Double Suicide 1

The Reason We Cannot Transform the World

Chikamatsu Monzaemon abandoned his samurai status by his own will, resolving to live among the newly rising townspeople. He moved between the two great cultural axes of Joruri and Kabuki, becoming the driving force that elevated both from medieval stagnation to a new artistic realm. I view Chikamatsu Monzaemon as a rare figure who explored the location of his essence through his own existence, gouging out the real of that time more than anyone else. Even now, three centuries after his death, Chikamatsu Monzaemon occupies an overwhelming position in worlds such as Ningyo Joruri, and his brilliance continues in the realm called traditional culture. However, the devastation of traditional culture has reached a disastrous extreme. Those involved cling so tightly to traditional norms that they have fallen into a state of forgetting its cultural essence. Consequently, few people now know Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and cultural devastation has progressed to the level where even those who know him do not know his works.

Since the decline of traditional culture is an unavoidable tide, I cannot do anything about it, but I pride myself on grasping what Chikamatsu Monzaemon tried to do more than anyone. This means that while I know nothing of norms such as manners or habits regarding traditional culture, I grasp the heart of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Culture is something where, even if the form later perishes, the heart survives by changing shape. This is not understood by those who cling to traditional culture, but it applies to all Japanese culture, not just Joruri or Kabuki. In other words, what is truly important for us is not to learn the norms of traditional culture, but to grasp the heat held by that singular cultural prosperity called Genroku culture (1688-1704). The attitude of observing the heat of this era is something I consistently hold in every consideration, and I premise that this grasping and expression is more important than anything. Genroku culture was a tide that occurred about a century after the beginning of the Edo period, so it was the sublimation of complex energy born from the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate, forming mainly in the urban areas of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Chikamatsu Monzaemon was a human born of the samurai class who abandoned that status in the midst of that era, performed trial and error while entering among the townspeople living with heat, and lived through it to the end. It should be the issue what kind of world this heart saw.

One hint lies in the problem of death set as the theme of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Death has been discussed by countless people, but only one thing is certain for us. That is that death for humans is an extreme form that cannot be earnestly constructed in the mind as one’s own matter, whether it is one’s own death or the death of others. Here I am discussing the mind and do not view physiological death as the problem. The root of the impossibility of the mind constructing death is that individual illusion and pair illusion are eroded by communal illusion in an extreme form in death. Yoshimoto Takaaki actually argues that we can define death mentally as the state where human individual illusion and pair illusion are eroded by communal illusion in an extreme form. What is important is that since this is a mental definition, the mode of death transforms depending on the cultural sphere of each place and region. Therefore, it is natural that even looking at the single problem of death from the global world of the 21st century, the difference in that death appears too stark depending on each region. The cause of this difference is that the illusion of death is formed by being cultivated over long years, but human migration lies at the base of the ancient layer of that propagation. Human migration continuous from ancient times is the power that composes cultural space.