[JIHEI]: You make me cry all over again by mentioning them. I can almost see their faces, sleeping peacefully, unaware, poor dears, that their father is about to kill himself. They’re the one thing I can’t forget.
CHANTER: He droops to the ground with weeping. The voices of the crows leaving their nests at dawn rival his sobs. Are the crows mourning his fate? The thought brings more tears.
[JIHEI]: Listen to them. The crows have come to guide us to the world of the dead. There’s an old saying that every time somebody writes an oath on the back of a Kumano charm, three crows of Kumano die on the holy mountain. The first words we’ve written each New Year have been vows of love, and how often we’ve made oaths at the beginning of the month! If each oath has killed three crows, what a multitude must have perished! Their cries have always sounded like “beloved, beloved,” but hatred for our crime of taking life makes their voices ring tonight “revenge, revenge!”120 Whose fault is it they demand revenge? Because of me you will die a painful death. Forgive me!
CHANTER: He takes her in his arms.
[KOHARU]: No, it’s my fault!
CHANTER: They cling to each other, face pressed to face; their sidelocks, drenched with tears, freeze in the winds blowing over the fields. Behind them echoes the voice of the Daichō Temple.
[JIHEI]: Even the long winter night seems as short as our lives.
CHANTER: Dawn is already breaking, and matins can be heard. He draws her to him.
[JIHEI]: The moment has come for our glorious end. Let there be no tears on your face when they find you later.
[KOHARU]: There won’t be any.
CHANTER: She smiles. His hands, numbed by the frost, tremble before the pale vision of her face, and his eyes are first to cloud. He is weeping so profusely that he cannot control the blade.
[KOHARU]: Compose yourself—but be quick!
CHANTER: Her encouragement lends him strength; the invocations to Amida carried by the wind urge a final prayer. Namu Amida Butsu. He thrusts in the savaging sword.121 Stabbed, she falls backward, despite his staying hand, and struggles in terrible pain. The point of the blade has missed her windpipe, and these are the final tortures before she can die. He writhes with her in agony, then painfully summons his strength again. He draws her to him and plunges his dirk to the hilt. He twists the blade in the wound, and her life fades away like an unfinished dream at dawning.
He arranges her body with her head to the north, face to the west, lying on her right side,122 and throws his cloak over her. He turns away at last, unable to exhaust with tears his grief over parting. He pulls the sash to him and fastens the noose around his neck. The service in the temple has reached the closing section, the prayers for the dead. “Believers and unbelievers will equally share in the divine grace,” the voices proclaim, and at the final words Jihei jumps from the sluice gate.
[JIHEI]: May we be reborn on one lotus! Hail Amida Buddha!
CHANTER: For a few moments he writhes like a gourd swinging in the wind, but gradually the passage of his breath is blocked as the stream is dammed by the sluice gate, where his ties with this life are snapped. Fishermen out for the morning catch find the body in their net.123
[FISHERMEN]: A dead man! Look, a dead man! Come here, everybody!
Jihei attempting to make the dying Koharu comfortable. (Photograph courtesy of Barbara Curtis Adachi Collection, C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University)
CHANTER: The tale is spread from mouth to mouth. People say that they who were caught in the net of Buddha’s vow immediately gained salvation and deliverance, and all who hear the tale of the Love Suicides at Amijima are moved to tears.
[Chikamatsu jōruri shū jō, NKBT 49: 359–387, translated by Donald Keene]
HOZUMI IKAN
Little is known about Hozumi Ikan (1692–1769) other than that he was a Confucian scholar and devotee of jōruri (puppet theater). He became a consultant for the Takemoto Theater around 1717 and worked closely with Chikamatsu in his last years.
SOUVENIRS OF NANIWA (NANIWA MIYAGE, 1738)
Souvenirs of Naniwa was published in 1738, fourteen years after Chikamatsu’s death. It is best remembered for the preface written by Hozumi Ikan, which is translated here and contains the only extended comments we have on jōruri in Chikamatsu’s own words.
At the heart of Chikamatsu’s understanding of the unique demands of jōruri is his conviction that the words of a play should be charged with the feelings of the characters and that those words must create movement in the puppets in order to make them come alive. In that respect, Chikamatsu is especially concerned with the use of language in jōruri, not only in describing a scene or in conveying differences between characters from different social classes, but, above all, in revealing their feelings. The word jō, translated here as “feelings,” is important because it is the link between the play and the audience: the joys and sorrows of the characters should evoke a sympathetic response in the viewers. In Confucian thought, jō is usually contrasted with giri, which broadly referred to one’s duties and obligations to others, and the conflict between giri and jō (or ninjō, human feelings) is fundamental to the plots of many jōruri and kabuki plays. Here, however, Chikamatsu uses giri in a different but related sense, “reason,” in an important passage in which he discusses two other nearly synonymous terms: urei (sadness) and aware (pathos). His point here is that as long as the sequence of events in a play is governed by reason, moments of pathos will seem natural and even more moving because of their inevitability. Here, then, Chikamatsu uses giri-as-reason in the service of the plot, which at another level, may driven by the conflict between giri-as-duty and human feelings.
Another important term is gei, or art. In several places Chikamatsu uses gei to refer to those aspects of a work of art that are not realistic, stating that it is precisely the unrealistic elements that make it art. When comparing jōruri with kabuki—for which he also wrote many plays—he argues for the necessity of such elements in the face of a growing demand for greater realism in the theater. In a key passage, however, he deploys two other critical terms, uso and jitsu, to discuss art in general. In this context, uso referred to the imaginary or the make-believe, in contrast to jitsu, the true or the real, but he characterizes uso and jitsu in terms of surface and depth as “skin and flesh” (hiniku). In Chikamatsu’s words, art “lies between” the make-believe or artifice of the “skin”—what the viewer can hear or see on the surface—and an underlying reality, the “flesh.” And because art “lies between” the two, it is both and neither: “Art is make-believe and not make-believe; it is real and not real.” Chikamatsu offers by way of example in this passage the use of makeup in kabuki, but earlier in his comments he also cites as an instance of gei those women characters who say things that in Chikamatsu’s day, a real woman would be expected to keep to herself. Although such artifices are not completely true to life as we know it on the surface, they serve to reveal the truth of an inner reality that might otherwise be inaccessible.
When I was visiting Chikamatsu at his home many years ago, he told me the following:
“Jōruri is a living thing: the most important consideration is that these are plays written for puppets, so jōruri differs from other kinds of fiction; the words must create movement. What’s more, jōruri competes with the artistry of live actors at nearby kabuki theaters, but since jōruri tries to capture the sympathies of the audience by endowing inanimate puppets with a variety of feelings, the usual plays can hardly be called superb literary works.
“When I was young, I read a story about Heian court life describing how on the occasion of a festival, the snow had piled up rather deeply. An attendant was ordered to clear the snow off the branches of an orange tree, but when he did so, the branches of a nearby pine tree, also bent with snow, recoiled as if in resentment.124 The stroke of a pen animated a soulless tree. That is because the pine tree, envious at seeing the snow cleared from the orange tree, recoiled its branches in resentment
and dumped the snow that was weighing them down. Isn’t that just how a living, moving thing would feel? With this model, I understood how to breathe life into the characters of my plays. It is essential, therefore, that even the words describing the scenery of the michiyuki, not to mention the narrative passages and the dialogue, be charged with feeling. If a writer does not bear that in mind, his plays will have little emotional impact.
“What poets call ‘evocative imagery’ is the same thing. For example, a poet may describe in a verse the marvelous scenery of Matsushima or Miyajima, but if it lacks the sense of wonder that comes from immersing oneself in the scene, it would be as if the poet were just looking idly at the portrait of a beautiful woman. A playwright, therefore, must keep in mind that his words should be based on feelings. . . .
“The old jōruri was the same as those tales sung by scandalmongers in the streets today; it had neither fruit nor flower. After I left Kaganojō and began writing plays for Takemoto Gidayū,125 I took more care with my words, so my plays were a cut above those of the past.
“For example, my first principle is to distinguish between the social position of each and every character, from the nobility and the samurai on down, and to depict them accordingly, from their demeanor to the way they speak. By the same token, even among the samurai, there are daimyō, chief retainers, and others whose stipends vary according to their rank, so I distinguish one from the other based on their social position. This is because it is essential that readers sympathize with the feelings of each character.
“The words of jōruri depict reality as it is, but being a form of art it also contains elements that are not found in real life. Specifically, female characters often say things a real woman would not say, but such instances are examples of art. Since they speak openly of things that a real woman would not talk about, the character’s true feelings are revealed. Thus, when a playwright models a female character on the feelings of a real woman and conceals such things, her deepest thoughts will not be revealed, and contrary to his hopes, the play will not be entertaining. It follows that when one watches a play without paying attention to the artistry, one will probably criticize it on the grounds that the female characters say many discomfiting things that are inappropriate for a woman to say. However, such instances should be regarded as art. There are, in addition, many other aspects that one should regard as art rather than reality, such as when a villain acts too cowardly or the humor is actually buffoonery. People should understand this when watching a play.
“Some playwrights, thinking that sadness is essential to a jōruri, often put in words like ‘How sad it is!’ or the lines are chant tearfully, as in the Bunyabushi style,126 but that is not how I write plays. The sadness in all my plays is based entirely on reason [giri]. Since the audience will be moved when the logic [rikugi] of the dramatization is convincing [giri ni tsumarite], the more restrained the words and the chanting are, the more moving the play will be. Thus, when one says of a moment of pathos ‘How sad it is!’ the connotations are lost, and in the end, the feeling conveyed is weak. It is essential that the moment be filled with pathos in and of itself, without having to say ‘How sad it is!’ For example, when you praise a landscape such as Matsushima by saying ‘Oh, what a beautiful scene!’ you have said all you can about it in a few words but to no avail. If you wish to praise a scene, pointing out all its features objectively will reveal its intrinsic appeal naturally, without having to say ‘it is a beautiful scene.’ This applies to everything of this sort.”
Someone said that in this day and age, people won’t accept a play unless it is very realistic and logically convincing, so there are many things in the old stories that people will not stand for now. It is precisely for this reason that people are apt to think kabuki actors are skillful when their acting resembles real life. They think the most important thing is for the actor playing a chief retainer to imitate a real chief retainer and the actor playing a daimyō to imitate a real daimyō. They will not accept the sort of childish antics of the past.
Chikamatsu answered: “That argument seems quite reasonable, but it fails to grasp the true method of art. Art is something that lies between the skin and the flesh [hiniku], between the make-believe [uso] and the real [jitsu]. In today’s world, of course, given the preference for realistic acting, an actor playing a chief retainer may imitate the speech and mannerisms of a real chief retainer, but if that’s the case, would a real chief retainer of a daimyō wear makeup on his face like an actor? Or would it be entertaining if an actor, saying that a real chief retainer does not use makeup, appeared on stage and performed with his beard growing wild and his own bald head? This is what I mean by ‘between the skin and the flesh.’ Art is make-believe and not make-believe; it is real and not real; entertainment lies between the two.
“In this connection, a lady-in-waiting in the old imperial court was in love with a certain man. The two communicated their feelings for each other with passion, but the woman lived deep within the palace. The man was unable to visit her in the women’s quarters, so she could see him only on rare occasions through the gaps of the hanging blinds at court. She longed for him so much that she had a wooden image carved in his likeness. It was unlike ordinary dolls in that its face was exactly like the man’s down to the tiniest hair, even the color of his complexion. The pores of his skin, the holes for the ears and nose, and even the number of teeth in his mouth were reproduced exactly. Since the image was made with the man right next to it, the only difference between the man and the doll was the presence of a soul in the one but not the other. Even so, when the woman drew near and gazed at it, because the man’s body had been duplicated exactly, her passion cooled; she found it somehow repulsive and frightening. Court lady that she was, her love for the man cooled as well. Just keeping the doll around became annoying, and it appears that she soon threw it away.
“With this example in mind, if we duplicate a living person exactly, even if it is Yang Gueifei,127 we will become disgusted with it. For this reason, whether painting an image or carving it in wood, there will be places where the artist takes liberties, even while copying the original form, on the grounds that it is a fabrication; but in the end, this is what people love. It is the same with new plot situations: even though the story resembles the original version, there will be places where the artist takes liberties, but in the end, this is what makes it art and entertaining. There are many instances where the dialogue in a play should also be viewed with this in mind.”
[Chikamatsu jōruri shū ge, NKBT 50: 356–359, introduction and translation by Michael Brownstein]
________________________
1. Brackets have been placed around the names of the characters in the play to indicate that the chanter is narrating, or chanting, their speech.
2. His face is covered by a deep wicker hat, commonly worn by visitors to the licensed quarters.
3. A street in Osaka famed for its theaters and houses of pleasure.
4. Within the precincts of the Ikudama Shrine were booths where various types of entertainment were presented. The impersonators mimicked the speech and posture of popular actors.
5. Places in the Japanese afterworld.
6. A passage from the nō play Miidera, quoted here mainly because the first word Hatsuse, a place in Nara, echoes the name Ohatsu in the preceding line. The last words similarly point to the arrival of Kuheiji.
7. Tokubei, relieved to see Kuheiji, at first teases him about his singing of the nō passage, but his words have an undertone of criticism of Kuheiji’s past behavior.
8. Readying themselves to come to Kuheiji’s defense.
9. In her agitation, she fails to slip on her geta (clogs).
10. The word shijimi means a “corbicula,” a kind of small shellfish, suggesting shells.
11. Umeda Bridge, whose name literally means “plum field.”
12. The Dōjima New Quarter in Osaka was opened in about 1700.
13. The wicker hat was worn fo
r concealment, but at night this precaution was normally unnecessary.
14. Standing in the street outside the teahouse was likely to occasion gossip about secret lovers.
15. Literally, he is bound to end up at Noe or Tobita, execution grounds on the outskirts of Osaka.
16. Alludes to the Chinese legend, familiar also in Japan, that tells of two stars (known as the Herd Boy and the Weaver Girl) that meet once a year, crossing over a bridge in the sky built by magpies.
17. The song overheard by Ohatsu and Tokubei is derived from a popular ballad of the time that describes a love suicide.
18. The shrine of Sonezaki, sacred to Tenjin (the god of Sugawara no Michizane).
19. According to yin-yang divination, a man’s twenty-fifth, forty-second, and sixtieth years are dangerous; for a woman, her nineteenth and thirty-third years.
20. The Buddhist prayer beads number 108, one for each of the sufferings occasioned by the passions.
21. Hitodama, a kind of will-o’-the-wisp believed to be a human soul.
22. The invocation of the name of the Amida Buddha, used in Pure Land Buddhism.
23. Exorcism practiced to prevent the soul from leaving the body.
24. It was believed by practitioners of yin-yang divination that a person’s hour of death was determined at his or her birth and could be foretold by an examination of the celestial stems governing the birth.
25. Pine-Breeze (Matsukaze) and Spring-Shower (Murasame) are two sisters who fall in love with the nobleman Yukihira in the nō play Matsukaze.
26. Mention of the pines is dictated by the customary pun on matsu (to wait) and matsu (pine). Similarly, yūte is at once “tying” and “talking.” Numerous other puns dot this section.
27. “This keepsake . . . to forget” derives from an anonymous poem in the Kokinshū (no. 746).
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 50