Vengeance and Its Toll in "Numazu": An Eighteenth-Century Japanese Puppet Play
1990; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1124036
ISSN1527-2109
AutoresStanleigh H. Jones, Chikamatsu Hanji, Chikamatsu Kasaku,
Tópico(s)Philippine History and Culture
ResumoNumazu is the sixth act in a long ten-act play, written by Chikamatsu Hanji and a collaborator, Chikamatsu Kasaku, for the Japanese puppet theatre (known today as bunraku). The full play, Through Iga Pass with the okaido Board Game (Igagoe dochu sugoroku), was first performed at the Takemoto Ichiza Theatre in Osaka on the twenty-seventh day of the Fourth Month of 1783, according to Japan's old lunar calendar. The play's best-known act (Act VI) is Numazu, translated here in full. The complete play is based on an actual vendetta that came to its bloody conclusion in the town of Ueno near Iga Pass in old Iga province (modern Mie prefecture) in the Eleventh Month of 1634. Rarely is the complete drama produced today (it would take some ten hours), though several of the more popular acts are performed fairly often both in sequence and separately.1 Numazu is the only act that is consistently and regularly staged independently. Three great vendettas in Japanese history are commemorated in eighteenth-century popular theatre. The first is the twelfth-century Soga brothers' revenge for the murder of their father, a tale that has been told in many forms but is best known in the dramatic genre by the 1713 kabuki work Sukeroku (Brandon 1975; Thornbury 1982). Most famous of all is the
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