Of Kabuki and its long line of brilliant actors, the world knows nothing. Their art was good, although it received but scant appreciation or recognition from those who occupied the seats of the mighty.
They were faithful to their ideals, and what they have accomplished is a contribution to the actor’s art of the world. In their day and generation the yakusha were members of a degraded class, looked down upon, derided, but nevertheless they were true to the theatre instinct within them.
Similar to their fellows in the West, these actors of Japan met with success and were the idols of the people. They died in harness, or passed their remaining years in obscurity. There were players whose names for some reason or other suddenly disappeared from the lists of the theatre chroniclers—others about to lose their popularity were fortunate enough to take a new lease of life, and continued to act until old age claimed them.
It was not infrequent that the yakusha took it into his head to retire, but, thinking better of it, returned again to the glamour of the stage. Among the yakusha there were always some who grew monotonous and old-fashioned, and failed to keep abreast of the times in which they lived.
Above this innumerable tribe of play-folks tower the men of genius who carried all before them, delighting the audiences of the three theatre towns, the most-talked-of and most beloved personalities of the time, taking ill while playing a favourite rôle, or breathing their last in their dressing-rooms, in which they spent such a large portion of their lives.
Many of the yakusha were similar to the Western actors in one respect—they were great spendthrifts, and the larger the earnings the greater the extravagance displayed. When the authorities in Yedo who presided over the affairs of the theatre found a yakusha who was too fond of display, his goods were confiscated, or else he was obliged to pay a penalty.
Considerable literary ability was found among these despised theatre-folk. They were especially fond of poetry; and studied under the masters of the different forms of short poems, and often excelled. The part the yakusha played in the composition of the Kabuki plays has not been fully acknowledged. That they often wrote plays or aided materially in the collaboration is well known. It was a common stage custom for the actors to improvise in the plays to suit themselves, and while the greater portion of this ephemeral material has perished, much remains to be seen, particularly in the eighteen traditional pieces of the Ichikawa family.
That the yakusha had the heart to study literature and compose poems is very much in their favour, when it is considered that they were regarded as a low class of persons—the dregs of society. It would have been quite natural if they had neglected the difficult art of calligraphy, owing to their strenuous lives in the theatre, but many yakusha were as versed in writing the complicated characters as they were in all the other accomplishments that distinguished the genteel person of Japan at this time. One actor was so proud, of his ability in this direction that he wrote long epistles the better to show off his accomplishment.
YAKUSHA MAKING A ROUND OF NEW YEAR CALLS. In the foreground a member of the Ichikawa family, with two pupils and his servants, following behind an onnagata similarly attended. The kites in the picture show the favourite pastime of children during the New Year holidays. (Colour print by Hasegawa Kanpei, the fourteenth, and Torii Kiyosada, father of Kiyotada.)