Chikamatsu Monzaemon

His histories are viewed less positively, though The Battles of Coxinga (1715) remains praised.

Training under Yamaoka Genrin is recorded. The recorded working language is Japanese. Works named in the authority record are Horikawa Nami no Tsuzumi, Shusse Kagekiyo, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The Battles of Coxinga, The Courier for Hell and Heike Nyogo no Shima.

Chikamatsu was born Sugimori Nobumori to a samurai family. There is disagreement about his birthplace. The most popular theory suggests he was born in Echizen Province, but there are other plausible locations, including Hagi, Nagato Province. His father, Sugimori Nobuyoshi, served as a medical doctor to the daimyō Matsudaira in Echizen. His mother was the daughter of Okamoto Ichiku, a physician to the Echizen domain, and Chikamatsu’s younger brother later became the physician and medical author Okamoto Ippō. • Illustration — Tomb of Chikamatsu at Kōsaiji temple In those days, doctors who served the daimyō held samurai status. But Chikamatsu’s father lost his office and became a rōnin, a masterless samurai. At some point in his teens, between 1664 and 1670, Chikamatsu moved with his father to the imperial capital of Kyoto, where he served for a few years as an obscure page for a civil noble family. Other than that, little is known about this period of Chikamatsu’s life. He published his first known literary work during this period, a haiku that appeared in 1671. After he served as a page, he next appears in records of the Gonshō-ji (近松寺) temple in Ōmi Province, in present-day Shiga Prefecture. The temple has long been suggested as the origin of his pen name Chikamatsu, a kun reading of 近松. With the 1683 Kyoto production of his puppet play about the Soga brothers (The Soga Successors or The Soga Heir; Yotsugi Soga), Chikamatsu became known as a playwright. The Soga Successors is believed to have been Chikamatsu's first play, although 15 earlier anonymous plays have sometimes been attributed to him. Chikamatsu also wrote plays for kabuki theatre between 1684 and 1695, most of them intended for performance by the famous actor Sakata Tōjūrō (1647–1709). From 1695 until 1705, Chikamatsu wrote almost exclusively kabuki plays, after which he abruptly and almost completely abandoned the genre. The exact reason is unknown, although speculation is rife: perhaps puppets were more biddable and controllable than ambitious kabuki actors, perhaps Chikamatsu no longer considered kabuki worth writing for as Tōjūrō was about to retire, or perhaps the growing popularity of puppet theater was economically irresistible. C. Andrew Gerstle argues that Chikamatsu's collaborations with various performers affected his development as a playwright. His collaborations with kabuki practitioners led to more realistic characters, while his later collaboration with Takeda Izumo led to heightened theatricality. In 1705, early editions of The Mirror of Craftsmen of the Emperor Yōmei announced Chikamatsu as a staff playwright. In 1705 or 1706, Chikamatsu left Kyoto for Osaka, where puppet theater was even more popular. Chikamatsu's popularity peaked with his domestic plays about love suicides and with the blockbuster success of The Battles of Coxinga in 1715, but patrons' tastes later turned to more sensational, gore-filled spectacles and cruder antics. Chikamatsu's plays fell out of use, and the music itself was lost for many of them. He died on January 6, 1725, in either Amagasaki, Hyōgo, or Osaka. In 1706, he wrote a three-act puppet play entitled Goban Taiheiki ("A chronicle of great peace played on a chessboard"), based on the story of the Forty-seven rōnin, which became the basis of the later and much better-known Chūshingura. Currently, 130 plays have been verified as Chikamatsu’s work, and another 15, mostly early kabuki works, are suspected to also have been penned by him.

• Japanese composer Mayako Kubo's opera Osan, an adaptation of Shinjū: Ten no Amijima that premiered at the New National Theatre Tokyo in February 2005.

• Illustration — Statue of Chikamatsu Monzaemon at Amagasaki, Hyogo

• Kagekiyo Victorious (Shusse kagekiyo 出世景清) (1685) • The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki shinjū 曾根崎心中) (1703) • The Night Song of Yosaku from Tamba (Tamba Yosaku machiyo no komurobushi 丹波与作待夜のこむろぶし) • The Courier for Hell (Meido no hikyaku 冥途の飛脚) (1711) • The Almanac of Love (Koi hakke hashiragoyomi) (1715) • The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusen'ya kassen 国姓爺合戦) (1715) • The Uprooted Pine (Nebiki no Kadomatsu 寿の門松) (1718) • The Love Suicides at Amijima (Shinjū Ten no Amijima 心中天網島) (1721) • The Woman-Killer and the Hell of Oil (Onnagoroshi abura no jigoku 女殺油地獄) (1721)

• The Courtesan on Buddha Plain (Keisei hotoke no hara けいせい仏の原) (1699)

• Major Plays of Chikamatsu, translated and introduced by Donald Keene. NY: Columbia University Press. 1961/1990. • Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays, translated by C. Andrew Gerstle. 2001. Consists of: • Twins at the Sumida River (Futago sumidagawa, 1720) • Lovers Pond in Settsu Province (Tsu no kuni meoto-ike, 1721) • Battles at Kawa-nakajima (Shinsh kawa-nakajima kassen, 1721) • Love Suicides on the Eve of the Kishin Festival (Shinju yoigoshin, 1722) • Tethered Steed and the Eight Provinces of Kanto (Kanhasshu tsunagi-uma, 1724)

Chikamatsu's dramatic theory is preserved chiefly in the preface to Hozumi Ikan’s Naniwa Miyage, published posthumously in 1738. In an interview recorded therein, Chikamatsu rejects strict imitation of reality, arguing that "Art abides in the narrow gap between the flesh and the skin, the real and the unreal." The passage has been interpreted as a theory of realism contrasting conceptual realism, which evokes emotion through action, dialogue, social role, and plot, with surface realism, which risks seeming vacant or eerie when it only imitates outward appearance.

• Naniwa Miyage (1738), written by Hozumi Ikan and preserving statements attributed to Chikamatsu on the art of puppet theater

• In the fictional world of Naruto, the first ninja puppeteer is named Chikamatsu Monzaemon, a reference to Chikamatsu's puppet plays. • In the Digimon multimedia franchise, a puppet Digimon by the name of Monzaemon—an obvious homage to Chikamatsu—was one of the first characters in the original line of virtual pets.

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