Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy. Edited and translated

摘要

This book reprints the 1985 hardcover edition of the same work without a single change (other than hard to soft cover), which goes to show what a long and useful life a good translation can give to the world. Of course, the quality and intrinsic value of the original text plays an important role in ensuring the longevity of a translation. In this case, the text is Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy), a Bunraku (Japanese puppet theatre) play, which was first produced at the Takemoto Theatre in Osaka in 1746. It became a runaway success, moving so many spectators to tears that, as a contemporary critique of the play observed, the price of tissue paper went up in the city. (1) Within six months, the Takemoto Theatre in Edo had mounted a production, and within a year, two Kabuki theatres in Edo had mounted their own versions of the play. In the fiercely competitive world of popular theatre in early modern Japan, imitation and plagiarism were the sincerest form of compliment. The Bunraku theatre has always been noted for the literary superiority of its scripts because the scripts are written to show off the virtuoso skill of the narrators. Both the puppets' dialogue and poetic narrative passages are intoned by a narrator whose highly stylised delivery is enhanced with the musical accompaniment of a shamisen. When a Bunraku play was adapted for Kabuki, of course, actors took over the dialogue, but the narrator and shamisen player were retained as an integral part of the staging, thus Bunraku plays on the Kabuki stage still maintain their own character. Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy is almost never performed in its entirety today, but its most famous scene, "Terakoya, The Village School (Act. IV. sc. 3), is frequently shown as part of Kabuki programmes. In fact, it was part of the May programme at the Kabukiza in Tokyo in 2016, almost as though it were timed to celebrate the reissue of this book.