Nakamura Utayemon, leading actor of the Tokyo Stage, in the rôle of Yayegaki-hime, the young princess in the play Nijushiko, or Twenty-four Filial Persons.
There is, however, a deeper reason to account for the onnagata. This specialty gave an actor an opportunity to apply a principle of all good art,—creativeness. The woman’s coiffure, make-up, and costume acted as an effective mask. The onnagata was able to hide himself behind his character, and not allow his own masculine personality to struggle through the disguise. The actor within the raiment of a woman was just as free from personal considerations as the doll-handler who pulls the strings and causes his doll to move. It was no mere lark to masquerade as a woman, but a serious study that required a lifetime to bring to perfection.
In a period of Japan when the samurai was uppermost and the artist counted for nothing, it is all the more surprising to find these actors devoting their lives to the art of female character-acting, and it was natural that they should be looked down upon by the militarists, who held in scorn everything effeminate. But the actors served the stage because the instinct within them was too strong to go unheeded. Moreover, they were as unconscious of their art as is a bird of its trill, and equally unaware of their service to their fellow-actors, to their day and generation.
The first onnagata of Kabuki are shadowy; they have left their names, but very little has been recorded of them. Kyoto produced the early onnagata, later Osaka became a headquarters, but Yedo was not the soil in which they could flourish. The people of Kyoto had not parted with their taste for things elegant, artistic, and literary,—the inheritance of centuries. Yedo was a political centre, and did not breed onnagata. But one characteristic of the onnagata was that they were common to the stages of the three towns. They received their early training in Kyoto or Osaka, then spent the best part of their careers in Yedo, or else wandered from one town to another. Still another peculiarity of the onnagata was that so many of them took to Buddhism, retiring from Kabuki to spend the remainder of their lives in some peaceful temple.
In Kyoto, Itoyori Gensaburo first acted female parts, and in Yedo, in 1642, Murayama Sakon came from Kyoto to play at the Murayama-za. He has been described on his first appearance in Yedo as wearing a flowing robe of light silk, his head covered with a cloth dyed in many colours, and he carried in his hand a branch of a tree to which was attached a long piece of paper inscribed with verse. His performance was nothing more than a simple dance. His popularity, however, brought disaster, for the authorities, ever watchful lest the theatre corrupt good manners, issued an order prohibiting onnagata. The existence of Kabuki trembled in the balance. It was some time before the matter was settled, for the proprietors of theatres, with the worthy Saruwaka Kansaburo, founder of Yedo Kabuki, at their head, made an application that male players be allowed to play as females, and permission was granted, provided the specialty should remain distinct from men’s rôles. This was the real origin of the onnagata.
Murayama Sakon’s rival and contemporary was Ukon Genzaemon. He was playing on the Yedo stage in 1655, when the city was swept by a conflagration, and his theatre was destroyed. As the actors of that time were forbidden to appear on the stage wearing long hair, but were obliged to shave the crown above the forehead, they covered their heads with a piece of silk to prevent the disfigurement from being seen. Ukon is described in the theatre gossip of the day as wearing an orange silk head-covering, and as he was a handsome youth and very womanly, it is easy to imagine that the Yedo audiences were highly pleased with him. From the criticism of the time, he was considered beautiful, a fine dancer, but had no animation, and so became monotonous. Murayama Sakon and Ukon Genzaemon played together in the same play, and were closely associated in the theatre of Osaka, Kyoto, and Yedo.
Another of these shadowy onnagata was Ebisuya Kichirobei, who was very likely kin to a theatre proprietor of that name. And there was Tamagawa Sennojo, who first went to Yedo in 1661. He played for two years at the Saruwaka-za, and afterwards, when performing in Nagoya, received what must have been a huge salary for his time, one ryo a day. He is mentioned in the theatre chronicles as an unrivalled onnagata; that he first went on the stage at the age of 14, and both while acting and in private life always wore the flowing robe of a woman, not giving up this practice until he reached that age which is considered so unlucky for a man in Japan, 42. He broke a bone, and afterwards his dancing was less graceful; he died at 50, his audiences never failing in their appreciation of him.
Two adopted sons of Murayama Matasaburo, the proprietor of the Murayama-za, became onnagata, but neither inherited their father’s theatre. There were also Taki Sansaburo, who came from Kyoto to play at the Murayama-za, and whose death at the age of 19 has been described in a romantic manner by the theatre historians. Tamagawa Shujen, also from Kyoto, was an onnagata who, early in his career, gave up the stage and became a priest.
Still another onnagata of this early period of Kabuki was Tamamura Kichiya, who rose to prominence, but afterwards declined. Ihara Saikaku, the dramatic critic of Genroku, has written of him as follows: “It is beyond doubt that he is brilliant on the stage; it is as though he were not of this world. He is skilled in his art, but with it is an air of pride and arrogance that is not satisfactory.”
Kichiya was responsible for setting the fashion in women’s apparel, for he tied his obi in a certain manner at the back and this style became the vogue. The character in which he excelled was as Yokihi, the beautiful mistress of a Chinese Emperor. A Nō play of this name deals with the beauty after she had passed on to another world, one of the many ghostly personages of the Nō, but when Mei Ran-fan, the Peking actor, appeared for the first time in Tokyo at the Imperial Theatre a few years ago, one of his successes was as Yokihi, a very human, badly behaving young person who became slightly intoxicated, but who was clad in all the colours of the rainbow, a most fascinating female. Tamagawa Kichiya, as the charming Yokihi, must have been an object of the greatest interest to Yedo people.