Japanese Plays and Playfellows

by Osman Edwards

Flower and fan,

Flutter and flitter;

Lord of Bamboo,

(Juvenile whacker!)

Porcelain too,

Tea-tray and lacquer!”

“Light-hearted friends of Japan find in these lines the most happy features of the country, and overlook the gross injustice done in the play to the Japanese nation. A Japanese chief of police is made to proclaim publicly that superior authority exists in order to satisfy the personal desires of its holder. Human souls are sold by public auction, and a person may be found guilty, according to law, after trial or before! I would not complain of these imputations, or rather results of ignorance, creeping into a comic piece if it were not patronised by those who think themselves good friends of Japan, and if it were not illustrative of the way in which they look at our country.”

At last, in September 1899, a serious romantic play, purporting to represent Japanese life, was produced under the title of “The Moonlight Blossom.” It was even more faithfully staged than the comic operas. We now saw for the first time a Shintō priest, a blind shampooer, and a temple with wooden torii and stone lanterns. The plot was compounded of Adelphi elements, familiar enough, in spite of their flavouring from Liberty’s. You had the good and bad brothers, the misunderstood heroine, the intriguing widow, forged documents, secret meetings, attempted murder. You had even the “comic relief” and cockney humour of a duel on stilts. But Adelphi incidents would not have mattered so much (the Tōkyō drama is mostly melodrama) if the author had avoided Adelphi psychology. No Japanese woman indulges in the independence or the invective of Naniwa. “What stupid owls men are!” might pass for a maidenly jest in this country; never in that. If Arumo were truly a Nagasaki priest, he would never condescend to solicit the advice and affection of the other sex. The fatal substitution of Occidental for Oriental particulars in “the way of a man with a maid” vitiated Mr. Fernald’s claim to interpret Japanese romance. His men and women lacked the dignity and severity of Eastern etiquette.

In adapting “Madame Butterfly,” a popular American story, for the Anglo-Saxon stage, Mr. David Belasco was on far safer ground. Since M. Pierre Loti set the fashion, many romancers have exploited the pathos of temporary marriage between the faithless Westerner and the trustful Oriental girl, but hitherto, in spite of the obvious opportunities for scenic effect, the theme had not been handled by a serious dramatist. Now, Mr. Belasco relies greatly, as all who saw his version of “Zaza” will remember, on the electrician and the limelight man. To them belongs the credit of the most exquisite and typical episode in “Madame Butterfly.” As poor little O Chō San sat patiently at her window, with her baby asleep beside her and her face turned towards the harbour where lay the newly arrived ship of her fickle lieutenant, for full twenty minutes there was silence behind the footlights, while through the paper panes of the shōji could be seen the transition of dusk to darkness, of darkness to twilight, of dawn to day. All the poetry of the play was in those twenty minutes, and a great deal of its truth. Devotion and dumb endurance are more characteristic, I think, of such a woman than the melodramatic suicide which touched so many of her audience to tears. If a competent musician had co-operated with the stage-manager to give us a play without words in the manner of “L’Enfant Prodigue,” I should have been better pleased, for the strange “broken American” jargon and the silly monotonous song which Miss Evelyn Millard had to say and sing, though legitimate enough, were tiresomely out of harmony with the grace and beauty of her movements, her looks, her costume. An extraordinary lapse of taste was that which permitted the dying heroine to wave the star-spangled banner in her child’s face. But most of all I doubt the verisimilitude of the alleged motive for self-destruction. Sometimes Madame Chrysanthème counts her money and feels rather relieved when her foreign lover sails away; sometimes she regrets him with genuine sorrow, and might conceivably put an end to her life if confronted with the alternative of an odious match. But what she would not do is what Madame Butterfly does—namely, consider that she had suffered a dishonour expiable only by death. The Western sentiment of honour is out of place in such a connection, for she had been party with open eyes to a legal, extra-marital contract, sanctioned by usage and arranged by her relations. The infidelity of her partner might wound her heart; it could not strike her conscience.

After many more or less accurate adumbrations of Japanese life on the boards of London theatres, at last, in the spring of 1900, came “The celebrated Japanese Court Company from Tōkyō,” of which the leading stars, Mr. Otojiro Kawakami and Madame Sada Yacco, were freely described as the Henry Irving and Ellen Terry of the Far East. Most of the critics, expecting too much and understanding too little, went empty away, or if they derived any pleasure from the entertainment, derived it from purely æsthetic and undramatic qualities. For a week the stars shone on empty benches; but then the fashionable and artistic public, which has a habit of ignoring the professional critic, became aware of the fact that a miniature comedy and tragedy of rare delicacy and charm, as naïf as they were beautiful, could be seen, and seen only for a few afternoons, in the prosaic neighbourhood of Notting Hill. Success was assured, and we are promised a return visit in the autumn. But the critics were partly justified in their cold reception of alien art. They had come for drama and been put off with pantomime. “If this be Japanese drama,” they said, “a little of it goes a long way. We have had enough.” Had they been given drama as it is played in Tōkyō, with long, irrelevant scenes and a plot requiring four hours to unravel, how much more discontented they would have been!