CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON

born 1653, Echizen [now in Fukui prefecture], Japan died Jan. 6, 1725, Osaka original name Sugimori Nobumori Japanese playwright, widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist. He is credited with more than 100 plays, most of which were written for the bunraku (puppet theatre). He was the first author of bunraku plays to write works that not only gave the puppet operator the opportunity to display his skill but also were of considerable literary merit. His works remained popular into the late 20th century. Chikamatsu was born into a samurai family, but his father apparently abandoned his feudal duties sometime between 1664 and 1670, moving the family to Kyoto. While there, Chikamatsu was attached to the court aristocracy. The origin of his connection to the theatre is unknown. Yotsugi Soga (1683; "The Soga Heir"), a bunraku play, 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 plays almost exclusively for live theatre. In 1703 he reestablished an earlier connection with the bunraku chanter Takemoto Gidayu, moving in 1705 from Kyoto to Osaka, to be nearer to Gidayu's puppet theatre, Takemotoza; he remained a writer for Takemotoza until his death. Chikamatsu's works fall into two main categories: historical romances and domestic tragedies. Modern critics generally prefer the latter plays because they are more realistic and closer to Western conceptions of drama. 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 declared, "Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal," and he endeavoured accordingly in his own works to steer between the fantastic nonsense that had been the rule in the puppet theatre and the facile realism that was coming into vogue. The characters that people Chikamatsu's domestic tragedies are merchants, housewives, thieves, prostitutes, and all the other great variety of people who lived in the Osaka of his day. Most of the domestic tragedies were based on actual incidents, such as the then-popular trend of double suicide of lovers. Sonezaki shinju (1703; The Love Suicides at Sonezaki), for example, was written within a fortnight of an actual double suicide. The haste of composition is not at all apparent even in this first example of his 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 that is based loosely on events in the life of the Chinese-Japanese adventurer who attempted to restore the Ming dynasty in China. Another famous work is Shinju ten no Amijima (1720; Double Suicide at Amijima), which is still frequently performed. Despite Chikamatsu's eminence, however, the decline in popularity of bunraku has meant that most of his plays have become unfamiliar to the theatre-going public, except in the abridgments and considerably revised versions used in Kabuki theatre, on film, and elsewhere.