Puppet Master

He is the love of your life. You are his one-and-only. The pair of you is doomed: Obligations to the social order make your relationship impossible. The only way out—double suicide. Actually, this being eighteenth-century Japan, you let him literally do it all; still, you are his forever and there is no turning back. How gorgeous the world seems here in the quiet forest, on this bridge among the flowering trees, the robin’s-egg blue sky above. How handsome he is as he brings himself to standing; you sink into your kimono at his manly wonderfulness. He looks at you and speaks of his memories of making love, of the softness of your skin. But the hour is late; the bells toll.

Performance

National Bunraku Theater: “The Fire Watchtower,” Scene from Oshichi, the Greengrocer’s Daughter / “The Forest by the Tenjin Shrine” Scene from The Love Suicides at Sonezaki

Place

Japan Society, New York, NY, October 3, 2024

Words

Mindy Aloff

National Bunraku Theater perform “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki.” Photograph by Richard Termine

The wind sings like three three-stringed instruments; Nature cries and croaks and keens with plucked perfection. This is life at the ultimate: The moment before his gleaming sword runs you through and then severs his own throat. You are ready. Collapsed to your knees, you turn to present yourself to him. As your lover slaughters you, his last look at the earth will be filled with your face, resigned as a lamb, looking up at him, the tips of your fingers curled around your kimono’s snow-white sleeve. Your resignation is your heroism. But wait! He lowers the sword. He cannot do it. A moment passes into eternity. He lifts the sword, curling his fingers around the hilt. You close yourself into yourself like a fan. He stretches higher than he has ever stretched. There is, between you, the invisible path of the decisive moment, invisible yet so present that all the onlookers complete it in their heads. Some of them might be moved to remember the St. Teresa of Bernini, ecstatic under the angel’s lifted arm, all that river of gold pouring down. Your lover directs his blade to the pigeon-blood obi around your pristine snow-white kimono; before the blade ever touches you, your life is gushing out of your waist. This is choreography at its most sophisticated—movement the audience ineluctably completes. The flowering trees begin to snow petals. He starts to drive his arm home, but the sword trembles. He completes the trajectory but the trembling sword—it’s like a child the two of you have made together. It’s his humanity whispering of his love for you. You drop. He raises the sword and, in one sharp action, he cuts his throat. Now, the wind picks up. The onlookers are taken on a magic ride through the forest as the world sings a lament. They ascend the trunk of the most noble of the trees, up through the canopy, higher than any tree, than any mountain, up to the blue, past the earth and into the universe, where two brand-new stars shine and shine.

National Bunraku Theater perform “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki.” Photograph by Richard Termine

The art of Japan’s bunraku puppet theater tradition—conceived about the period of Shakespeare at the Globe—enacts huge emotions and spectacular gestures by implication. The feelings and the actions are completed in the heads of the audience. The reality of this puppet theater is embodied in tiny, everyday gestures and bodily motions—things that one takes for granted outside the theater and yet that suddenly seem miraculous when one watches a fabulously costumed and coiffed rod puppet precisely reproduce them in the company of three puppeteers per puppet-actor—one operating the head, with all its tiny nuances of eye and eyebrow expression, and the right arm; a second operating the left arm; and a third operating the legs and feet—or, in the case of female puppets encased in kimono, the illusion of legs and feet. To see one hand of a puppet stretched out except for the topmost finger joints—which are curled down, like certain gestures Nijinsky performed in photographs—while the other hand ends in a fist, or to see a puppet wipe a tear with fingers curled around the corner of her kimono, or to see a puppet struggle to climb the ladder to a fire tower and momentarily stop to twist around and look back: It renews one’s awe for the wonders of the everyday body, the wonders of being alive, and, most of all, the wonders of the imagination. On this occasion, the excerpt performed from The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the 1703 bunraku masterpiece by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, enjoyed not only elegant puppet carvings and master performers, shamisen players, and chanters of the story momentarily transforming their voices for each character in a variety of moods, as well as choreography by Ryunosuke Sawamura, who authored the disposition in space of limbs and expressions for both the puppets and the precision movements of the puppeteers. The production also offers the magnificent animated forest and clouds of Studio Ghibli’s Kazuo Oga. Not an aristocrat in sight, but high art beyond the beyond.

Basil Twist’s “Dogugaeshi.” Photograph by Richard Termine

It happened that seated right in front of me was another great puppet master, Basil Twist. His range of artistic expression goes way beyond that of the bunraku tradition per se. However, one of his early productions—Dogugaeshi—commissioned by Japan Society in 2003 and revived there several weeks ago, refers to another tradition of Japanese puppetry: the rural puppetry from the island of Awaji, an art Twist discovered at a festival in France, in 1997. This branch of the tradition consists in the main of puppets that are animated sliding rectangular screens. As Twist describes the film he saw in ’97: “On a small black-and-white monitor flashed a sequence of sliding screen doors. It as brief and mysterious, and then it was gone. . . .” For his homage to the tradition, he reproduces that film (or recreates it), so that the audience is launched into the Awaji world from the same base that Twist had been.

In his hour-long, intermissionless Dogugaeshi, Twist presents 88 scenes of different kinds of sliding screens—some constructing rooms, some theaters, some shrines, sometimes in two dimensions, sometimes in three. Eventually, one has the sense that one is being led through a long story. As their history dance unscrolls, a puppet of a fox resembling a lamb keeps popping up as a silent guide. On a rotating platform to the side, the lovely shamisen-and-koto musician Yoko Reikano Kimura plays a many-textured accompaniment. Some of the screens are in sumptuous condition, some are in tatters, some suggest antiquity, a couple suggest the late twentieth century. Only the fox and the musician are not geometric abstractions, and yet how deeply touching the parade of inanimate things becomes.

There is a sizeable team at work on these performances, including Twist and four other puppeteers. I first saw Dogugaeshi at Japan Society a year after it was commissioned; seeing it this fall, some twenty years later, I was astounded by, first, how much emotion it leads one to experience from abstract slides, and, second, how much of its rich detail I’d forgotten.

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff's writings on the arts, dance a specialty, have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Her most recent books are Why Dance Matters (Yale) and Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology (Library of America).

comments

Faye Arthurs October 10, 2024

What a riveting, beautiful read!

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