Destiny in the hands of powerful forces
A naturalistic obsession with physical detail on the stage coupled with offstage musical and vocal performances stripped to ritualistic essences: That’s the potent mix that gives bunraku, the justly famed adult puppet drama of Japan, its fusion of charm and power.
At the Aratani/Japan America Theatre on Thursday -- the final stop on a sold-out, five-city U.S. tour -- the distinguished National Puppet Theatre of Japan showed exactly how to introduce a complex art to a foreign audience. An illustrated program booklet contained complete English texts of the two plays on view, and supertitles kept spectators’ understanding on track moment by moment.
Dating from 1773, the first play, “Datemusume Koi No Higanoko,” turned out to be merely a climactic one-character scene from a longer work: ideally picturesque and accessible, with its falling snow, puppet dancing and depiction of a desperate woman climbing a slippery fire tower.
Immediately afterward, Peter M. Grilli of Boston’s Japan Society interviewed members of the company, illuminating the techniques used by bunraku chanters, musicians and puppeteers. We heard about the stylization of voices, the dramatic underscoring of action, the way that three puppet masters collaborate in manipulating each elaborately costumed 3-foot doll-figure.
Far from demystifying bunraku, the lecture-demonstration made everyone more deeply appreciative of the skills resplendent in the three-scene drama “Tsubosaka Kannon Reigenki” from 1887.
And, anyway, how could you demystify the vocalism of Takemoto Tsukomadayu, as raw in tone as the finest flamenco singing yet extraordinarily varied in portraiture? Or the amazing number of sounds that Takezawa Danshichi coaxed from the three strings of his shamisen? Seated on a dais to the right of the full-scale sets, these artists converted antique homilies about love and duty into burning expressive statements.
Lead puppeteers Yoshida Tamame (the blind, suicidal husband in the play) and Yoshida Kazuo (his saintly wife) made the characters’ gestural interplay, dancing and emotional turmoil equally graphic. Sometimes they exploited our delight in domestic minutiae (the wife sewing and biting off the thread), elsewhere our capacity to be moved by tragedy in miniature (the two suicide arias in which vocal, musical and visual arts converged at maximum power).
Both plays depicted and ennobled self-sacrifice. The heroine in the first must commit a capital crime (a false alarm on the fire tower) to save her lover. In the second, a husband kills himself to free his wife from the burden of taking care of him, while she ends her life to care for him beyond the grave: “With nobody to take his hand, he will wander a lost spirit, never at peace.”
In each play, the woman’s death pays important dividends. “Her lover is a warrior and must go back to his people,” we’re told in “Datemusume Koi No Higanoko.” “They can have no future. . . . That is fate.” And in “Tsubosaka Kannon Reigenki,” the wife’s devotion generates a miracle.
Love always imposes permanent and sometimes cruel obligations in Bunraku, and although feminists might consider these plays propaganda for the notion that a woman’s life is worth less than a man’s, the bedrock vision of the art makes all humans tiny figures being manipulated by forces they cannot see or control. In the wife’s words, “our destinies are determined,” so the presence of the puppeteers hovering over each character adds to the sense of fated action -- of larger-than-life forces hurrying us to our deaths.
Yoshida Seizaburo served as lead puppeteer in “Datemusume Koi No Higanoko.”
The richness of the accompaniment came from chanters Toyotake Rosetayu and Takemoto Aikodayu as well as shamisen players Toyozawa Tomisuke, Takezawa Dango and Toyozawa Ryouji.
The engagement will conclude with two performances today, both sold out. For a lucky few, however, there might be cancellations or single tickets.
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Bunraku
Where: Aratani/Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St., L.A.
When: 2 and 8 p.m. today
Price: $58 and $65
Contact: (213) 680-3700
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