Foreword to The Love Suicides at Takayama

The impetus for this play was an experience I had many years ago in Japan. I had taken a train from Tokyo to Nagoya and planned to switch lines to the old city of Takayama in the Japanese Alps. When I reached Nagoya, I disembarked into the underground shopping area and called my girlfriend to see if I could visit her family before returning to America. She told me that I should not so much as set foot in the next prefecture, because she was afraid of what her father might do.

The Love Suicides at Takayama is a comedy that imagines what might have happened if I had continued my journey. It also pays homage to the love suicide tradition of Japan’s most admired playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), who wrote plays for the Kabuki and puppet theatre (bunraku).

I first became aware of Chikamatsu on reading The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the three-act template from which Chikamatsu built his most successful domestic plays, and many of his major works in translation. According to Donald Keene, the grand interpreter of Japanese literature, the final scene of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki—the last walk of the lovers before their suicide—is one of the finest examples of Japanese poetry.

Chikamatsu believed that “art lies in the thin margin between reality and unreality.” Art is not life, with its banality and randomness, but an illusion that can reflect emotional truths more closely than the real world.

Chikamatsu wrote more than 100 plays, and his domestic tragedies are notable because they are among the first mature dramas in world literature to focus on the common man—in Chikamatsu’s case, an odd mixture of clerks and tradesmen, robbers and acolytes. Most of the domestic tragedies are set in the pleasure quarters and involve an indulgent young man and a courtesan who fall in love and want to see each other exclusively. Unable to purchase the woman’s freedom or to give up their relationship, they take their lives.

The heart of the love suicide play is the final act, sometimes an extended poem, in which the playwright lifts his desperate puppets above their tawdry and constrained circumstances and gives them a dignified sendoff that speaks not only to their own tragedy but to the transient nature of our own lives. The playwright must create an illuminating clarity that allows the audience to join the lovers’ final embrace and hold in abeyance the obstacles of social class, poverty, human failures, and the stigma of death by one’s own hand. The ritual suicide is presented not simply as exiting this life but, in true Buddhist fashion, a rebirth.

I will leave for a dramaturg to identify the complete list of devices I borrowed from Chikamatsu that are buried in the bondo—the putty of composition and design—that holds this work together. The most important is the poetic michiyuki, the final walk of the lovers before they take their lives, which provides the structure of the last act. Other key elements of Chikamatsu’s Shinjū (double suicide) plays include: the narrator who comments on the feelings of his characters; use of street sounds of the demimonde; the establishment of a rival who is interested in the female protagonist; misunderstandings across generations; and the use of go-betweens who connect the separated lovers.

While tales of misaligned fortunes caused by societal circumstance were Chikamatsu’s stock and trade, my play veers from Chikamatsu’s model in important ways. Most obviously, it is comic in nature and introduces a play within a play (the creative entourage making a film about the love suicides).

The circumstances of the play and its characters lent themselves to the form of a “screwball comedy.” This cinematic genre that began in the aftermath of the Great Depression draws its name from a pitch in baseball that moves in unexpected directions. The play finds its movement through unexpected farcical situations and fast-paced repartee. The genre is noted for its scenes of courtship that satirize traditional love, a female lead who dominates the relationship, and especially for the highly charged verbal interplay that substitutes for sexual activity. These films often include the presence of an out-of-place, improbable hero who tries to outwit others to get his way and usually draws attention to themes that satirize some of the ills of society.

In addition, The Love Suicides at Takayama is set in the 1980s, which is more than 250 years after Chikamatsu. The modern characters are better educated, more self-aware, and more cosmopolitan than the characters of the bunraku theatre who focus on a consuming love affair, their day-to-day responsibilities, and issues of survival. I also reinvented the type of falling action in the Shinjū to make it more deeply rooted in the psychology of the couple rather than an inevitable direction caused by circumstances. This turns the tragedy into a bittersweet comedy that speaks directly to a modern audience.

I invite readers to enjoy a style of storytelling that merges aspects of comedic cinema with techniques from the poetic ritual drama of the Japanese puppet theatre established in the 17th century.

Ultimately, this presents a world where partners constrained by society find the freedom to fully know each other as they take their lives (or, rather, in this modern version, take ownership of their lives) and find their own rebirth.

This work is both a literary and a dramatic project that will be published before it is produced. I welcome the opportunity to work with a theatre company and its artists—especially directors and actors—to deepen the conflict and characterization to maximize its dramatic potential for the American and Japanese stage.