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For over 400 years the Kabuki theatre has been a part of Japanese culture. The flash and spectacle have entertained audiences and told tales of love, magic, treachery, and justice. Kabuki playwrights have borrowed material from history, politics, and mythology and the kabuki style is certainly no exception for borrowing and adapting from others. Attributes that define Kabuki stage, props, and subject matter have been adapted from Noh and Bunraku theatre. This paper will follow the path of all three types of theatre to examine these qualities.
Noh theatre is the oldest of the three forms, preceding Kabuki and Bunraku by 200 years. It is the combination of Korean Dengaku and Chinese Sarugaku styles of performance. The Dengaku began as a colorful acrobatic folk dance accompanied by music. It was imported from Korea and used as an educational tool in Shinto shrines. Sarugaku also had acrobatic characteristics but used mimetic dance. This was borrowed from the Chinese and incorporated into Buddhist religious drama. The forms were combined and a more controlled, calm style emerged.
Puppet plays of various types were performed throughout Japan for many years but none have achieved the status and longevity of the Bunraku style. Originally called ningyo joruri (“puppet storytelling”), the puppets had been used in religious settings and public entertainment since the mid 1500’s (Adachi, 1985). Through the next 200 years puppeteers developed the performance and mechanics to a level of sophistication and popularity unrivaled by any other performance art of the time. Then by the mid to late 1700’s, after a series of deaths that included some of the best operators and playwrights of the day, joruri began to loose popularity. The decline continued for some 30 years until a revival started with the opening of a joruri school on the island of Awaji by a puppeteer named Uemura Bunraku-ken. The revival was slow in the making but by the mid 1800’s the...