The plays usually begin at half-past four in the afternoon and last until eleven in the evening. A play may run for several days, or there may be three or four at one performance. During the intermissions the audience goes out and gets dinner at one of the score of restaurants in the building.
Although stage people are looked up to a little more than formerly, they are still regarded as a rather low class. Madame Sada Yakko is perhaps the best known actress of the new school, for she met with great success, not only on the Parisian stage in 1900, but later in America as well. Danjuro, Kikugoro, and Sadanji, the greatest actors of the Japanese stage, are all dead. To-day the best are Sojuro and Sawamura, who take women's parts, and Koshiro Matsumoto, who takes men's.
On a previous visit we spent a day at the Theatre Nakamuraza, which was then the finest in Tokyo. Danjuro, who was playing there, "supported by a strong company, including the great comedian Tsuruzo," was the favourite actor of the time and delighted a large audience. I do not feel competent to judge his acting, as I saw him only once, but critics say that he was much like Henry Irving, and one of the world's greatest artists of the old school. There is a marked difference between good Japanese acting and the inferior article, the former is so much more natural, with less that is grotesque and ranting.
AN ACTOR OF THE PRESENT DAY.
The founder of the Japanese drama is supposed to have been a woman—O Kuni, a priestess of the temple at Kitzuki. She was as beautiful as she was pure, and was skilled in the dances which are supposed to delight the gods. One day, however, she fell in love with a "wave-man"—a ronin—and fled with him to Tokyo. Here her dancing and her beauty soon made her famous. Not satisfied with this, she and her lover—who was also her devoted pupil—became actors, and were the first to put secular plays on the stage. While still quite young the "wave-man" died, and O Kuni left the stage for ever. She cut off her wonderful long hair and became a Buddhist nun, spending the rest of her life writing poems. From her day until recent times women have not been allowed to appear on the stage, men taking all the parts as in the plays of ancient Greece and old England. To-day, however, women often take part with the men, as with us.
The old plays are very interesting and well done, the costumes being superb and the scenery excellent. The characters consist for the most part of samurai and daimyos, two or three of whom are either killed or commit hara-kiri during the performance. While their postures mean little to our eyes, to a Japanese every movement has its significance. When the actors pose and stamp around and finally kill themselves, the audience weeps in sympathy. The speeches are in the scholarly language, which only the better educated (very few of whom are women) can understand. This fact accounts for the large amount of sensational action which is considered necessary to hold the attention of the common people. One result of the many historical dramas given in the theatres is that the lower classes know and revere their national heroes.
In the early days of the theatre masks were much used. They were made to express sadness, hatred or amusement, and the actors chose them to fit the part they had to play. Often they portrayed the faces of well-known persons, and these were especially popular. If the actors wished to represent divinities or devils they had masks coloured black, red, green, or gold, often with real hair on them. The custom of masking on the stage was given up at the end of the seventeenth century.
One day we went to a native theatre and sat cross-legged in a box for over three hours, watching with real interest the exciting legendary romance of the famous Forty-Seven Ronins, whose story is told in another chapter. This was a very long play which had already taken twenty days, from eight in the morning till five in the afternoon, and would require three days more to finish it. The dialogue was, of course, quite unintelligible, but the play was nevertheless very interesting, for there was always a lot of action. The hero was truly superb—by a glance of his eye or a threatened blow he could knock down a whole stage-full of men! There was a very realistic suicide, with spurting blood and many gurglings. The acting was a trifle exaggerated—at times even grotesque and absurd—but I could follow the thread of events quite easily.