Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/300

284

The scene changes to Hirado, in Japan. Kokusenya, with his wife, is gathering shellfish on the seashore, when a small boat approaches. It proves to contain the Princess, who had drifted over from China. Kokusenya's wife, a low, vulgar woman, who provides the comic element of the play, is overcome with laughter at the Chinese which the Princess and her husband talk. Jealousy then gets the upper hand, but this gives way to respect when she learns the rank of the stranger.

Kokusenya, who is the son of a trusted minister of the Ming Emperors, makes up his mind to restore that dynasty, and proceeds with his father and mother to China, leaving the Princess in his wife's charge. On arriving there, they resolve to seek the assistance of Kanki, a Chinese magnate who had married a sister of Kokusenya. While travelling through a forest on their way to his castle, Kokusenya bearing his aged mother on his back, they fall in with a tiger. Disdaining to use his sword against the beast, Kokusenya gains the mastery over him after a struggle, which, doubtless, gave much gratification to the "groundlings" of the Ōsaka theatre. A hunting party arrives; their leader claims the tiger for Ri Toten, the traitorous one-eyed minister of the first act. Kokusenya replies in a style of inimitable braggadocio. With the tiger's assistance he subdues the huntsmen, and forms of them the nucleus of an army with which to conquer the Tartar invaders. Kokusenya's first care is to cut off the pig-tails of his recruits, and to give them new names, in which Japanese terminations are stuck on to names indicative of their foreign origin. One of