Part 6

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 Sada Yacco with a part which affords full scope for her talents. It proves her not only an ethereal dancer, but a tragic actress of real power. When the curtain rises we are in the Yoshiwara of Yedo (euphemistically termed the geisha-quarter), with its line of cherry-trees in full blossom between the fifty tea-houses, with the bustling crowd of domestics, minstrels, dancing-girls, and _samurai_, conventionally disguised, as a knight was bound to be, by _amigasa_, or large braided hats. Katsuragi, the famous courtesan, attended by her little bevy of servants, passes in gorgeous apparel on those high, black-lacquered _sabots_ which only the _taiyu_ might wear. Soon a quarrel bursts out between her rival suitors, and Banza, determined to provoke a duel, inflicts on Nagoya the disgraceful insult of _sayâte_, a blow on the sword from a sword’s hilt. But scarcely has the fight begun when the girl throws herself between and compels her lover to desist.

The second act passes in a Buddhist temple, where Nagoya, flying with his _fiancée_, Orikime, from the jealous and abandoned beauty, has taken refuge. But Katsuragi, well knowing that no woman may enter there alone, yet tries to cajole the genial priests by the pretence of dancing in honour of Buddha. Permission is given. First she treads a solemn temple-dance, a _no-mai_, wearing the golden mitre of a mediæval geisha; then, as the jocular monks relent and even mimic her, she performs dance after dance. A child, she trips through the ball-dance (_maru-odori_), chasing and tossing an imaginary ball with nimble gaiety; a woman, she personates the cherry-blossom, and, crowned with a floral emblem, while red flames of flowers unroll from her hands, she stoops and sways like a bough in May; a priestess of Inari, the rice-goddess, with upturned hands and conical drum she depicts the terror of the goblin-fox in a _pas de fascination_ woven of strange swift rushes and sudden turns. But all her wiles are useless. The monks roughly repulse her when she attempts to enter the temple itself. But Katsuragi is not to be baulked. Suddenly she flies through the gate and as suddenly reappears, driving before her the hapless Orikime, whom she batters down with the huge striker of the temple-bell. At this moment, with bare arms and dishevelled hair, she thrills and dominates the audience: the fairy has become a fury; the comedy is at once attuned by this tragic figure to ghastly seriousness. A priest aims a blow at her, but Nagoya arrives in time to ward it off, and, panting, frenzied by conflicting passions, she sinks dying in her lover’s arms.

A fourth play was subsequently added, which I had not the good fortune to see; but from the foregoing descriptions it will be evident that Mr. Kawakami brought us, if not entire plays, at any rate authentic glimpses of the unfamiliar world in which Japanese playgoers delight. It is an ingenious, palpitating world, richly stored with action and sentiment and lit with many cross-lights of allusive fancy. There is so much _naïf_ and childish joy in it, so many pretty and grotesque details, that one easily is diverted by these from the consideration of its deeper aspects. Both are better comprehended by a retrospective glance at theatrical history.

It is rather interesting to observe that national drama began its career in England and Japan at about the same time. In 1575 Okuni, the pretty priestess who ran away from the Kizuki temple in Izumo with Nagoya Sanzaburō, and made her peace with the god Ōnamuji by devoting part of the receipts to repairing his shrine, gave her first theatrical performance at Kyōto. In 1576 “the Earl of Leicester’s servants” erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. The times were dramatic, and the excitement of foreign adventure quickened the impulse of the masses towards a more turbulent form of art than religious plays. The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, and in 1592 Hideyoshi’s armada set sail for the conquest of Corea. The dramatists were men of similar stamp. Just as Greene and Marlowe were reckless rebels against tradition and convention, so Chikamatsu was a _rōnin_, or disgraced _samurai_, too headstrong to endure feudal discipline. Small wonder, then, that their plays were full of “coarse horrors and vulgar blood-shedding.” Independence of Christian “Mysteries” and Buddhist _Nō_ was a marked characteristic of the secular humanistic drama, but whereas England had not long to wait for a Shakespeare, the fifty odd five-act pieces of Chikamatsu were written between 1690 and 1724.

Moreover, they were written for marionettes. This fact explains many surviving customs, which hamper theatrical representation to the present day. Although the thread of poetical narrative, on which spectacular episodes were strung, is much attenuated, the chorus, charged with reciting it to musical accompaniment, is not yet banished from a cage or stage-box behind the footlights to the right of the audience. Many actors retain the stiff, jerky motions of the wire-pulled dolls which they were formerly taught to imitate, and whereas the words through artificial declamation are often difficult to follow, more persistent appeal is made to the eye than the ear by pose and gesture. Why the dramatist should have preferred wooden to human puppets is hard to say, unless it be that they were capable of more amazing contortions, for acrobatic activity plays a large part in legitimate drama, which would seem incomplete without _damari_, or pantomimic scenes.

Chikamatsu was followed by Takeda Izumo, who reduced the function of the chorus, and thus lessened the opportunity for literary display. In both writers you find sensational plots, surcharged with incident and developed in daring disregard of probability. While the marionettes’ theatre at Ōsaka was thus served, the men’s theatre at Yedo was provided with pieces of a similar character with regard to substance, though the style was colloquial and the dialogue largely invented by the actors. Since the eighteenth century it may be said without injustice that the _kabuki-shibai_ (popular theatre) has remained stationary. Certain improvements in histrionic and scenic matters have been introduced, but no development in construction and character-drawing, as we understand those terms, no change in the peculiar ethical and feudal teachings of the Yedo period, has supervened. Enter a Tōkyō theatre to-day, and you will find yourself in old Japan, among resplendent monsters, whose actions violate our moral sense, yet exhibit a high and stern morality by no means out-moded through the advent of modern ideas.

Beauty and duty are the hall-marks that stamp as authentic the plays which delight and instruct the Japanese. A race of artists, they expect and obtain such stage-pictures as no other stage affords. To watch act after act of their spectacular tragedies is like looking through a portfolio of their best colour-prints. One revels in the rich series of glowing hues, flowing lines, majestic contours. And, whereas in a play by Shakespeare or Molière, however sumptuously mounted, the European actor often spoils the picture by inability to wear the garb and adopt the gait of more ceremonious ages, becoming a vociferous fashion-plate, a strenuous caricature, the Oriental actor never does so. He has not been forced to acquire, having never lost, the dignified movements proper to more deliberate dress. His pictorial charm is enhanced by his faculty of sublime repose. Fidgety “supers” are unknown. Moreover, visible beauty, of which the credit may be shared between costumier and stage-manager, is supplemented by the invisible beauty of ideas. The author can give free rein to fancy. Dragons and demons, ogres and magicians, will not be wasted on prosaic pittites, who starve their imagination by feeding it once a year on vulgarised pantomime, because to them music-hall ditties are more congenial than a midsummer-night’s dream. His audience would just as soon hear a fairy-story as a love-story. When “The Tongue-cut Sparrow” or “The Fisher-Boy of Urashima” is presented, the adults are quite as appreciative as the children. Perhaps this imaginative audience is too complaisant. It ignores the cloaked attendants, who creep about the stage to remove “properties” or in other ways assist the actors, because it knows that their black garments denote invisibility and is much too polite to perceive them. The same readiness to meet illusion half-way is shown by the retention of the _hana-michi_ or flower-walks, two inclined platforms which slope from the stage to the back of the auditorium, trisecting the pit and enabling the actors to make their entry or exit through the midst of the spectators. On the other hand, they facilitate the execution of processional and recessional effects.

After all, the aim of Eastern art is not illusion, but edification. However clear the call of beauty, duty’s voice is louder still--duty, not as we Westerns conceive it, a half-hearted compromise between our own interests and those of others, but complete moral and mental suicide. No lesson was more impressively preached to the people by the dramatists in hundreds of historical plays than the duty of obedience at any price. Iyeyasu had established a _pax japonica_, a golden age, in which there was no war, but a rigid system of caste upon caste: obedience was the cement which held the whole together. The cultivated _samurai_ were not allowed to enter the theatre, but the masses were melted to tears and heated to transports of patriotic subservience by the representation of heroic self-sacrifice. As a political instrument the Greek Church is not more useful to the Czar for indoctrinating docile peasants than the Yedo drama was of service to the Shōgun.

One of the most admired examples of unscrupulous virtue is Nakamitsu, applauded in 1898 as in 1598, for the same hero holds the stage for centuries. This is the story of Nakamitsu. His feudal lord, Manju, had confided a reprobate son, named Bijomaru, to his care, in the hope that a _samurai’s_ control would prove more efficacious than a priest’s; but, as Bijomaru continued to “indulge in all sorts of wild sports, sometimes going so far as to kill innocent common people,” Nakamitsu was ordered to put him to death. Instead of doing so, he beheaded his own son, Kojumaru, and took the head to his master, who, believing in his fidelity, refused to inspect it. Years afterwards, when Bijomaru has become an irreproachable priest, he is restored to his father, who forgives Nakamitsu for disobeying him and rewards his self-sacrifice with the gift of an adopted son and an extensive tract of land. Now, the moral of this story to us appears atrocious, that a father may murder his son to oblige his general, but a little reflection will show that the Jewish legend of the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, though similar, is less heroic. For Nakamitsu’s act was voluntary, and his son, eager to be sacrificed on the altar of duty, welcomed death, while Manju had not demanded such cruel fidelity.

A typical instance of the teaching and technique of popular plays is furnished by “Ichi-no-tani Futaba-gunki” (“The Tale of the Sapling of Ichi-no-tani”), produced with exceptional splendour and a first-rate cast--both Danjuro and Kikugoro, leading Japanese actors, were included--at the chief Tōkyō theatre in the autumn of 1898. The incident, more or less historical, on which it is founded, is simple enough. During the great civil war between the Taira and Minamoto clans in the twelfth century, a Minamoto general, Kumagaya, is said to have been so touched by the likeness to his own son of a youthful adversary, named Atsumori, that he spared his life and connived at his escape from the battle of Ichi-no-tani, a famous valley near Kōbe. This theme had to be embroidered with improbable episodes and extravagant actions to satisfy public taste. Accordingly, Kumagaya saves Atsumori’s life in a supremely sensational manner. In obedience to secret orders from his feudal lord, Yoshitsune, he induces his son Kojiro to enter Atsumori’s castle by cutting down a score of guards single-handed, to change clothes with Atsumori, to personate Atsumori so as to deceive both friend and foe, and finally to be killed by his own father in single combat, that the world may be absolutely convinced of Atsumori’s death. While the plot requires that most of the characters in the piece should be mystified, it is important that the audience should not be mystified, and this twofold object is secured by the ingenious co-operation of stage and cage. While father and son, mounted on terrific black and white chargers, interchange threats and insults so as to blind their fellow-actors, the chorus expresses their real feelings of anguish and affection in such pathetic strains that the audience cannot fail to grasp the situation. But concealment of the truth from the other characters leads to more entanglements. Atsumori’s mother, the Lady Wistaria, believing her son to be dead, pays a visit to the murderer’s wife, and discovering in her a feudal dependent, insinuates that her obvious duty is to assist in her husband’s assassination when he shall return. When Kumagaya comes home, his position, between the woman who thinks he has killed her son and the woman whose son he has really killed, is made more embarrassing by the fact that Kajiwara, an enemy who suspects the truth, is listening at the door. His fluent and inconsistent explanations would be superfluous if he might show the dead man’s head, which he carries with him in a box; but that must, of course, only be revealed at the last moment to Yoshitsune as a proof of his loyal obedience, when he will be praised for his loyal devotion and retire to a Buddhist monastery, muttering “Life is a hollow dream.” The piece is a great deal more complicated than might be supposed from the foregoing analysis. Subsidiary peasants, beggars, and woodcutters turn out at opportune moments to be Taira or Minamoto warriors and court-ladies in disguise. The first three acts are occupied with a kind of prologue, which has only two points of contact with the main Atsumori _motif_: first, the characters, though entirely different, belong to the same historic period; and, secondly, their business is also to glorify parental murder.

Casuists have urged that to sacrifice another’s life, even though that other be one’s own child, is less heroic than to sacrifice oneself. But that, too, is common in the _jidaimono_, or historical plays, which far outnumber the rest in popularity. Not to speak of the forty-seven _rōnin_, whose simultaneous suicide is the subject of more than fifty dramas, and whose venerated tombs at Sengakuji are yet covered with poems and visiting-cards every New Year’s Day, I suppose one drama in ten contains a case of _hara-kiri_, or “happy dispatch.” The actor writes a letter, generally in blood, to explain why his honour requires self-slaughter, and then with great deliberation draws a knife across his stomach, until his admirably twitching limbs are covered with gore. At this point the squeamish foreigner is apt to leave the theatre, but the Japanese babies do not blench at blood, and are taught by such sights from their earliest years that superb indifference to death, that supreme attachment to honour, which no other nation displays to the same degree. _Hara-kiri_ cannot be approved by utilitarians, but it implies a higher pitch of heroism than you find in a British melodrama, where the hero and villain are probably engaged in selfish rivalry for the hand of the same young woman, and merely differ in the choice of means to gratify the same desire. I find an exquisite instance of Japanese subtlety in the mingled ferocity and devotion of their popular plays, which please at once the devil and the angel cohabiting the human heart. If the devil gloat over blood-shedding, the angel exults in death for an ideal. The devil holds the knife and the angel rams it in. Nor must you suppose that the playgoers who revel in such incidents regard them as part and parcel of an effete morality. Every few years the partisans of Western ethics are startled by similar tragedies. The assassins or would-be assassins of Viscount Mori in 1887, of Count Okuma in 1889, of the Czarevitch in 1891, of Li Hung Chang in 1895, were prepared to pay with their own lives for what they deemed dishonourable concessions to foreigners. The young girl, Yuko Hatakeyama, who cut her throat in expiation of the outrage offered to the Czarevitch; the young wife of Lieutenant Asada, who, learning of his death on the battlefield, slew herself before his portrait, that she might follow him; the forty soldiers, who took their own lives because the Government gave up Liaotung at the bidding of Russia, France, and Germany--all these were as widely praised and honoured by their fellow-countrymen as Kumagaya or Nakamitsu.

Next in popularity to the historical are the social plays (_sewamono_), of which the main topic is love. This love, however, has nothing in common with the well-regulated affections which dominate our middle-class comedy from “Our Boys” to “Sweet Lavender,” and culminate in the addition of two or three conventional couples to suburban villadom. Domestic happiness having been arranged for most young folk by their elders, neither courtship nor marriage (if the former could be said to exist) presented material for dramatic treatment. The heroine is either a geisha or a courtesan, exposed by her profession to the worst caprice of passion and of fortune. In neither case is she necessarily repulsive or even reprehensible. On the contrary, she is often held up to sympathy as a model of filial devotion, having sold her virtue for a certain period to save her parents from beggary. Public opinion is still so much more Confucian than Christian among Japanese peasants, that not only does a father incur no odium for selling his daughter, but she would be regarded in many districts as wickedly unfilial if she objected to be sold. It is true that by decrees added to Japanese law in 1875 and 1896 such sale is forbidden: girls are no longer bought; they are hired. But during the Yedo period, whose morals are mostly reflected in such pieces, the famous _oiran sama_ or lady-courtesan was a very dazzling figure, while the humble _jōro_ was at least regarded with pity. If we put aside for the moment Western feeling on this subject, it is clear that no romance could be more deeply pathetic than that of a duteous heart fluttering behind the gilded bars of self-imposed shame and responding to the generous affection of a liberating lover. The _entourage_ of spies and gaolers made escape no easy thing: thus plenty of dangerous adventure would diversify the plot. The nimble-witted theatre-goer loves intrigue, and follows hero and heroine through an imbroglio of ruses and disguises and machinations which it would be tedious to describe. Again let me pay tribute to the ingenuity of the didactic dramatist, who illustrates a lesson in filial unselfishness with pictures of attractive wickedness. Few scenes could surpass in beauty the luxurious lupanar, with its troop of richly robed Delilahs. Drury Lane has produced nothing more spectacular or more sensational than the meretricious, murderous dramas of this class.

Less numerous, but of great interest to the student, are _Oikemono_, or plays “connected with the private troubles of some illustrious family.” These would obviously strengthen feudal ties, and some have considerable merit. The first piece I saw in a Japanese theatre was founded on the legend (told at length in Mr. Mitford’s “Tales of Old Japan”) of the Nabeshima cat. One of the lords of Nabeshima had the misfortune to marry a species of vampire-cat, or rather his wife was possessed by one. While the daimyō and his friends keep watch, the wife retires to bed, and soon the shadow of a cat’s head is silhouetted on the paper lantern near her couch. Caterwauling is heard: the watchers, armed with swords, rush in and stab the cat-wife, whose death ends the play. Life in the court of a feudal lord during the Tokugawa shogunate is most vividly portrayed in “Kagamiyama-kokyo-no-nishiki,” which may be regarded as the Japanese counterpart of Scribe’s “Bataille de Femmes,” except that the ruling passion is not love, but loyalty. It deals with a feud between two court ladies. Iwafugi, old and ugly, is jealous of the favour extended to Onoye by the daimyō’s daughter, who has entrusted to her care a consecrated statue of Buddha and a box of precious perfume. Having caused these to be stolen and concealed with a straw-sandal of her own, Iwafugi accuses her young rival of trying to fasten the theft upon her, strikes her in the face with the sandal, and leaves the mortified Onoye no remedy for insult but suicide. But Ohatsu, a devoted maid of the latter, avenges her mistress by stabbing Iwafugi to death, and is rewarded with promotion to high rank. Thus the supreme merit of loyalty at any cost is once more vindicated. This piece is interesting, because it furnishes the veteran actor, Danjuro, with a striking female part--that of Iwafugi--and proves that the subjection of women in domestic matters by no means robbed them of spirit and individuality. The rash inference that Confucian domesticity must reduce women to the level of a slave or a doll is disproved by the heroic figures which are so frequent in historical, social, and court-family drama.

Such, then, is the popular play, dear to both actors and public, who value Western imports of a material kind, but prefer their own moral and social ideals to those of foreigners. Railways and ironclads may be readily adopted, but not the New Testament or the New Woman. Yet, setting such vexed questions aside, and taking the neutral ground of art, it is clear that the pieces which I have described are inferior even to the archaic _Nō_. Let them be as imaginative, as patriotic, as lofty as you like, they remain stirring spectacles, without cohesion, depth, or unity. They are fascinating pictures of a deeply loved and daily vanishing past, but drama of a high sort they are not. Is there no movement, it will be asked, among the more educated classes to raise the standard of art, to create a drama which shall appeal less to the eye and more to the intelligence?

Yes; there are two forces at work which deserve credit for their energy in what is almost an impossible task until the conditions of theatrical representation shall be radically altered. How is the action to be compressed within reasonable limits when the audience demand a whole day’s entertainment? How is closer realism to be achieved by the actor when the never silent orchestra compels him to pitch his voice in a falsetto key? How are women’s parts to be adequately rendered so long as men monopolise the stage? How are women to take their places when the size of the theatre and the length of the performance put a prohibitive strain on their physical powers? And how is the author to complete a masterpiece when manager, actor, and musician claim the right to interpolate scenes, business, and melody for the irrelevant amusement of the uncritical? These questions must be answered before reform can make headway. In the meantime, a glance at what reformers have tried to accomplish is only due to their laudable endeavour.