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.
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