Japanese Plays and Playfellows

“When her mother died O Kamma was so overcome with grief that she lost for a time all interest in living. Every day she laid flowers on the grave and every night she cried herse...

Other festivals, more intimate than these, assuaged the rigour of imprisonment. Though Inari had four temples in which to welcome her votaries, other divinities, too, offered di...

I was awakened the next morning by a peculiar rocking sensation, as if my bed were a cradle swung to and fro by invisible hands. Then I saw the _obbasan_, an old woman who waite...

On this patriotic note I thought it well to close. I urged Kishimoto to exhaust his stock of honorifics in a suitable vote of thanks, and, as I took leave of the patient, archie...

There being no hotel near Yamada’s dwelling, he secured me a room in a geisha-house, with the result that late revelry made sleep impossible. But a bathe next morning in the rus...

The last play, written by Mr. Kawakami himself about ten years ago--“The Geisha and the Knight”--is dramatically the best as well as the most picturesque. It furnishes Madame Sa...

I had been at Ikao a fortnight, and absorbed by new acquaintances, was beginning to forget the very existence of O Maru San, when a long letter from Kose conveyed the surprising...

“Irresponsible rhetoric,” the reader may think, and indulged in the more freely because the writer chose to employ the English tongue, which is yet unknown to the majority of hi...

Nothing is more difficult to eradicate than a British misconception of foreign defects. French lubricity, German clumsiness, Russian cruelty, are quite as much articles of faith...

Most famous of these insular jewels is Miyajima. As no boats were running thither from Kōbe, we travelled by the San-yo railway as far as Onomichi, skirting the coast so closely...

The most important, if not the most interesting, item in the programme was a little historic play in two scenes, entitled “Funa Benkei,” or “Benkei at Sea.” No figure in Japanes...

Resurrection--the recurrence of spring and the renovation of fame--crowns the final movement of this transcendental ballet. The Hideyoshi monument, as it partly is and wholly sh...

Kōbe received us, weary and late, with hospitable arms. In that prosperous port, so rapidly distancing Yokohama in commercial importance, an English colony is solidly entrenched...

The first friend I made was a silk merchant and a poet. I shall call him Yamada San. I had gone one day a few hundred yards down the precipitous path leading to Shibukawa, when...

_I do not pretend to compete in the crowded field of Japanese sociology with those who have lived more than six months or less than six weeks in the country. My own stay was lim...

Then it should be remarked that the wife figures as frequently as the sweetheart in this lyrical woodland, vocal with twittering sentiment. The European has been so long accusto...

Rather more than ten years ago, when enthusiasm for Western things was at its height, a species of independent theatre, calling itself the Sōshi-Shibai, was started with a loud...

However, the beginning of the Ashikaga period in the fourteenth century saw the corruption and development of a perfect germ into complex variety. Both sacred and secular rivalr...

Alas! the pagan mountain-god, who when he speaks will fulminate in fire and ashes, has been dumb for more than a hundred years. He allows the preachers of an alien creed to fill...

Of course, I would not insinuate that cases of genuine conversion were not numerous and productive of moral regeneration, or that the creed of Christendom has failed to strike r...

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained. For example, lay preacher, lay-preacher; lifelong, lif...