Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/322

282 arranged for them on lines of tranquil duty. But the Unfortunate Lady, transferred in girlhood, a chattel or a heroine, from village poverty to urban splendour, becoming half a queen and half a slave, was both free and not free to follow the voice of passion, which her secluded sisters had often never heard. They slept peacefully, with nothing to greatly hope or fear from the hand of destiny, but to her at any moment might come a Perseus, cleaving the dragon's mail with golden sword and delivering Andromeda from deadly servitude. Out of the hundreds of plays devoted to Andromeda, I will recall one, which has sunk most deeply into popular favour, and which I saw enacted before a weeping audience at the Kabuki-za theatre.

His name was not Perseus, but Gompachi, and he is supposed to have lived no more than two hundred and fifty years ago—the hero of this typical romance. He had the misfortune at the age of sixteen to kill one of his relations in a quarrel about a dog, and was obliged to flee for refuge to the capital. On his way to Yedo he was roused at midnight from his bed at a wayside inn by a beautiful girl, who warned him that a band of robbers, having stolen her from her parents, intended to slay him and steal his sword before daybreak. This was not Andromeda, but Komurasaki. As in duty bound, the gallant samurai cut down the whole band and restored their captive to her father, a wealthy merchant, who, for his part, asked nothing better than to marry his daughter to so dashing a youth. But this would have been against all precedent. For Andromeda to rescue Perseus and bestow on him the hand of a prospective heiress would have been to reverse the rôles in a most unbecoming manner.