Chikamatsu Monzaemon facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Chikamatsu Monzaemon
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| Born |
Sugimori Nobumori
1653 |
| Died | January 6, 1724 (aged 70–71) |
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松 門左衛門, real name Sugimori Nobumori, 杉森 信盛, 1653 – 6 January 1725) was a Japanese dramatist of jōruri, the form of puppet theater that later came to be known as bunraku, and the live-actor drama, kabuki. The Encyclopædia Britannica has written that he is "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist". Of his puppet plays, around 70 are jidaimono (時代物) (historical romances) and 24 are sewamono (世話物) (domestic tragedies). The domestic plays are today considered the core of his artistic achievement. His histories are viewed less positively, though The Battles of Coxinga (1715) remains praised.
Contents
Biography
Chikamatsu was born Sugimori Nobumori to a samurai family. There is disagreement about his birthplace. The most popular theory suggests he was born in Echizen Province, but there are other plausible locations, including Hagi, Nagato Province. His father, Sugimori Nobuyoshi, served the daimyō Matsudaira in Echizen as a medical doctor. Chikamatsu's younger brother became a medical doctor, and Chikamatsu himself wrote a book on health care.
In those days, doctors who served the daimyōs held samurai status. But Chikamatsu's father lost his office and became a rōnin, a masterless samurai. At some point in his teens, between 1664 and 1670, Chikamatsu moved to Kyoto with his father where he served for a few years as an obscure page for a noble family, but other than that, little is known about this period of Chikamatsu's life. He published his first known literary work in this period, a haiku that appeared in 1671. After serving as a page, he next appears in records of the Gonshō-ji (近松寺) temple (long suggested as the origin of his pen name "Chikamatsu", which is kun reading of 近松) in Ōmi Province, in present-day Shiga Prefecture.
With the production in 1683 of his puppet play in Kyoto about the Soga brothers (The Soga Successors or "The Soga Heir"; Yotsugi Soga), Chikamatsu became known as a playwright. The Soga Successors is believed to have been Chikamatsu's first play although sometimes 15 earlier anonymous plays are contended to have been by Chikamatsu as well. Chikamatsu also wrote plays for the kabuki theatre between 1684 and 1695, most of which were intended to be performed by a famous actor of the day, Sakata Tōjūrō (1647–1709). After 1695, and until 1705, Chikamatsu wrote almost exclusively Kabuki plays, and then he abruptly almost completely abandoned that genre. The exact reason is unknown, although speculation is rife: perhaps the puppets were more biddable and controllable than the ambitious kabuki actors, or perhaps Chikamatsu did not feel kabuki worth writing for since Tōjūrō was about to retire, or perhaps the growing popularity of the puppet theater was economically irresistible. C. Andrew Gerstle argues that Chikamatsu's collaborations with various performers affected his development as a playwright. His collaborations with kabuki practitioners led to more realistic characters, while his later collaboration with Takeda Izumo led to a heightened theatricality.
In 1705, Chikamatsu became a "Staff Playwright" as announced by early editions of The Mirror of Craftsmen of the Emperor Yōmei. In 1705 or 1706, Chikamatsu left Kyoto for Osaka, where the puppet theater was even more popular. Chikamatsu's popularity peaked with his domestic plays, and with the blockbuster success of The Battles of Coxinga in 1715, but thereafter the tastes of patrons turned to more sensational gore fests and otherwise more crude antics; Chikamatsu's plays would fall into disuse, so even the actual music would be lost for many plays. He died January 6, 1725, in either Amagasaki in Hyōgo, or Osaka.
In 1706, he wrote a three-act puppet play entitled Goban Taiheiki ("A chronicle of great peace played on a chessboard"), based on the story of the Forty-seven rōnin; this became the basis of the later and much better-known Chūshingura.
Chikamatsu was the first known Japanese playwright who did not act in the pieces he wrote. Currently, 130 plays have been verified to have been authored by Chikamatsu, with another 15 plays (mostly early Kabuki works) suspected to also have been penned by him.
Quotations
- "Art is something that lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal." — Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Naniwa Miyage
Adaptations
Selected film adaptations
- Kenji Mizoguchi's black and white film Chikamatsu Monogatari (literally, 'a story from Chikamatsu' but given titles in French "Les amants crucifiées" and in English "The Crucified Lovers"] is a 1954 film based on a play by Chikamatsu called Daikyōji Mukashi Goyomi (1715).
- Masahiro Shinoda's celebrated 1969 film, Shinjū: Ten no Amijima employs cinematic techniques based on bunraku conventions.
Opera
- Japanese composer Mayako Kubo's opera Osan, that premiered at the New National Theatre Tokyo in February 2005.
Major works
Jōruri
- Kagekiyo Victorious (Shusse kagekiyo 出世景清) (1685)
- The Night Song of Yosaku from Tamba (Tamba Yosaku machiyo no komurobushi 丹波与作待夜のこむろぶし)
- The Courier for Hell (Meido no hikyaku 冥途の飛脚) (1711)
- The Almanac of Love (Koi hakke hashiragoyomi) (1715)
- The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusen'ya kassen 国姓爺合戦) (1715)
- The Uprooted Pine (Nebiki no Kadomatsu 寿の門松) (1718)
Critical work
- Naniwa Miyage (1738; written by a friend and preserving a number of statements by Chikamatsu on the art of the puppet theater)
Translations into English
- Major Plays of Chikamatsu, translated and introduced by Donald Keene. NY: Columbia University Press. 1961/1990.
- Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays, translated by C. Andrew Gerstle. 2001. Consists of:
- Twins at the Sumida River (Futago sumidagawa, 1720)
- Lovers Pond in Settsu Province (Tsu no kuni meoto-ike, 1721)
- Battles at Kawa-nakajima (Shinsh kawa-nakajima kassen, 1721)
- Tethered Steed and the Eight Provinces of Kanto (Kanhasshu tsunagi-uma, 1724)
See also
- Japanese literature
- List of Japanese authors
- Gagaku
