Жапон драматуры Чикамацу Монзаэмон өмірі мен шығармашылығы

Japanese playwright

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松 門左衛門) was a Japanese dramatist of jōruri, the form of puppet theater that later came to be known as bunraku, and the live actor drama, kabuki. The Encyclopædia Britannica has written that he is "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist". 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 the daimyō Matsudaira in Echizen as a medical doctor. Chikamatsu's younger brother became a medical doctor, and Chikamatsu himself wrote a book on health care. In those days, doctors who served the daimyōs 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 to Kyoto with his father where he served for a few years as an obscure page for a noble family, but other than that, little is known about this period of Chikamatsu's life. He published his first known literary work in this period, a haiku that appeared in 1671. In 1705, Chikamatsu became a "Staff Playwright" as announced by early editions of The Mirror of Craftsmen of the Emperor Yōmei. In 1705 or 1706, Chikamatsu left Kyoto for Osaka, where the puppet theater was even more popular. Chikamatsu's popularity peaked with his domestic plays of love suicides, and with the blockbuster success of The Battles of Coxinga in 1715, but thereafter the tastes of patrons turned to more sensational gore fests and otherwise more crude antics; Chikamatsu's plays would fall into disuse, so even the actual music would be lost for many plays. He died January 6, 1725, in either Amagasaki in 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; this became the basis of the later and much better known Chūshingura. Currently, 130 plays have been verified to have been authored by Chikamatsu, with another 15 plays (mostly early Kabuki works) suspected to also have been penned by him.

"Art is something that lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal." — Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Naniwa Miyage came to be regarded as high literature in the Meiji and Taishō eras. Many have argued that his genius was “his masterful depiction of the passions, obsessions, and irrationality of the human heart.” While Chikamatsu's jidaimono (history plays) were considered more important in his own time, the domestic tragedies are now “the main focus of critical attention and the more frequently performed”, praised as deeply drawn in their portrayals of commoners. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703), one of the earliest domestic plays in puppet theater, was a hit that revived the fortunes of the Takemoto Theater in Osaka. While it is not considered as strong as his later play The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721), Donald Keene praised the death passage as “one of the loveliest passages in Japanese literature”. Also, it was written in Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600 1900 that The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (1707) is “of considerable interest for its exploration of female sexuality and its implicit critique of the life of lower level samurai”. Rei Sasaguchi listed the same play as one of Chikamatsu's most striking bunraku works along with The Couriers of Love to the Other World. The Love Suicides at Amijima is generally regarded as the greatest of his domestic plays, though The Courier for Hell (1711), The Uprooted Pine (1718), and The Woman Killer and the Hell of Oil (1721) have also been praised as works “of exceptional power”. The last of the three initially was not well received, and acquired a high reputation only in the late 19th century. Robert Nichols wrote that The Almanac of Love (1715) is highly regarded. Kenneth P. Kirkwood argued that the work is somewhat thin in texture but “nevertheless reveals the playwright’s skill in making a dramatic plot out of the slightest materials.” In a review of Gerstle's Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays, Katherine Saltzman Li praised the "depth of character" achieved in Twins at the Sumida River (1720) through the various allusions. though Keene argued that even they are “inferior in every respect” to the jōruri works written around the same period. Nichols listed The Courtesan’s Frankincense, The Tethered Steed, and Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards as the best histories. Anne Walthall at UC Irvine said that the "vivid portrayal of interpersonal relations and individual personality [in Love Suicides on the Eve of the Kōshin Festival] provides excellent evidence why Chikamatsu's domestic plays have become more popular than his historical dramas." "Devil’s Island", the second scene of the second act of Heike and the Island of Women (1719), became part of the kabuki repertory in the 19th century and today is usually performed in jōruri and kabuki as a single play.

Japanese composer Mayako Kubo's opera Osan, an adaptation of Shinjū: Ten no Amijima that premiered at the New National Theatre Tokyo in February 2005.

In the fictional world of Naruto, the first ninja puppeteer is named Chikamatsu Monzaemon, a reference to Chikamatsu's puppet plays. In the Digimon multimedia franchise, a puppet Digimon by the name of Monzaemon—an obvious homage to Chikamatsu—was one of the first characters in the original line of virtual pets.