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.
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 flourish of trumpets in
Tōkyō. The promoters were _sōshi_ (ex-students), who, as actors or
authors, or both, proclaimed their intention of revolutionising
the stage and informing it with nineteenth-century culture. They
began, as such societies generally begin, with translations, and
by dramatising the romances of the elder Dumas succeeded for a
time in attracting. “The Three Musketeers” and “Monte Cristo”
were spectacular enough to please. But when it came to producing
original work, their will was found to exceed their capacity.
Without enough money or experience to make a sustained effort,
they kindled a flame which soon flickered out. Mr. Kawakami, as I
have already stated, won a great success by dramatising the more
striking incidents of the war with China. He visited Port Arthur
and supplied himself with photographs of many varieties, so that,
at any rate, his play was realistically mounted. How far its
structure was in advance of less up-to-date pieces I cannot say. If
it at all resembled his adaptation of “Round the World in Eighty
Days,” I fear it was no more than a series of tableaux. But no
production on strictly European lines could command an intelligent,
much less a sympathetic, reception from playgoers unacquainted with
European life. In the summer of 1898 Mr. Osada, whose models are
Parisian, presented his compatriots with a version of “Le monde
où l’on s’ennuie.” It will be remembered that the climax of that
amusing comedy is reached when a young diplomat is discovered
kissing his wife in a dark conservatory by the scandalised
guests, at a French château. Now, the Tōkyō tradesman has never
kissed anybody, and would not incommode his wife with sentimental
attention. He was merely mystified by this queer illustration of
barbarian habit, and returned with relief to the contemplation of
his politely blood-stained ancestors.
The most promising path of improvement would seem to be that
pursued by Mr. Tsuboüchi and Mr. Fukuchi, who continue to write
plays on episodes in their own history, but strive to avoid the
extravagance and unreality of their predecessors. Mr. Tsuboüchi,
who was well known as a critic and novelist before he turned
playwright, invented the term _mugen-gekki_ or “dream-play” in
ridicule of such wildly improbable incidents as disfigure “The Tale
of the Sapling of Ichi-no-tani.” I have not seen his own drama, the
“Maki no Kati” (1897), which deals with the turbulent thirteenth
century, but Mr. Aston discerns in it “careful workmanship and
gratifying freedom from extravagance,” in spite of “several murders
and two _hara-kiri_ by women.” Of Mr. Fukuchi’s work I can write
with some confidence, having been privileged on many occasions
to discuss it with him. He is recognised as the leading Japanese
playwright, and has produced about thirty plays during the last
ten years. He has been engaged for some time on translations of
“Hamlet” and “Othello,” but has no idea of staging them, for
reasons which will be presently explained. Though anxious to
modernise the drama by introducing less bloodshed and more careful
study of character, he finds modern Japan unsuited to dramatic
treatment. The typical advocate of progress, who dresses and
talks like a foreigner, takes little interest in his own arts and
antiquities, being absorbed in politics or money-making. He has
neither the picturesque nor heroic qualities which a dramatist
postulates, and is therefore rejected by Mr. Fukuchi in his search
for material. A serious obstacle to reform lies in the ignorance
of actors and the indifference of the upper classes. While the
former too often lack the erudition to appreciate and interpret
a scholarly reproduction of antique habit and speech, the latter
are only beginning to discard their aristocratic prejudice against
the theatre, compelling the author to write down to the level of
his middle and lower class audience. But better education and
more democratic ideals are beginning to tell. The reception of
“Kasuga-no-Tsubone” (“The Lady-in-Waiting of Kasuga”)--one of Mr.
Fukuchi’s finest plays--marked a most creditable advance in public
judgment.