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Paper short abstract

In Golden Age ningyō-jōruri, Act III forms the emotional core of jidaimono history plays. Focusing on works attributed to Namiki Sōsuke, this paper shows how recognition often arrives too late to enable meaningful action, thereby intensifying rather than resolving the tragic situation.

Paper long abstract

Ningyō-jōruri puppet theatre, the direct ancestor of modern bunraku, also provided a substantial portion of the kabuki repertoire. Its Golden Age, marked by the creation of successive hits, is generally acknowledged to have occurred in the Dōtonbori district of Osaka in the early eighteenth century.

In Golden Age jidaimono history plays, Act III conventionally functions as the emotional and dramaturgical centre of the five-act structure shaped within the Takemoto tradition and exemplified in the works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. While this act typically culminates in a pathos-driven climax, the operation of tragic recognition within Act III has not been systematically theorised in studies of jōruri tragedy.

Focusing on works attributed to Namiki Sōsuke (1695–1751), this paper introduces the concept of tragic recognition as a tool for analysing Act III in Golden Age jōruri. Drawing on close textual readings, it argues that Sōsuke developed a distinctive dramaturgical mode in which recognition does not lead to moral clarification or restorative resolution, but instead produces a belated awareness of irreversible constraint arising from an earlier misdeed. In these scenes, knowledge arrives too late to enable meaningful action, intensifying rather than resolving the tragic situation, even where characters briefly articulate forms of spiritual acceptance.

Through analysis of Act III episodes from Sōsuke’s early play Seiwa Genji Jūgodan (1727) and the mature work Yoshitsune Senbonzakura (1747), the paper identifies recurrent formal features of this tragic mode, including delayed recognition, retrospective narrative framing, and the ethical ambiguity of substitution and sacrifice. Whereas the Sushi-ya scene from Yoshitsune Senbonzakura remains central to the modern bunraku and kabuki repertoire, the Nemonogatari scene of Seiwa Genji Jūgodan survives only in textual form and is no longer performed.

By foregrounding tragic recognition as an analytic category, this paper clarifies the dramaturgical function of Act III in Golden Age jōruri and Namiki Sōsuke’s substantive contribution to the development of early-modern Japanese tragic form.