Classical Japanese drama is an extraordinary phenomenon, and Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) its greatest playwright. He has been called the Japanese Shakespeare, but whereas Shakespeare wrote some 37 plays, each lasting on stage between two and three hours, Chikamatsu wrote over a hundred, many lasting in performance all day. Quantity isn't everything, needless to say, but the plays in this volume suggest real brilliance, both of this playwright and of the tradition as a whole.
Up to now English readers and would-be directors have had to rely on the 11 plays translated by Donald Keene in Major Plays of Chikamatsu, published in 1961. Andrew Gerstle, who is a professor of Japanese at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, writes that one aspect of Chikamatsu's work not represented in Keene's book is his late plays. Hence this sample to begin the work of filling the gap.
These old Japanese plays were all commissioned by specific theater companies, as were Shakespeare's. As a result they are a mixture of the strange and the accessible, strange because they are written in antique traditions, accessible because they had to provide a gripping experience in the theater, the essence of which doesn't really change.
Most of Chikamatsu's plays were written for puppet performances. This is the celebrated Japanese bunraku, where the puppets are half to two-thirds life size and are manipulated by men shrouded in black standing behind the stage in a half-meter deep trench. The words of all the characters, and those of the narrator, are intoned by a single chanter, though several men take turns in this work as the event progresses. There is also a solo musician who sits by the chanter and plays the shamisen. A few additional musicians operate hidden in the wings.
The chanter has to vary his effects according to the character he's playing and the stage of the drama. It is half-way between a kind of intoned opera and the revenge, betrayal and interaction between men and gods of an Old Icelandic saga.
The translator points out that these later plays of Chikamatsu exhibit a different style from his early and middle-period ones. They are longer, and also range freely from the realistic to the mythological and imaginary.
It's interesting, though it can only be totally coincidental, that Shakespeare's last plays also tend in that direction, if less boldly than Chikamatsu's. Four of the plays in this book are in this later "fantastic" style, while one is the last play Chikamatsu wrote in his old, more realistic manner. They are all extraordinary by any standards.
One, Tethered Steed and the Eight Provinces of Kanto, for instance, features a spirit horse at large in the palace grounds, a giant spider, and a plot as ingenious, and as tightly woven with irony and divided loyalties, as you could find anywhere. It was Chikamatsu's final play, has never been available in English before, and is an undoubted masterpiece.
Another, Lovers Pond in Settsu Province, is far from being the romantic idyll its title suggests. It's an attack on how sexual obsession among the great leads to conflict in the state and the consequent suffering of the people. It features a retired leader who, as a young man, had murdered his wife's first husband. This crime is exposed when his son kills himself after discovering he's married to his own half-sister, his mother's daughter by her first marriage.
In another part of the plot a dissolute and barbarous shogun arranges for his earlier lovers to be butchered in order to give pleasure to his new, young wife.
The more you read about Chikamatsu the more striking the parallels with Shakespeare become. Both, for example, were in the habit of taking pre-existing plays and re-writing them with additional twists and sub-plots.
Perhaps this isn't really remarkable, however. Many art forms were like this for most of human history, and total originality was something that only appeared, and indeed only came to be valued, relatively recently. And there's no way that European Renaissance drama or Japanese theater of the same period can have known about the other. They are alike because theater naturally throws up similar conventions to answer shared needs.
It's arguable that in Europe classical drama strove to be universal, but gave up the ghost when it was overtaken by music. Opera took over the task and led theater to heights that words on their own couldn't achieve. Yet long before the Japanese had already discovered this secret, and their great dramatic forms, with their musical accompaniment, testify to this monumental breakthrough.
Professor Gerstle brings great erudition to this fine book, identifying the Chinese sources of many a proverbial pronouncement, but at the same time rendering the plays in vivid modern English. These are very different talents, and to find them both in one scholar is remarkable.
The plays in this book are all magnificent works. Today's realistic, domestic dramas are scraps of paper blowing in the wind by comparison.
Indeed, in his last plays Chikamatsu can be seen striving to embrace all of life, both as lived and as imagined, in one day in the theater. The greatest artists are always aspiring to comprehensiveness, and Chikamatsu is doing exactly that, and not only in his subject matter but also in his style.
Songs, narratives, dramatic exchanges, tragedy, comedy, and the two mixed together, swift changes of fortune, profound emotional paradoxes -- these are dramas that perhaps no one has ever improved on. Chikamatsu may have been called the Japanese Shakespeare. But readers of this wonderful book may begin to think of Shakespeare instead as having been the English Chikamatsu.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist