CHIKAMATSU: FIVE LATE PLAYS, translated and annotated by C. Andrew Gerstle. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 234 pp., 60 line drawings, maps and photographs. $39.50.

Though the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724) has been inaptly called "The Shakespeare of Japan," he remains the single local dramatist of eminence. His accomplishment was to be, as Charles Dunn has said, the first to create "characters of realistic complexity and show the tragedy and pathos of their entrapment by circumstance."

One of the reasons that he was able to do so was that his best work was done for the "joruri" puppet play. The dolls (much more primitive in his day) needed all the realistic complexity they could get.

It is interesting that when he wrote for the kabuki (real, live actors) the results were thought so bad. Donald Keene has written that these works "are inferior in every respect to the joruri plays he wrote at the same period."

The characters in the kabuki plays are often stereotypes with no realistic complexity at all, since his leading roles were determined solely by the strengths of the actors performing them. Since one of them (Sakata Tojuro) was considered good at playing gentle and amorous young men in unhappy circumstances, the playwright was stuck with this wimpy character.

In the joruri puppet plays, however, he could take the same character and flesh him out with realistic contradictions to create the much more complex Tokubei in "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki."

Though Chikamatsu could not escape many of conventions of the dramaturgy of his time (Keene complains that "his concern with 'giri' and 'ninjo' deprives his 'sewamono' of some of the variety we expect of a great dramatist") this more realistic genre managed to make even the hoary conflict between social responsibility and personal inclination something more dramatic than it usually was.

Despite his prowess in the joruri and his various difficulties with the kabuki, Chikamatsu often moved between the two stages. After all, Chikamatsu's plays (all 100 of them) were written under contract for commercial theaters. And, toward the end of his career, he moved back to the kabuki.

C. Andrew Gerstle has here chosen five of the late plays (all hitherto untranslated, none represented in the standard repertoire) and gives a cogent and closely reasoned request for our attention. (Eleven earlier plays are translated in Keene's "Major Plays of Chikamatsu," published almost 40 years ago.) Among the reasons given for this suggested regard is that realism is not the only criterion for excellence.

Japanese dramaturgy was, until quite recently, unconcerned with realistic means considered necessary in the West. "Like ancient Greek drama or more recent European opera," Gerstle writes, "the action is carried forward by different types of language and presentation, marked by lively, dramatic sections and intense, lyrical moments of high passion."

The joruri or "gidayu" narrator-chanter (with whom Chikamatsu always worked in the closest collaboration) was the one who decided whether a line should be sung or declaimed. This heightened lyricism, indeed very operalike, was something that the actors of the kabuki could not contrive -- perhaps another reason for the assumed inferiority of the plays he wrote for them.

Once realism is removed as a favored style, however, it is possible to see new virtues. Chikamatsu himself wrote that joruri "is basically a musical form, and the length of the lines recited is therefore determined by the melody." To which Gerstle adds that "as in opera, the essence of human feeling, particularly sadness, is expressed by words in song riding the high notes of the music."

This would also explain why reading Chikamatsu as realistic drama is a difficult business. If you read him as an opera librettist, however, a kind of Japanese Lorenzo da Ponte, then his excellences become evident.

This is the kind of reading that Gerstle would favor, and indeed contrives. He includes musical notation in the text to help show how it was traditionally read and performed, so the reader of today may imagine how it appeared on its original stage.

Original, yet supported by scholarship, this interpretation of late Chikamatsu gives us an alternate view of the dramatist and brings his accomplishments into sharper focus.