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Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Japanese playwright (1653–1725)

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Biography

Chikamatsu was born Sugimori Nobumori to a samurai family. There is disagreement about his birthplace. The most popular theory suggests he was born in Echizen Province, but there are other plausible locations, including Hagi, Nagato Province. His father, Sugimori Nobuyoshi, served as a medical doctor to the daimyō Matsudaira in Echizen. His mother was the daughter of Okamoto Ichiku, a physician to the Echizen domain, and Chikamatsu's younger brother later became the physician and medical author Okamoto Ippō.

In those days, doctors who served the daimyō held samurai status. But Chikamatsu's father lost his office and became a rōnin, a masterless samurai. At some point in his teens, between 1664 and 1670, Chikamatsu moved with his father to the imperial capital of Kyoto, where he served for a few years as an obscure page for a civil noble family. Other than that, little is known about this period of Chikamatsu's life. He published his first known literary work during this period, a haiku that appeared in 1671. After he served as a page, he next appears in records of the Gonshō-ji (近松寺) temple in Ōmi Province, in present-day Shiga Prefecture. The temple has long been suggested as the origin of his pen name Chikamatsu, a kun reading of 近松.

With the 1683 Kyoto production of his puppet play about the Soga brothers (The Soga Successors or The Soga Heir; Yotsugi Soga), Chikamatsu became known as a playwright. The Soga Successors is believed to have been Chikamatsu's first play, although 15 earlier anonymous plays have sometimes been attributed to him. Chikamatsu also wrote plays for kabuki theatre between 1684 and 1695, most of them intended for performance by the famous actor Sakata Tōjūrō (1647–1709). From 1695 until 1705, Chikamatsu wrote almost exclusively kabuki plays, after which he abruptly and almost completely abandoned the genre. The exact reason is unknown, although speculation is rife: perhaps puppets were more biddable and controllable than ambitious kabuki actors, perhaps Chikamatsu no longer considered kabuki worth writing for as Tōjūrō was about to retire, or perhaps the growing popularity of puppet theater was economically irresistible. C. Andrew Gerstle argues that Chikamatsu's collaborations with various performers affected his development as a playwright. His collaborations with kabuki practitioners led to more realistic characters, while his later collaboration with Takeda Izumo led to heightened theatricality.

In 1705, early editions of The Mirror of Craftsmen of the Emperor Yōmei announced Chikamatsu as a staff playwright. In 1705 or 1706, Chikamatsu left Kyoto for Osaka, where puppet theater was even more popular. Chikamatsu's popularity peaked with his domestic plays about love suicides and with the blockbuster success of The Battles of Coxinga in 1715, but patrons' tastes later turned to more sensational, gore-filled spectacles and cruder antics. Chikamatsu's plays fell out of use, and the music itself was lost for many of them. He died on January 6, 1725, in either Amagasaki, Hyōgo, or Osaka. In 1706, he wrote a three-act puppet play entitled Goban Taiheiki ("A chronicle of great peace played on a chessboard"), based on the story of the Forty-seven rōnin, which became the basis of the later and much better-known Chūshingura.

Currently, 130 plays have been verified as Chikamatsu's work, and another 15, mostly early kabuki works, are suspected to also have been penned by him.

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