Bunraku, Puppet Theatre
If you have ever attended a bunraku performance
either in Japan or abroad, then you have experienced a theatrical performance
like no other. Bunraku is a fairly recent term describing the traditonal
professional puppet theatre of Japan. A more descriptive term is ayatsuri
joruri. Ayatsuri means puppetry and joruri refers to reading dramatic
text through the art of chanting. Bunraku performs dramas in an entertaining
and serious fashion. These are all performed by puppets manipulated by three
puppeteers per puppet, a chanter -called a tayu- narrating the performance,
and a shamisen player providing musical accompaniment. The name bunraku
comes from a particular puppet troupe headed by the main puppeteer whose
stage name was Uemaru Bunrakken. He was active in the mid 1800's and the
troupe's subsequent popularity allowed the form to regain its former popularity.
In 1872, the Bunraku Theatre opened and the name came to denote the style
of Osaka puppet theatre. Even though we may discuss earlier forms, we will
still describe them as bunraku for the purposes of this article.
Bunraku has often been described as the art of
threes, because it is composed of the interplay of the puppets, the tayu,
and the shamisen (a three-string banjo type instrument) player. It also
requires three puppeteers to make the main character puppets perform. It
is the confluence of these three principal components that makes bunraku
the special theater that it is. But there are certainly a lot more people
involved in the total performance of a bunraku play: set designers and makers,
stage hands, puppet head keepers, wig masters, prop masters, and a costume
seemstress all work together.
Unlike other western puppetry such as marionettes
and hand puppets, bunraku plays are always performed with the puppeteers
in view of the audience. The tayu, and the shamisen player sit on an auxillary
stage off to the side and are also seen by the audience. The tayu sits with
the libretto of the play before him on a kendai, a lacquer bookstand.
The shamisen player sits to his left. More elaborate plays may have two
sets of tayu and shamisen players.
History
The earliest mention of the word puppet is kugutsu,
which comes from 8th century Buddhist texts. The origin of this word has
been a point of discussion over the years, with some stating that the word
and art of puppetry came from the Middle East via the Silk Road. The earliest
known puppets were used in Shinto rituals. These puppet performances were
used to show the ancient past glories of the divinities that were worshipped
at the shrine. Typically, the puppets were used to perform dances and wrestling
matches.
Puppet performances not tied to Shinto go back
to the 11th century. These performances were put on by what is described
in old texts as nomadic hunters and work
ers.
These wandering workers would additionally support themselves by performing
episodic puppet plays. As an additional source of income, the women in the
group would also engage in prostitution. Most of these troupes eventually
centered in Sanjo on Awaji island. There they perfected the art of various
forms of puppetry.
The earliest form of bunraku puppet theatre was
created by a troupe started in the mid 1500's at the Nishinomiya Shrine
near Osaka. These puppeteers were known as ebisu-mawashi. Some forty years
later saw the addition of the joruri chanters and shamisen players to enhance
the puppet performance. The puppets of those troupes were manipulated with
both hands and the puppeteers were hidden below a front curtain. These puppets
evolved into complex devices that eventually, around the mid 1730's, became
the type of puppet that we are most familiar with in bunraku. Concurrenty,
the curtain hiding the operators would sometimes be made of gauze so that
the audience could see their movements, evolving into the practice of showing
the operators in full view of the audience. A number of puppet troupes formed
in Kyoto and Edo, but the merchant city of Osaka with its large merchant
population was the place were puppet theatre flourished the most. At its
height in the early 18th century, bunraku was more popular than kabuki theater.
Much of this popularity was due to the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon.
Bunraku's popularity increased after Chikamatsu's
death in 1714 and remained popular until the 1780's. One of the most popular
plays is Chusingura, The Treasury of the Faithful Retainers. It was
based on the famous revenge by the forty-seven ronin in 1743. When that
play was performed in its entirety it lasted eleven hours. In the latter
part of the 18th century, playwrights began abandoning bunraku for kabuki
theater. Many of the popular bunraku texts were adapted by kabuki. However,
the public's appetite for bunraku switched to kabuki The decline of audience
attendence almost forced bunraku into extinction, despite the fact that
new heights of artistry were achieved at that time. It was not until the
aforementioned Bunrakken's theater that the art was revived in the mid 1800's.
Puppets and Operators
Bunraku puppets are generally two thirds to one
half life-size. The heads are made of 
wood
have a handle grip that is inserted into a wooden body. The heads are usually
grouped by sex, age and facial temperment. The facial expression can be
fixed or demonstrated through the use of moveable eyes, mouths, eyebrows,
and sometimes noses and ears. Female puppets have no feet but have hands
that are delicate and flexible. The movement of the legs is simulated through
the puppeteer's movement of the lower kimono. Heads are disproportionally
small because a small head is considered more attractive than a large one.
Some female heads have a small needle near the mouth that can hook the kimono
sleeve onto it to portray crying. The left arm of the puppet is generally
longer than the right because the operator of the arm has to stand further
away. Audiences generally ignore or don't even notice the difference. A
theater group can have as many as three hundred puppet heads in its repetoire.
Male heads tend to be the more complex but there are some roles in which
the femal character's head transforms itself into a fox or even a demon
with a hannya (devil looking) type face.
On stage, the chief puppeteer, the omo-zukai,
manipulates the head and the right arm. His left arm and hand is inserted
through the back of the doll and holds the head grip. He turns the head
and m
anipulates any articulated
facial features by pulling on toggled strings with his fingers. His right
hand is put through a strap underneath the puppet's right hand in order
to hold any props. He also can manipulate any articulation in the puppet's
hand. He wears tall straw clogs on his feet which elevate him above the
other puppeteers. The omo-zukai generally wears a black kimono and a hakama,
a split skirt. He is sometimes hooded but if the play is one of great diffficulty
to perform, he will perform hoodless. It is the omo-zukai who chooses the
head of his principal puppet from the inventory of available heads.
The second puppeteer, and the first assistant,
is the hidari-zukai: he manipulates the left hand and arm. The third
puppeteer, called the ashi-zukai, moves the puppet's legs. As mentioned
before, since female dolls usually have no feet or legs because of the long
kimono worn, the robes are folded and shaped to represent movement of the
legs. The assistants are always clothed in black with hoods. The apprenticeship
of puppet operators can be quite lengthy. The ashi-zukai must apprentice
for 10 years before graduating to hidari-zukai. Likewise the hidari-zukai
generally operates the left arm for the same amount of time before he can
assume the mantel of omo-zukai, although there is not really a set timetable
for their advancement
Historically, puppet operators have always been
on the low rung of the social acceptance ladder. They traditionally have
been looked down on in relation to the tayu and even the shamisen player.
It may have something to do with puppetry's early history. It might also
have to do with the nature of the operator's job. The better he does it,
the more invisible he becomes. It is amazing to watch a play with several
principal characters on stage operated by many as nine puppeteers. The coordination
in which they harmoniously move together, putting life into the puppets,
while seeming to disappear from the audience's gaze, is an incredible feat
of artistry. Today, puppeteers are held in the same high regard as other
theatrical artists.
Chanting
The art of story telling through the spoken word
is the oldest way of conveying fables, myths, and epic stories in all cultures.
In 15th and 16th century Japan, biwa hoshi, blind bards, would tell
stories from legendary tales such as The Tale of Heike, Heike monogatari.
They would accompany themselves on the biwa, a lute type instrument
imported from China via Persia. During the latter 16th century, the nature
of this chanting changed into the style called joruri. The term originated
with a story called Joruri which was the name of a girl who was in
love with the historical, tragic hero Minamoto Yoshitsune. The story was
told through the chanter and became so popular that it became synonomous
with that style of chanting art. This style of chanting was very popular
with the common people. It became even more popular when music from a shamisen,
introduced to Japan around the same time, accompanied the chanting. Many
of t
he stories were taken
from the classics but also many were adpatations from Noh plays
Music
One of the essential ingredients of bunraku is
the music which accompanys the play. The music is played on a shamisen,
specifically a wide neck shamisen called a futazao. It is the largest of
the three sizes of shamisen, so that it can provide a wide range of sounds,
adding to the drama of the performance. The shamisen was introduced to Japan
from the Ryukyu Islands (now Okinawa) in the 1570's. The original instrument,
called the jabi-sen, had snake skin on the body of the instrument,
later replaced by cat skin. The cat skin was a sturdier substance and allowed
the musician to have a more percussive striking of the string and skin.
This style of playing uses an ivory plectrum similar to that used for biwa.
The musician's role is to create an atmosphere and the tempo of the performance.
His playing enhances the tayu's presentation of the story, while providing
musical cues to the puppeteers. He can build the drama and provide the musical
bridge between the tayu's narration. Even his silences heighten the dramatic
moments of the play. Rarely does the shamisen player get to display his
own virtuousity. His role is to advance the story and the tayu's telling
of it.
Playwright
The old phrase "if it's not
on the page, it's not on the stage" was just as releveant for bunraku
as it was for other theatre. One of the reasons that bunraku was so popular
with the common people was that its plays dealt with comtemporary common
people's situations. The other reason bunraku reached the heights it did
was because of the great playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. The first play
written by him for puppet theater was Yotsugi Soga, The Heir of Soga.
It was first performed in 1684 at the Osaka theatre of Takemoto Gidayu,
a master tayu. The combination of these two masters' work transformed puppet
theater into a true presention of drama rather than plays based on Buddhist
morals. Chikamatsu continued to write plays of heroic nature. However, in
1703, he wrote Sonezaki Shinju, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki ,which
was based on a real life event which happened several weeks before. It was
not uncommon for such suicides to take place, but they were still the talk
of the town. The reaction of the public to having a play so soon after the
event was overwhelming. The increase of such suicides after the play caused
the government to ban such acts, to little avail. Chikamatsu continued to
write domestic tragedies and heroic plays. Not many of Chikamatsu's plays
remain untouched, as many puppet troupes have added their own touches to
increase some dramatic scenes for the puppets and the tayu. Also, some of
the dialogue had to be cut to accomodate the movement of the larger three-man
puppets instead of the smaller ones of Chikamatsu's day.
Bunraku Today
Bunraku has survived over the years after WWW
II largely through government support of the cultural arts. The National
Bunraku Theatre in Osaka and the National Theatre in Tokyo are the primary
presenters of bunraku in Japan and abroad. Competition from other forms
of entertainment, and the attitude of the younger generation toward the
old ways, have made bunraku's future far from secure.