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."