Tokichi once more enters, searching for the Shogun’s mother, who has remained immured in the Golden Pavilion and invisible. He climbs a tree to reach the upper story, and, rolling up a curtain, the hostage is seen sitting calmly within. It is an unusual and picturesque scene worthy of the jidaimono tenets.
After entering into the doings of all these queer stage-folk, it is a pleasure to find that Daizen, like most theatrical villains, is finally defeated by Tokichi’s superior strategy.
IV
In contrast to the realistic plays with their snow-storms and earthquakes, fighting bouts and harakiri scenes, there are the shosagoto, or music-posture dramas. Dr. Yuzo Tsubouchi once characterised these pieces as phantasmagoria. To the stage workers in the Occident, groping their way to find a new method to unite the independent arts of the theatre, this Kabuki form would come as a delightful surprise.
The shosagoto consists of a slight plot, simple dialogue, descriptive dances, symbolic movement, descriptions sung by a chorus,—welded together by the rhythm of drum, flute, and samisen. For the shosagoto the three different styles of stage music are used, Nagauta, Tokiwazu, and Kiyomoto, that originated in Yedo and are as typical of Yedo Kabuki as the Joruri, or balladry of the Doll-theatre, is of Osaka.
Both as to plot and music, the shosagoto owe their inspiration to the older music-drama of the Nō, and the best pieces are adaptations of Nō plays. A partiality for the weird is pronounced in shosagoto. No doubt the fantastic characters of the Nō had much to do with the cultivation of this taste in the people, and the craftsmen of Kabuki have become master-hands in the staging of such plays.
Matsumoto Koshiro, the seventh, as Benkei, the warrior-priest in Kanjincho He performed in this rôle when the Prince of Wales visited the Imperial Theatre.
Kanjincho, a scroll on which are written the names of those contributing to a fund for the erection or repair of a temple, is an acknowledged Kabuki masterpiece.
The play had its origin, far back in the past, in the classical Nō drama, but for 200 years has been produced on the popular stage. Preserving much of the Nō tradition as well as Buddhist atmosphere, it gives an impression of dignity, but even more of unity of plot and treatment, of speech and chorus, of posture and costume, centring in the motive of loyalty of man to master.