Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Japanese playwright

• Born: 1653
• Birthplace: Fukui, Echizen Province, Japan
• Died: January 6, 1725
• Place of death: Sakai, Japan

Chikamatsu wrote more than one hundred plays for the puppet and Kabuki theaters, most of them concerned with the drama and emotional life of common, ordinary people.

Early Life

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (chi-kah-mah-tzoo mohn-zah-ay-mohn) was born the second son of Sugimori Nobuyoshi, to a line of samurai who had been temporarily without government employ several generations earlier. His father served Matsudaira Tadamasa, lord of Echizen province, in Fukui until Matsudaira’s death when he began to serve one of his lesser sons, which was his position when Chikamatsu was born. Chikamatsu’s father was of minor samurai rank. Chikamatsu’s mother was the daughter of a physician. Chikamatsu’s father moved to the provincial town of Yoshie (now Sabae City) when Chikamatsu was two. Chikamatsu probably lived comfortably there for the larger part of his childhood.

When Chikamatsu was fifteen or sixteen years old (1668 or 1669), it seems his father lost employment and moved the family to Kyoto. Chikamatsu began serving Ichijō Ekan, probably soon after their arrival. After Ekan’s death in 1672 he served other high-ranking officials. Given his status as the son of a lordless samurai, it is unlikely that Chikamatsu expected to advance as a samurai himself. It is more probable that he was learning the life of an intellectual, the educated class, under the tutelage of the men he served. For example, a haikai poem (short verse of three lines) by him was published when he was age nineteen (the earliest known record of his writing). The men he served also had interest in the puppet theater (jōruri), and Chikamatsu surely gained his exposure to this world through them. One of the gentleman whom he served wrote a puppet play for the master Uji Kaga-no-jō, and it is believed that by around 1677, Chikamatsu did so as well, perhaps not as an independent writer but as one who corrected plays based on what Kaga-no-jō determined needed correcting.

His father’s move to Kyoto and Chikamatsu’s subsequent social intercourse while he was not yet twenty with men of education who had special interests in literature, especially the puppet theater, should be seen as life-defining, providing the stimulus and opportunity for Chikamatsu to leave the samurai tradition of many generations within his family to become a playwright.

Life’s Work

The first play known to have been independently penned by Chikamatsu Monzaemon was a puppet play titled Yotsugi Soga (the soga successors), first performed in 1683 (pb. 1896). Chikamatsu’s reputation began with this well-received play of morally sanctioned revenge. The following year, Takemoto Gidayū, who would later be known as the founder of the Gidayū tradition, used this play for the opening of his first theater house, the Takemoto-za, in Osaka. Staging this play prefaced a collaboration that would prove successful for both men.

Though Chikamatsu continued to write plays for the puppet theater, for the next twenty years the greater part of his energy was devoted to composing scripts for the more showy and increasingly popular Kabuki theater, through an association with the famous Kabuki actor of the era, Sakata Tōjūrō.

The play that would truly establish Chikamatsu’s reputation, however, came in 1703, when he wrote, once again for the Takemoto Theater, the wildly popular Sonezaki shinjū (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, 1961), the oldest puppet play still performed. He would thereafter be officially employed by that theater. Moving from Kyoto to Osaka in 1706, he continued to write puppet plays for the remainder of his life. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, loosely based on a pair of what had been recent suicides, had such a social impact that it is said similar love suicides increased after this play. In this story, a simple, overly trusting shop clerk refuses the marriage that has been arranged for him by his family because he is in love with a courtesan. His mother, unfortunately, has already accepted the dowry for the marriage. It is money he must return, but even though he manages to find the sum, he foolishly loans it to a friend, who then claims never to have received such a loan. The extreme predicament leads the clerk and his lover to decide that suicide is their only option. The description of the two luckless lovers as they walk toward the place where they intend to kill themselves is the moving climax, and a scene still highly regarded for its emotional impact and fine language.

Chikamatsu would write other plays that focus on domestic situations, including Meido no hikyaku (pr. 1711; The Courier for Hell, 1961), his masterpiece Shinjū ten no Amijima (1720; The Love Suicides at Amijima, 1953), and Onnagoroshi: Abura jigoku (pr. 1721; The Woman-Killer and the Hell of Oil, 1961). He wrote at least twenty-four such plays. Chikamatsu explores in all these plays the strong emotions of ordinary people, with special emphasis on betrayal, revenge, and ill-conceived love. Though not considered morality plays as Western traditions might define them, such domestic plays (sewa-mono) do explore the painful and contradictory imperatives that derive from desperate personal needs and the immovable, strict requirements placed upon individuals by social norms. This friction between obligation (giri) and human feeling (ninjō) was the source of suspense and impact of many Chikamatsu plays.

In addition to his domestic plays, Chikamatsu wrote more than eighty historical plays (jidai-mono). Though based on historic events, these plays often have current, if concealed, political relevance. His most famous is Kokusenya kassen (pr. 1715; The Battles of Coxinga, 1951). Set in the year 1644 at the dramatic fall of the Ming Dynasty, the story deeply involves the forbidden country of China. The play’s exoticism, variety of dramatic events, settings, and sheer beauty of language make this his most popular play, one that ran for seventeen months after opening.

Chikamatsu’s aesthetic has been described in the following manner: “the space between fiction and truth is like that between the surface of skin and flesh” (kyojitsu himaku). That is, truthful art should not strive for perfect realism but rather present an alteration of reality that achieves truth. Chikamatsu made special effort to achieve a high literary level for his scripts. They are replete with words that have resonance with other nearby word choices (engo), additional meanings derived from using homonyms (kakekotoba), rhyming, and careful choice in rhythm to help set off the prose passages from poems.

According to the inscription on his tombstone, Chikamatsu had a wife who died in 1734. It appears that he also had two sons. Not a great deal is known about them, though it seems one son, Tamon, painted and the other, Taemon, served as a steward for an important family. (In 1741, however, he was removed to Izumi province for causing trouble during a parade.) Chikamatsu died at the Nichiren sect Buddhist temple called Kōsai, in present-day Amagasaki City, near Osaka, at the age of seventy-two.

Significance

Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s reputation during his lifetime was great enough that in one commentary he was called “the guardian god of writers.” His influence extended throughout the puppet and Kabuki theater worlds. His impact on puppet theater is so great that it is with his Shusse Kagekiyo (pr. 1686, pb. 1890; Kagekiyo the victorious) that historians demarcate between old and new puppet theater. His introduction of the lives and emotions of a merchant class man and his prostitute lover in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki has been recognized as the beginning of premodern drama. His approach to the relationship of fiction to fact remained a central framework for Japanese writers as they began to import and interpret European literature with the establishment of an open country in the nineteenth century.

In part because of the later ascendancy of the Kabuki theater, many of Chikamatsu’s plays themselves, however, were rewritten or not performed in later years. In the twenty-first century, while Chikamatsu is firmly established as an icon in the history of Japanese literature and theater, only a few of his works remain well known.

Bibliography

Gerstle, Andrew C., trans. Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Translations of plays never before translated into English. Includes annotations by the translator.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986. An analysis of Chikamatsu’s approach to the puppet theater.

Heine, Steven. “Tragedy and Salvation in the Floating World: Chikamatsu’s Double Suicide Drama as Millenarian Discourse.” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (May, 1994): 367-393. Heine’s article studies suicide in the context of Confucian and Buddhist teachings.

Keene, Donald, trans. Major Plays of Chikamatsu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Keene presents translations of eleven plays, with an introduction to Chikamatsu, his plays, and his era. Originally published in 1961.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-modern Era, 1600-1867. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Originally published in 1978, This book presents a history of the remarkable Genroku period, during which Chikamatsu wrote his plays. Includes a new preface.

Mueller, Jacqueline. “A Chronicle of Great Peace Played Out on a Chessboard: Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Goban Taiheiki.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 1 (June, 1986): 221-267. Mueller examines this historical play.

Shinoda, Masahiro, dir. Double Suicide. Videorecording. Criterion Collection, 2000. A film director’s interpretation of Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Amijima. Originally released in 1969. 103 minutes, black-and-white, subtitles in English.

Shively, Donald H. The Love Suicide at Amijima: A Study of a Japanese Domestic Tragedy by Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. An introduction to the puppet theater and a study and translation of this play. Originally published in 1953.