Koki Mitani is Japan's top comedy writer, having written a number of stage plays, TV dramas and films. He also loves working with puppets, and has put together a serialized puppet drama for public broadcaster NHK. Despite a love of puppets, however, it was only about 10 years ago when he first saw a performance of bunraku, the 300-year-old traditional Japanese puppet theater.
The experience gripped him so deeply, he says, that it inspired him to write his own bunraku play, which had a successful run last year at Parco Theater in Tokyo and will be back for an 11-day encore beginning Aug. 8.
Titled "Sorenari Shinju (Much Ado about Love Suicides)," Mitani's bunraku is sort of a comic sequel to the famous, tragic bunraku play "Sonezaki Shinju" ("Love Suicides at Sonezaki"). Originally written and staged by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), the 1703 play is Japan's equivalent of "Romeo and Juliet" and is based on the real-life story of the forbidden love between a young couple — a soy sauce maker servant and a young prostitute in the pleasure district of Osaka. The couple committed suicide in the Tenjin Shrine forest in the city's Sonezaki district, in the hope that doing so would unite them in heaven. The incident and its dramatization caused such a sensation back then that it spawned a rush of joint suicides (shinjū) among other star-crossed young lovers.