The actors enter at a gait that out-struts the most exaggerated stage stride ever seen, the body held rigid as a statue, and the foot, never wholly lifted, sliding slowly along the polished floor. These buckram figures, moving with the solemnity of condemned men, utter their lines like automata, not a muscle nor an eyelash moving, nor a flicker of expression crossing the unmasked countenance. Their tones are unspeakably distressing, nasal, high-pitched, falsetto sounds, and many performers have ruined and lost their voices, and even burst blood-vessels, in the long-continued, unnatural strain of their recitatives. The children who take part equal the oldest members in their gravity and woodenness. In some delightful scenes the demons, with hideous masks and abundant wigs of long, red-silk hair, spread deliberate and conventional terror among the buckram grandees, and, stamping the stage wildly, leaping and whirling, relieve the long-drawn seriousness of the trilogy. It is only when the performers are without masks that the scene is recognized as intentionally a light and amusing farce, while the roars of the audience are elicited by stately, ponderous, and time-honored puns, and plays upon words that a foreigner cannot appreciate.
Fine representations of the No may be seen at the Koyokwan club-house in Tokio, and in the audiences one beholds all the bureaucracy, the court circles, and a gathering of aristocratic families not elsewhere to be encountered.
The existing theatre and the legitimate drama are not yet three centuries old, and the name shibai, meaning turf places, or grass plot, implies the same evolution from out-door representations that the occidental drama had. There is no Shakespeare, nor Corneille, nor, indeed, any famous dramatist, whose works survive from an earlier day, to align the stage with literature and make its history. Authorship is rarely connected with the plays, and authors’ royalties are unknown. Many of the novels of Baku have been dramatized, but most often anonymously. Plays are usually written in the simpler hirakana, or running characters, in which light romances and books for women are written, and this fact alone shows the esteem in which dramatic literature is held. Incidents in history, lives of warriors, heroes, and saints furnish themes for the drama, and all the common legends and fairy tales are put upon the stage. That great classic, the affecting history of the “Forty-seven Ronins,” is always popular, and the crack-brained heroisms of the days of chivalry fire the Japanese heart notwithstanding its passion for the foreign and modern. The trials, tortures, and miracles of the early days of Buddhism, and the warlike histories of the great feudal houses, furnish tragedies and sensational and spectacular plays without end. There are, also, romantic melodramas, emotional dramas, and comedies of delicious humor and satire.
New plays, while rare, are not theatrical events, and first nights by no means indicate success or failure. The play is tried on the audience, changed, cut, and altered as actors, manager, scene-painter, carpenter, and patrons desire, without consideration of the author’s rights or feelings.
I once asked a great star who had written his play.
“I do not understand,” said the tragedian; and a bystander explained that the manager had cut reports of a theft, a murder, and a shipwreck from a newspaper, and, discussing them with the star, evolved the outlines of a connected play and decided on the principal scenes and effects. A hack writer was then called in, who, under dictation, shaped the plot and divided it into scenes. The managerial council elaborated it further, allotting the parts, and the star then composed his lines to suit himself. In rehearsal the play was rounded, the diction altered, and each actor directed to write out his own part, after which a full transcript was made for the prompter.
As to the authorship of the play of the “Forty-seven Ronins,” he said: “That is our country’s history. We all know the story of their lives and glorious deaths, and many novelists and poets have written of them.”
“But who made it into a drama?”
“Oh, every theatre has its own way of representing the different scenes, although the great facts are historical and cannot be misrepresented, now that the Tokugawa’s ban against the play is removed. Danjiro plays it in one way, and other actors have their versions, but none of them play it the same at every engagement, nor repeat just the same acts on every day of an engagement.”
With dramatic authorship so vague and uncertain, the origin or author of any play is far to seek. Revivals and rotations of the old favorites constitute a manager’s idea of attractions, a new scene or two, a novel feature, and some local picture or allusion being enough to satisfy the most blasé patron. No accurate libretto nor printed book of the play can thus exist, but the illustrated programmes give a pictorial outline of it—a veritable impressionist sketch, noting its salient features, and leaving all details to time and imagination. There are no dramatic unities, no three-act or five-act limitations, and no hampering laws of verse and rhythm. An orchestra and half-concealed chorus explains, heralds, and lauds the action, a survival of the No gradually disappearing with other things before the demand for shorter hours and briefer plays.