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Old 11-28-2012, 01:40 PM   #1
Talon87
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Chuushingura

Background reading:
Kanadehon Chuushingura, the original play
Chuushingura, referring to the collective of stories

Thoughts:
So, after putting this off for many years, last night on a whim I picked up my copy of Donald Keene's translation of Kanadehon Chuushingura, or simply "Chuushingura" as it is called. I'm through Act 7 of the eleven acts. Apparently the play, when performed live in its entirety, can take up to eleven hours? ^^; That's startling. I wouldn't think it'd take that long to perform at all. I'd say I covered half of the play in roughly 2 hours of reading and I'm a rather slow reader. Faster readers could probably read the entire thing in 2 hours or less. But reading and acting are two very different things, and I can understand that when you actually act out the various fights, or when you play music and stuff in between scene transitions, it could draw things out. And if Japanese puppet plays were anything like Noh theater in their pacing, then I can very well see how this might've taken so many hours to perform.

Keene's translation of the original text holds up well for modern readers. It's impossible to know to what extent he rendered things more intelligible for modern readers and to what extent he translated prosaic Japanese into prosaic English, but I can say that the play reads sort of like "Shakespeare Lite." You can't rush through it because the characters will often say much with little in their prosaic ways, but that prose is not difficult to decipher. To be honest, it reminds me most of the English-language translations of Sophocles's plays we read in 12th grade English. So if you've ever read Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, or Antigone, then you know what to expect here in terms of legibility and delivery.

The drama also reminds me of a classic Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. Bad things happen to good people, people get screwed only for their would-be salvation to show up moments too late, and so on. That stated ...

Spoiler: show
... it's right around where I am right now that the light at the end of the tunnel starts to shine. For while Chuushingura is most definitely a tragedy, it's one with a bittersweet ending. After so many things going the wrong way up until this point, things start to turn around at the end of Act 7.

Why you should read it:
First of all, because it's the most widely-reproduced historical tale in modern Japan. From 1997 to 2007 alone, ten different television adaptations were produced. To draw a comparison with Western history, that'd be like if the BBC and ITV aired one different television dramatization of the Battle of Hastings every year for ten years in a row; or it'd be like if HBO and PBS and so on were to between them air one different television production telling the story of the Alamo every year for ten years. While the names and the era in the Kanadehon Chuushingura were changed for legal reasons from the Edo period to the Muromachi period, the story is pretty much a thinly-veiled copy of the historical tale of the Forty-Seven Masterless Samurai which occurred from 1701 to 1703.

2) 'Cause it's entertaining.

3) 'Cause famous world leaders have read this story. Theodore Roosevelt is said to have read the story and some speculate that it may have helped him to form his impressions of the Japanese military as he mediated talks to end the Russo-Japanese War. So that's kinda cool. And apparently the Chuushingura was the only Japanese story to get its own article in the Encyclopedia Britannica until after the 1950s. Even The Tale of Genji didn't have its own article until after then! So that goes to show you that for many years in the late 19th and early 20th century, the Chuushingura was pretty much the West's portal to the Japanese cultural mindset.
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