Tsuyuno Tenjinsya (Ohatsu Tenjin)

This guide to Tsuyuno Tenjinsya, also known as Ohatsu Tenjin, in Osaka begins on the night of May 22, 1703, when a courtesan named Ohatsu and an oil clerk named Tokubei slipped into the shrine grove together, their romance forbidden by the gap between their stations. It follows the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who turned their story into a puppet play within weeks, and how Osaka audiences reacted. The shrine's own history reaches back centuries earlier, to a poem about dew on an exiled scholar's sleeves.