Stephanie's Week 1 Reflection

This week we started our research into our topic of Bunraku. Our group decided to start searches individually and to come together again to discuss our findings. My initial searches began with the databases where I found plenty of articles dealing with various topics related to Bunraku and Japanese theatre in general. One of the first articles I came across dealt with the aesthetics of Japanese theatre, including Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki. In it, the author, Alexander Alland Jr., discusses the roles of the actors and puppets in their genres and the traditions the actors follow while performing. He also goes on to compare the various styles and their relationships to religion and reality saying that Bunraku is more realistic than either Noh or Kabuki because the puppets are able to represent reality more than the actors on stage, “During battle scenes heads literally fly off bodies, sexual activity is sometimes rather vividly presented, and magical transformations such as a change from human to animal form are accomplished with relative ease,” (8).

A second intriguing source I came across deals with Modern Bunraku plays and the author’s experiences with Bunraku puppets and the theatre. The majority of the article focuses on the modern performances of the Otome Bunraku troupe which is comprised entirely of female puppeteers. I was fascinated by this article because she mentions that males were the only ones allowed to operate Bunraku puppets traditionally, but this changed in about 1900 when the proprietors of Bunraku theatres sought a larger audience. Unlike the men who use three people to operate a puppet, Otome Bunraku operators only use one person. Although men are a part of the Otome troupe, only women are allowed on stage. Her article features pictures and drawings of the traditional Bunraku puppet operators and the Otome operators and shows how their bodies are attached to the puppet in order to operate it. In her interview with Michiko Hirano of the Japan Society I noticed a similarity between how the puppeteers treat the puppets and how the Noh actors treated their masks, Hirano says of the puppeteers “…they try to feel and understand how the doll feels. And they move themselves according to what the puppet is feeling,” (18). Similarly, in Alland’s article he says “Just as the mask must come to life through the Noh actor who wears it, the Bunraku puppet must come to life through its chief operator,” (Alland, 8).

 I used these two articles as my primary examples when our group met on Friday night to discuss and come to a final decision about our topic. Our possible topics included things such as Bunraku puppets and the influence on modern Anime, the role of Bunraku in Japanese pop culture, older Bunraku plays being adapted in contemporary Japan, the connection of Bunraku to Buddhism, contemporary Bunraku troupes (including Otome), and the origins of Bunraku. We finally agreed to focus on one of the more famous Bunraku playwrights, Chikamatsu, primarily because his name popped up in most of the articles and books we read about Bunraku. In fact, every history book about Bunraku and Japanese theatre mentioned him somewhere. From what I recall from a source one of my group mates found, his repertoire includes over one hundred plays. From that point, we decided to focus mostly on his life as a playwright and to find one of his more popular plays to study as well. Overall, I feel that our research and reading from the first two thirds of class has helped me to practice focusing on specific areas of study and to find the discrepancies in one person’s “history” of a certain topic versus another person’s. While conducting my research this week I had an eye out for anything that seems contradictory or very different to another author’s account of Bunraku and the history of the art. I am still on the lookout for such an occurrence and I will continue to read my sources closely.

Alland, Alexander Jr. “The Construction of Reality and Unreality in Japanese Theatre.” The Drama Review, Performance Theory: Southeast Asia Issue. 23:2 (Jun. 1979) pp. 3-10. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.

Skipitares, Theodora. “The Tension of Modern Bunraku.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. 76:1 (2004) pp. 13-21. Web. 29 Oct 2014.