The third Utayemon wrote his own plays, but did not have good luck in the sakusha whom he engaged to help him,—Nagawa Seisuke. He did his best with Nagawa’s poor compositions, but the latter possessed inferior ability. On one occasion the playwright became angry because his ideas had not been carried out properly, and he drew his sword to kill Utayemon, when he was stopped.
Tsuruya Namboku stands out from among these unsatisfactory writers, and several of his plays are regular features of the modern stage. He was the son of a dyer in Yedo, wrote especially for the third Bando Hikosaburo, and was particularly successful in ghost plays. Onoe Matsusuke and Onoe Kikugoro, who were in their element when playing ghostly rôles, shone in Namboku’s compositions. The most familiar of his plays to modern audiences is Yotsuya Kaidan, or The Ghost of Yotsuya, the latter a certain quarter of Yedo that remains to-day one of the thriving centres of Tokyo. Namboku was a genius in the invention of stage apparatus to make his supernatural characters more gruesome, and Yotsuya Kaidan is an example of his skill in overcoming mechanical difficulties.
He caused O-Iwa, the weird heroine of this play, to make her entrance upon the scene through a large lighted lantern, and disappear through the solid wall, etc. Once he pasted black paper all over the stage to fashion the body of a whale, and a Jonah-like actor stepped out of it carrying a crown. The audiences of his time were quite carried away by the boldness of his ideas, and his works have a lasting quality, for their power to make the flesh creep is undiminished.
It was the lot of the sakusha to be poor, and Namboku was no exception. An incident is told of him that during a period of poverty he was kneeling in front of his little writing-desk, when his wife entered and asked for the wherewithal to buy some rice. He had no money, so she took the mosquito net, an indispensable article in a Japanese house in warm weather, and went to the pawnbroker, where she exchanged it for sufficient coin of the realm to keep the house supplied with rice for a short period. Namboku made good use of this domestic episode, and has immortalised it in Yotsuya Kaidan. The long-suffering O-Iwa is cruelly treated by her husband that she may leave the house, as he wishes to marry another woman, younger, prettier, and richer in this world’s goods. In his attempt to get rid of her he sells everything in the house piece by piece, the mosquito net among them, hoping by his callous cruelty to drive her away.
Namboku died at the age of 75, in the compound of the well-known Fox Shrine in Fukugawa, a ward of present-day Tokyo. He had a son who succeeded him, and who became adviser to the seventh Danjuro. The latter was a quick writer, and specialised in plays that had the gay quarters for settings.
A quaint character among these pre-Restoration playwrights was Hanakasa Rosuke. This was not his real name, but rather a theatre nickname, Flowery-Straw-Hat-Rosuke, given him because of his habit of going about in extraordinary clothing. He generally wore a gaudy kimono, yellow velvet tabi, or socks, and on his head a wide straw hat adorned on top with artificial flowers, in imitation of a festival reveller in the cherry-blossom season. He was the eldest son of the chief doctor of the Takeda Clan, and had been bred in a samurai atmosphere. He was also something of a scholar, but never became a first-class sakusha.
Rosuke went to Osaka and wrote for the theatres there. He returned with the seventh Danjuro, when this great actor was allowed to return to Yedo, after the long exile imposed upon him for extravagance. Later, Rosuke wrote for the third Kikugoro, but he spoke against Kikugoro’s son, and was requested to cease composing plays for the Onoe family. Again he left Yedo, and went to Osaka, where he died in poverty at the age of 76.
For many years after Namboku Tsuruya, there were no playwrights capable of filling his place except Mimasuya Nisoji, who gained a position in Yedo because of his long service to Yedo Kabuki. For twenty years Nisoji wrote for the third Kikugoro, the fourth Nakamura Utayemon, and the seventh Danjuro, but his work consisted largely in revision. He belonged to a wealthy family and began to write for his own amusement. On account of extravagance and dissipation, he was sent away from his home, and died in his seventies.
Nisoji and Namboku were great friends, and they played practical jokes upon each other. Namboku was once slightly ill and Nisoji asked a Court doctor to go and examine him. A kago, or palanquin, carried on the shoulders of six stout bearers proceeded to Namboku’s humble dwelling. The Kabuki sakusha had received no warning of the Court physician’s visit, and was greatly surprised. Taken unawares, he got out of his bed and bowed low on the mats. When the great medical man took his departure, the kago bearers asked for money, but the maker of plays was incurably poor, and could only pay a small portion of the kago men’s demands.
In order to get even with Nisoji, Namboku planned a counter joke. There was a certain shrine in Shinagawa, a suburb of Yedo, where the spirit of the famous general, Kato Kiyomasa, was enshrined, and it was Nisoji’s habit after visiting the shrine to repair to a tea-house in the vicinity. There was some gossip that Nisoji had carried on a flirtation with the daughter of the tea-house keeper, and Namboku ordered a lantern to be made bearing his friend’s crest together with that of the tea-house maiden, and hung it up in front of the shrine. Nisoji was much perplexed, and acknowledged that Namboku had evened up the score.