Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Chikamatsu
Monzaemon, original name Sugimori Nobumori (b. 1653,
Echizen [now in Fukui prefecture], Japan—d. Jan. 6,
1725, Amagasaki, Settsu province?), Japanese
playwright, widely regarded as among the greatest
dramatists of that country. He is credited with more
than 100 plays, most of which were written as jōruri
dramas, performed by puppets. He was the first
author of jōruri to write works that not only gave
the puppet operator the opportunity to display his
skill but also were of considerable literary merit.
Chikamatsu was born
into a samurai family, but his father apparently
abandoned his feudal duties sometime between 1664
and 1670, moving the family to Kyōto. While there,
Chikamatsu served a member of the court aristocracy.
The origin of his connection to the theatre is
unknown. Yotsugi Soga (1683; “The Soga Heir”), a
jōruri, is the first play that can be definitely
attributed to Chikamatsu. The following year he
wrote a Kabuki play, and by 1693 he was writing
exclusively for actors. In 1703 he reestablished an
earlier connection with the jōruri chanter Takemoto
Gidayū, and he moved in 1705 from Kyōto to Ōsaka to
be nearer to Gidayū’s puppet theatre, the
Takemoto-za. Chikamatsu remained a staff playwright
for this theatre until his death.
Chikamatsu’s works
fall into two main categories: jidaimono (historical
romances) and sewamono (domestic tragedies). Modern
critics generally prefer the latter plays because
they are more realistic and closer to European
conceptions of drama, but the historical romances
are more exciting as puppet plays. Some of
Chikamatsu’s views on the art of the puppet theatre
have been preserved in Naniwa miyage, a work written
by a friend in 1738. There Chikamatsu is reported to
have said, “Art is something that lies in the
slender margin between the real and the unreal,” and
in his own works he endeavoured accordingly to steer
between the fantasy that had been the rule in the
puppet theatre and the realism that was coming into
vogue.
The characters who
populate Chikamatsu’s domestic tragedies are
merchants, housewives, servants, criminals,
prostitutes, and all the other varieties of people
who lived in the Ōsaka of his day. Most of his
domestic tragedies were based on actual incidents,
such as double suicides of lovers. Sonezaki shinjū
(1703; The Love Suicides at Sonezaki), for example,
was written within a fortnight of the actual double
suicide on which it is based. The haste of
composition is not at all apparent even in this
first example of Chikamatsu’s double-suicide plays,
the archetype of his other domestic tragedies.
Chikamatsu’s most
popular work was Kokusenya kassen (1715; The Battles
of Coxinga), a historical melodrama based loosely on
events in the life of the Chinese-Japanese
adventurer who attempted to restore the Ming dynasty
in China. Another celebrated work is Shinjū ten no
Amijima (1720; Double Suicide at Amijima), still
frequently performed. Despite Chikamatsu’s eminence,
however, the decline in popularity of puppet plays
has resulted in most members of the theatregoing
public being unfamiliar with his work, except in the
abridgments and considerably revised versions used
in Kabuki theatre, on film, and elsewhere. Eleven of
his best-known plays appear in Major Plays of
Chikamatsu (1961, reissued 1990), translated by
Donald Keene. Mainly historical plays are in
Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays (2001), translated by C.
Andrew Gerstle.
Donald Keene