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This introductory chapter begins with an overview of the Japanese puppet plays presented in this volume. The plays were created during the period when Kabuki became increasingly a serious competitor to the popularity of Japan's puppet theatre, known today as Bunraku. They span the sixty-odd years of 1769 to 1832, and all are works that have been sufficiently appreciated by audiences that since their first performances they have continued to appear regularly on the puppet and, in their adapted forms, the Kabuki stages. The group of plays are all classified in the genre known as jidaimono, works set in the past and based on historical (or semihistorical) characters or incidents, a feature that reflects the predominance of that genre in the period covered. The remainder of the chapter describes the form of the puppet stage and the text sources for the translations.

This chapter presents the translation of Vengeance at Iga Pass (Igagoe Dōchū Sugoroku), a ten-act play written for the puppet theatre. The play was first performed at the Takemoto Ichiza Theatre in Osaka on May 26, 1783. It is based on the vendetta that came to its bloody conclusion toward the end of 1634 in the town of Ueno near Iga Pass, about twenty-five miles southeast of Kyoto. The historical incident that had led to the vendetta centered on the murder of a brother. Rarely is the complete drama produced today, though certain of the more popular acts are performed often both independently and in sequence.

This chapter presents the translation of one of the great history-based plays (jidaimono), The Genji Vanguard in Ōmi Province (Ōmi Genji Senjin Yakata), which came to the stage of the Takemoto puppet theatre on Osaka on the ninth day of the Twelfth Month of 1769.1 It was so well received by audiences that it was adapted to Kabuki less than six months later. The play continued to be performed occasionally in its full nine acts up through 1830, but since that time it has come to survive on stage principally in the form of act 8, “Moritsuna's Camp” (Moritsuna Jinya).

This chapter presents the translation of Mount Imo and Mount Se: Precepts for Women (Imoseyama Onna Teikin), one of the day-long jidaimono history dramas for which the Bunraku and Kabuki theatres are noted. It was written originally for the puppets and first performed on the twenty-eighth day of the First (lunar) Month of 1771 at the Takemoto-za in Osaka. Today, the play is occasionally mounted in all or most of its five acts with their numerous scenes, but it is best known for the often performed scene known simply as “The Mountains” (Yama No Dan) that concludes act 3.

Kabuki, through its penchant for borrowing from the puppets, has been the beneficiary of a large number of works that were written for the puppet theatre—plays that have gone on to become favorites in both these traditional theatres. This interaction, however, has not been one-sided. The puppet theatre, particularly in the hands of some of its mid-to late eighteenth-century dramatists, has borrowed from Kabuki a fair amount of that theatre's stage techniques as well as modifications made by Kabuki writers to the texts of borrowed plays. One of these is The True Tale of Asagao (Shōutsushi Asagao Banashi), the translation of which is presented in this chapter. The play was ranked among the top ten Bunraku plays in audience popularity, based on a survey taken in the 1990s.