The actors enter the stage by two long, raised walks through the auditorium, so that they seem to come from without. These raised walks, on a level with the stage and the heads of the spectators in the floor boxes, are called the hana michi, or flower-walks, and as a popular actor advances his way is strewn with flowers. The exits are sometimes by the hana michi and sometimes by the wings, according to the scene.
The miniature scale of things Japanese makes it possible to fill a real scene with life-like details. The stage is always large enough for three or four actual houses to be set as a front. The hana michi is sufficiently broad for jinrikishas, kagos, and pack-horses, and with the illumination of daylight the unreality of the picture vanishes, and the spectator seems to be looking from some tea-house balcony on an every-day street scene. Garden, forest, and landscape effects are made by using potted trees, and shrubs uprooted for transplanting. The ever-ready bamboo is at hand and the tall dragon-grass, and the scene-painters produce extraordinary illusions in the backgrounds and wings. Some of the finest stage pictures I have seen were in Japan, and its stage ghosts, demons, and goblins would be impossible elsewhere. In the play of “Honest Sebi” there was a murder scene in a bamboo grove in a rainy twilight that neither Henry Irving nor Jules Claretie could have surpassed; and in “The Vampire Cat of the Nabeshima,” or “The Enchanted Cat of the Tokaido,” a beautiful young woman changed, before the eyes of the audience, to a hideous monster, with a celerity more ghastly than that which transforms Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.
Japanese theatres use the revolving stage, which has been their original and unique possession for two centuries. A section of the stage flooring, twenty or thirty feet in diameter, revolves like a railway turn-table, on lignum-vitæ wheels, moved by coolies below stairs, who put their shoulders to projecting bars, as with the silk-press. The wings come to the edge of this circle, and at a signal a whole house whirls around and shows its other rooms or its garden. Sometimes the coolies turn too quickly, and the actors are rolled out of sight gesticulating and shouting. The scenery is painted on wings that draw aside, or on flies hoisted overhead. Curiously enough, the signal for opening the curtain is the same as that used at the Comédie Française—three blows on the floor with a big stick.
The Japanese theatre of to-day is given over to realism and the natural school, and Jefferson and Coquelin are not more quietly, easily, and entirely the characters they assume than Danjiro, their Japanese fellow-Thespian. The play is a transcript of actual life, and everything moves in an every-day way, though Japanese manners and customs often seem stilted, artificial, and unnatural to the brusque Occidental, with his direct and brutally practical etiquette. Pathos is always deep and long drawn out, and the last tear is extracted from the eyes of audiences quick to respond to emotional appeals. Tragedies are very tragic and murders very sanguinary. Death is generally accomplished by edged tools, and the antics of the fencers, the wonderful endurance of the hacked victims, and the streams of red paint and red silk ravellings that ooze forth delight the audiences, who shout and shriek their “Ya! Ya!” and “Yeh! Yeh!” The swordsmen are often acrobats and jugglers in disguise, who enliven the extended slaughters with thrilling tours de force. Seppuku, the honorable death, or hara-kiri as it is most commonly known, is always received with breathless interest and wild applause, and the self-disembowelling of the hero, with a long last oration, still seems to the Japanese something fine and heroic and the most complete revenge upon an insulting foe.
The detail and minuteness with which everything is explained, and the endless etiquette and circumlocution, are thoroughly Japanese. Little is left to the imagination in their dramatic art, and an ordinary play has more sub-plots and characters than one of Dickens’s novels. With the rapid adoption of new customs, the theatre is becoming the only conserver of the old life and manners.
If the Japanese stage has its blood-and-thunder and its tank drama, it has also its millinery play. The costumes alone are often worth going to see, and the managers announce the appearance of historic brocades and armor worthy of museums. Danjiro owns and wears a sacred coat of mail that belonged to one of the Ronins, and his appearance in it is the signal for the maddest applause. Such treasures of costume and of armor are bequeathed from father to son, and from retiring star to favorite pupil. As tokens of high approval rich and noble patrons send to actors rare costumes, swords, pipes, and articles of personal use. Excited spectators even throw such tributes upon the stage. One approving foreigner, seeing the rain of hats, coats, obis, and tobacco-pouches, once tossed his hat down. Later the manager and the actor’s valet returned the hat and asked for ten dollars, as those seeming gifts from the audience were merely pledges or forfeits, to be afterwards redeemed by money under the star’s regular schedule of prices. As protests availed nothing, and the whole house only roared in derision when he said that he had wished Danjiro to keep the battered derby as a souvenir, the enthusiast paid his forfeit.
DANJIRO, THE GREAT ACTOR