What is bunraku? Come on, don't play that game. Fine, if you want to do it this way: bunraku is traditional Japanese puppet theater, developed in Osaka in the 17th century and closely tied to the theatrical traditions of kabuki.
No, not that kind of puppet.
No, think paler, creepier, more...y'know, Japanese-looking.
Agh! No!
There we go. It's generally a good time, though the show does require some intimate knowledge of Japanese theatrical conventions, mythology, geography, history, and domestic culture to understand. Oh yeah, and classical Japanese. Or, alternatively, you can fork over 600 yen for an earphone guide. Since we only had a week to prepare to go to this show rather than the requisite 40 years it would take to learn all of that, we paid up.
Bunraku is fun times, all said. Each puppet is worked by three puppeteers, all of whom appear on stage covered entirely in black. At first, it seems like the stage is crowded with people playing with dolls, but by the end it's easy to ignore the puppeteers entirely and see the puppets as the only figures on stage (somewhere in between it's kind of like the puppets are being attacked by ninjas). The whole thing is narrated by a single reader (swapped out with other readers between scenes) who sings every character's lines from behind a podium; the effect, though powerful, made me wistful for when I too used to play with action figures and do the voices myself. There was no showmanship like drinking glasses of water or whatnot, though at one point a puppet tossed something to another puppet across the stage to riotous applause. Also, there was a samurai duel on the beach that moved progressively closer, represented by using increasingly larger puppets. CGI, Schmee-GI.
I'm not really sure what I can tell you about the story of the plays we saw: reading the plot summary in the program, things seem pretty action-packed, with plenty of daring sword thefts, murder-suicide pacts, beheadings, samurai showdowns, and conspiracies...also, at one point a spy masquerading as an old stone mason kills a samurai by throwing a chisel across stage (sadly, this was accomplished by the performers by having the puppet being hit by an apparently invisible chisel, then falling over). As is the case with most Japanese theater, though, these deceptively simple set pieces are filled out with pausing for every character to stop and describe exactly how they're feeling at any given moment, how sad something makes them, how sad they are about what happened in the last scene, and occasionally how sad they are at the transient nature of existence or something.
I wish I could tell you a little more about the plot of the first play, if only to demonstrate just how long these damn things can be, but I'll keep it to the interesting (non-beheading) part that gave me the most pause: at the end of a lengthy duel between samurai of two rival clans and hashing out the repercussions of that duel, it turns out the protagonist and his son conspired for the son to switch places with the illegitimate son of the Emperor so the hero could kill his son and get the Emperor's son smuggled off to safety. It's never really established how any of the characters know that this young samurai is the (again, illegitimate) Prince or why some characters really care about that and others don't, but apparently it was completely necessary for our hero to sacrifice his beloved son to save the Prince even when nobody thought that was important before head-chopping-time. The Japanese teacher we saw the show with said she understood that part, even if she didn't think she could ever do such a thing. Go fig.
I'll leave you with this last little tidbit: the last play of the evening was translated as "The Red-Hot Love of the Greengrocer's Daughter." Sadly, the title proved to be the most exciting part of the story.
Kurosawa meets Kukla, Fran & Ollie...
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