The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
It started, as these things always do, with an idle remark to a friend over the phone. We were discussing dating, and our lamenting of our thousands of miles of distance making it hard for us to be suitable wingmen for each other.
"We'd be like Barry and Levon," I said, referring to two of his favorite sketch characters from the ill-fated MTV comedy series The State. It wasn't long before I was on YouTube re-watching them get freaky with two hundred and forty dollars' worth of pudding.
And of course the YouTube corollary of The Wikipedia Effect kicked in. By then I was reliving some keen moments from my youth enjoying Old-Fashioned Guy, Froggy-Time Jamboree, and, finally, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki.
I was, what, twelve? Whatever. I was young. Too young to really understand the morals and themes prevalent in Kabuki theatre, but sure enough I've since been studying them, albeit only ever scratching the surface, as I learn more and more about the global attitudes towards adultery.
In short: three hundred years ago in Japan, if you fell in love with somebody who wasn't your betrothed (which the playwrights would have you believe happened, like, every other day in downtown Hokkaido), you'd both kill yourselves. There's more to it, of course, but that's just how you dealt with it.
I'm very happy to see that The State appreciated this artform many years before I was ready to get it, but seeing it again reminds me of just how phenomenal the series was, and now I appreciate it in an entirely new light.
In case you're curious, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki is a real play, albeit I think The State may have taken some liberties with the dialogue. Just a hunch.
1 comment:
Oh yeah, the love suicide genre was pretty big in Japanese theatre, although it was more for joruri (puppet plays) than for kabuki, and absolutely unsuitable for noh theatre. The plays were actually criticized for romanticizing and promoting love suicides, although of course there's no evidence to support that they actually increased the number of love suicides. There's a really excellent film called Double Suicide that's based on The Love-Suicide at Amijima that came out of the 1960's Japanese New Wave movement that I think you'd really like. It has a bunch of guys dressed up in black puppeteer clothing that facilitate the action of the story, which I think is just the coolest device I've ever seen in a film.
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