Chikamatsu (1653–1725), wrote all of his famous plays for the puppets, and even today, when this theatre has fallen rather out of public favour, it remains at an artistic level probably unequalled by the theatre of living actors.
The jōruri would have been impossible without the Nō before it, even though the methods of the two are in some ways so dissimilar. The tradition of masks made it easier for audiences to accept the expressionless faces of the puppets, and the chorus reciting for a Nō dancer led the way to a chanter delivering lines for voiceless puppets. Indeed, in its early days the jōruri was not only easier to understand, but more realistic than the Nō, in spite of the fact that the puppets were rather crudely made. This is indicated by the account we possess of a performance of 1647. A philosopher visited a theatre where he saw wooden puppets dressed as “men, women, monks or laity, immortals, soldiers, horsemen and porters. There were dancers and musicians who beat time with fans and drums. Some leapt about and some rowed boats and sang. Some had been killed in battle, and their heads and bodies were separated. Some were dressed in the clothes of the gentry. Some shot arrows, some waved sticks, and some raised flags or bore aloft parasols. There were dragons, snakes, birds, arid foxes that carried fire in their tails, at which all the spectators marvelled. … The puppets were just as if they were alive.”[1] Certainly this performance sounds more lively than a Nō tragedy, with its gloomy poetry and slowly executed dancing. The tricks of the puppet-operator, such as having fire in the foxes’ tails as in Japanese ghost stories, were undoubtedly meant to capture the interest of the audience by their realism. The philosopher declared that the puppets seemed to be alive. However, although such facile realism undoubtedly appealed to the audiences, it was rejected
- ↑ Quoted in Keene, The Battles of Coxinga, p. 20.
