This was the common attitude towards the drama, acting, and everything else that pertained to the Japanese theatre. Badgered and beset by unsympathetic outsiders,—who were the mere minions of officialdom,—isolated and degraded, the players and playwrights, pariahs of society as they were, builded better than they knew.
Nakamura Fukusuke of Tokyo in an onnagata rôle.
CHAPTER XXII
EXTERNALS OF SHIBAI
For a faithful preservation of the stage of the Murayama-za, one of Yedo’s first shibai, modern playgoers are indebted to a play within a play. It concerns Banzuiin Chobei, a plain citizen of Yedo who was treacherously done to death by an evil samurai, and brings to mind the turbulent Yedo days when the samurai tested their new swords on such loiterers as happened to pass their way, while the otokodate, or chivalrous commoners, were ever ready to take the part of the oppressed, and risk their lives in crossing swords with the blustering soldiery.
Chobei and Mizuno happen to meet in the Murayama-za. The play is progressing on the old-fashioned stage, patterned so closely after that of the Nō theatre. Four pillars support a heavy sloping roof that is constructed like the entrance to a temple. The stage is square, the musicians kneeling at the back. A long bridge passage joins the stage at right angles—the hashigakari of the Nō theatre.
The characters in the play are a youthful hero in gorgeous attire and a timid onnagata listening to an argument between a peaceful priest clad in scarlet and Kimpira, the grotesque, bloodthirsty hero of the old ballads.
Guards are stationed on either side of the theatre near the stage proper to preserve the peace. Looking down on the stage to right and left are upper boxes hung with fine bamboo curtains for such members of the privileged classes as may attend. For audience there are the playgoers of Tokyo. And when all eyes are focussed on the stage of the Murayama-za, a character in the play, a drunkard looking for a quarrel, swaggers in along the hanamichi and causes a disturbance. Chobei suddenly appears, springing out of his seat in the pit, and as if by magic the twentieth century is wiped out, and the playgoer travels back into the past, and for the moment is immersed in the very atmosphere of the old Yedo shibai.
This early Yedo stage showed scarcely any difference from the type in vogue during the Onna Kabuki and Wakashu Kabuki periods, and was in all essentials like that of O-Kuni Kabuki with the exception that it was of a more permanent construction.
There was, however, no roof as a protection against the weather. The pit was of beaten earth, and the groundlings had a straw mat apiece and were provided with a small hibachi, or brazier, Tickets were purchased for the whole or half day, or for one act. But evidently the theatres knew how to charge,—a matter that is not overlooked even at the present,—for in an old book it is mentioned that it was necessary to pay even to light one’s tobacco. These lights were called fire-ropes, a twisted cord of rice straw set on fire and left to smoulder, a convenient manner of starting a pipe in the days before matches, when the only means of producing fire was by striking the flint.