Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/31

 discussion when the edict was about to be enforced marks a very definite turning-point, as is shown in the prints made for the play, produced at the Kawarazaki-za in the beginning of the eleventh month of 1794. To this play are assigned the first of the yellow-ground bust-portraits; for this play also were made the first of the hosoye on untinted grounds and the first with background accessories. And to make the break even more sharply apparent, of the twelve prints illustrating that production five are signed “Tōshūsai Sharaku” and seven are signed merely “Sharaku.” Up to this period every print had the full signature; on the remainder the Tōshūsai does not appear.

The Kabuki theatre had a number of stock stories, and each time that one of these tales was put on there might be even greater variations from the normal in the version given than those which marked a recent American production of “Macbeth” in which the scene had been transferred to Haiti. There is a French version of the same Shakespearean story in which the protagonist, instead of being killed by Macduff, retires to a monastery to end his days in peaceful repentance; but the Japanese of the eighteenth century would have been perfectly capable of producing a variation in which Duncan murdered Macbeth and Lady Macbeth turned out to be in love with Banquo.

There must have been nearly 300 stage versions of the Soga story; and when it has been impossible to find the actual and complete text of a play whose characters are represented in prints by Sharaku, we have been obliged to draw our “Outline of the Plot” from contemporary references to the production or from general knowledge of the usual course of the action in the development of that theme. We believe that the outlines we have given are, in the main, correct for the versions represented; but it is only fair to those who will depend on this book to state the difficulties encountered in their preparation by citing the most complicated example of them.

has to do with the well known stage story of the love affair of a samurai named Gengobei with a girl called Oman of the Pearl House whom he kills by mistake. Throughout the action of the piece his friend Sangobei, and Sangobei’s wife, Koman, remain loyal to him. This is the so-called “Satsuma-Uta” version of the tale and it is supposed to have been developed from a seventeenth century folk song. The play was written by Chikamatsu in 1704 and revised by Namiki Gohei just before 1795. The revised version, which is the one put on in the first