The puppets, replete with elaborate costumes and individualized facial expressions, are handcrafted by master puppet makers. The three puppeteers must carefully co-ordinate their movements to ensure that the puppet’s gestures and attitudes appear realistic. Although the tayu “reads” from a scripted text, there is ample room for improvisation. The tayu plays all the characters, both male and female, and uses different voices and intonations to suit each role and situation. From a projecting elevated platform (yuka), the narrator (tayu) recounts the action while a musician provides musical accompaniment on the three-stringed spike lute (shamisen). Three puppeteers, visible to the audience, manipulate large articulated puppets on the stage behind a waist high screen. Ningyo Johruri had adopted its characteristic staging style by the mid eighteenth century. The plots related in this new form of puppet theatre derived from two principal sources: historical plays set in feudal times (Jidaimono) and contemporary dramas exploring the conflict between affairs of the heart and social obligation (Sewamono).
1600) when puppetry was coupled with Johruri, a popular fifteenth-century narrative genre. This theatrical form emerged during the early Edo period (ca. Ranking with Nô and Kabuki as one of Japan’s foremost stage arts, the Ningyo Johruri Bunraku puppet theatre is a blend of sung narrative, instrumental accompaniment and puppet drama.
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