Paper short abstract:

This presentation will examine the Golden Age of the Jōruri puppet theatre in Osaka. Focusing on the work of the talented playwright Namiki Sōsuke (1695-1751) who wrote for both major Jōruri theatres, it will explore the nature of the ideological codes which influenced the action on the stage.

Paper long abstract:

From the late seventeenth century, the celebrated playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon and the chanter Takemoto Gidayū, active at the Takemoto-za Theatre in Osaka, raised the stature of the Jōruri puppet theatre, the ancestor of today’s Bunraku. After Chikamatsu’s death in 1724, a new generation of talented theatre artists arose. The post-Chikamatsu theatre reached its zenith in the 1740s, Jōruri’s Golden Age, when the puppets seemed to outshine Osaka’s Kabuki stars.

An intriguing feature of this scene is its binomial nature, in a geographical, artistic and ideological sense. The Takemoto-za had a junior rival, the Toyotake-za theatre, its near neighbour in the Dōtonbori theatre district. Nicknamed the theatres of the ‘West’ and ‘East’ respectively, they developed contrasting, though closely related, performance styles, and each had its loyal supporters. One can also witness the development of two distinct ideological codes governing the action performed on stage. These codes, closely related to audience expectations, were to some degree unconscious, but contributed to demarcating two distinct types of theatrical experience.

Here, I shall examine this binomial theatrical universe through the prism of the playwright Namiki Sōsuke (1695–1751), who is now generally acknowledged as the main creator of Kanadehon Chūshingura and other co-authored successes of the period.

Sōsuke’s early works were written for the Toyotake-za. During this period, Sōsuke was criticized for ideological incorrectness by theatre-loving Confucianists, themselves partisans of the rival Takemoto-za. Sōsuke incorporated his predecessor’s method of highlighting laments (kudoki), in which protagonists in extremis explain their true motivations, drawing on a lexicon of ethical concepts. Sōsuke’s laments are distinguished by their piercing psychological insights and relative lack of sentimentality or idealism.

In the second part of his career, Sōsuke moved to the Takemoto-za theatre, where he oversaw his greatest theatrical projects, including Kanadehon Chūshingura. His style now drew closer to that of the direct successors of Chikamatsu, in which the parent-child relationship is idealized as a powerful, transcendent force, resolving the complications of the plot. But even here, Sōsuke continued to hint at a more pessimistic vision of fate, at odds with the Takemoto-za trademark of redemption through sacrifice.