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.
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