Chikamatsu Monzaemon

For those of you who are wondering what that long bunch of Japanese in the title line means, it's actually a person's name. Chikamatsu (surname) is one of the most well-known Japanese playwrights of the Edo period (he wrote from the 1670s through the 1720s). I volunteered to do a short, in-class presentation summarizing a reading assignment about him which we were given, and it turned out to be one of the most interesting assignments that we have read this semester in Japanese literature class.

The introduction described Chikamatsu as being raised in a well-off family but going on to work with actors, people who were, at the time, considered social outcasts. I wonder why actors were considered social outcasts during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I'm thinking that it may have something to do with society associating the theater world with risqu é or even base values and/or activities. But then again, Chikamatsu's plays often include characters who display samurai values such as loyalty, devotion, and honor, values that would probably be respected by society at large.

The play that I read was a sewamono, a genre in which three-scene, one act plays that deal with sensational current events are written. Indeed, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the play that was included in the packet I read, was based on a true incident and was first performed only a month after the incident occurred. The play takes place in what is modern-day Osaka, the huge city next to where I live. Tokubei, the protagonist, falls in love with Ohatsu, a prostitute. Tokubei spends all of his money on Ohatsu and falls on hard times, so Tokubei's boss from the soy sauce factory, who also happens to be Tokubei's uncle, decides to try to help Tokubei by allowing Tokubei to marry the boss's wife's niece. Tokubei, however, does not want to marry her, which causes him to fall into his boss's disfavor. Furthermore, when Tokubei tries to return the dowry money to his boss, he realizes that his friend Kuheiji, who borrowed Tokubei's dowry money and was supposed to return it the next day, is pretending to have never borrowed any money from Tokubei, and refuses to pay Tokubei back. Tokubei has no way to redeem his honor by staying alive, and Ohatsu is so devoted to him that she refuses to be left alone in the world without him, so the two lovers head to the Sonezaki forest and commit a double suicide.

If you could follow all that, you'd surely agree with me how sad the story is. The protagonist is whole-heartedly a good person, but various events prevent him from living with honor, leaving him no choice but to kill himself. The concept of honor is one of the several samurai values that Chikamatsu incorporated into this play. Other important aspects of Chikamatsu's writing that make his works interesting to read are his emphasis on passion and emotion and his inclusion of the struggle between reason and desire. These focal points make Chikamatsu's works easy to relate to, because the audience can empathize with the characters' emotions and struggles between reason and desire.