This play was written by Tsuruya Nanboku who was well known as a playwright writing an erotic, grotesque, eccentric drama. If I was asked who the best kabuki playwright was, my answer would be that Nanboku must be the best. And this play 'Sakurahime Azuma Bunsyo' is not an exception.

Well, princesses who appear on the kabuki plays have terrible fate. Of course, it isn't wrong to say that every girl in the kabuki play has terrible fate. However, princesses have different tragedy from ordinary girls. Many girls just were killed in the kabuki plays, but most princesses survived because they had something to betray. One of them betrayed her elder brother, and the other stole a treasure of her father, and everything was done for their lovers. When males die for their father, lord, or morality, princesses betray their father, lord, and morality for their lovers. And males exploit princesses for their profit as the result.

I think that a princess who had the most terrible fate is Sakurahime in this play. She was raped, and she loved the rapist whom she didn't know until she met him again. Moreover, she was even pregnant then.  After Sakurahime met the rapist, Gonsuke, he made her a prostitute. And Sakurahime has known that Gonsuke was a murderer who killed her father and younger brother. Sakurahime killed Gonsuke and their baby finally. I don't know anyone who had fate as terrible as Sakurahime.

Although Sakurahime killed Gonsuke and a baby, it could have been done not as a vendetta of her father and younger brother, I think that she did it to become free from Gonsuke. Sakurahime lost herself because of love, and she had no way to take back her pride as a princess except she killed Gonsuke. Then, Sakurahime had managed to take back her identity again. I thought before that Sakurahime had fallen in love with Gonsuke, because she didn't know another male yet. However, now I think that she loved him, because Gonsuke was nobody except Gonsuke. Sometimes love is illogical like this case.

At the beginning of this play, a page Siragikumaru and a monk Seigen committed double suicide, and Seigen believed that Sakurahime must be a rebirth of Shiragikumaru after that. In the same space time continuum, death means that all of the things become past, and that being's existence stops radically. Everyone must die, and this is the most obvious thing in the world. Thus Shiragikumaru can never do rebirth as Sakurahime.

Recently an elementary school student girl killed her classmate, and it was very impulsive murder for the Japanese society. That girl said that she would like to apologize to the victim directly. She didn't know what death meant. Everything is alright on the stage, so that audiences can enjoy unreasonable situation, or illogical circumstance. However, drama is different from the fact. Although I know that Sakurahime is not the girl murderer,  I can't stop feeling that two girls are the same girl. Both of them were too stupid.

I wish that the girl murderer can get an opportunity to learn many things that she needs. There is terrible tragedy actually that is not only the works that was written by Tsuruya Nanboku. (2004,7,4)