Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Chikamatsu Monzaemon, born Sugimori Nobumori, was a Japanese writer for both jōruri (the puppet theater later called bunraku) and kabuki, the live-actor drama. Britannica calls him "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist." He is best known for plays about honor-bound lovers who die together in double suicides.

Among his puppet works, roughly 70 are jidaimono (historical romances) and 24 are sewamono (domestic tragedies). Today, the domestic plays are seen as his finest work, especially The Courier for Hell (1711) and The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721). His historical plays are less admired, though The Battles of Coxinga (1715) is still praised.

Biography

Chikamatsu came from a samurai family. His birthplace is disputed; the leading theory places it in Echizen Province, but Hagi in Nagato Province is another possibility. His father, Sugimori Nobuyoshi, was a doctor to the daimyō Matsudaira in Echizen.

His mother was the daughter of Okamoto Ichiku, a physician in the same domain, and Chikamatsu’s younger brother later became the doctor and author Okamoto Ippō. Because doctors serving daimyō held samurai rank, the family had status, but his father lost his position and became a rōnin, a masterless samurai. In his teens, sometime between 1664 and 1670, Chikamatsu moved with his father to Kyoto, where he worked briefly as a page for a noble family. Little else is known about this period.

His first known work, a haiku, appeared in 1671. After his page service, he shows up in records of Gonshō-ji temple in Ōmi Province (now Shiga Prefecture). That temple is thought to be the source of his pen name Chikamatsu, a kun reading of the characters 近松.

Chikamatsu gained recognition as a playwright in 1683 with the Kyoto production of his puppet play about the Soga brothers, The Soga Successors (also called The Soga Heir or Yotsugi Soga). This is believed to be his first play, though 15 earlier anonymous works have sometimes been credited to him. Between 1684 and 1695, he also wrote kabuki plays, most for the actor Sakata Tōjūrō (1647–1709).

From 1695 to 1705, he focused almost entirely on kabuki, then abruptly stopped. The reasons are unknown, but guesses include that puppets were easier to manage than actors, that he lost interest in kabuki as Tōjūrō neared retirement, or that puppet theater’s growing popularity was too profitable to ignore. Scholar C. Andrew Gerstle argues that working with different performers shaped Chikamatsu’s growth: collaborations with kabuki actors led to more realistic characters, while later work with Takeda Izumo pushed him toward heightened theatricality.

In 1705, early editions of The Mirror of Craftsmen of the Emperor Yōmei listed Chikamatsu as a staff playwright. Around 1705 or 1706, he moved from Kyoto to Osaka, where puppet theater was even more popular. His fame peaked with domestic plays about love suicides and the huge success of The Battles of Coxinga in 1715. But audiences later wanted more sensational, gory spectacles and crude humor.

His plays fell out of favor, and the music for many was lost. He died on January 6, 1725, either in Amagasaki, Hyōgo, or Osaka. In 1706, he wrote a three-act puppet play, Goban Taiheiki ("A chronicle of great peace played on a chessboard"), based on the story of the Forty-seven rōnin; it later became the basis for the much better-known Chūshingura. Today, 130 plays are confirmed as his, with another 15 (mostly early kabuki works) suspected to be his.

Dramatic theory

Chikamatsu’s dramatic theory survives mainly in the preface to Hozumi Ikan’s Naniwa Miyage, published after Chikamatsu’s death in 1738. In a recorded interview, he rejected strict imitation of reality, saying, "Art abides in the narrow gap between the flesh and the skin, the real and the unreal." This has been read as a theory of realism that contrasts conceptual realism—which stirs emotion through action, dialogue, social role, and plot—with surface realism, which can seem empty or eerie if it only copies outward appearance.

Reception

Chikamatsu’s bunraku works, including the 24 sewamono, were recognized as high literature during the Meiji and Taishō eras. Many critics say his genius lies in "his masterful depiction of the passions, obsessions, and irrationality of the human heart." Though his jidaimono were more valued in his lifetime, the domestic tragedies are now "the main focus of critical attention and the more frequently performed," praised for their deep portrayals of commoners. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703), one of the earliest domestic puppet plays, was a hit that saved the Takemoto Theater in Osaka. While not considered as strong as The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721), Donald Keene called its death scene "one of the loveliest passages in Japanese literature." The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (1707) is noted in Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 as "of considerable interest for its exploration of female sexuality and its implicit critique of the life of lower-level samurai."