Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/185

Rh wooden dolls, a most lugubrious effect was produced. At last, to my relief, a male performer, a pince-sans-rire, whose dry humour and staccato diction stamped him of the tribe of Grossmith, transformed the audience from weeping Niobes to effigies of mirth. In vain the polite little ladies tried to smother their smiles behind their raised kimono sleeves: as the song proceeded they were vanquished by fits of laughter, and shook helplessly on their cushions. I possessed but one cue to this infectious merriment in the constantly recurring word emma, which on the lips of Mr. Dan Leno would have assuredly referred to his wife or his mother-in-law, those patient butts of music-hall humour, but which would only mean for Japanese ears the Buddhist Rhadamanthus, who pronounces sentence on all who enter hell. Considerably mystified, I turned to Tanaka Okusama, another visitor from Ashikaga, and inquired if "the honourable singer were really singing about hell-things." He was. The song was an amusing but irreverent pastiche of social satire. It described the arrival in Hades of the bad judge, the cheating merchant, the false singing-girl; their confession and appropriate punishment. Again I missed the marionettes, for their presence would have recalled an exactly similar treatment of the same theme in a Montmartre puppetshow. And I remembered how the Parisian populace joined delightedly in the cry of "A la chaudière!" as the mimic devil chased lawyer and cocotte into a Punch-and Judy Inferno. It was the mystery play of the Middle Ages, surviving as a crude comedy for the ignorant poor—a rough travesty of the theology in which their more instructed superiors still affect to believe.