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276 as well as the most eminent novelist (Bakin) of this period should both belong to the ranks of these hommes déclassés.

After leaving the service of the Kiōto nobles, Chikamatsu wrote a number of stories and pieces of no great merit for dramatic performance at Kiōto. One of these, formerly attributed to Saikaku, is the Kaijin Yashima, which bears traces of a study of the older Nō drama and Kiōgen. Its subject is an episode in the life of Yoshitsune. Chikamatsu's earliest dated work was written in 1685. In 1690 he took up his residence in Ōsaka, when his connection with the Takemoto marionette theatre began. From this time until his death in 1724, he produced in rapid succession a number of dramas which, whatever their faults, leave no doubt of his possessing a fertile and inventive genius.

On a superficial examination of one of Chikamatsu's plays, a European reader might fail to recognise the fact that it is a drama at all, and take it for a romance with rather more than the usual proportion of dialogue. All the Jōruri contain a large narrative element of a more or less poetical character. This part of the play is chanted to music by a chorus seated on a platform overlooking the stage on the spectator's right, where also the persons sit who declaim the speeches of the puppet actors. It is the narrative part which is more especially designated by the term Jōruri. The chorus which recites it is the true successor of the Jōruri-Katari or dramatic reciters above mentioned, and is the nucleus of the whole, the dialogue being at first merely subsidiary. It not only supplies a thread of story to connect the scenes represented by the puppets on the stage, but aids the imagination of the audience by describing expressions of countenance,