Kabuki

by Zoë Kincaid

Namiki Gohei, born in Osaka in 1747, was the chief playwright of his time. His plays were so much in demand in the theatres of the three towns that he travelled back and forth a great deal. He was patronised by Sawamura Sojuro, the third, and also wrote for the third Onoe Kikugoro. Banzuiin Chobei, written for the fourth Ichikawa Danjuro, remains exceedingly popular at the present day, showing the democratic leaven that was working in Japan in Gohei’s day. This is among his best pieces.

Chobei was an otokodate, or brave commoner, ever ready to champion the cause of the weak and down-trodden citizens, often the victims of the tyrannical two-sworded gentry. He incurred the enmity of an evil samurai, who put him to death. This was a theme to stir the audiences of Osaka and Yedo.

After the death of the third Sojuro, Namiki wrote for his son, the fourth Sojuro, and for the fifth Matsumoto Koshiro. As he had been an actor in his early days, he knew something of the stages of Osaka and Yedo, that had many different characteristics, and he combined the two. His play, written around the ever-verdant story of the Soga brothers’ revenge, one of the most fruitful sources for the Kabuki’s sakusha’s inspiration, was so popular that it was given for many years at every Yedo theatre on the New Year programme, and the custom was only discontinued at the beginning of Meiji. In using historical material, Gohei felt the cramping influence of the authorities, and he skilfully combined the true with the false facts of history. Popular rumours of the day, gossip that went on round the hibachi in the dwellings of Yedo, were prohibited from finding representation on the stage, and consequently Gohei utilised the talk of the town as false reports, and the audience knowing the true inwardness of things that had been circulated far and wide, could easily understand his references.

That the business of playwriting was not very lucrative seems to be suggested from the fact that Gohei once kept a tobacco shop in Osaka, later becoming a seller of sake. In Yedo he also opened a little medicine shop and sold pills, an old-fashioned Chinese remedy for colds.

His excursions into business could not have been to his liking, but due rather to forced circumstances, since he is on record as having said when he sat down before his desk: “All the world is my own. No enemy is near me. All the actors are my own, and I can use them as I like.”

A Yedo playwright some years younger than Namiki Gohei was Horikoshi Nisanji, but his plays have not been handed down as have been those of his more popular Osaka contemporary.

Nisanji was followed by Sakurada Jisuke, who became the first playwright of Yedo, and wrote during a period of forty years. He was associated with such distinguished actors as the fifth Ichikawa Danjuro, the fourth Matsumoto Koshiro, the first Nakamura Nakazo, and the fifth Iwai Hanshiro. He excelled in plays depicting real life, or sewamono, and took his characters from the varied life about him,—handsome young samurai, heroines of the gay quarters, and brave men of the people. The play of his that has lived longest is Sukeroku, one of Kabuki’s most characteristic pieces, with scenes laid in the gay quarters, and Sukeroku, the very personification of bravery and loyalty, as the hero.

The periods of Bunka and Bunsei, or from 1804 to 1817, saw the beginning of Kabuki’s decline, and for fifty years before the Restoration in 1868 there was little development. It was a time of stagnation, and the people shut up within their own country were beginning to suffer from lack of outside stimulus. A distinct loss of originality began to show itself in the theatre, and there was a dearth of good playwrights, while the Doll-theatre had taken a plunge downward, and there was little activity among the writers for the marionettes. Kabuki had depended largely upon the Doll-theatre playwrights, and failing these fell back upon dramatisations of popular fiction. The novels of Bakin, Tenehiko, and Kyoden were dramatised for the stage.

Although the theatre had become more complex, and material for plays was abundant, the period did not produce the playwright. The position of the sakusha, which in the beginning had been of great dignity, changed for the worse. They became mere slaves of the actors. There was a stage writer called Nagawa Shimesuke, son of the keeper of a theatre tea-house, who did not create, but patched and altered at the bidding of the actors, so that he was nicknamed Sentaku-ya Shimesuke, or Laundry-Man Shimesuke, which gives a good idea of the playwriters’ low estate at this time.

Nagawa Tokusuke gave up the priesthood to become a playwright. He had been connected with a country temple, and went to Osaka to learn how to write. There were so few sakusha at this time, that the third Nakamura Utayemon invited him up to Yedo, and was so anxious to encourage him, hoping that he would prove to be a goose to lay golden eggs in the way of popular plays for the actors, that he bestowed upon Tokusuke the precious family pen-name of Issen, used by the first Utayemon when he signed his poetry. One of his plays was a failure, which disconcerted the actors to a considerable degree. He returned the literary nom de plume with which his patron Utayemon had honoured him, and departed whence he had come. Thereafter he wrote pieces for side-shows, set up along the banks of rivers, on temporary sites in the compounds of shrines, or at cross-roads. At last he shaved his head and retired as the keeper of a tea-house in Kyoto, dying at 79. So the sakusha, like the yakusha, had their falls from favour, and their lives often ended in disappointment.