時代物

Jidaimono ("period pieces") deal with worlds remote from everyday Edo life: events of the distant past and the affairs of samurai and court society. Kanadehon Chūshingura, Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami, and Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura are celebrated as the three masterpieces of the genre.

Where sewamono depict the everyday life of townspeople, jidaimono are performed with weighty, larger-than-life stylization. They often retold contemporary events through historical figures—using the distance of fiction to speak truths that could not be staged directly.

There was a practical reason jidaimono borrowed the distant past: the shogunate forbade the direct dramatization of contemporary events, above all political ones. Kanadehon Chūshingura, drawn from the Akō vendetta of the Genroku era, is said to have shifted its setting into the "world" of the medieval chronicle Taiheiki, renaming its characters accordingly. Behind the conventions of the genre lies a shrewd wisdom for slipping past the censors.

Much of the Danjūrō family's aragoto repertoire—Shibaraku, Narukami—unfolds within the world of jidaimono. The aragoto vision of superhuman heroes subduing evil blooms most fully on this grand historical stage.