Japanese Puppet Theatre

There are no pictures to accompany this entry, but I had a really exciting cultural experience at the National Bunraku Theatre of Japan this past Saturday. My host mother had asked me a month or two ago if I wanted to see a bunraku, or puppet theatre, performance in Osaka, and of course I said yes.

Since the new year was celebrated quite recently, the inside of the theatre was decorated with small, delicate pink and white balls hanging from the ceiling. Many women came in kimono, and I even saw a few men in the male version (I do not know the Japanese word). The theatre was absolutely packed, but it seemed rather small for a "national theatre," it had only one floor. Hanging from the ceiling above the edge of the stage were two large, red fish, faces pointing toward each other. Below the fish there was a screen for supertitles, which were presented in Japanese.

To the right of the stage, a しゃみせん (shamisen - traditional Japanese instrument) player sat and strummed the three-stringed instrument. In between the shamisen player and the stage is the narrator. There maybe anywhere from one to eight narrators, depending on how the performance was written. The narrators sing in a chant-like way, and the plays were all written hundreds of years ago, so the narrators sing old-fashioned Japanese.

A single puppet, which is probably one and half to two feet in length, is operated by three men. When the puppets come out on to the stage, they are held on the right side by one man in hakama (wide-legged, loose clothing for the lower body that resembles pants) and a happi, a shirt that is folded left side over right side like a kimono. The puppets are operated from the center rear and on the left side by two men who are clothed completely in black with their faces covered, called kuroko, black children. The faces of the kuroko are hidden so that those puppeteers' facial expressions do not distract the audience from watching the puppets' movements. The men without covered faces who operate the puppets show almost no expression on their faces.

The plays reminded me of European operas that I have seen performed at the Lyric Opera House in Chicago. One play was about a foiled plot to assassinate a young successor to a family clan, and another was about a young couple, deeply in love, who had to sneak around behind their parents' backs and overcome various obstacles such as arranged marriage propositions in order to finally live happily ever after. I am not surprised that this art has flourished so much in Japan, a country that seems to show appreciation for the subtle nuances in life. Truly, bunraku, which involves intricate plots told in artful ways, also relies on the audience's attention to the detail in the puppet movements to appreciate the dedication it takes to master this art form.