Love Suicide and the Puppet Theatre in Early Modern Japan

At the turn of the eighteenth century in Osaka, a rash of double suicides broke out as lovers who could not be together in life chose death in the hopes of being reunited in the next life. Playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon dramatized these stories for the puppet theatre (now commonly known as bunraku) in a series of plays that became one of the most celebrated genres in Japanese theatre: the love suicide play. Despite their stature and influence, the plays are viewed primarily as private, domestic dramas of star-crossed lovers—an interpretation developed in the nineteenth century when the plays were canonized as “national literature.”

In this book, Jyana S. Browne restores the plays to their historical context to demonstrate their deep connections with the lives of Osaka commoners. The love suicide plays functioned as vehicles for mourning the recently deceased and for critiquing Osaka’s rapidly-growing prostitution industry and the status system, the social and political structure that governed commoner life. Browne reads across Chikamatsu’s entire corpus of love suicide plays, many of which have not been translated into English or discussed in English-language scholarship. Through a dramaturgical analysis of the plays, this book shows how Chikamatsu crafted “embodied afterlives,” the reanimation of the stories of the dead through live performance, communal witnessing, and the circulation of ideas and affects among the theatre’s audience of commoners. It also demonstrates how the radical aspects of the plays were tamed and neutralized through censorship, revival, and canonization, and how contemporary artists are resuscitating their historical meaning and religious power through new productions with emergent technologies.