O-Tsuya meeting secretly with her lover is suddenly surprised, and they are rudely parted. In despair, she commits suicide with her maid, and the ghostly shapes visit Shinsaburo nightly. A priest gives him a small golden image of the Goddess of Mercy to ward off her nocturnal visits, and puts up a charm to keep O-Tsuya away.
Tomozo, the hero’s faithless servant, steals the image and tells his wife that the ghost of O-Tsuya will appear and pay him a sum of money for hiding it, the influence of which prevents her from entering her lover’s house. He is firmly convinced the ghost will appear, and his look-out for the apparition is so full of surprise and contrast, and the suspense so well sustained, that the audience is thoroughly keyed up in anticipation. Tomozo and his wife talk so much of the ghost that every moment they think she has come, and soon are trembling with fear, the frightened wife taking refuge under the large green mosquito net suspended over her bed.
O-Tsuya and her maid are suddenly seen to float behind the drooping branches of a willow tree, seemingly suspended in air, the maid carrying the ghostly lantern, shaped like a pink peony, that gives out a dim and intermittent glow.
The transaction over between O-Tsuya and Tomozo, the ghosts make their way towards Shinsaburo’s house, but they cannot enter unless the Buddhist charm above the doorway is removed. This Tomozo accomplishes, and immediately as the two weird shapes vanish, a peony lantern is seen to rise mysteriously from mid-stage and without the aid of hands, sail through the air and enter an open space over the door. Shinsaburo is now left to the mercy of the ghosts, who claim him as their own and take him away from the land of the living.
There is a superstition concerning The Peony Lantern to the effect that actors who play the ghosts’ rôles soon pass away. This was brought home when the play was presented at the Imperial Theatre in August 1919. During the performances two of the most promising young actors of Tokyo, taking the rôles of mistress and maid, took ill and died within a week of each other. Nightly they had been seen, pale-faced, the hair worn long and dishevelled, the maid with the ghostly lantern in hand, moving behind the willow tree. Soon they were to become like the shades they impersonated, no longer of the earth, earthy.
V
The frequency with which heads—the variety that Salome bore on a charger when she danced before King Herod—enter into Kabuki plays would seem to bear out the pronouncement made by the late William Archer that the Japanese drama was “barbaric and insensate”. This was the impression made upon a Western critic on first contact with Kabuki during a brief visit to Japan. Considering, however, the wide range of Kabuki plays, this sweeping statement revealed but half-knowledge.
Even as the unnatural crimes in Shakespeare’s plays pleased the Elizabethans, so the playwrights of Old Japan provided strong fare for their feudal audiences. Unless the abstract motive of loyalty is recognised, the significance of a head symbol as a stage accessory is lost.
One of the best of many such loyalty pieces is Omi Genji, by Chikamatsu Hanji and Miyoshi Shoraku. Two brothers, Moritsuna and Takatsuna, descendants of the Genji clan, live near the lake of Omi. They are on different sides, one for the Shogun, the other a rebel. Moritsuna holds his brother’s son, Koshiro, as a hostage and tells his venerable mother to instruct the lad to commit harakiri that Takatsuna may be influenced to take an honourable course of action.
The boy is disinclined to listen to his grandmother, the more so as he sees his mother approaching the gate. His grandmother tries in vain to carry out the execution, but her love for her grandchild renders her powerless to act. Messengers arrive and relate in descriptive posture dances how the battle went and that Takatsuna has been killed. A representative of the Shogun comes with Takatsuna’s head in order that Moritsuna may identify it. He is Tokimasa, a dignified old warrior in gold armour, his white hair bound with a silver band, and comes through the audience followed by his retainers in armour, one carrying the head-box, another a chest of armour.