Love Suicides at Amijima (1720), a shinju mono puppet play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Contrary to our usual association of puppetry with simple children's stories and fairy tales, the art of bunraku puppetry developed in connection to stories of great tragedy and psychological complexity. Some of the most popular plays within the repertoires belonged to the shinju mono (double suicide play) sub-genre. In a feudal Japanese society in which it was extremely difficult for young people to form relationships across social rank and political alliance, there were many "Romeo and Juliet" stories of young lovers ending their lives in despair at their thwarted romance. Love Suicides at Amijima (1720), Chikamatsu's most famous shinju mono plays, was based on just such a real event in 18th century Japan. Theatre, and especially puppet theatre, provided an opportunity for Japanese audiences to experience and grieve over these issues, which might be too scandalous and controversial to discuss directly.

Chikamatsu's play for bunraku puppets remains in the repertoire at the National Bunraku Theatre. It was also adapted into a very popular version for the live kabuki theatre. Lastly, as you can see in the clip below, the story has found its way into Japanese avant-garde film. This trailer (with English subtitles) is for an avant-garde Japanese movie, "Double Suicide" (1969), directed by Masahiro Shinoda, and adapted from Chikamatsu's puppet script. About halfway through this clip, the director interpolates some images of puppets used in the bunraku version, invoking a tension between the sensuality of the live actors' bodies and the uncanny mythic life of their puppet models. This kind of layering of meaning makes for a rich textual and performance tradition.

Japanese Puppetry: from ko-joruri to bunraku

The collaboration that gave birth to bunraku: Playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), and Chanter, Takemoto Gidayu (1651-1714)









I. Conventions of bunraku

Bunraku is typically described as the combination of three previously separate arts: ayatsuri (puppet manipulation), katari mono (storytelling) and shamisen. The puppets are divided into many character types, distinguished primarily by their heads, which are built to be separate from the rest of the puppet. The scenery and stagecraft is related to kabuki, but less intricate, because the puppeteers and puppets themselves take up so much space. The omu zukai (chief puppeteer) wears high clogs to allow better manipulation of the right hand, head and torso. He changes his costume depending on the play, and usually exposes his face. Although the omu zukai’s face is understood to be expressionless, there is a subtle relationship between his embodiment and the actions of the puppet. The hidari zukai (left arm operator) and ashi zukai (leg operator) wear a black robe and hood so that no part of their bodies complicates the character image. The chanter and the shamisen player sit on a special platform at stage left.

II. Placing bunraku within the historical development of Japanese puppetry

There are records of puppet theatre in Japan going back at least to the eighth century, with handheld puppets or stick puppets performing on miniature portable stages. Traveling puppeteers would perform as part of temple festivals and rituals.

In the seventeenth century when bunraku first appeared, the prevailing form of doll puppetry in Japan was called ko-joruri (old joruri, based on the name of Lady Joruri, a character from 12th century history). Ko-joruri grew out of performances by chanters telling stories from the 14th century Tale of Heike. The form of joruri appeared by the 1590s with chanters telling the story to the accompaniment of the shamisen (three-stringed Japanese lute). Ko-joruri was popular in Kyoto and Osaka in the early 17th century, and there were several theatres established just for its performance, and special musical narrative styles (bushi) that developed into the styles of bunraku. Compared to bunraku, the puppets were also relatively simple, requiring only one operator.

The transition started with the chanter-playwright, Uji Kaganojo, who in the late 17th century shifted from the old mythic plays to stories depicting real human emotions, and changed the dramatic structure of the plays to the kind of jo-ha-kyu development practiced in noh and kabuki. Another important step came with the collaboration of two disciples of Kaganojo: the playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon and tayu (chanter) Takemoto Gidayu. Chikamatsu wrote The Soga Heir (1683) and Kagekiyo Victorious (1685) for Gidayu, introducing a more literary text with psychologically complex characters and stories drawn from contemporary and historical sources, requiring the kind of sophisticated arts we saw in the video. They created many of the basic genres of plays used in both bunraku and kabuki: jidai mono (history plays), sewa mono (domestic plays), and shinju mono (a subset of domestic plays built around double suicides, such as the Love Suicides at Amijima, 1720). These double-suicide plays were particularly popular and startling to audiences as they depicted events “ripped from the headlines”—real suicides that had occurred in living memory. From this point on, chanting and playwriting became separate occupations, and the playwrights often wrote for both bunraku and kabuki.

The kind of mechanical puppets that developed into bunraku were probably introduced from China in the fifteenth century, and some other styles probably came with Portuguese and other Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century. The kind used today developed with bunraku starting in the late 17th century. The limbs were developed in the 1690s, and the techniques used to manipulate eyes, mouth and eyebrows in the 1720s and 1730s. Originally, the performers were completely concealed. In 1703, Takamatsu Hachirobei performed behind a translucent screen but in full view of the audience for the first time. Then in 1705, he eliminated the screen, leaving the manipulator completely exposed like today. In 1734, the sannin zukai (three-man puppeteering) technique was introduced, and so the techniques of apprenticeship described in the film developed. A manipulator begins operating the lower limbs, advances to the left hand and then finally to becoming the primary manipulator of the head and right hand. From this point on, only minor characters were performed with one operator. These more elaborate puppets responded to the need in the plays of Chikamatsu and his successors to portray more complex emotions and psychological states in stories based on real events.

III. Bunraku and Kabuki

Bunraku and kabuki developed alongisde each other for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, competing for audiences and adapting many of the same plays. From the 1690s to the 1760s, it was bunraku that was the more popular, and many of the masterpieces of kabuki from this period were drawn from puppet scripts. This was the case, for example, with Kandehon Chushingura (The treasury of loyal retainers, 1748) by Takeda Izumo II, a few scenes of which we saw in the film. Playwrights from this golden age of bunraku “dramatized the emotional turmoil of characters embroiled in impossible historical conflicts or burdened by unbearable social obligations: the classic conflict was between duty and emotion created under the constraints of Confucian-inspired morality.” (Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre 580)

In the 1760s, kabuki began to outshine bunraku in popularity and by the end of the century, it had almost died out. It was revived by Uemora Bunrakuken (1737-1810) who re-established the form in Osaka, and after whom it is now named. Bunraku lived on in Osaka through the 19th century and gained some popularity again, but it ran into trouble again in the 1920s. The main theatre burned down, and audiences started dwindling. In 1933, the government essentially nationalized it, then supported bunraku through WWII by using it for propaganda plays. The theatre was destroyed again by US air raids in 1945, destroyed all the old puppet heads and props. In 1963, the Bunraku Association was formed as a foundation of performers and government representatives dedicated to preserving the art. When the National Theatre opened in Tokyo in 1966, it included a smaller stage for bunraku. Finally, in 1984, the government opend the National Bunraku Theatre in Osaka, which remains the primary venue for seein bunraku in Japan, and where most of the performances take place in the video.