Michiyuki: the road to a multimedia, multidisciplinary, multilingual Banraku (Japanese puppet theatre) research site

In Japanese puppet theatre plays, especially those written by the great playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), the michiyuki served a transformative function. Characters in the plays, especially domestic tragedies culminating in lovers´ suicides, frequently weak and flawed characters who were trapped into a position in which death seemed the only way out, were transformed during the michiyuki from their weakness to a kind of transcendent nobility, purified by love and poetry. The project to digitize the Barbara Curtis Adachi Collection of materials on the post-war Japanese puppet theatre will, I hope, serve a similar transformative function, in allowing researchers access to information in ways which transform their thinking, or, in the words of Hsinchun Chen, allow them to “navigate abstract spaces to perform correlations across sources”