Wife.—Oh! how furious I am! Oh! how furious I am!
[The husband runs away.
Where's the unprincipled wretch off to? Is there nobody there? Please catch him! I won't let him escape! I won't let him escape!
FOOTNOTES:
[162] The reader will call to mind the extreme simplicity which distinguishes the method of representing the Japanese lyric dramas. In accordance with this simplicity, all the changes of place mentioned in the text are indicated merely by a slight movement to and fro of the actors upon the stage.
[163] It is said that in antiquity an ode commencing with the name of Mount Asaka was the first copybook put into the hands of children. The term is therefore now used as the "Pillow-word" for learning to write.
[164] The doctrine of retribution set forth in the above lines is a cardinal point of the Buddhist teaching; and, as the afflicted Christian seeks support in the expectation of future rewards for goodness, so will the pious Buddhist find motives for resignation in the consideration of his present sufferings as the consequence of sins committed in past stages of existence.
[165] A little further on, Kauzhiyu says it is a "rule" that a retainer must lay down his life for his lord. Though it would be difficult to find either in the Buddhist or in the Confucian teaching any explicit statement of such a duty, it is nevertheless true that the almost frantic loyalty of the mediæval and modern Japanese was but the natural result of such teaching domiciled amid a feudal society. We may see in this drama the whole distance that had been traversed by the Japanese mind since the time of the "Mañyefushifu" poets, whose means of life and duty were so much nearer to those of the simply joyous and unmoral, though not immoral, children of nature.
[166] Literally, "turns his child into a dream."
[167] During the Middle Ages it was very usual for afflicted persons to renounce secular life, the Buddhist tonsure being the outward sign of the step thus taken.