Kabuki

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.

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.

The love affairs of Princess Joruri seem to have been the impetus that started a great flood of ballad-dramas about the time of O-Kuni, for there existed in this early period a thousand red or blue covered books in which was written the story acted out by the dolls and illustrated by wonderful drawings of strange heroes and heroines.

To Menukiya Chosaburo is attributed the distinction of founding the first doll-theatre. He obtained the services of a man in Nishinomiya, a village near Osaka, who knew how to make puppets, and started to move them to express the emotions of the different ballad plays. He first performed in Kyoto, and had the honour of being summoned before the Emperor. Such was the dignity of the early puppets. With Kabuki, the Doll-theatre came in after years to be despised, being considered as something low and vulgar.

Female minstrels, or Joruri Katari (lit., to speak Joruri), made their appearance about the same time as O-Kuni in Kyoto, and two of them were famous, Rokuji Namuyemon and Samon Yoshitaka. In an old book there are pictures of these river-bed entertainments in Kyoto, and on a screen belonging to the Keicho period, when O-Kuni was active, there is depicted one of the first Joruri theatres conducted entirely by women. The tayu, or minstrel, sat on a platform higher than the stage on which the dolls were handled. The puppets had no hands or legs, and the hands of the women manipulators were not seen. Those who strummed the samisen were also women. But when the women’s stage, or Onna Kabuki, was found to be the source of moral corruption and was prohibited, the women of the Doll-theatre likewise came under the ban and were obliged to go out of existence.

Kyoto continued to be the centre of the doll performances, which spread to the surrounding towns and were well received in Osaka. Every class of the people patronised this new form of entertainment.

The rise of the Doll-theatre to public favour was the result of the relation of the dolls and minstrelsy. They had existed separately for many years. Before Joruri was born, there were blind minstrels who sang their ballads, accompanying themselves by scratching the ribs of their fans to mark the rhythms. These blind men were called zato, and frequented the compounds of shrines and temples, or stationed themselves on street corners, putting up an awning for protection, and reciting their ballads to all who would stop to listen. Sometimes they were asked to help to entertain at feasts, but generally they wandered about from place to place, staying at mean inns, giving entertainments for the guests, thereby earning a lodging, and at other times singing short pieces to make their livelihood. They came to be regarded as beggars, and were looked down upon accordingly.

Strolling puppet players there were also, with boxes suspended by cords around their necks. They displayed their dolls on the top of the box which formed a miniature stage for the movements of the little figures.

In the fullness of time the dolls and minstrels approached each other, instead of leading separate existences. But it was music that brought them together. The introduction of the samisen from the Loo Choo Islands, by way of the port of Sakai, near Osaka, shortly before O-Kuni’s appearance, was the medium that united these workers in the sphere of puppetry. By the end of the sixteenth century, this combination had produced the popular music-ballad drama called Joruri, which at one time threatened to completely overwhelm Kabuki in the estimation of the people.

The initial stages of the Doll-theatre development are very interesting, for the conventions evolved at this time were appropriated by the real actors and may be seen upon the modern stage of Japan. The first ballad plays in which the dolls performed harped on one motive, the efficacy of I prayer to gods and Buddhas. The stage technique in use at this time was especially adapted to display before a wondering audience appearances of gods, phantoms, apparitions, and ghosts, and many ingenious contrivances were invented to suit these supernatural visitors, while the plots of the plays were moulded so that the various stage tricks in connection with the godly and ghostly personages could be carried out.

During the vogue of the doll-ballads, with the answering of prayer for plots, elaborate machinery came into use for the manipulation of grotesque characters which were neither man nor beast, god nor demon, strange creatures created that machinery might give them life. Conjuring also played its part in astonishing the audiences of those days, and there was a period when the most ingenious devices were planned, in which water was used, the characters of the stories disappearing into waterfalls, floating on lakes, and even moved by water power.

Then followed an outburst of the military spirit in Joruri, and the answered-prayer balladry took a secondary place. It was the adventures of the great warrior Kimpira, the incarnation of courage, slayer of devils and demons, that captured the popular fancy. The exploits of brave men were of more interest than the ghostly and godly pieces, and Kimpira overshadowed all the rest.

The Kimpira bushi, or Kimpira tune, was started in Yedo by Sakurai Tamba, and he was followed by his son Izumi Dayu, who was even more sanguinary than his father. He handled an iron rod so dexterously when he marked the rhythm to his ballad about the extraordinary adventures of Kimpira that he knocked off heads and lopped off limbs of the dolls every day. This realistic display suited the Yedo audiences.

Izumi is said to have disliked everything weak and unmanly, to such an extent that his door-keeper was always a strong man, physical robustness being his ideal. Perhaps the muscular guardian of the entrance was a necessity rather than an ideal, for the spirit of combat sometimes seized the audience, after witnessing a martial doll performance, and two men would begin to fight in the midst of the crowd, within or without, proving too much for the stout gate-keeper. Izumi Dayu began to quarrel himself, and at last killed a man and was executed. This bloodthirsty Joruri did not last long, and when the mania cooled down the efficacy-of-prayer ballads came into vogue again for a short time.

It was Takemoto Gidayu who gathered up all that was useful in the Joruri that had gone before him, and established the school that has been called after him, and continues to the present day,—Gidayu Joruri, more often spoken of simply as Gidayu. He was originally a farmer in Settsu province, and had a voice of large range. In Kyoto he learned how to sing Joruri from a follower of the minstrel Inouye Harima. Gidayu first appeared in Dotombori, the theatre street of Osaka. Tatsumatsu Hachirobei, a ningyo-tsukai, or doll-handler, was a genius in moving the dolls, while Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Japan’s greatest dramatist, wrote the plays.

The name of Gidayu’s theatre in Osaka was the Takemoto-za. It had flourished for some time when one of Gidayu’s followers wrote a play called the Jewel-Well-Double-Suicide, which was produced at Sakai, the port city near Osaka. It proved so successful that this man opened a rival Doll-theatre calling it the Toyotaki-za.

For long years these two theatres were close rivals, the competition between them bringing about great improvements in stage management, and each tried to outdo the other in new plays, good minstrels and doll-handlers, elaborate settings, stage devices, and gorgeous costumes.

For nearly eighty years, during the Doll-theatre’s golden age, the collaboration of the workers was so complete and Successful that Kabuki was quite cast into the shade.

The movements of the dolls were so spirited, the doll-handlers so creative in the variety of gestures that they invented to express a whole world, gay and grave, that the actors came at last to acknowledge the puppets as a source of inspiration. At first they imitated, but as the vogue for the Joruri Gidayu grew intense, the yakusha were converted into enthusiastic devotees. They went to the Doll-theatre to learn, and returned to their own acting with a keener zest. The marionettes demonstrated before their eyes the heights and depths of acting, of which they had been unaware, and they were competitors in their own profession, saving them from the inertia of self-satisfaction.

The playwrights of Joruri Gidayu were responsible for the best dramas that have been produced in Japan. Especially were they highly successful in a new kind of play, the jidaimono, having historical personages for characters, fashioned out of the most fascinating imaginative material that brought the dolls into full play as creatures of a world of fantasy.

In time Yedo actors who were removed from the doll atmosphere of Kyoto and Osaka were obliged to journey down to these towns that they might know how to play the characters of the Doll-theatre plays. The jidaimono became all the rage in Yedo, and the actors could no longer remain indifferent to the activity of the doll performers.

But the movements of the dolls were not the only attraction, for stage costumes were purloined as well, and Kabuki appropriated unto itself all the novelties and ideas of the Doll-theatre one after the other.

Something of an influence was exerted upon the Doll-theatre by the legitimate plays and players, but it was small in comparison with the highway robbery of everything of interest from the Doll-theatre carried on for years by the actors and stage managers of Kabuki.

Chikamatsu, who never hesitated to take his ideas, plots, and materials from any source that suited his purpose, borrowed to some extent from Kabuki. One of his plays, Tamba Yosaku, was originally played twenty years before his own composition by the first Arashi Sanyemon. Yuki-Onna-Gomai-Hagoita (lit., the Snow-Woman-Five-Battle-dores), a Chikamatsu masterpiece, was in reality one of Arashi Sanyemon’s favourite plays. The dolls also took for model the gestures and style of living actors, closely following their specialties, young women, heroes, and villains.

Sakata Tojuro’s most popular rôle, that of Izaemon, in the play concerning Yugiri, a heroine of the gay quarters, influenced Chikamatsu, for he took Tojuro’s one-act play and made it over into one of his masterpieces, Yugiri of Awa in Naruto. Moreover, the doll-handlers imitated Tojuro’s manner and gestures as Izaemon. Chikamatsu also modelled his characters on such actors as Yoshizawa Ayame, Midzuki Tatsunosuke, and Kataoka Nizaemon. Sawamura Sojuro played as Yuranosuke, the leader of the Forty-seven Ronin, and this Kabuki piece was the basis of Chushingura, the masterpiece of the Doll-theatre playwright, Takeda Izumo, in which the Yuranosuke doll portrayed the manners and gestures of Sojuro.

Lovers of Kabuki do not like to acknowledge the extent to which the actors borrowed from the stage of the inanimate players, but it was very great.

Sometimes famous actors were sons of the ningyo-tsukai, or puppet performers, and young actors who went to the dolls to study soon discovered that they were able to see themselves as others saw them.

One of the most famous ningyo-tsukai, Bunsaburo, designed many costumes for his puppets. One he embroidered in plum blossoms and young bamboo for the doll representing Michizane, the patron saint of Japanese literature—in history the prime minister who was exiled from Japan by his enemies; and he also dressed the triplets, faithful servants of Michizane, in kimono bearing large yellow horizontal stripes lined with scarlet to emphasise the fact that they were brothers. Thereafter, when these characters were represented by Kabuki actors the exact costumes were worn. Once during a performance Bunsaburo saw a doll on the point of falling and went to the rescue. The doll moved in an awkward manner, not according to the rules and regulations, and the audience laughed. It afterwards became the custom to make this doll do the same thing, and the Kabuki actors imitated even this.

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.