Tragedy and the tragic in the Japanese puppet theatre. Imported or native categories?

Beata Kubiak Ho-Chi, Warsaw University Tragedy and the tragic in Japanese puppet theatre: imported or native categories? The Japanese puppet theatre - ningyō jōruri - known today primarily as the Bunraku theatre, is one of those forms of traditional art in which the tragedy (higeki) and the tragic (higekisei) are found. Since the beginning of the discussion on the tragedy in Japan, which dates back to the second half of the 19th century, the above two concepts have been clearly linked with the name of the modern playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) and jōruri plays he wrote specifically for the puppet theater. It is also known that the tragedy and the tragic are concepts the genesis of which is widely regarded as to be Western. The reflection on those concepts has a long tradition in the Western philosophical, literary and theatrological thought, dating back to ancient Greece. Moreover, Western philosophical thought is inclined to recognize the existence, in addition to tragic cultures, of non-tragic cultures as well, which include i.a. the Japanese one. Would the Japanese tragedy then be, together with the tragic, a postcolonial product, an "imported" concept, artificially transposed to the Japanese context during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when Japan opened up to the influence of Western culture, thought and science? Would Japan be only superficially inspired by the ancient Greek or Elizabethan theatre? Or perhaps, as some Japanese theater researchers, philosophers and Western japonologists seem to recognize, the tragic feeling of human existence and the desire to express it in an artistic form susceptible to be called tragedy belong to Japanese culture since the dawn of time? The author of the present paper tries to find answers to above questions, while still recognizing the difficulty of a clear statement. She presents the history of research on the tragedy in Japan and defines the characteristics of the tragedy recognized as Japanese, focusing on a theory elaborated by the pre modern theatre contemporary scholar Suwa Haruo.