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Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Chapter 4--Renaissance--CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON (1653-1725)         We are still in Kyoto, where Japanese literature has been from its beginnings a thousand years earlier, but now in a much more stable environment than Chomei's, as we enter "The Floating World" of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868).  I choose Chikamatsu because he is the greatest dramatist of this Tokugawa Period, probably of Japanese literature--and that's where the literary action is in this period.  Chikamatsu is even sometimes called the "Japanese Shakespeare," though he is certainly not that.  He has nothing of the range through comedy, tragedy, and history of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare's language complexity (but, then, neither does anyone else in world literature).  No, once the Japanese discovered Shakespeare in the late 19th century, Shakespeare himself became the Japanese Shakespeare, so that you can no doubt see as much Shakespeare in Tokyo as in London or New York any given year (certainly more Shakespeare than Chikamatsu).  But, Chikamatsu did write 130 plays (to Shakespeare's 37), and, as Shakespeare is the quintessential Elizabethan, Chikamatsu may be seen as the quintessential representative of the Genroku period (1688-1703), the Japanese Renaissance period which comes about 100 years later than the Elizabethan period in England, and has much the same character, as Tokugawa Ieyasu, after his victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, established the Tokugawa bakufu, absolute political control, much as Henry Tudor did in England after his victory at Bosworth Field in 1485. In each case, the period of civil war was over and a strong royal (shoganate) family was clearly in control, so that, after this period of stability had been in place about a hundred years, it generated, in each case, a middle-class urban environment in which the arts, particularly literature, and particularly dramatic literature, began to flourish.

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