Kabuki

by Zoë Kincaid

The Kimpira bushi, or Kimpira tune, was started in Yedo by Sakurai Tamba, and he was followed by his son Izumi Dayu, who was even more sanguinary than his father. He handled an iron rod so dexterously when he marked the rhythm to his ballad about the extraordinary adventures of Kimpira that he knocked off heads and lopped off limbs of the dolls every day. This realistic display suited the Yedo audiences.

Izumi is said to have disliked everything weak and unmanly, to such an extent that his door-keeper was always a strong man, physical robustness being his ideal. Perhaps the muscular guardian of the entrance was a necessity rather than an ideal, for the spirit of combat sometimes seized the audience, after witnessing a martial doll performance, and two men would begin to fight in the midst of the crowd, within or without, proving too much for the stout gate-keeper. Izumi Dayu began to quarrel himself, and at last killed a man and was executed. This bloodthirsty Joruri did not last long, and when the mania cooled down the efficacy-of-prayer ballads came into vogue again for a short time.

It was Takemoto Gidayu who gathered up all that was useful in the Joruri that had gone before him, and established the school that has been called after him, and continues to the present day,—Gidayu Joruri, more often spoken of simply as Gidayu. He was originally a farmer in Settsu province, and had a voice of large range. In Kyoto he learned how to sing Joruri from a follower of the minstrel Inouye Harima. Gidayu first appeared in Dotombori, the theatre street of Osaka. Tatsumatsu Hachirobei, a ningyo-tsukai, or doll-handler, was a genius in moving the dolls, while Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Japan’s greatest dramatist, wrote the plays.

The name of Gidayu’s theatre in Osaka was the Takemoto-za. It had flourished for some time when one of Gidayu’s followers wrote a play called the Jewel-Well-Double-Suicide, which was produced at Sakai, the port city near Osaka. It proved so successful that this man opened a rival Doll-theatre calling it the Toyotaki-za.

A scene from Chushingura, as played by the marionettes in the Bunraku-za of Osaka.

For long years these two theatres were close rivals, the competition between them bringing about great improvements in stage management, and each tried to outdo the other in new plays, good minstrels and doll-handlers, elaborate settings, stage devices, and gorgeous costumes.

For nearly eighty years, during the Doll-theatre’s golden age, the collaboration of the workers was so complete and Successful that Kabuki was quite cast into the shade.

The movements of the dolls were so spirited, the doll-handlers so creative in the variety of gestures that they invented to express a whole world, gay and grave, that the actors came at last to acknowledge the puppets as a source of inspiration. At first they imitated, but as the vogue for the Joruri Gidayu grew intense, the yakusha were converted into enthusiastic devotees. They went to the Doll-theatre to learn, and returned to their own acting with a keener zest. The marionettes demonstrated before their eyes the heights and depths of acting, of which they had been unaware, and they were competitors in their own profession, saving them from the inertia of self-satisfaction.

The playwrights of Joruri Gidayu were responsible for the best dramas that have been produced in Japan. Especially were they highly successful in a new kind of play, the jidaimono, having historical personages for characters, fashioned out of the most fascinating imaginative material that brought the dolls into full play as creatures of a world of fantasy.