Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/120

 There is always a drop-curtain, generally ornamented with a gigantic character or solitary symbol, and often nowadays covered with picturesque advertisements. Formerly, so much of the play was given by day that no footlights and few lamps were used. In those good old days a black-shrouded mute hovered about each actor after dark, holding out a candle at the end of a long stick to illuminate his features, that the audience might see the fine play of expression. With the adoption of kerosene the stage was sufficiently lighted, and the Shintomiza has a full row of footlights, while the use of electricity will soon be general. The black mutes act as “supers” throughout all plays where changes are made or properties manœuvred while the curtain is up.

The actors enter the stage by two long, raised walks through the auditorium, so that they seem to come from without. These raised walks, on a level with the stage and the heads of the spectators in the floor boxes, are called the hana michi, or flower-walks, and as a popular actor advances his way is strewn with flowers. The exits are sometimes by the hana michi and sometimes by the wings, according to the scene.

The miniature scale of things Japanese makes it possible to fill a real scene with life-like details. The stage is always large enough for three or four actual houses to be set as a front. The hana michi is sufficiently broad for jinrikishas, kagos, and pack-horses, and with the illumination of daylight the unreality of the picture vanishes, and the spectator seems to be looking from some tea-house balcony on an every-day street scene. Garden, forest, and landscape effects are made by using potted trees, and shrubs uprooted for transplanting. The ever-ready bamboo is at hand and the tall dragon-grass, and the scene-painters produce extraordinary illusions in the backgrounds and wings. Some of the finest stage pictures I have seen were in Japan, and its stage ghosts, 104