Kabuki was made proper and even elegant. In a sense, too, a kind of democratization was at work. The affluent bourgeoise from the High City does not at all mind being seen at a Kabuki opening with a Low City geisha a few seats away. The one is not demeaned and the other is perhaps somewhat elevated. Yet the form, as an institution, a play of social forces, has changed utterly; and because it was so crucial to the culture of the city, that has changed as well. The change was of course gradual. Yet something important happened when the Meiji emperor viewed Kabuki and so bestowed upon it the ultimate cachet. Something important happened again when the Imperial Theater was opened, and the gentry finally had a place where they could watch the old theater comfortably, among people who knew them and whom they knew. The Low City had lost an element of its culture that had but a few decades before been of supreme importance. Other people and places gained, but the loss of something that harms scarcely anyone, and has a refining and even ennobling effect upon many, is sad. In later days the son of Edo may have ruined himself watching baseball. That seems a comedown, somehow, from ruining himself watching Kabuki.
Kabuki was the liveliest of the arts cultivated by the Edo townsman. It was expensive, however, and did not attract people as did the Yose, or variety halls. The term Yose, which has been tendered above as “vaudeville,” is in fact an abbreviation of a word signifying “a place that brings in the crowds.” The heart of it was the monologue, sometimes serious and edifying, sometimes comic. It was the genuinely popular theater.
The average admission for Kabuki ran seven and eight times that for Yose, not including the levies of the teahouses. The cheapest possible day at the Kabuki was twice as expensive as the average for Yose. Attendance at Yose consistently ran four and five times as high as attendance at the Kabuki theaters; and yet total revenues were smaller. The less affluent son of Edo, when he wished to be away from the noise and clutter of home, went to either a bathhouse or a Yose theater.
“There were no electric trolleys and no busses and taxis,” wrote the playwright Osanai Kaoru late in his life. “Only horse trolleys ran along the main streets of the Low City. It was a very rare occasion indeed when the Tokyo person set out for Ginza or Asakusa after dark. He would for the most part range no farther than the night stalls in the neighborhood or perhaps a temple or shrine fair. Yose was his one real diversion. It was a bore to stay at home every night, and he could hardly go on a constant round of calls. Even the stroll among the night stalls was denied him on a rainy evening. So what he had left was Yose.”
The sedentary father of a geisha in Osani’s The Bank of the Big River goes off every afternoon to the serious, edifying sort of Yose. The playwright Hasegawa Shigure, who grew up in Nihombashi, describes a person in her neighborhood who spent his mornings at the bathhouse and in the afternoon had a good rest in a Yose hall.
The number of such places fluctuated through Meiji, but it was never under a hundred in the fifteen wards, and sometimes it ran as high as two hundred. The greatest concentration was in the less affluent wards of the Low City. In Shiba there were seventeen houses in 1882, and sixteen are listed in a guide published by the city in 1907. In Kanda there were twenty-two and seventeen, respectively.
The best Yose monologues may claim to be literature. Sanyūtei Enchō, the most famous of Meiji performers, is held by the literary historians to have been a pioneer in the creation of a modern colloquial prose style. Born in 1839 in the Yushima section of Hongō, the son of that Entarō who gave his name to the horse-drawn trolley and part of it to the taxi, he was active to the end of the nineteenth century. Like the great Danjūrō of the Kabuki, Enchō has had his critics, and for a similar reason: he too harbored a penchant for “improving,” for making his genre acceptable to high society. He did edifying historical pieces (one of them about Queen Elizabeth) and adaptations from Western literature, clearly in an attempt to raise it to the level of high culture, suitable for noble gentlemen and ladies, and for the international set as well—to achieve for Yose, in short, what such improvers as Danjūrō were achieving for Kabuki. Perhaps he was also like Danjūrō in that his popularity did not quite match his fame. He was very good at publicizing himself. Recent scholarship has cast doubt upon the theory that he too was summoned to perform in the royal presence. The chronology does not accord, it seems, with what is known of the emperor’s round of engagements. Perhaps, late in his life, Enchō made the story up, and no one saw any reason to doubt him.
Yose did not become excessively proper despite Enchō’s efforts. It was not, like Kabuki, taken over by the upper classes and made over into an assembly at which a person of the lesser classes, an artisan or a shopkeeper, was likely to feel uncomfortable. Today it is performed in the National Theater (at rather unfriendly hours), but it survives in the Low City as well. When the writer Nagai Kafū—in rebellion against the High City and intent upon losing himself in low, traditional places—sought to become a Yose performer, a spy tattled upon him, and he was dragged home and presently sent into exile beyond the ocean. It is true that the family’s reactions to his plans for a career as a Kabuki playwright were no more positive, but it seems likely that, had he persisted and avoided exile, his chances would have been better in improved Kabuki than in still benighted Yose.
Enchō’s achievements were considerable all the same. His was only the biggest name among the many that made for Yose its last golden age. It began to decline from about the turn of the century, although it may be said that the Meiji flowering was in any event not as fine as that of late Edo. The puritanical reformers of the mid-nineteenth century, identifying pleasure with decay, had allowed only one Yose house for every thirty that earlier dotted the city. The Meiji total never reached the highest Edo total, upwards of five hundred. Edo is said, with only slight exaggeration, to have had a Yose house for every block.
Though it has declined grievously since late Meiji, enough remains that we may imagine what Yose was like in the best years of Edo and Meiji. By any standard it was superior to the popular entertainment of our day. A good storyteller, whether of the edifying or the amusing sort, was a virtuoso mimic. The katsuben narrator for the silent movies, a remarkable and uniquely Japanese performer, may be seen as successor to the Yose man of the great days. He too took (and still does, vestigially, in the surviving Yose halls) all the parts, distinguishing among them with most remarkable skill. Mass entertainment has come to be dominated by the popular singer and the talk man, neither of whom tries to be other than himself, occasionally interesting and often not. It is perhaps inevitable that this should happen as the mass has grown and the tightness of the Low City been dissipated. The story of decline is a sad one all the same.
The few houses that survive today (there are no more than a half-dozen in the city) are large by Meiji standards, holding several hundred people. The typical Meiji house was cozier, more neighborly, perhaps occupying the space up some back alley that had once accommodated a private house or two, now lost to fire or wind or rot. The great masters of Meiji Yose are said to have striven for small, intimate audiences. A hundred was the ideal size. Fewer than a hundred led to an appearance of unpopularity, and more than a hundred to a loss of rapport. When a theater became too popular, the leading performers would turn their duties over to disciples and wait for more manageable circumstances.
* * *
The son of plebeian Edo and Tokyo had many things besides Kabuki and Yose to look at and go bankrupt over. The grounds of the larger shrines and temples were often pleasure centers. The Asakusa Kannon, busiest of them all, was one vast and miscellaneous emporium for the performing arts. As Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason observed in the 1891 edition of their guide to Japan:
On no account should a visit to this popular temple and the grounds (Kōenchi) surrounding it be omitted; for it is the great holiday resort of the middle and lower classes, and nothing is more striking than the juxtaposition of piety and pleasure,
of gorgeous altars and grotesque ex-votos, of pretty costumes and dingy idols, the clatter of clogs, cocks and hens and pigeons strutting about among the worshippers, children playing, soldiers smoking, believers chaffering with dealers of charms, ancient art, modern advertisements—in fine, a spectacle than which surely nothing more motley was ever witnessed within a religious edifice.
And again:
The grounds of Asakusa are the quaintest and liveliest place in Tokyo. Here are raree shows, penny gaffs, performing monkeys, cheap photographers, street artists, jugglers, wrestlers, life-sized figures in clay, venders of toys and lollipops of every sort, and, circulating amidst all these cheap attractions, a seething crowd of busy holiday-makers.
The skill of jugglers, acrobats, magicians, paper cutters and folders, and the like was so remarkable that Japanese performers had already traveled abroad, to acclaim, before the Restoration. There are records of fat women and peacocks, pleasing to the child of Edo, from the very earliest years of the city. In the last decades of the shogunate, Asakusa was the most thriving pleasure center, for it had the Yoshiwara and the theaters in addition to its great temple. There were other centers, near the two Tokugawa mortuary temples at Ueno and Shiba, for instance, and across the river in Honjo, where the Ekōin Temple, erected in memory of those lost in the great fire of 1657, had become a place for cheering departed spirits as well as for remembering them. Asakusa, Ueno, and Ryōgoku, where the Ekoin is situated, had the most thriving of the hirokōji, the “broad alleys,” originally cleared as firebreaks and scattered through the city. The broad alleys of Ueno and Ryōgoku did not fare well in Meiji, as Asakusa prospered more and more. The stalls and shows were presently moved from the immediate environs of the temple to the western edge of what had become Asakusa Park.
Some of the shows seem to have been inelegant, even grotesque. At Ryōgoku there was a man greatly skilled at breaking wind. For some years a spider man turned up on all the big Asakusa feast days. He had the head of an aged adult, a body some two feet tall, and the arms and legs of an infant. He was very popular. Also at Asakusa was a woman who smoked with her navel. The painter Kishida Ryūsei, born in 1891, described a puppet show in the Ginza of his boyhood, in which a she-devil slashed open the stomach of a pregnant woman and ate the foetus—or rather, being a doll, not up to the ingestion, announced that she would take it home for dinner. (It was Ryusei who—see page 76—informed us of that particular Ginza pleasure, peeping in upon Shimbashi geisha as they made ready for a night.)
Many of the shows were free, some of them to aid in the hawking of medicines and the like, while some were willing to accept whatever pennies the viewer felt like tossing down. The larger shrines had stages for Kagura, “god performances,” which also were free, and sometimes, as Tanizaki’s reminiscences inform us, not very godly.
Kagura has all but disappeared from the shrines of Tokyo, festive performances are probably even rarer. The modern child would probably think it stupid beyond description, but I am filled with almost unbearable longing for the very feel of them, those naive dances to drum and flute, the dancers masked as fool and as clown, on a long spring day in Nihombashi… The troupes would also perform for this and that banquet, but the one I saw most frequently offered skits on the grounds of the Meitoku Inari Shrine, very near our house, on the eighth of every month, the feast day, in the evening. A genuine “god dance” would sometimes be offered to the presiding deity, but more commonly there were skits. The performers were amateurs with other occupations. One of them functioned as head of the company, and even had a stage name, Suzume. All the others referred to him as “the master.”
About then, which is to say the autumn of 1897, there occurred in Ochanomizu the murder of Kono, a very famous one that will doubtless be remembered by other old persons my age. A man from Fukushima named Matsudaira Noriyoshi, aged forty-one, who lived in Ushigome, murdered his common-law wife, Kono, who had been a serving woman in a geisha quarter and had accumulated a little money. He murdered her on the night of April 26, the Bishamon Fair, and mutilated her face to prevent identification. Wrapping the naked body in a straw mat and tying it with ropes, he set it rolling down the slope at Ochanomizu towards the Kanda River. It stopped some five feet short and was immediately found. There was an enormous stir. Noriyoshi was soon apprehended. The newspapers of course made a huge thing of the incident, and in this and that shop and in stalls on the day of the Suitengu fair I often saw card-sized pictures of Kono’s mutilated face among the usual pictures of actors and geisha. Kono was forty, a year younger than Noriyoshi. The line where her eyebrows had been shaved was “iridescent,” it was said, and she was “like a cherry still in fresh leaf,” That the new avant-garde theater should take the incident up was inevitable. Already in June at the Ichimuraza the troupe headed by Ii Yōhō and Yamaguchi Sadao presented a “sensational” (or so it was proclaimed) version, along with A Comical Tour of Hell… It was perhaps a month later that I saw the Suzume troupe do the affair on the Kagura stage of the Meitoku Inari, in imitation of Yamaguchi and Kawai, who were the murderer and his victim at the Ichimuraza… Noriyoshi … throttled her. Then, with the greatest concentration, he carved several trenches on her face, and, lifting her head by the hair, showed it to all of us. It seems strange that such a play should have been done on the grand Kagura stage of a shrine, and it does not seem strange at all, for it was a day when Kono’s face, on display in all the stalls, upset no one.
All the best-loved crimes of Meiji became material for the theater, and all of them, probably because the dramatic possibilities were heightened, involved women. A murdered woman, such as Kono, made good theater and good popular fiction, and a murderess was even better. There was, for example, Harada Kinu, known as “O-kinu of the storm in the night,” a reference to her last haiku, composed as she set out for the Kotsukappara execution grounds:
A storm in the night.
Dawn comes, nothing remains.
A flower’s dream.
She was beheaded early in the spring of 1872. Heads of criminals were still put on display, in the old fashion. On his first trip from Yokohama to Tokyo, W. E. Griffis saw some, near the southern limits of the city. The newspapers reported that O-kinu’s head possessed a weird, unearthly beauty. The concubine of a minor daimyo, she was left to fend for herself after the Restoration. She became the mistress of a pawnbroker and fell in love with a Kabuki actor, whom, in accepted style, she purchased. The affair proved to be more than a dalliance.
One winter morning in 1871 she fed the pawnbroker rat poison, that she might live with the actor. She did so until apprehended. One may pity O-kinu, for she belonged to the class that suffered most in the revolution called Restoration.
The most famous of Meiji murderesses, vastly popular on stage and in fiction, was Takahashi O-den, who was beheaded in the Ichigaya prison in 1879 by the executioner who dispatched O-kinu. She too came from the lower ranks of the military class. The story of her misdeeds has probably been exaggerated by writers of popular fiction. She is charged with more than one poisoning before she committed the crime that took her to Ichigaya. Evidence in support of the charges is slight, and she was convicted only of slitting the throat of a used-clothes merchant in an Asakusa inn. She did it for the sincerest of motives: after the Restoration she had made her way chiefly by prostitution, and she robbed the merchant to pay the debts of her chief patron. Hers was the last case assigned to the famous executioner. He did it badly, wounding her before the final cut. There were horrible screams, according to newspaper accounts.
The execution of Takahashi O-den. from an 1879 woodcut
O-den, too, composed a final poem:
I wish to be no longer in this hapless world.
Make haste to take me over, O ford of the River of Death.
Her grave may be visited in the Yanaka Cemetery, where the poem is cut upon the stone. The little plot of earth is a sad one, beside
a public lavatory, clinging precariously to the edge of the cemetery, given only cursory notice in guides that account for all the famous graves, such as that of Kafū’s grandfather. The stone is not unimposing, however, and it is replete with bittersweet irony. It was erected in 1881 from contributions by most of the famous theatrical and journalistic persons of the day, and the man who collected the funds was Kanagaki Robun. Robun had rushed into woodcut print with a sensational story of her life a scant month after her execution. (He did a quickie on General Grant before the general had even departed the city.)
Among these dangerous women the most romantic was Hanai O-urae, the only one of the three who survived to enjoy her fame. It is generally agreed that she was less criminal than victim. She too came from the low ranks of the military class. After service as a geisha in Yanagibashi and Shimbashi, she opened a place of her own, near the river in Nihombashi. She was tormented by a former employee, Minekichi by name (it is a name with a nice ring to it), who wanted to take over both her and her business. One night early in the summer of 1887, answering a summons to meet him on the bank of the canal that ran through her part of Nihombashi, she stabbed him thrice with his own butcher knife, beneath the willows, in a gentle rain. A troublesome and less than romantic detail is that she, and not he, may at the outset have been in possession of the knife. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and freed in 1903. In her last years she joined a troupe of traveling players; her most popular role was that of herself in her finest moment. She died in 1916, in a Yotsuya slum.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 19