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INTRODUCTION

Kawatake Mokuami (1816-1893) was the last great playwright for the kabuki, the popular theater. He is credited with close to four hundred pieces, making him the most prolific writer in the history of the Japanese theater. Even discounting the fact that many of them were adaptations from older plays and that he had numerous disciples during his productive years to help him write the less important scenes, this is a staggering accomplishment. His plays are frequently given today, and The Love of Izayoi and Seishin is one of the most popular.

Mokuami's real name was Yoshimura Yoshisaburō. He was born in Edo (later Tokyo), where his family had lived for five generations. We know nothing definite about his schooling, but since his father was a pawnbroker, the boy must have been sent to a temple school for a rudimentary education, as he later kept the books. When he was sixteen, Mokuami was hired as a delivery boy by a book dealer. He became familiar with various types of popular literature, including the texts of puppet and kabuki plays, and errands frequently took him backstage into the three licensed kabuki theaters of Edo.

When Mokuami was eighteen, his father died. As the eldest son, he had to manage the business, but being temperamentally unsuited for it he turned it over to his younger brother. He then drifted about until a dance teacher suggested that he become an apprentice to a playwright, a relative of hers. He took her advice and in 1835 became a disciple of Tsuruya Magotarō (1796-1852). Magotarō, who was not an especially gifted writer, was the adopted grandson of Tsuruya Namboku IV (1755—1829), the outstanding playwright before Mokuami.

Apprentice playwrights in the Edo period did not begin their training by writing. They were not much more than servants at the beginning. They then moved up to the position of scribe, excerpting and copying the dialogue of each character in a play for the actors assigned the roles, and making final copies of scripts. They were also expected to make preliminary sketches for theater billboards and handbills and to conduct preliminary rehearsals of minor scenes for the playwright, who was responsible for the staging of all his plays. If the apprentice carried out his duties satisfactorily, he was finally given the task of writing a scene under the supervision of the playwright. In 1840, after seven years with Magotarō, Mokuami was assigned an entire act.

In 1841 the three official theaters were ordered by the government to relocate in the outlying Asakusa district. This was part of a program of curbing extravagance among the townsmen and improving the moral climate. Mokuami became the chief playwright of one of the theaters and took the name of Kawatake Shinshichi II. (The first Shinshichi, who was active toward the end of the eighteenth century, produced little of importance.) In the following ten years, Mokuami did not distinguish himself in any way. This was due in part to the conservative policy of the management which favored the old (and mainly history) plays to original domestic dramas, which were Mokuami's forte. The first original domestic play by Mokuami was produced in 1851. It was an unexpected success, and the delighted management gave him opportunities to write more. But it was not until 1854 that he finally came into his own.

In that year the actor Ichikawa Kodanji IV (1812-1866) came from Osaka for the season. This was the actor for whom Mokuami wrote his most famous plays, and the association was to last until the actor's death. Kodanji was not of distinguished lineage (pedigree is important in the kabuki). He was unimpressive physically and vocally, and although he had a wide range of roles (leading man, villain, female parts, and could dance), he was not noted for his dramatic ability until he worked with Mokuami, who also profited by the association. He preferred writing original plays involving thieves and other criminals, and in Kodanji he found his ideal interpreter. They collaborated on twenty-six domestic plays and five history plays. Kodanji's death left the Edo theater bereft of its star performer, but waiting in the wings were the young actors who were to become the leading figures in the kabuki of the Meiji era: Ichikawa Danjūrō IX (1838-1903), Onoe Kikugorō V (1844-1903), and Ichikawa Sadanji (18421904). Mokuami was to write for all of them.

The Tokugawa shogunate came to a turbulent end when Mokuami was in his prime. But because the kabuki was shackled by the regulation which prohibited depiction of any person or event of the Tokugawa period, almost none of the momentous events and changes confronting the nation was reflected in the traditional theater. It was left to the new drama from 1880 to come to grips with important political and social problems.

This is not to say that some minor internal reforms and external physical changes did not affect the kabuki. Theaters were built along western architectural lines; box-offices replaced theater teahouses as purveyors of tickets; and gaslight was installed. Writers from outside infiltrated the kabuki with cries for reform. They had returned from abroad and were eager to remodel the kabuki in the western image. They advocated elimination of the erotic and vulgar, and insisted on the substitution of antiquarian authenticity for the numerous historical inaccuracies in the plays. Mokuami, as the leading playwright of the day, was their pet scapegoat. The prospectus of the Society for the Reformation of the Drama, which was issued in 1886, read in part, ". . . we believe that the ugliness or beauty of a play depends to a large extent upon the skill of the writer. Granting this, we observe not a single gentleman of learning among our playwrights. They all attract the lower classes merely by a facile patchwork of stale ideas."

Sensing the winds of change, Mokuami announced his retirement, and in 1881, at the age of sixty-five, completed what he believed would be his last play. In it, characteristically, all of the main characters were criminals. He gave the name of Kawatake Shinshichi to his leading disciple and took the name Mokuami. This name has a special significance. It comes from the expression moto no Mokuami ("back to the old Mokuami") and refers to a humble person who, like the original Mokuami, a blindman forced by circumstances to impersonate a feudal lord, returns voluntarily to his former state. But it was not possible for a writer of Mokuami's stature and ability to retire completely. Theater owners and actors persuaded him to continue writing.

Mokuami had been stung by the disparagement of the critics. He now wrote plays, characterized by historical accuracy, which were called "living history plays." They were so real they expired out of sheer dullness. Mokuami also wrote domestic plays with a contemporary background, but they were only superficially modern. The male characters wore their hair in the new western style, but in spirit they were similar to the characters in Mokuami's earlier plays. The theater-goers demanded plays with scenes laid in the nostalgic past. It is with these that Mokuami achieved his greatest successes in the Meiji period. Kikugorō V, an actor whose style owed much to Kodanji IV, appeared in many of these. It was for him that Mokuami wrote his last piece before suffering the stroke that paralyzed his left side and led to his death on February 22, 1893. His death poem read:

In vain it has waited

For the flowering spring:

The old plum tree

That withers from one branch.

The Love of Izayoi and Seishin is a domestic play, or, more accurately, a sub-class in the domestic play. The three main classifications in kabuki drama are the history play, the domestic play, and the dance narrative. In the history play the characters are of the warrior class. The language is formal and the acting is stylized. In the domestic plays the characters are from the townsman class, mainly well-to-do merchants. Chikamatsu (1653—1725) originated this style for the puppet theater. The dialogue is in the vernacular and the acting is realistic. The subclass in the domestic play is the "raw" domestic play. This label derives from the fact that the plays are populated by characters from the lowest strata of the plebeian class. Namboku IV pioneered this style and Mokuami brought it to perfection. The Love of Izayoi and Seishin is typical of Mokuami's "raw" domestic plays. The plot revolves around a dishonored Buddhist monk turned thief, and a prostitute who casts her lot in with him.

The play was first given in 1859. It had a different title and was performed in seven acts. One of the conventions in the kabuki by this time was that a play had to be in several acts which alternated in the history-play and domestic-play styles. The second, fourth, sixth, and seventh acts of this play were in the "raw" domestic play style and proved to be more popular than the history acts. It is these four acts which make up the play popularly known as The Love of Izayoi and Seishin. It is not, however, a completely self-contained play. Occasional references are made to events in the history scenes, and in the last act a character from the history section appears. (For the sake of clarity, brief synopses of the omitted acts are given on page 21.)

The play had a great success, but because the two leading male characters were based on actual persons and insufficiently disguised, the censors demanded that deletions and revisions be made. A dissolute priest at the Kan'ei Temple in Ueno had suggested the character of Seishin to Mokuami. This priest, after numerous lapses in conduct, had turned thief and earned the name of Seikichi the Devil Priest. In 1806, at the age of twenty eight, he was arrested in Kyoto, brought back to Edo, tried, and decapitated. Hakuren, the other leading character in the play, was modeled after the thief who broke into the shogun's treasury in 1855 and made off with 4000 gold coins. Mokuami was inconsistent in his observance of the regulation against too close historical verisimilitude. He used the conventional aliases (which fooled nobody in the audience): Kamakura stood for Edo; the Inase River for the Sumida; the Hanamizu Bridge for the Eitai or Ryogoku; Minamoto Yoritomo (1147-1199), the founder of the Kamakura shogunate, for Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616); and Ōiso for the Yoshiwara. But Mokuami also mentions actual place names in Edo like Broad Avenue, which was near Ryogoku Bridge, and the Hundred Piles on the Sumida River. It was only after the fall of the Tokugawa government that this and other ordinances could safely be ignored and plays given as written.

The play exemplifies many of Mokuami's characteristics and style and embodies the philosophy which underlies most of his "raw" domestic plays. The theme is retribution. A series of events carries the action forward and illustrates this theme; a man's circumstances and all his acts are governed by the Buddhist law of karma, or the law of cause and effect. Since every cause has an effect and every effect a cause, a man's reward or punishment in this world has a direct relation to his deeds here and in a previous existence. Every act in this world is therefore preordained. This theme is reiterated at intervals throughout the play. The initial robbery is justified by Seishin on the grounds that it was the victim's predestined misfortune to be at a particular place at a particular time, carrying a substantial sum of money. Seishin sees his own suicide at the end of the play as having been predetermined. This tenet in popular Buddhism was an important part of the mental baggage of the Edo townsman (as to some extent it still is of the modern Japanese), and was a valid theme for a play. The nature of this theme also explains what might be taken as lack of dramatic ingenuity, namely, the various coincidences which occur at crucial moments. (Seishin unknowingly is accessory to the death of his brother-in-law, and later unwittingly exposes his brother as a thief.) But these incidents are the dreadful tightening in the net of circumstances inexorably closing in on Seishin, and they are made more moving to Japanese audiences for their being beyond his control.

Implicit in the play was the didactic thesis of "promoting good and chastising evil." This edifying idea had been siezed on by playwrights of the late seventeenth century to justify the existence of kabuki. At this time the theatre had become the target of the shogun's Confucian advisers, who looked upon the kabuki as being on a par with brothels as sources of immorality and extravagance. The dramatists had stilled criticism by promising to point up the moral that good always triumphed over evil. This was perhaps not so much the hindrance that it would seem to be at first glance. There was the other side of the coin: the most licentious scenes could be played and the most heinous crimes committed on stage so long as the criminals repented and paid for their deeds.

Among such crimes in Mokuami's "raw" domestic plays was murder. Namboku's murder scenes are brutal and savage, but the horror in Mokuami's bloody scenes is greatly ameliorated by the poetic language employed and by the use of music and stylized, almost choreographic, movements. (In this play, Motome dies of a self-inflicted injury, but Seishin believes himself to be the boy's murderer; he also causes the death of Izayoi.) Another crime-extortion figured so frequently in late Tokugawa domestic plays that the term "extortion scene" came into existence. (In the present play, it occurs at the beginning of Act VI where Seishin and Izayoi blackmail her former protector. Their scheme is successful but it ends with an ironic twist of fate: their victim is exposed as a thief and it is his long-lost brother who does this.) And so many robbers figure in Mokuami's plays that he was known as "the thieves' playwright."

Some remarks must be made about the language and stylistic devices used by Mokuami. In the scenes leading up to a climax the speeches are all in the vernacular. In the climactic scenes they are written in the consciously heightened form of poetry, and in classical Japanese this means the use of the basic pattern of alternating lines in five and seven syllables; the "pivot word," which runs together, with no hint of transition, two separate ideas; and "related words," which are words related to one another by class or quality and are woven into the text. An example of the pivot word is found in the opening line of the Kiyomoto lyrics in Act II, Scene 2: "Even on a hazy moonlit night the images of the stars number one, two, three, four, five. 'Five strokes on the alarm bell?'" (p. 24). The reckoning of the stars slips at the number "five" into the number of bell strokes which Izayoi fears is the alarm raised at the discovery of her flight. In this literary device the logical conclusion of the first part and the beginning of the second are left unexpressed. An example of the "related words" is found in Act II, Scene 4. Seishin begins by referring to the river on whose banks he and Motome have met. This then calls forth such words as "current," "ice," "freeze," and "waves." (p. 60.) Mokuami was also fond of splitting lines so that the thought expressed by the first character is carried on by a second (or third or fourth) and then tossed back to the first and brought to a conclusion (pp. 23-24, 38-39, 48-49, 60, 123).

These literary devices present problems of varying difficulty for the translator. The "split dialogue" and the "related words" are relatively easy. The pivot word, however, can only be translated literally in a clumsy way or explained in elaborate footnotes. When they occur in this play, the cunning effect has been sacrificed for the meaning. No attempt has been made to retain the syllabic count; this is an impossibility.

Another problem is the structure of the play. Western readers expecting a long sweep leading to a climax will be disappointed. As in most kabuki plays, there are several climaxes distributed in each act. The most important in this play occur as follows: Act II: the encounter of Izayoi and Seishin, Motome's death, and Seishin's metamorphosis in character; Act IV: Izayoi's renunciation of the world; Act VI: the extortion scene and the discovery of the fraternal relationship between Seishin and Hakuren; Act VII: Izayoi's death and Seishin's suicide. The structural balance is further upset by the almost equal importance of three characters—Seishin, Izayoi, and Hakuren. (In Act IV Seishin does not appear, and Hakuren is the leading character.) Moreover, too much is made of the haiku poet and his comic junkman friend in Act IV.

This can be explained by the fact that the kabuki has always been a repertory theater with a full complement of actors signed for the season. Once the company was assembled, it was the playwright's responsibility to provide each actor with roles within his specialty. (Actors specialized in the following parts: young man, adult male, villain, old man, adolescent boy, comic, young girl, adult woman, old woman, and child. In the 1859-1860 season there happened to be three senior actors and a popular comedian at the theater for which Mokuami was the house writer.) This necessity sometimes led Mokuami and others to write a big scene for each actor to play. A glaring example here is the death of Ofuji in Act VI. Hakuren's wife has been a secondary character until attention is suddenly focused upon her in a contrived and unbelievable scene. She pretends to turn informer on her husband after the revelation that he is a thief, in order to force her husband to kill her. It was a role tailored to the personality of an actor who specialized in playing noble women.

The use of music by Mokuami has been mentioned. He was partial to the Kiyomoto school for its pensive and melancholy melodic line which made it peculiarly suitable for sad love scenes. He used it in Act II, Scene 2, in the encounter of Izayoi and Seishin. (It must be noted here that the narrator, or chanter, and a samisen player accompany the scene in full sight of the audience. The chanter in other scenes of the play is normally concealed.) The lyrics for this scene were written by Mokuami, but he often appropriated them from other Kiyomoto pieces or from the narratives of puppet plays. In the latter case, Mokuami sets the scene so that the music comes from a neighboring house. This procedure is sometimes unsatisfactory. The emotional state of the actors onstage and the characters in the music may coincide in general, but not always in detail. In Act VII, Seishin's overwrought condition as he prepares to kill his son is echoed in the narration from a puppet play about a father's anguish at the impending execution of his wayward daughter. There is a concurrence in pathos, but the narrative is so famous that it serves to distract rather than intensify the tragic mood. But perhaps a similarity in mood was all that Mokuami's audiences required, for in the face of the overall impact of the scene, niceties of musical appropriateness were of small import.

In treating the theme of retribution in terms of human passions at a less-than-princely level, Mokuami was in his element. The fate of a monk torn between the demands of the flesh and the spirit, and the consequences of his easy capitulation to worldly desires, were more readily understandable to audiences than, say, the fate of an ambitious warrior. They could also sympathize with a prostitute more than with a princess. Monk and prostitute, bound by karma, lurk in the shadowy edge of society, and even as they alter their course (he turns thief; she becomes successively a kept woman, nun, wife and mother), each new development brings them a step closer to their ultimate destiny. Mokuami was aware of the importance of contrasting moods in creating greater dramatic force. Each of the four acts has a comic opening which leads to one or more moving climaxes, some of which are characterized by poetic passages of great beauty. All of the leading roles are eminently playable—another reason why this play, which is representative of the works of one of the major playwrights in the kabuki, and typical of a dramatic genre, has remained a favorite in the kabuki repertory for over a hundred years.