[OFUJI]: You foolish man, Hikokurō! Had I known what was going on, do you suppose such a disgraceful thing would have happened?
CHANTER: She weeps bitterly again.
[HIKOKURŌ]: The servant must have been the go-between. Send for the wench.
CHANTER: At his summons the girl appears, trembling all over.
[ORIN]: Begging your pardon, sir, but I don’t know anything about it. The other day Madam Otane asked me to buy some abortion medicine. She told me not to let anybody know. I bought three doses at seven fun each, which made two monme, one fun, all together. That’s all I ever did. Even so, I was afraid, master, if you heard about it you might scold me for buying such expensive medicine. So I paid for it with bad coins.47
CHANTER: She prattles on in this inane fashion. Hikokurō is flabbergasted.
[HIKOKURŌ]: You say she’s pregnant? Bunroku, I know you’re still a boy, but why, when the whole fief’s bursting with the scandal, didn’t you kill Gen’emon and get rid of him long ago?
[BUNROKU]: I heard about it only this morning. I informed the household retainers, and they sent some men to Gen’emon’s lodgings to kill him. But they discovered that he had gone back to Kyoto a couple of days ago.
[HIKOKURŌ]: It can’t be helped, then. Somebody light a fire in front of the Buddhist altar. Stand up, woman. Come here before the altar.
CHANTER: His wife wipes away her tears.
[OTANE]: I expected you to hate me until the end of time. But I know now, when you tell me to stand before the Buddha, that something still remains of your old affection. How shall I forget it, even after death? My dear husband, I did not betray you intentionally, after knowing your goodness all those many months and years. My crime took place in a kind of nightmare. While I dreamed, a horrible man—but if I go on, it will only make my death mean and shameful. It may be wrong of me, I know, to kill myself before my husband’s sword can strike, but let me vindicate myself in this way. Forgive me, please. This is my atonement.
CHANTER: She pulls open the front of her kimono and plunges the dagger to the hilt into her breast, a moving display of her resolve. Ofuji and Bunroku cry out in horror. The tears well in their hearts, but taken aback by Hikokuro’s impassive expression, they clench their teeth in silent grief. Hikokurō unsheathes his sword and, jerking up Otane’s body, deals her the death blow with a final thrust. He pushes away her body, wipes his sword, and deliberately sheathes it. He rises to his feet: this is the stern behavior expected of a samurai. Hikokurō picks up the traveling costume he had taken off only this morning—his wicker hat, straw sandals, and sword.
[HIKOKURŌ]: Bunroku, I’m going now to report to my superiors what has happened. I shall ask for leave, even though I can’t wait until it is granted. I intend to go as quickly as possible to Kyoto. While I am busy disposing of my wife’s lover, I want you to escort these women to a safe place with our relatives.
Hikokurō dealing Otane the death blow. (Photograph courtesy of Barbara Curtis Adachi Collection, C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University)
CHANTER: He starts to leave after these parting words. Ofuji, Bunroku, and Yura, all wishing to follow, vie in their eagerness to join him. Fury blazes in Hikokuro’s dilated eyes.
[HIKOKURŌ]: Do you expect me to take along the lot of you just to kill one man, like some shopkeeper’s vengeance? Are you trying to bring even more disgrace on me? If even one of you follows me, I’ll never speak to you again.
CHANTER: He is outraged. The others burst into tears.
[OFUJI]: You are being too unkind. The man, as far as I am concerned, is my sister’s enemy.
[BUNROKU]: For me, he’s my mother’s enemy.
[YURA]: And for me, my sister-in-law’s enemy.
[ALL THREE]: Can we allow this villain to go unpunished? Please let us go with you.
CHANTER: The three together join their hands in supplication, weeping aloud. Hikokurō is unable to hide his grief any longer. His resolute expression gives way to despair.
[HIKOKURŌ]: If you think so much of your mother, sister, or sister-in-law, why didn’t you beg me to spare her life? Why didn’t you suggest that she put on Buddhist robes and become a nun?
CHANTER: Lifting the lifeless body in his arms, he shouts his grief, and the others are carried away by tears of sympathy. The misery of it! This is the heartbreaking conduct demanded of those born to be samurai.
[Chikamatsu jōruri shū jō, NKBT 49: 39–57, translated by Donald Keene]
THE BATTLES OF COXINGA (KOKUSENYA KASSEN, 1715)
Although now the contemporary-life (sewamono) puppet plays are the main focus of critical attention and the more frequently performed, the history plays (jidaimono) were the more important in Chikamatsu’s time. Chikamatsu himself wrote three times as many jidaimono as sewamono, and The Battles of Coxinga, which was first performed in 1715, was his greatest success in this genre. This was the first play that Chikamatsu wrote after the death in 1714 of Takemoto Gidayū, the chief chanter of the Takemoto Theater with whom he had first established himself as a playwright. Chikamatsu wrote The Battles of Coxinga to maintain the life of the theater and ensure the success of Gidayū‘s successor, Masatayū. The play became a long-running hit and was quickly adapted by the kabuki theater. Indeed, until well into the nineteenth century, The Battles of Coxinga was performed more often than any other Chikamatsu play. The exoticism of the drama, the setting in China, and the incorporation of a number of foreign details contributed to its popularity, as did the many special puppet effects. Even so, the play was not performed in its entirety for long. The tendency toward fragmentation has left only the second half of act 2 (Bamboo Forest of a Thousand Leagues) and the two scenes of act 3, translated here, in regular production on the puppet and kabuki stages.
The Battles of Coxinga follows the five-act structure that Gidayū had advocated for jidaimono: the first act (love), second act (warriors and battle), third act (tragedy), fourth act (michiyuki/poetic journey), and fifth act (celebratory speech). In act 1, the Ming emperor is duped by Ri Tōten, one of his ministers, who gouges out one of his own eyes in what appears to be a show of loyalty but turns out to be a sign that he has joined the Tartars (Manchus), who are plotting to overthrow the Ming court. Go Sankei, a minister loyal to the Ming emperor, points out Ri Tōten’s deception as well as the plight of Ikkan (Tei Shiryū), who was banished from the court and fled to Japan nineteen years earlier for similarly warning the emperor of treacherous courtiers. But the emperor refuses to believe Go Sankei. The emperor and the court are then attacked by the Tartar army, led by Bairoku, a Tartar prince. Bairoku also is intent on capturing Lady Kasei, the Ming emperor’s consort, who is pregnant with the future crown prince. When the emperor and the pregnant empress are killed, Go Sankei takes the baby out of the womb and replaces it with his own child, whom he kills so that the Tartars will think that the imperial line has died. In the meantime, Go Sankei’s wife manages to escape with Princess Sendan, the younger sister of the dead emperor, and the two set sail for Japan.
Act 2 opens in Japan some six months later and centers on Ikkan, now married to a lowly Japanese fisherwoman, and their grown son, Watōnai (wa stands for Japan and tō for Tang, his father’s home), the future Coxinga. Watōnai and his wife discover the boat carrying Princess Sendan, who tells them that Ri Tōten has killed the emperor, allied with the Tartars, and taken over the empire. Watōnai and his parents then decide to sail for China to restore the Ming dynasty. Upon their arrival in China, Ikkan resolves to find Kinshōjo, his daughter by his previous wife. Kinshōjo’s mother died giving birth, and Kinshōjo, who was only two years old when Ikkan fled to Japan, is now married to Gojōgun Kanki, an illustrious prince whose aid Ikkan hopes to enlist by appealing to Kinshōjo. Ikkan parts company with Watōnai and his mother, who enter the Bamboo Forest of a Thousand Leagues. In a scene long popular with audiences, they are attacked by a tiger, but Watōnai subdues it using a Japanese charm given to him by his mother.
In act 3, which is translated here, Watōnai and his mother rejoin Ikkan at Red Cliff Mountain and proceed to Kanki’s castle only to learn that Kanki is away. With Kinshōjo’s help, Ikkan and Watōnai manage to get the mother into the castle, as a hostage, to await Kanki’s return. Upon his arrival home, the mother asks Kanki if he will join Watōnai to defeat the Tartars, whom Kanki has been serving. Although not related by blood, Kinshōjo acts as a filial daughter to Watōnai’s mother, but she becomes an obstacle for Kanki, who wants to join Watōnai’s cause but cannot because he would seen as a leader influenced by his wife and therefore a disgrace. Kinshōjo kills herself ostensibly out of shame over her inability to help Ikkan, Watōnai, and her stepmother, to whom she feels duty bound (giri); but implicitly, her reason is to free Kanki to join their cause. Watōnai’s mother then joins Kinshōjo in death, taking her own life out of a sense of duty to Kinshōjo so that she will not be viewed as a “shame to Japan”—that is, as a cruel stepmother who forced her foreign stepdaughter to kill herself. Beneath the surface, however, the mother’s suicide also reveals the purity and justice of their cause. The sacrifice of the two women allows Watōnai and Kanki—who play masculine aragoto (rough-style) roles and are about to fight each other to the death—to become allies. For both women, private and public conflicts are resolved through death. Their sacrifice is followed by a lament and praise for the dead, which function as a kind of catharsis.
The tragic third act of a jidaimono was considered especially important and thus was always performed by the chief chanter. By the early eighteenth century, it had become customary for the tragedy to involve the substitution of one person for another (migawari). This ill-fated substitute was a usually a secondary figure, such as a retainer to the main character or a relative, who was faced with the task of overcoming severe obstacles in order to help restore the social order. In the third act of Coxinga, Kinshōjo and Watōnai’s mother, two relatively powerless women, are faced with just such a task, and it is their sacrificial death that finally resolves the major conflict between the two male figures, Watōnai and Kanki. Chikamatsu’s humanism implies that such lesser people can, through self-sacrifice, make a major impact on the course of history, which, in Chikamatsu’s jidaimono, means the return and triumph of the forces of good over evil.
While for the chōnin audience the history plays were a form of escape from the everyday world in which they lived, the jidaimono were also indirect commentary on the contemporary situation. As Uchiyama Michiko has pointed out, the danger in which the Ming court finds itself—particularly the corruption that comes from within in the form of Ri Tōten, the evil adviser—reflects the chaos that Japan found itself in following the corrupt administration of Shōgun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646–1709). Much like Tsunayoshi, the Ming emperor cannot discern between good (Go Sankei) and evil (Ri Toten), thereby causing a crisis that requires the sacrifice of the innocent and weak to restore peace and stability.
CHARACTERS
WATŌNAI, later called Coxinga, son of a Chinese father (Ikkan) and a Japanese mother
[GOJŌGUN] IKKAN, Watonai’s father, also called Tei Shiryū, a former Chinese minister loyal to the Ming emperor, father of Kinshōjo by a previous Chinese wife, now married to a Japanese woman
[RŌ] KANKI, an illustrious Chinese prince, Ikkan’s son-in-law
KINSHōJO, wife of Kanki and daughter of Ikkan by his previous Chinese wife, the half sister of Coxinga
MOTHER, Japanese mother of Watōnai (Coxinga) and stepmother of Kinshōjo
Act 3
Scene 1: Outside the castle of Gojōgun Kanki.
CHANTER:
The most benevolent ruler cannot keep a worthless minister,
Nor can the kindest father love a shiftless son.48
Thus with China and Japan: though their paths diverged by custom and tradition,
They stray not from the Way of Sincerity.
At the foot of Red Cliff Mountain, Ikkan joins his wife and son, and the three hurry on until they reach Lion’s Keep, the stronghold of Gojōgun Kanki, knowing only that he is Ikkan’s son-in-law. The castle looks more formidable than they had heard: far above the high stone walls, in the darkness of a spring night still bitterly cold, decorative dolphins arch their tails to the sky atop roof tiles glistening with frost. The waters of the moat, dark as indigo, uncoil like a long thick rope and flow toward the distant Yellow River. The tower gate is tightly bolted; a sentry’s gong clangs noisily within. The loopholes in the castle wall bristle with crossbows, and cannons stand here and there ready to be fired: no fortress in Japan looked so mighty as this. Shocked by what he sees, Ikkan whispers to Watōnai.
[IKKAN]: I heard the country was at war, but such an imposing gate—it’s enormous! If I knock on it in the middle of the night and tell them that I, Kanki’s father-in-law, have arrived from Japan, no one will believe me—they’ve never even heard of me! If I could just speak to my daughter, I could offer all kinds of proof that I am the father who left her when she was two and went to Japan, but getting into that castle won’t be easy. What’ll we do now?
[WATŌNAI]: We shouldn’t be surprised now. Ever since leaving Japan, I knew we wouldn’t find any allies here. Sentimental appeals like “I am the father-in-law you never knew!” or “My son-in-law!” may fall on deaf ears. Better to ask him directly: “Can we count on you or not?” “No” means he is our enemy. The daughter you left here is also my half sister, but if she had cared for you at all, she would have wanted news from Japan and sent letters. Her feelings can’t be trusted. If I made those brutes I defeated in the Bamboo Forest the core of an army and used them to win over others, then fifty or a hundred thousand men would join us in no time. But I don’t need any help to kick down that gate, twist off the head of an unfilial sister, and fight it out with Kanki.
CHANTER: He leaps up to charge the gate, but his mother holds him back.
[MOTHER]: I don’t know what her feelings are, but a woman’s place is to obey her husband, not to do as she likes. Ikkan is her father, and you, Watōnai, are from the same seed. I am the outsider here, and although I’ve been separated from her by a thousand leagues of oceans and mountains, I cannot escape the title of stepmother. I am sure that her heart is filled with love for her family. If you fought your way in and then people blamed it on her Japanese stepmother’s envy, it would bring shame not only to me but to Japan as well. Humble though your station may be, you are committed to a noble cause—to destroy the Tartars, a mighty foe, and restore the Ming dynasty. Don’t think of my shame! Swallow your resentment!
The first rule of military strategy, they say, is to win over others to your side, even if it is just one from the lowest ranks. Far better still would be having Kanki on our side, the lord of a castle who controls the whole region! Do you think that is an easy task? Calm down and ask them to let you in!
CHANTER: Ikkan and Watōnai approach the gate, and Watōnai calls out.
[WATŌNAI]: We have something to discuss with Lord Kanki! Open the gate! Open the gate!
CHANTER: He pounds on the gate, but the sound only echoes back from within the walls. Then the sentries shout down, one by one: “Lord Kanki left yesterday by order of the Tartar king.” “We don’t know when he’ll return.” “Coming in the middle of the night while he’s away is bad enough, whoever you are, but demanding to speak with him personally—what nerve! If you have something to say, then say it—we’ll tell him when he returns!” Ikkan answers in a low voice.
[IKKAN]: A messenger won’t do. If Lord Kanki is away, I would like to speak directly to his wife. Once you tell her that I’ve come from Japan, I’m sure she’ll consent.
CHANTER: His words spark an outcry behind the wall even before he finishes speaking.
[SENTRY]: We’ve never even seen the lady’s face, and you want to meet with her in private? Bold talk indeed—and from a Japanese! Keep your eyes on him, men!
CHANTER: In the light of the pole lanterns, the sentries bang their gongs and cymbals while a
swarm of soldiers appear on top of the wall and take aim with their muskets. “Fire the cannons! Crush them!! Fuses! Bullets!” they shout, jostling against each other in alarm. Hearing the commotion from her rooms, Kinshōjo runs out and climbs the gate tower.
[KINSHŌJO]: Calm down! Calm down! I will listen to everything they have to say. Don’t shoot until I give the order myself. Stand at ease!
You there, outside the gate! I am Kinshōjo, Lord Kanki’s wife. The whole realm bows before the Tartar king. My husband, mindful of the times, also serves that king and has been entrusted with this castle. Why do you want to meet with me at a time like this, when he is away and the castle is under heavy guard? It makes no sense. And yet you mention Japan—tell me about those who are dear to me. How I long to hear news of them!
CHANTER: Even as she speaks, she wonders: “Could it be my father? Why would he have come here?” Though fearful of the danger, her yearning increases.
[KINSHŌJO]: You soldiers—Be careful! Do not fire your muskets by accident!
CHANTER: Her fears are understandable. Ikkan sees his daughter’s face for the first time, like the hazy spring moon, and tears cloud his voice.
[IKKAN]: Pardon me for addressing you in this abrupt manner, but your father was Tei Shiryū of the Ming. Your mother died giving birth to you, and your father incurred the emperor’s wrath. When he fled to Japan, you were only two years old, too young to understand his sorrow at leaving you behind, but you must have heard something about this, even from your nursemaid. I am your father, Tei Shiryū. I’ve passed the years at Hirado Bay in Hizen, a province in Japan, and my name now is Ikkan. This man is your brother, born in Japan, and this woman is your new mother. I come to you now, without hiding my shameful state, because I have something to ask of you, in private. Please have them open the gate.
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 42