I’ve got a Hitachi tape recorder. It works just fine. I dubbed a Godzilla movie once (“Monster coming, free to the mountains!”). Now and then I meditate on one hand clapping. Hell, I’m no redneck snob Westerner. But the Bunraku Theatre of Japan . . . As Boswell once said to Johnson, after he had seen a puppet leaping over sticks, “I can do that, too.” Sure enough, he could. And better. I suspect—and I have to admire my own temerity in saying it, such things are simply not said, ever—I suspect this show is on the road because that’s where the culture suckers are. Bunraku isn’t exactly an SRO event in Japan; the government has had to subsidize it since 1963. Well, we send our broken-winded shortstops to the Yokohama Giants. That’s fair. Maybe. I never did see a puppet that could make the double play.
One puppeteer for the head and right arm; one for the left arm; one for the feet. A Mafia judge isn’t manipulated as thoroughly. The three puppeteers per figure are in plain view, hooded, black, like negatives of a Ku Klux Klan convention. This is distracting, cumbersome, and eerie in equal parts. The puppets are more compliant than Barbie dolls and ten times as big: Eyebrows go up, eyeballs jerk left and right, hands snap shut. So lifelike they appear superartificial. Disney’s audioanimatronic figures offer the same paradox. They may be capable of seven thousand computerized motions, but one shrug of a human ball-and-socket joint— subtle, inimitable—discomfits them. Man is the only creature that can stand contrapposto; homo slouch. The playbill says that stylization, not realism, pertains in Bunraku. I have doubts. The dramas are packed with gimmickry: sword fights; skulls lopped neatly in half; tree climbings; complicated pouring and emptyings. The audience, earmuffed by consecutive translation headsets, reacted noticeably just once. When a puppet hacked off lengths of bamboo. It seemed real.
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