The Battle of Kokusenya, by Chikamatsu, was one of the first doll-plays to be acted in the theatres of Osaka, Kyoto, and Yedo. Ichikawa Danjuro, the second, took the chief rôle, that of Watonai, a picturesque character who had a Japanese mother and Chinese father and went to China in search of adventure. Later the second Danjuro acted in other pieces by Chikamatsu that were first played by the dolls. Takeda Izumo’s plays, as well as those of Kino Kaion, both play-writers for the dolls, were used by Kabuki actors.
The relationship between the two theatres became far more complicated during the Horeki period. Not only the plays, but the acting, stage furniture, and costumes of the Doll-theatre influenced Kabuki. The music of the Doll-theatre was also incorporated into Kabuki.
Previous to the first year of Horeki (1757), the Doll-theatre was at its height. After this it declined.
As fast as the Doll-theatre artists evolved new plays, they were quickly seized upon by Kabuki. The public came at last to be more interested in the real actors than in the dolls. The vogue of the puppets slowly and surely began to wane. No progress was made, the theatres burned down, the minstrels and doll-handlers changed from one theatre to another.
After 1804 the dolls almost went out of existence, but rallied in later years, and to-day this unique art is crystallised in the Bunraku-za, of Osaka. A small Doll-theatre held its own in the theatre quarter of Kyoto until recently, but the ever-increasing prosperity of the surrounding moving-picture theatres has driven it to the wall. There are touring companies that pay visits to the different towns at regular periods. Once a year a Bunraku-za company plays in Tokyo, and the leading actors may always be seen in the audience watching closely the puppets acting in their own familiar rôles. The art of the Doll-theatre is by no means dead, the spark of art is smouldering, but it would take some big wind to fan it into flame once again,—perhaps the wind of self-confidence among the theatre-folk of Japan in their own institutions.
The decline of the Doll-theatre was due to the fact that Kabuki took everything the dolls had to offer, and made such a poor return that the doll-stage began to starve. When Kabuki and the Doll-theatre had approached so nearly together, one had to go under, for there was not sufficient novelty to attract in the sphere of the marionettes, the source from which Kabuki had so slavishly drawn inspiration.
There was another very good reason, too, why the Doll-theatre almost ceased to be. The collaboration that had made it the centre of talent came to an end. Had the dolls continued to succeed, it would have been necessary to maintain the source of their originality, and it was the misfortune of these mute actors that the workers ceased to serve in their behalf, harmony died, and talent gradually fell away.
Kabuki, which benefited so largely from the creativeness of the dolls, faithfully preserves these traditions, and still lives on the past, that golden age when the doll was at its height, and for whom so many workers offered in their behalf the theatre gifts that in them lay.
CHAPTER XVII
LIVES OF THE YAKUSHA
The yakusha (lit., rôle man), of Kabuki, belongs to the actors’ fraternity, the brethren of the buskin, who form a peculiar company of their own, irrespective of the lands from which they have sprung or the creeds they hold.