Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/72

 itself, as it lies, concrete and symbolic, wrapped in apple-green brocade, near the front-centre of the stage. This inclusion of a significant silent object among the dramatis personæ is curiously effective. The sight of Yamashina tottering beneath a physical weight would have made clumsy prose of a beautiful poetic truth. His feelings are better conveyed by the dirge-like song and lugubrious posturing, which poverty of language compels one to miscall a "dance." Full of dignity and fine gesture is the ghost's rebuke. Slowly revolving on his heels, or tossing back his streaming, silvery hair, now dashing his staff upon the ground, now raising his kimono sleeve slowly to hide his face, one felt that this weird figure was expressing elemental passion in a language more elemental than speech. I cannot say as much for the lady, whose coronet of thin gold with silver crescent in front and pendent pagoda-bells on either side, surmounting a mask of singular ugliness, seemed the fantastic headpiece of a crude idol very foolishly idealised. But it served to illustrate, with an irony which the imperial author had not intended, the so grievous "burden of love."

Kyōto court-life of the twelfth century, painted for posterity in the famous, interminable pages of "Genji Monogatari," one of the oldest achievements of the lady-novelist, has found less tedious and equally faithful presentment in such dramatic miniatures as "Aoi no Uye," Prince Genji's long-suffering wife. Jealousy is the keynote of this lyrical play—that insatiable, self-torturing jealousy which is the hardest of demons to expel. Again I noticed a piece of curious, silent symbolism. The poor, demoniac wife, who gives her name to the play, does not appear, either as person or figure: in her stead a long strip of folded brocade,