Bunraku

Bunraku combines three things that were originally separate: joruri narrative chanting, the shamisen, and puppetry. They fused in Osaka around 1600, and the form took its mature shape here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

How it works

The omozukai controls the head and right arm, standing on raised clogs; the hidarizukai works the left arm; the ashizukai works the feet, crouched, for years before being allowed anything else. Apprenticeship is often described as ten years on the feet, ten on the left arm, and then the head.

Only the chief handler shows his face. The other two wear black hoods. Nothing is concealed, no screen hides them, and the audience simply agrees not to see them.

One chanter performs every character, male and female, plus the narration — and the shamisen player is not accompaniment but a second voice arguing with the first.

Chikamatsu, and why it matters

Chikamatsu Monzaemon, working in Osaka around 1700, wrote for these puppets what no one was writing for actors: contemporary tragedies about ordinary townspeople. Merchants, shop clerks, courtesans. His Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) was based on a real double suicide that had happened in this city weeks earlier.

It was so successful that the authorities eventually restricted the genre, because young couples were imitating it. He is routinely called the Japanese Shakespeare, and the comparison is about subject matter as much as quality: he took the lives of non-aristocrats seriously.

Seeing it

The National Bunraku Theatre in Nipponbashi runs several seasons a year. Full programmes are long, but single-act tickets are sold, English earphone guides are available, and the surtitles make the plot followable.

Between seasons the theatre’s exhibition room shows the puppets, the heads and the mechanisms, and that alone is worth thirty minutes if you are nearby.