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THE BUNRAKU PUPPET THEATRE OF JAPAN: HONOR, VENGEANCE, AND LOVE IN FOUR PLAYS OF THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES. Translated and annotated by Stanleigh H. Jones. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013. 320 pp. 20 illustrations. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $29.00.
Chikamatsu Monzaemon is often referred to as the Shakespeare of the Japanese traditional puppet theatre, bunraku. His plays have been in almost continuous performance since his lifetime (in the early eighteenth century) and represent the majority of the repertoire of the National Bunraku Theatre of Japan today. Most anthologies that include translations of bunraku scripts, therefore, focus on Chikamatsu's work; the few anthologies specifically dedicated to bunraku are almost all simply collections of Chikamatsu's plays. Stanleigh H. Jones's collection of four thoughtfully translated bunraku scripts flies in the face of this expectation, including not a single play by Chikamatsu. Rather, the collection explores the period after the so-called golden age of bunraku and Chikamatsu's death in 1725. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, when these plays were written, bunraku was steadily overtaken by the other popular theatre of the time, kabuki. The plays represent influential writers from a key transitional time in the art form's history. Jones contributes a much-needed educational resource for introducing and exploring the art of bunraku broadly and deeply. The translations, along with their introductions and annotations, open the world of bunraku to novices while still being rigorous enough to be of interest to specialists.
In the introduction, Jones offers a brief yet comprehensive survey of the practices and history of bunraku. Each of the book's four translated scripts are then also given a specific introduction that presents a synopsis of the play, provides the cultural context often needed by a modern English-speaking reader, highlights the staging practices used, and relates the history of the play's composition and production. The tone of these introductions lands somewhere between conversational and academic. For example, Jones indicates that the complexity of plot seen in these plays "is another...