reborn on the same lotus!
[Quote some of his theory on the puppet theatre, back
a page.]
[Comment on his other plays, particularly The Battles
of Coxinga.]
See Donald Keene, Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu (Columbia University Press, 1961)