Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/184

154 in elaborate armour and a long-nosed tengu, or mountain-goblin, which has many characteristics in common with the Scandinavian trold. Unfortunately, our acquaintance was limited to three days, for at the end of that time business recalled the poet to Ashikaga, but he exacted a promise that I would pay a visit to that interesting town, given up to cotton and Confucius.

As if to console me on the evening of this departure, the kindly Kindayu family invited all their guests to a performance given by three local geisha in the principal room of the hotel. The chief musician was a masculine-looking woman of fifty, who thrummed a kokyu, or three-stringed fiddle, and broke in on the recitative of her young companions at unexpected moments with peculiar growls and sharp cries as of an animal in agony. When the narrative of the soloist took a tragic turn, these inhuman noises were so distressing that, without following the story, I experienced acute pain, while my neighbours of the more sympathetic sex were actually in tears. Had my musical education been more advanced, I should have realised that these were no singers of light Dodoitsu, but exponents of a far loftier type of entertainment, the Gedayu or musical drama. It originated in the middle of the seventeenth century, and is sometimes called Jōruri after a heroine of that name, whose tragic love for Yoshitsune is a favourite theme of composers. In fact, the geisha on this occasion were usurping the rôle of Jōruri-katari or dramatic reciters, whose chanted recitative formed the nucleus, first, of the marionette theatre, and, later, of the popular theatre, when dialogue and scenic art were superadded. In the absence of either human or