This play was discovered by the late Edo gesaku writer, Ryūtei Tanehiko, and published by him. Andrew Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 71–80. Margaret Rose, Parody Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 46.įor studies of The Soga Heir, see Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance, 113–20 and C. Paul Schalow (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).įor an analysis of Wada’ s Banquet Parody, see Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance, 73–75, 94–97.
Caryl Ann Callahan (Tokyo: Monumenta Nipponica, Sophia University, 1981) and The Great Mirror of Male Love, trans. Both have been translated into English under these English titles: Tales of Samurai Honor, trans. Two works by Saikaku that contain accounts of contemporary vendettas are Buke Giri Monogatari ( Tales of Samurai Honor) and Nanshoku Okagami ( The Great Mirror of Male Love). This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.įor a study of the Soga revenge in Japanese medieval and Edo Period drama, see Laurence Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor: The Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1995). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Jūrō was killed in combat immediately after the brothers slew their enemy. In this vendetta two impoverished samurai brothers, Jūrō and Gorō, spent many years tracking down a powerful minister of state who had orchestrated their father’s murder nineteen years earlier, when the brothers were still little children. For medieval Japanese the archetypical virtuous blood revenge was the Soga brothers’ vendetta, consummated in 1193. In the medieval period, legitimate acts of revenge were performed by samurai avengers against other samurai who had killed a close male relative of superior status-notably a father or elder brother.
Playwrights’ notions concerning revenge reflect those of the major patrons and viewers of each of these theatre forms. Vendetta plays constitute an important subset of every major traditional theatrical genre: medieval no and kōwakamai, Edo period puppet theatre (now called Bunraku), and kabuki. In traditional Japanese warrior society and on the traditional Japanese stage, no secular act was as heroic, even sacrosanct, as the successful resolution of a legitimate vendetta.