At the turn of the eighteenth century in Osaka, a rash of double suicides broke out as lovers who could not be together in life chose death in the hopes of being reunited in the next life. Playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon dramatized these stories for the puppet theatre (now commonly known as bunraku) in a series of plays that became one of the most celebrated genres in Japanese theatre: the love suicide play. Despite their stature and influence, scholarship hews to an interpretative lens developed at the start of the modern era that views the plays primarily as private, domestic dramas of star-crossed lovers. This approach obscures the plays’ social and political engagement with their times. Additionally, when modern scholars canonized the plays, they designated them “national literature,” and divorced them from the live theatrical event and ritual structures that lay at the core of their potency for their eighteenth-century audiences.

This book restores the plays to their historical context to demonstrate their deep connections with the lives of Osaka commoners. Thematically, Chikamatsu critiqued the political and social structure, the status system (mibunseido), that regulated the population during the Edo period (1603-1868). He also criticized the prostitution industry, a business built on women’s bodies and a major economic motor for the rapid expansion of Osaka. Theatrically, Chikamatsu cultivated an embodied form of spectatorship in which spectators were encouraged to respond through and with their bodies during the performances and carry memories of the performances outside the theatre. The ritual structures, which he interwove throughout the plays, transformed the performances into dedicatory prayers for the dead. Through a dramaturgical analysis of the themes and the theatricality of the plays, this work demonstrates how Chikamatsu crafted “embodied afterlives,” the reanimation of the stories of the dead through live performance, communal witnessing, and the circulation of ideas and affects among the theatre’s audience of commoners. It also shows how the radical aspects of the plays were tamed and neutralized through censorship, revival, and canonization, and how select contemporary artists are resuscitating their historical meaning and religious power through new productions.

Jyana S. Browne is an assistant professor of premodern Japanese literary and cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. Jyana has published scholarly articles in the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature, Puppetry International, and Theatre Research International. Additionally, she has written chapters in two edited volumes and co-edited a special section of Theatre Topics. In 2025, Jayana received two awards for her publications: the Nancy Staub Publication Award from The United States Center of Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA-USA) and the Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Prize for Japanese Theatre Scholarship from the Association for Asian Performance (AAP).