Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/321

Rh weep, at the harlot's fate. He proved the sincerity of his sympathy with women of that class by marrying two of them in succession. They are said to have been excellent wives. At the age of thirty he was "condemned to fifty days' handcuffs (in his own house)," for circulating what he called an "Edifying Story-book." His subsequent stories were mostly founded on less dangerous themes.

If any should suppose that the writers of stories and plays on this subject had no other purpose than to supply unwholesome food for unclean appetites, he would be egregiously mistaken. The author of a witty book might indeed be liable to this imputation, though the naïf attitude of his fellow-countrymen to physical facts which it is our habit to ignore robs the pat epithet "pornographic" of much opprobrium. Still there were limits of propriety, which, in his zeal to amuse, he frequently left behind. But the dramatist had every justification for dramatising the Unfortunate Lady, who appealed most strongly to his imagination and his heart. To begin with, his audience loved a spectacle, and what spectacular setting could dazzle them more than the spacious Kuruwa with its balconied palaces, divided by cherry-trees and hung with showy lanterns? What other section of society could provide such a feast of colour for beauty-loving eyes as these priestesses of pleasure, when they moved in procession through thronging suitors in their gorgeous sweeping robes, or sat superbly immobile, like painted idols, their high coiffures haloed with radiating pins of pearl and silver and tortoise-shell? And beneath all that picturesque elegance throbbed a tragic, adventurous existence. Other women passed silently from father to husband, from mother to mother-in-law, their lives