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Through the net of Buddha's grace
Even Buddha's great love and mercy is discriminatory."
The "I alone" is Shunkan; the voice that of the gidayū. There is nothing like this metatheatrical speech to punctuate emotionally intense moments in traditional Western theater. What happens in this case is that, as with other aspects of performance, like the use of dolls as part of an army and stagehands, kabuki is reflecting the practice of the puppet theater, under the influence in part of the important role Chikamatsu Monzaemon played in the history of these dramatic forms. He was the author of the texts for both kinds of theater. Originally he had been a kabuki actor and playwright; however, he decided to write for bunraku, a theater in which the "actors" were dolls and did not ask for changes in the scripts. Bunraku then enjoyed a period of popularity in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The result was that in order to compete, the plays that Chikamatsu and others wrote for bunraku, among them Shunkan, were adapted for the kabuki stage to bring back its audiences.
In the West, if we had a Punch and Judy show written for marionettes and made into a play for human actors, the effect would be similar; however, traditionally we have tended to take fairy tales or stories and apply them to puppet shows or to live theater. We have not taken plays used in puppet shows and passed these on to the theater, as the Japanese did in the Genroku period of the 17th and 18th centuries. This interim phase seems to have influenced kabuki, thanks to the great master Chikamatsu, the jōruri from Okinawa, and the earlier ninth-century puppet performers. The dolls were manipulated to function like the real actors, the real actors like the dolls. Each reflected the other.
It is a telling cultural indicator that in the bunraku, the most highly charged moments of grief, pity, and so forth feature the gidayū emoting to the point that he is perspiring as he immerses himself fully into the role and brings life to dolls. On the other hand, in the kabuki at the most highly charged moments of tragedy the play reverts to the practice of the bunraku and the actor loses his voice, as it were, and assumes a stance like a doll's. That is not to say the moment is any less powerful in kabuki than in bunraku; it is rather to say that the expression of emotion is in some ways less direct in the theater performed by live actors than in the puppet theater, but the audience knows the convention and waits for it. When we turn to nō, another, but not unrelated, phenomenon occurs. Nō is less realistic than kabuki. The actors are, as in kabuki, all male, but there are usually fewer of them in each play. The chorus sitting always at stage left is a group, rather than an individual, that assumes a collective entity, which like the actors behind their masks or expressionless faces creates an anonymity or better, a third-person identity for them. These chorus members are not granted the individual voices of the gidayū. They are one voice together. And yet, in other respects they function like the gidayū. Sometimes, although their mode of delivery is singing rather than speaking, the chorus will provide some background to the play, will comment on the characters or the significance of the play, or will describe the stage action. These all are forms of narration and storytelling like those of the gidayū. However, whereas the chorus reflects the practices of jōruri and puppet theater's storytelling, nō follows the conventions of the bards.
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