Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/284

248 Lucullus, the goat, was an epicurean like his master, but less eclectic, for his diet included wood and iron and stones, nails and lighted cigars and boxes of matches. Indeed, he might still be living, a triumph of desire over digestion, had he not one day tried a dose of refined camphor, which brought death and a costly Shintō funeral.

Having penetrated the bodyguard of animals, you would enter a large room, adorned with fine bronzes and screens, which you had not leisure to examine, for so many unusual sights claimed attention. At the back would be masked dancers or musicians, rather cramped for space by reason of the motley, semi-circular crowd of men, women, and children, who filled the foreground as far as a row of chairs set in the verandah for barbarian friends. Dominating all sat the master of the revels, his huge torso bare to the waist and profusely tattooed with elegant designs. As he passed the whisky to the "parasites" (for so he was accustomed to call the band of adherents who made his house their own), the genial, rotund Doctor looked the very incarnation of Ebisu or Silenus.

The first dancer on the afternoon of my arrival was Kabukei-jishi, the boy in a lion's mask, whose figure is so familiar in Japanese streets on New Year's Day. Kabukei, a native of Echigo, is said to have originated and given his name to this realistic dance. Though the children must have seen it often before, some of them laughed and others cried with terror, as the clever mimic crawled up to them roaring, or scratching himself, or shaking his ears. Then followed a comic scene between two peasants and a Daimyō, who was obliged to defend himself with sword and fan against the heavy hoes of his disrespectful henchmen. A