• 其礼成心中 (Much Ado About Love Suicides)

I see they’re bringing back the Bunraku puppet parody Much Ado About Love Suicides (Sore Nari Shinju) of 2012 by the prolific stage and film writer Mitani Koki. The show riffs on the popular double-suicide (shinju) puppet dramas of the early 1700s by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Japan’s most famous playwright. The highly conservative Bunraku world, unlike Kabuki, has made little attempt to innovate or attract new audiences and has struggled as a result. It has been left to individuals such as Mitani and the renowned photographer Sugimoto Hiroshi to take up the mantle. Mitani is primarily known as a comedy writer (Warai no Daigaku; Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald), so expectations were generally along those lines. Here is a review of the 2013 Tokyo revival.

(8/11/13, Tokyo)

I wasn’t so wild about Mitani’s Kabuki parody Duel in Takadanobaba (決闘！高田馬場) at this theater way back when, but the Bunraku experiment was intriguing for a number of reasons. First, unlike Kabuki, few new pieces are written for Bunraku, and I figured a new show might provide a new perspective and give the art a jolt. A play by such a popular playwright – most of whose fans have probably never gone anywhere near puppet theater (as suggested by an informal show of hands prior to the performance) – could help introduce Bunraku to a new audience, basically doing the work that the closed Bunraku world isn’t doing itself. Plus, it gives younger Bunraku performers a chance to take the stage. Of course, other rare attempts at modern Bunraku have had mixed results: I’m still trying to forget the horrendous Tempest, and the Sugimoto Bunraku depended more on stage effects, interesting though they were, than the quality of the live performance. In any case, it was good to see a younger audience packed into a Bunraku show.

The show had a fun prologue by a puppet version of the author, which looked amusingly like him down to the glasses and balding hair. Then to the story: a manju bun shop in Sonezaki is benefiting from a boom in double suicides inspired by Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s big Bunraku hit Sonezaki Shinju (hence Sonezaki manju – get it?). Their business is threatened when Chikamatsu’s new Amijima-based suicide show lures couples to that area instead, rendering Sonezaki irrelevant. Those difficulties are compounded when the bun makers’ daughter falls in love Juliet-style with the son of a major rival, an Amijima tempura maker.

The desperate father goes to Chikamatsu to beg for a sequel to the Sonezaki show to win people back to his town, but the author advises him first to come up with a better suicide to justify such a work. Unable to convince his daughter to off herself, the father eventually decides in desperation to commit a double drowning with his wife. They jump in the water but fail to complete the deed. However, when they eat the bun he was carrying, they discover a new product – a mizu manju (水饅頭 , literally “water manju” – nothing to do with water, but offers an opportunity for a pun). That brings them the promise of success and a new life.

The story itself was more of a send-up than a new way forward. It got cheap laughs out of modern phrasing, bad puns and funny staging (female puppet going into hysterics, collapse of shop, man in water with scuba mask and flashlight). It would have been more interesting to see a modern story portrayed more seriously in Bunraku style, perhaps reset in the Edo era – I always thought the poisoned curry case a few years back would make a good candidate. Still, the show was enjoyable as a light, forgettable spoof and managed to keep the energy level up throughout. Whether it will make new Bunraku fans is an open question.

The staging offered some original touches. The tayu narrators, traditionally placed outside the proscenium at stage left, were seated above the puppeteers like virtual surtitles, separated from the playing area by special lighting that made it look as though they were floating. It was a striking image that I thought worked nicely, though it does diminish the live effect to some extent by putting the musicians at one remove from us. The hooded puppeteers, usually seen only from around the waist up, were fully visible throughout, which was distracting. There are just too many people on stage for that. At one point, a string was stretched across the stage representing the imaginary ground, simulating the normal practice. That highlighted for me why it would have been better to have the normal stage height in the first place.

One of the better innovations in the show was the fluid movement of the sets, such as the swift creation and dismantlement of Chikamatsu’s office, which allowed for more shifting of scenes and was well handled. That’s something Bunraku could learn from. It led to some scattered moments of interest, like the transparent sheet raised to show the puppets swimming under water. Unfortunately, most of the memorable set pieces, like the collapse of the manju shop, were generally for comic purposes rather than for telling the story and thus stood out in a bad way.

The main tayu was the expressive Chitosetayu, who did his usual solid work. In a great curtain call, the puppeteers finally appeared with hoods off, revealing an exceedingly young team, but it was the puppets who took the bows. (Since there were more puppets than puppeteers, some of the latter actually appeared twice with different puppets.) That was a creative way to introduce curtain calls, which do not exist in traditional Japanese theater of any genre.

All in all, the show was a nice distraction. It was not a big contribution to the art of Bunraku, which has attracted headlines in Osaka recently due to criticism by the governor that the art sucks up public subsidies without making itself relevant to the times. I don’t think Mitani’s show will help the cause in any way or lead to any further Bunraku experiments, but it was welcome for luring Bunraku novices into the theater. Let’s see if it keeps them there.