Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (Echizen Province, 1653 – Osaka, 6 January 1725) was the leading dramatist of jōruri, the puppet theatre that gave rise to bunraku and existed alongside kabuki. His output of roughly 130 verified works for jōruri and kabuki earned him the nickname "the Japanese Shakespeare". He was also among the first to put ordinary people at the centre of tragedy, most famously in plays about double love suicides.

He was born into a samurai family as Sugimori Nobumori. His father, a physician serving a daimyō, later lost his post and became a rōnin, a samurai without a lord. Between 1664 and 1670, as a teenager, Chikamatsu moved with his father to Kyoto, where he spent a few years as a minor page in a family of court nobility. Little is documented about this period, though a haiku of his was published in 1671.

His first known puppet play, about the Soga brothers, was staged in Kyoto in 1683 and brought him attention. From 1684 to 1695 he wrote mainly for kabuki, often for the star actor Sakata Tōjūrō, and until 1705 he worked almost exclusively in that form. He then all but abandoned kabuki, and scholars still debate why. Around 1705 or 1706 he settled in Osaka, where puppet theatre drew bigger audiences, and there he reached his greatest success with his domestic love-suicide dramas and with The Battles of Coxinga (1715).

His everyday tragedies, with their human warmth and absence of heroic rhetoric, are now the core of his reputation, while his historical dramas, more admired in his own day, are generally judged less successful. In 1706 he wrote Goban Taiheiki, the basis for the later and far better-known Chūshingura. He died in 1725, in either Amagasaki or Osaka. His legacy lives on in bunraku and kabuki and in film and opera adaptations of his plays.