Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/104

78 When Kumagaya comes home, his position, between the woman who thinks he has killed her son and the woman whose son he has really killed, is made more embarrassing by the fact that Kajiwara, an enemy who suspects the truth, is listening at the door. His fluent and inconsistent explanations would be superfluous if he might show the dead man's head, which he carries with him in a box; but that must, of course, only be revealed at the last moment to Yoshitsune as a proof of his loyal obedience, when he will be praised for his loyal devotion and retire to a Buddhist monastery, muttering "Life is a hollow dream." The piece is a great deal more complicated than might be supposed from the foregoing analysis. Subsidiary peasants, beggars, and woodcutters turn out at opportune moments to be Taira or Minamoto warriors and court-ladies in disguise. The first three acts are occupied with a kind of prologue, which has only two points of contact with the main Atsumori motif: first, the characters, though entirely different, belong to the same historic period; and, secondly, their business is also to glorify parental murder.

Casuists have urged that to sacrifice another's life, even though that other be one's own child, is less heroic than to sacrifice oneself. But that, too, is common in the jidaimono or historical plays, which far outnumber the rest in popularity. Not to speak of the forty-seven rōnin, whose simultaneous suicide is the subject of more than fifty dramas, and whose venerated tombs at Sengakuji are yet covered with poems and visiting-cards every New Year's Day, I suppose one drama in ten contains a case of hara-kiri, or "happy dispatch." The actor writes a letter, generally in blood, to explain why his honour requires self-