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.