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.
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