The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves. In a scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven to take their own lives. Both plays were inspired by real events, and Chikamatsu’s was followed by a wave of double suicides that led to a ban on further performances. This mirroring of life and art is all the more astonishing given the fact that the actors are not people but puppets.
Bunraku, named for Uemura Bunrakuken, the owner of an Osaka puppet theatre, has its roots in the seventeenth century, and especially in the plays of Chikamatsu. Writing often for puppets rather than actors, he was interested in the clash between duty and passion in the lives of a rising merchant class. Bunraku was a kind of people’s theatre, but it wasn’t light entertainment, showing fascination with tragedy and ritual violence in ordinary lives.
The Fire Watchtower scene has a cast of one: Oshichi, whose beloved will have to commit ritual suicide if she cannot help him recover a lost sword. To do this, she must sound a false alarm on the fire drum, opening the city gates—an offense that, in a city of largely wooden buildings, is punishable by death. As Oshichi enters, she is convulsed with fear and determination, and her puppet body, half the size of a person, flings violently forward at the waist as she makes her way to the watchtower, escorted by three puppeteers, two shrouded head to toe in black, the other unmasked.
I was so engrossed in Oshichi’s mission that I hardly noticed the puppeteers at first; she seemed to be acting alone as she scrambled up the tower steps, fell back, and tried again. But in an extraordinary moment, when the drum is struck, she meets her barefaced puppeteer at the top of the tower stairs. All I could see was him, his thick right arm coiled around her frail limb as she—he—struck the bell. A crucial shift had occurred: she appeared to be watching as he pumped her arm and the alarm sounded. Which of them did the deed? The puppeteer is implicated, or is he? We saw his hand, but, in the world of the story, he does not exist, and Oshichi alone will ultimately pay the price.
After this came a jarring interlude that looked to me like a puppet autopsy. With comic delight, the puppeteers took poor Oshichi apart and revealed her naked, inert form. In Bunraku, one puppet is handled by three puppeteers, each of whom is responsible for a different portion of the puppet’s body: the lead puppeteer takes the head and the right arm and guides the torso; the second puppeteer handles the left arm; and the third operates the lower half. Moving a single body part in synchrony with the whole is a skill that takes years of training; Kiritake Monyoshi, one of the lead puppeteers, has been practicing his art for more than thirty years. He explained how his right hand enters the puppet, how hidden strings move the eyes or raise the eyebrows, and how he and the second puppeteer cue each other to coördinate the puppet’s arms. Perhaps most shocking of all, the puppet’s skirts were thrown up so that we could see her missing legs (female puppets have no legs, only a kimono that falls to the floor), and we glimpsed how the third puppeteer nonetheless makes her appear to kneel and walk.
Presumably, someone thought that this Japanese art form needed to be demystified for an American audience, but I was dismayed by the jokey and mechanical treatment of a puppet that, moments before, had conveyed a devastating human drama.
The next scene, from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” comes from the end of the play, when Tokubei, a clerk ruined and humiliated by a cheating friend, drifts onto the stage with his beloved courtesan, Ohatsu. It is night: they skim ghostlike through the dark, and we sense their faint breathing and taut nerves.
The lovers, knowing that society will never let them be together, set out to end their lives and be together in the afterworld. They stand on a bridge, weeping into the water; they embrace and flow apart, reflecting with remorse and pride on the act that they are about to commit. An animated backdrop (designed by Oga Kazuo, a frequent collaborator of Hayao Miyazaki’s) moves them along a path through the forest. Ohatsu expresses sadness at leaving her parents behind, while Tokubei, whose parents are dead, says that he will meet them in the hereafter.
These are intimate moments, but the lovers are not alone, because of the puppeteers tenderly carrying them. Human and puppet limbs are entwined, and there is a sense, both comforting and disconcerting, of a group-individual, like the shadowy figures who merge with the dark in Goya’s Black Paintings. Each puppet is both itself and a small society, and even the puppets’ materiality is uncanny—they are floating, airy creatures weighted by earthly human spirits. The puppeteers are not the only artists giving the puppets life. On a separate platform to the right of the action, three male chanters sit in a neat row, next to men playing the shamisen, a stringed instrument with a raw and piercing tone which is often used in vocal accompaniment. The chanters give the puppets voice with intense and compressed screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, and remorse—but they themselves slip from our awareness. Their disembodied voices operate like a soundtrack, synchronized with puppet gesture and emotion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, a feverish shake.
What we are seeing is an elaborate division of labor, in which body and soul, movement, sound, and speech are parcelled out among different players—witnesses who (like us) are also players in the events onstage. Who is responsible for the terrible deaths that will follow? Are the individuals to blame, or are they impelled by a cruel society or a divinely sanctioned hand? With Bunraku puppets, culpability for unbearable individual acts is shared, making intimate human violence possible and even disturbingly beautiful. None are guilty; all are complicit.
A scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” a play from 1703 by the famous dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon.
In the lovers’ final hour, we see poor Tokubei draw his sword and despair. He moves to strike Ohatsu, who opens herself to his blow, but he hesitates, overcome by her vulnerability. Then, in a piece of choreography that momentarily brings puppeteers, chanters, and musicians all into view, Ohatsu pulls her long obi across the stage, a complicated maneuver that ends in a striking tableau: Tokubei at one end of the sash and her at the other, with the black figures of the puppeteers between them—a silently adjudicating human presence—and the musicians completing the visual arc.
Finally, the lovers wind themselves tightly together and the sash falls away. Ohatsu solemnly turns to Tokubei, her back to us, and falls to her knees before him. His arm shaking with tension, he raises the blade high above her and plunges it into her neck. She sinks backward, and he immediately turns it on his own throat and falls on her, as if in love. It is a riveting scene but, for the record, was edited for this performance to spare the audience the most gruesome parts. In Chikamatsu’s version, the narration tells us that, when Tokubei first thrusts, “the point misses. Twice or thrice the flashing blade deflects this way and that until a cry tells it has struck her throat. . . . He twists the blade deeper and deeper, but the strength has left his arm. When he sees her weaken, he stretches forth his hands. The last agonies of death are indescribable.”
Which may be why I did not need to be lifted to the skies by the animated backdrop, which now flew the lovers’ bodies upward and turned them into a rocklike monument to incarnation and passing lives, a pretty distraction from the tragedy at hand which left me rewinding in my own mind to the real final image: dead puppets. ♦
