One performance, three kinds of performer
Bunraku is the puppet theatre of Japan most closely associated with Osaka. Its distinctive feature is that no single performer gives a character everything. The voice belongs to a chanter, the music to a shamisen player, and the movement to a team of puppeteers. The audience hears one character and sees one character, but three or more artists are working to produce that illusion.
The older word for the underlying art is ningyo joruri. Joruri is chanted storytelling accompanied by a shamisen, and ningyo means puppet. The name “bunraku” came into wide use later, taken from a theatre that carried on the tradition in the nineteenth century. Today it is often used for the whole art.
A short history
Chanted tales and puppet shows both existed in Japan before the Edo period. They came together in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the shamisen, a three-stringed instrument, became part of the chanted narrative. The art flourished in the commercial cities of the Edo period, especially Osaka, where merchants and the Edo townspeople more broadly formed a large audience.
Two names recur in most accounts. The chanter Takemoto Gidayu opened a puppet theatre in Osaka in the late seventeenth century, and the style of chanting he developed became so closely linked with the form that his name is still used as a term for it. The playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote for that theatre. His works include historical dramas and plays about townspeople whose duties and feelings pull them in different directions, and they remain central to the repertoire.
For a time puppet plays were extremely popular, and kabuki borrowed many of their stories. Later the art declined in commercial terms and survived with the help of dedicated companies and public support. It is now recognized internationally as an important traditional performing art.
The chanter
The narrator, called the tayu, is the voice of every character in the scene, along with the descriptions of setting and feeling in between. A chanter might speak as an old woman, a young lover and a stern official within a few minutes, changing vocal color without changing his seat. The delivery sits between speech and song, with a wide range of pitch and volume. The chanter holds a printed text on a stand and typically bows to it before beginning, a gesture usually read as respect for the text.
The chanter and the shamisen player sit together on a small platform at the side of the stage. In many performances the platform turns, so one pair leaves as the next arrives. The shamisen player does more than accompany. The instrument sets the pace, marks emotional turns, and sometimes creates effects such as footsteps or wind. The two performers work in close cooperation, often breathing together, and the relationship is considered central to the art.
The puppeteers
The main puppets are large, often a good fraction of human size, with carved and painted heads, costumes and fine mechanisms for moving eyes, mouths or brows. Heads are made for particular character types, such as young women, old men, villains or heroes, and they are reused across many plays.
A principal puppet is traditionally operated by three people:
- The principal puppeteer controls the head and right hand.
- A second operator controls the left hand.
- A third operator controls the feet.
The system is usually dated to the eighteenth century. It allowed more natural gestures, such as turning a sleeve, wiping a tear, or walking with weight. Training is famously long, and the stories told about it often say that a performer spends years on the feet before moving to the left hand, and longer still before handling the head and right hand. Those details are traditional accounts rather than strict rules, but they reflect the emphasis on apprenticeship.
The assistants usually wear black hoods and clothing, a convention that asks the audience to treat them as unseen. The principal puppeteer often appears with his face visible. Spectators quickly stop noticing the human figures and watch the puppet. In kabuki, a similar convention governs the black-clad stagehands, and it is part of a broader tradition in Japanese theatre of showing the means of the performance openly while still expecting the audience to focus elsewhere.
Why the divided design works
Many first-time viewers are surprised by how emotionally convincing a puppet can be. Part of the effect is the voice. Because the chanter gives full expression to the character’s feelings, the puppet does not need a mobile face. Its small motions, a tilt of the head, a hand that stops mid-gesture, gain weight from the voice and music behind them. The audience supplies the rest.
The same split is also a way of storytelling that favors suggestion. The puppet can remain quiet while the chanter describes a thought, or the chanter can fall silent while the puppet moves. That play between presence and absence has drawn comparison with other Japanese arts, though such comparisons are interpretations.
Watching bunraku today
Performances are staged in several Japanese cities, and companies sometimes tour abroad. Many theatres provide synopses or translated summaries, and a plot outline beforehand helps, since the chanted text uses older language. Because the repertoire often involves duty, loyalty and sacrifice, it can feel unfamiliar at first, yet the human conflicts, such as love against obligation, are easy to follow once the scene is set.
Bunraku also sits within a larger group of stage arts that include noh and kabuki. Each approaches the same questions of voice, movement and music differently, and bunraku is the one that divides them most openly.