Yet it must be mentioned that because of the present array of onnagata that adorn the stages of Osaka and Tokyo, there is very little danger that the specialty is near extinction. On the contrary, the two leading theatres of Tokyo are headed by onnagata, Nakamura Utayemon, of the Kabuki-za, and Onoe Baiko, of the Imperial. It is also very significant that this unique art is still unknown in that other half of the world, where, since the boy actors of Shakespeare’s time, who played the famous heroines of the eternal dramatist, the playing of female rôles by males has become a lost art.
CHAPTER XVI
YAKUSHA AND MARIONETTE
How the doll-actors took their rise, how for them the best theatre talent of the land was concentrated, and how these gorgeously costumed puppets of wood, animated by pulleys and strings, influenced the actors of flesh and blood, forms a unique chapter in the history of the Japanese theatre.
Kabuki and Ningyo-shibai, or the Doll-theatre, were the two chief amusements of the people during the long period of national seclusion when the Shoguns ruled in Yedo. And many of the conventions of the modern stage are unintelligible to the Occidental unless the debt Kabuki owes the art of the Doll-theatre is clearly understood. The relationship of the marionette and the yakusha can only be briefly touched upon here, since the complex history of Ningyo-shibai belongs to a separate volume.
The Doll-theatre began as a popular entertainment of the people at the very same time that O-Kuni’s dance on a temporary platform on the bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto marked the beginning of the popular theatre that was to become the exclusive possession of male players.
The exact date when minstrel, or tayu,—the accompanist on the samisen, or samisen hiki,—the ningyo-tsukai, or doll-handler, and the ningyo, or doll-actors, began their remarkable collaboration is not known, but when O-Kuni was practising her art the Doll-theatre had already begun to exercise an influence upon the public.
This combination of ballad sung and recited by the minstrel, while the performer on the samisen marked the rhythms to which the dolls moved, and the doll-handlers created the gestures that expressed the emotion of the ballad-drama, was called Joruri, because the first ballad to be sung to the samisen concerned the love affairs of the legendary lover Yoshitsune and the beautiful Princess Joruri.
Yoshida Bungoro, a doll-handler of the Bunraku-za of Osaka, who has devoted his life to the management of female marionettes.
A woman is credited with inaugurating this new form of entertainment. She was Ono-no-Otsu, a lady-in-waiting in the household of Oda Nobunaga, the famous general, whose death gave Hideyoshi his opportunity to become the chief military dictator.