Kabuki

by Zoë Kincaid

Characteristic simplicity, taste, and style are shown by the men accustomed to handle material for stage pictures. Above all, these workers are free from a worship of things, and do not overcrowd, but concentrate on essentials. In the management of details the producer displays a finish that is near perfection. Things are not allowed to clutter up the stage for their own sake, but are necessary only as a medium to express the underlying motive of the play. In the manner, also, in which trees, flowers, birds, the sea, mountains, waterfalls, lakes, and the seasons are represented, it is apparent that Kabuki is still near to nature, and a product of a non-commercial age.

During the three hundred years of its history, Kabuki experts have been designing scenery and fashioning furniture and properties, unknown to their contemporaries in England and Europe, who were quite as much alive to the adornment and embellishment of their stage productions.

Hasegawa Kampei, the fifteenth, is the leader among Kabuki craftsmen in Tokyo. He considers himself a simple workman, and is busy designing and executing scenes in all the theatres of Tokyo, showing a surprising versatility and creativeness. He has, however, to compete with the flood of westernisation that would destroy the very foundations of the art his ancestors developed.

The first Kampei, the son of a samurai, was a skilled artisan in wood-carving and the decoration of temples, setting up stone gateways and lanterns, and the beautiful wooden gates of approach. His ability in this direction became so well known that he was called in to help in the production of plays.

In 1644, large furniture began to be used at the Ichimura-za in Yedo. And by the time of Kampei, the eleventh, the development of odogu and kodogu, or great and small furniture, was at its height, and his designs are regarded as models at the present.

The greatest improvement in the Yedo stage took place from 1780 to 1800, and the Hasegawa Kampei who presided over the destiny of the stage at that time invented new contrivances, especially in the management of ghosts; causing buildings to rise into the air, and trap-door disappearances. Finally the fashion for realistic furniture became so great that the interior of one of the great halls of the Imperial Palace, Kyoto, was reproduced on the stage. The authorities protested against the extravagance shown in this beautiful conception, and inferior materials were substituted by order.

Although the members of the Hasegawa family were skilled men, the real source of Yedo’s stage scenery progress was due to the creativeness of the Doll-theatre in Osaka. The collaborators for the dolls were fertile in ideas, and developed new stage settings in bewildering rapidity.

If there is one direction in which Kabuki shows the true craftsman more than another it is the pictorial. It is doubtful if on any other stage in the world can be viewed more charming effects achieved by such simple means. A red lacquered bridge over an iris pond, and the characters in picturesque combinations of colours; the soft greys and whites of a snowy scene, and in the centre an ancient cherry tree in full bloom; the lonely camp fire of a beggar in the mountains, a castle moat in the moonlight; a single fantastic pine by the seashore, are some of the familiar Kabuki scenes.

Brighter and more elaborate is a maple picnic under flaming foliage, the leaves falling, the feast spread on a scarlet rug, all the properties of black and gold lacquer, and the rainbow tints of Asia used plentifully in the costumes.

There is a flash of steel in the moonlight as many assailants rush upon a samurai, and the air is filled with fireflies. After the courageous hero has disposed of his enemies he wipes his sword, and to ascertain that it is quite clean lifts up a cage of imprisoned fireflies, by the glow of which he is able to see. Or again, it is old Nihonbashi, the Bridge of Japan, the centre of Yedo and from which all distances were calculated; Mount Fuji in the distance; a band of firemen returning after a conflagration, singing a characteristic song.