Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/175

 and attached comparatively small value to female chastity or even to conjugal fidelity. Adultery was not infrequent. Records show that the babies abandoned in Osaka numbered from five to twenty every month. Suicides were common, owing to the belief that those dying for one another's sakes would be united eternally beyond the grave. The growth of dramatic literature promoted this mood. The great author, Chikamatsu Monzayemon, perceiving the sentimental value of such tragic incidents, wove them into his dramas so skilfully that they became models for popular imitation. Widely celebrated stories, like those of Ohatsu and Tokubei, of Koharu and Jihei, of Onatsu and Seijūro, of Ohan and Choyemon, of Okame and Yohei, and of Osome and Hisamatsu, were simply tales of amatory intrigue so refined and idealised by the touch of literary genius that they appealed with resistless force to the heart of the nation. Singers of the jōruri recitative in Kyōtō and Osaka took similar subjects for their themes, and enhanced their effect by music and histrionic skill. In Yedo, on the contrary, jōruri performers, seeking inspiration in the realm of courage, loyalty, and military heroism, assisted to maintain the warrior spirit of the northern samurai and of the citizens who took them for models. Gradually, however, as intercourse between Kyōtō and Tōkyō became closer, this difference between the morality of the two cities disappeared. The first three Tokugawa Shōguns