Kanadehon Chushingura

Kanadehon Chushingura, commonly known simply as Chushingura, is a Japanese puppet play written jointly by Takeda Izumo II, Miyoshi Shoraku and Namiki Senryu, first performed in the bunraku puppet theater tradition in August 1748 at the Takemoto-za in Osaka, with a kabuki adaptation following the same year. Its title translates roughly as A Kana Practice Book: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, a play on words linking the number of Japanese kana syllabary characters to the forty-seven retainers at the center of its story, who carry out an avenging vendetta after their lord is forced to commit suicide following a court insult. To evade contemporary censorship of works depicting recent events, the playwrights set the action several centuries earlier, during the period of the medieval Taiheiki chronicle, and gave its characters fictionalized names rather than dramatizing the real, then-recent Forty-Seven Ronin incident of 1701 directly. Though based loosely on that historical vendetta, Chushingura is itself a stylized, substantially fictionalized dramatization rather than a historical account, and it has remained one of the most frequently performed works in the kabuki and bunraku repertoires.