Japanese Plays and Playfellows/Chapter 4
GEISHA AND CHERRY-BLOSSOM
Nothing is more difficult to eradicate than a British misconception of foreign defects. French lubricity, German clumsiness, Russian cruelty, are quite as much articles of faith on this side of the Channel as Albion's perfidy on the other. Similarly, it is useless to controvert the popular opinion that the geisha is generally pretty and always improper. Her detractors have seen an English opera bearing her name and traducing her character: it is enough; they know. Nevertheless, this opinion is founded on imperfect knowledge, and requires much modification before it can be received as even partially true. Etymologically, a gei-sha is an accomplished person; socially, she is an entertainer, who has been trained from the age of seven or eight to dance or sing for the amusement of guests at a dinner-party. Probably her parents have leased her for a certain number of years to a teacher, who undertakes to board and train her, to procure engagements and to chaperon her, to pay a fixed sum to her family as well as a tax to the Government, in return for all of which a sufficient recompense is assured by the fees which a talented artist is able to earn. Less frequently she lives at home and obtains engagements through an agent, who receives only a percentage of her gains. The training is continuous and severe. To a foreigner the dancing will appear graceful but monotonous; it has none of the free, vigorous motion which we associate with the term: on the other hand, for the connoisseur each gesture is significant, each pose symbolic. To appreciate many of the "dances," requiring hours of patient rehearsal, it would be necessary to catch continual allusion to poems, legends, and flowers, with which the treasure-house of Japanese memory is stored. Those who would deny the applicability of the term "music" to "the strummings and squealings of Orientals," would yet admit that both the koto and samisen (the stringed instruments most in vogue) are not to be mastered without constant practice, and the irregular rhythm of the songs, with their abrupt intervals and capricious repetitions, cannot be easy to render until the voice has attained extreme flexibility. On the mysteries of Japanese music, however, seeing that the best authorities are at variance, only an expert dare pronounce judgment. To return to the question of the social status of the geisha, I should say that it corresponds more exactly with that of a Parisian actress than of an Athenian hetaira. Convention having banished the actress from the Japanese stage, the geisha takes her place as the natural recipient of masculine homage. She is much courted, and sometimes makes a brilliant match. There are a large number who make the profession an excuse for attracting rich admirers, just as the name of "actress" in more Puritan climes will cover a multitude of sins. But a professional courtesan she is not: her favours are not always for sale to the highest bidder. When her short reign is over at the age of twenty-five, she generally imparts to a younger generation the secrets of professional success. Among these the art of conversation is not the least important. To parry indiscreet advances and to bandy compliments enter as much into her rôle as the playing of "Kitsune ken" or "fox-forfeit," in which no little agility is needed to represent at the right moment the fox, the man, and the gun on facile fingers. Childish of course the geisha is, like most of her younger countrywomen; sometimes dangerous and fickle, as her popular nickname of "Nekko," the cat, testifies; but virtuous as well, in many cases, where she has enough independence and strength of character to resist the flattering importunity of fame's innumerable suitors.
If one of these aspire to win her affection, or merely to make her acquaintance, he has many advantages over the callow youths who wait, like lackeys, at the stage-door of a Western theatre. He is spared the preliminary purgatory of appealing letters, of supplicatory presents, which may easily fail to secure the desired access. He is not forced to share with a crowd of jealous or indifferent strangers the bitter joy of her nightly apotheosis, when her smiles and wiles must be lavished in promiscuous appeal. He has merely to dine at the tea-house with which she, or her employer, has made a mutually advantageous contract: there, on sufficient notice, she will arrive with her duenna, ready to perform, if need be, for his delight alone, while the semi-privacy of the entertainment affords him every opportunity of pressing his suit. As a rule, however, the geisha performs in parties of two, or three, or more, according to the number of guests. Often the convivial character of the occasion tends to lower the standard of art involved; indeed, such feasts are apt to degenerate into orgies. To realise the æsthetic possibilities of an art which is only at its lowest bacchanalian, we must quit the tea-house, that temple of the senses, and seek the sacred city of Kyōto, where palace and monastery raise, like antique junks, their majestic or quaintly carven heads above white waves of cherry-blossom. . . .
It is April. While English weather is struggling in spasmodic furies of wind and rain to escape the clutch of winter, here the enfranchised spring creeps, fairy-like, from plain to height on rosy sandals. First Tōkyō, whose hundred miles of unpaved thoroughfare fatigue the foot and offend the eye with naked dreariness, is clothed with draperies of fleecy pink. The spacious parks of Ueno and Shiba are thronged with gazing multitudes, who ride or saunter all day long through flower-encumbered avenues. At night the river-reaches of Mukōjima are packed with pleasure-boats, whose lanterns gleam like fire-flies beneath the pale mass of overhanging bloom. Yamaguchi San, who by trade is a rice merchant but by nature a poet, has written in the intervals of business, which is not brisk at this time of year, a little sheaf of poems, each consisting of three lines, which run perpendicularly down strips of iridescent rice-paper. So far as their purport can be construed into grosser forms of verse, I take it to be as follows:
"Put on your brightest kimono,
O Haru San, and let us go!
"Bring ivory chop-sticks, lacquer-cup,
And rice and wine, that we may sup.
"On honourable trees is set
A rosy-petalled coronet.
"The shine of day, the sheen of night,
Are drowned in cherry-blossom-light.
"We have no need of sun or star
To revel at Mukōjima."
But Mukōjima is no more to be compared with Yoshino than Rosherville with Stonehenge. The trees which line the broad Sumidagawa are beautiful but modern; their festal boughs are familiarised and a little vulgarised by the loud merry-making of cockney crowds; all this shouting and laughing recall a barbarian's bank-holiday. Far westward, on the ridges of Yoshino, where no modern city disturbs the silence of the imperial tumuli, encircled by a low granite fence and enclosing dusty gold relics of dead kings, grow the Thousand Cherry-Trees of immemorial renown. Motoöri sang of them; Hiroshigi painted them; Jimmu Tenno, the first of the Mikados, in his mausoleum fifteen miles away, is hardly more venerable than they. Every year pilgrims pass through the bronze gateway of the Zo-o-do Temple and climb the mountain side to rest beneath the canopy of tender, billowy blossom, which broods like an ever-renascent cloud of beauty above the Yamato plain, endeared by thirteen centuries of history and romance. Many pleasure-seekers mix with the white-robed pilgrims, who belong for the most part to distant villages and look on religion as an excellent excuse for change of interest and change of scene. Heedless of theology and harassed by no conviction of original sin, they return, like happy children from a picnic, with eyes brightened by the sea. of colour and spirits clarified by pure mountain air. Soon the green hills are carpeted with flakes of soft flowerage; the brief splendour of the Thousand Trees is over; the scattered hamlets and holy mounds resume their ordinary quietude.
At Kyōto the cult of the national flower culminates in an annual celebration, the Miyako-odori, a spectacular ballet with choric interludes. For many years the same poet, an old resident, has been assigned the task of composing appropriate lyrics, in which the glories of some historic or legendary hero blend with the praises of the blushing sakura. Musicians, painters, dancers, are engaged to elaborate with auxiliary sound, design, and movement the series of dream-pictures which his fancy has evoked. But words and notes are really subsidiary to the dancing: the tale of the poet is chiefly told by the winding feet and waving arms, the ever-changing pose and mimicry, of the most highly trained geisha in Japan. These number as many as seventy, of whom eighteen combine the functions of choir and orchestra, now chanting, now accompanying on drum and mandoline the statuesque or processional development of the choregraphic theme. The Hanami-Kōji, specially set apart for such representations, is not easy to find. Though within the precincts of the theatrical quarter, it stands a little apart from the other houses, such as the Gion-za Theatre, and is far less capacious; in fact, it bears about the same proportion to its huge, banner-flaunting brethren as the smaller Queen's Hall to Drury Lane. The structure, too, is entirely different from theirs. Three sides of the building are reserved for the performers. Instead of the parallel hana-michi, trisecting the audience and sloping from stage to entrance, two dancing platforms skirt the "pit" on left and right and join the extremities of the scene: on them sit the singing-girls, concealed at first by cotton curtains. No room remains for the public but the floor between the platforms and a gallery, which faces the drop-scene of the stage proper. As the performance only lasts an hour, it is repeated four or five times in the afternoon and evening of twenty days, and the price of admission to the best (gallery) seats is fifty sen, about one shilling, for economy and simplicity are conspicuous in this essentially popular entertainment.
The dance is preceded by a ceremonious reception of great interest to the foreign visitor. He is conducted to an ante-room and requested to participate in O Cha-no-yu, an august tea-making. The preparation of this aristocratic refreshment must be conducted in accordance with inviolable rules, invented or rather modified by the great Taikō himself, who, not content with military glory, desired to regulate the boudoir as imperiously as the State, in this resembling Queen Anne, who "would sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea." The twelve utensils employed must be separately cleansed and waved in air by the demure but smart damsel who presides with becoming dignity and science, every gesture, every operation of her deft hands being prescribed by rigid etiquette. After twenty minutes of silent incantation, as it seems, the dainty sorceress has brewed her potion. Then a careful sub-sorceress, who has attentively waited on the principal witch, prostrates herself at the feet of each of the guests, touches the floor with her forehead, and, as she presents a cup of thick, green bouillon, murmurs, "Oh, gracious stranger, deign to taste this honourable tea!" Long as the tea ceremonies appear to the uninitiated, they are considerably shortened and imperfectly observed by the tea-drinkers, who, it is feared, break a thousand and one rules in uncouth efforts to copy the better educated Japanese.
As seen from the strangers' gallery (for the majority of humble coolies and small shopkeepers have been waiting in patient line until the august tea has been absorbed by their betters, and now sit, packed in tiny compartments, on the floor of the pit) this liliputian theatre has much in common with the galanty-show which first kindled a passion for the stage in distant childhood. The drop-scenes are scarcely more than nine feet high, and of such thin material that through their pale pattern of willow and pine the shining of candles is discerned. It would not surprise me if they grew gradually whiter and brighter, serving at last as the medium for a droll shadow-pantomime of fantastic silhouettes. But even the children would not have come to see that, since their eyes have often followed at home the ingenious shadow-play of parental hands behind the paper-panelled shōji. Rarer and more exotic must be the show to please this easily amused but quickly sated audience. Suddenly the curtains on either side lift, disclosing to the left nine geisha, holding taiko or tzuzumi, circular drums and drums conical, beaten with batons or smacked with open palm; to the right, nine more, with koto and samisen, plucking the strings with curved finger or ivory plectrum: all are much powdered and painted, but soberly attired in black and gold. The prelude lacks melody, lacks harmony, as we understand them, but the sharp, staccato cries, emphasised by drum-taps, the antiphonal, diminishing shrieks, which seem to punctuate a nasal, wailing recitative, insensibly induce a nervous tension of disquieting suspense. The time is most exact: the drums rattle, the zithers clang, in perfect unison. Then along the narrow platforms in front of the musicians issue simultaneously from beneath the gallery two slender files of geisha, whose pink and blue kimono suggest the hues of cherry-blossom and the else cloudless sky. Like running ribbons, they wind towards the stage, festooning at last into a momentary bow before the famous gate, called O Kuruma-yose, of which the curiously carven peonies and phoenixes are admirably reproduced, evoking instant recognition. While the dancers disappear through that pictured portal and the curtain falls on the first figure of the dance, let me briefly indicate the subject and intention of this year's fantasy.
Its hero is Hideyoshi, often entitled Taikō (the retired regent), next to Iyeyasu perhaps the most notable name in all Japanese history—so proverbially notable that Cromwell and Napoleon are not more vividly impressed on the memory of their countrymen. His dramatic rise from rung to rung of the feudal ladder, from peasant's hut to a regent's palace, which none but a noble had occupied before him; the contrast of his mean appearance, which caused him to be dubbed "The Monkey," with his grandiose achievements, which included the commercial supremacy of Ōsaka and the subjugation of Corea; his dreams of world-empire; the patronage of art, which led him to summon a congress of tea-drinkers and to take an active part in the presentation of Nō plays; the adroit concentration of power in his own person, despite the jealousy of patricians and the victories of contemporary generals; these and many other circumstances of his career loom large in patriotic tradition. He was eclipsed by Iyeyasu in statesmanship, for the latter founded a constitution and established a dynasty, which lasted two hundred years, and might have lasted longer but for foreign intervention; yet Hideyoshi's is the more picturesque, the more striking personality. Perhaps it would not be straining an historical parallel to allege that the great soldier of Kyōto prepared the way for the great legislator of Yedo as effectively as Julius Cæsar prepared the way for Augustus. Be this so or not, it is plain that the beginning of the seventeenth century after Christ in Japan and the end of the last century before Christ in Italy coincided with similar transitions from militant anarchy to peaceful despotism. The golden age of the Tokugawa may be cited as an argument for imperial rule with the pax Romana of the Cæsars. It might be supposed that the names of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi have no more virtue as a rallying-cry for their descendants than the watchwords of Roundhead and Cavalier have for us. But such is not the case. Subtly reincarnate in the cities which they glorified in life, their spirits still give battle after death in the bloodless field of civic rivalry. Tōkyō is still Yedo, the Petersburg of the empire, created by a despot's will and the centre of law, of authority, of administration; but it is to Kyōto, as to Moscow, the holy city, that lovers of art and of religion are inevitably attracted. Hers are still the finer temples, the lovelier fabrics, the nobler legacies of Old Japan. One thing, however, she has not, which the capital has—a fitting monument of her greatest citizen. Whereas the mausoleum of lyeyasu at Nikkō is such a masterpiece of commemorative gratitude, expressed in the language of plastic and decorative art, that "whoever has not seen Nikkō [so runs the saw] has no right to use the word kekkō (splendid)," the conqueror of Corea, the arbiter of august tea-making, lacks the tribute of a monumental tomb. This stain on the scutcheon of Kyōto is to be speedily wiped out. Now that the Emperor has transferred his court to the eastern capital and made the Tokugawa citadel his own, the western merchants are eager to redress the balance by building on the heights of Maruyama for the glory of Hideyoshi and the bewilderment of tourists such a triumph of memorial architecture that lyeyasu shall at last be outshone and the connotation of kekkō be fraught with ampler meaning. The plans are drawn, the work begun, patriots and pilgrims have subscribed thousands of yen, the best modern artists in wood and bronze have been charged with the heavy privilege of surpassing their illustrious predecessors. Whether they succeed or not, the Hideyoshi monument was a subject so rich in suggestion, so popular in itself, so complex in its appeal, that the poet of the Miyako-odori could not wish for a better or more burning theme. And that is why the pink-and-blue geisha made their first exit through O Kuruma-yose, which Hidari Jingoro, the immortal left-handed carpenter, adorned with marvellous birds and flowers when commissioned to carve a royal gateway for his master's, the Taikō's, palace at Fushimi.
The next scene represented Hideyoshi's garden. It is no ordinary garden, whatever foreigners may think, who merely see in it an appropriate background for the swaying flower-like bodies of the dancing-girls. It is a masterpiece of the celebrated æsthete, Kobori Enshu, and the artful disposition of lake and lantern, pebble and pine, may symbolise, for all I know, a divine truth or philosophic precept. My neighbour (a Buddhist neophyte, whose enthusiasm is tempered by erudition) points out to me the Moon-Washing Fountain, the Stone of Ecstatic Contemplation, and the Bridge of the Pillar of the Immortals, but it seems that the exigencies of scenic space have so fatally curtailed the Mound facing the Moon that the exact meaning of the parabolic design is made obscure, if not heretical. It is not in my power to reassure him, so I welcome with relief the reappearance of the dancers, who, bearing flowers in one hand and a fan in the other, step gaily out of the garden and, posing, perching, pirouetting, flutter with deliberate grace through a maze of correlated motions. I do not dare to ask if their gestures point a moral: it is wiser to assume with Keats that "beauty is truth, truth beauty," and to follow with undistracted eye the solemn prettiness of these human dragon-flies. For their gauzy kimono sleeves and red-pepper-coloured obi recall the wings and hue of a giant dragon-fly, which dominates in its pride of national emblem the principal bridge over the Kamogawa. And, whether they poise flower on fan or fan on flower, or revolve with open fan extended behind their triple-tressed coiffure, they dart here and settle there with almost the unconscious, automatic smoothness of bird or insect. Proximity destroys this illusion. Watched from the subjacent vantage of the floor, the features of these tiny coryphées are seen to wear that fixity of resolute attention which few children when engrossed in a performance are able to repress. The art of concealing art is hard to learn. Their elder sisters smile continually behind taiko and samisen, but the gravity of the childish troupe is more in keeping with the poet's retrospective vision.
I hope the stage-carpenter atoned for his unorthodox abbreviation of Enshu's lesson in landscape by the exquisite view of the monastery of Uji Bridge. Nestling in the lap of pine-forested hills, this ancient temple of Byodo-in has been for at least six hundred years the protective centre of vast tea-plantations where is grown the finest tea for native taste, called Gyokuro, or Jewelled Dew. But Uji Bridge is famous also for its fire-flies, which on warm nights flash like living jewels beside the stream, to the joy of countless sightseers, eager to catch and cage them. Throughout the ensuing dance many eyes were diverted from the geisha to the sparkling play of emerald motes across the mimic Ujigawa. This time the girls wore kerchiefs such as peasant women wear when, with heads thus guarded and skirts rolled upward to the knee, they toil among the tea-plants. Then, unfolding and waving the kerchiefs, while a soloist intoned a rhapsody in honour of "the Great Councillor, whose memory lives for ever in the fragrant sweetness of the Jewelled Dew," they moved in pairs along the platform, alternately kneeling and rising, with arms extended or intertwined, their gradual retrocession signifying, as I learn, the reluctant withdrawal of summer.
Autumn succeeds. Momiji-Yama, or Maple Mountain, deeply mantled in myriads of reddening leaves, gives the cue to the now melancholy, almost stationary languor of gliding figures: no longer dragon-flies or humming-birds, they drift slowly, one by one, into the crimson gorge, and are lost among the maple-leaves. At this point the floral march of the seasons is abruptly broken, as if to forbid too hasty interpretation, by the fall of tricolour curtains, richly embroidered in scarlet, blue, and gold with Hideyoshi's crest, the large fan-like leaf of the Pawlonia Imperialis.
The five-storeyed pagoda of Omuro Gosho, outlined in snow against the wintry landscape, signalises an ascent from temporal to eternal beauty. To this monastic palace ex-mikados came after abdication; it had no abbots but those of imperial blood. And the next scene, presenting the Daibutsu, or great Buddha of Hideyoshi, is elegantly illustrative of the Buddhist teaching of permanence in transition. The first wooden image, 160 feet high, erected by the Taiko in 1588, was destroyed by earthquake in 1596. After his death his widow constructed a second in bronze, which was almost completed save for the casting of the head when fire devoured it in 1603. Lastly, his son, Hideyori, persuaded by perfidious Ieyaysu to waste his substance in rearing a yet more colossal figure, was forbidden to consecrate it by a message from the Shōgun, who chose to discover in the Chinese inscription on the bell ("On the east I welcome the bright moon, on the west I bid farewell to the setting sun") a prophecy of his own waning and Hideyoshi's waxing radiance. A second earthquake in 1662, corrosive lightnings in 1775 and 1798, consumed successive Buddhas in the same shrine, but the present god, whose gilded head and shoulders alone are visible, scaling fifty-eight feet from ground to ceiling, has defied the strokes of fate for ninety-nine years, and recalls to pious beholders the original builder's piety, triumphant at last through the irresistible resurrection of deity.
Resurrection—the recurrence of spring and the renovation of fame—crowns the final movement of this transcendental ballet. The Hideyoshi monument, as it partly is and wholly shall be, rises tier above tier on heaven-scaling stairs, approached by temples and groves which will one day vie in splendour with the carven gateways, the gigantic cryptomerias of Nikkō. In a joyous finale the dancers pose, wreathed about the central summit of the monument, while cascades of red and green fire play on them from the wings; then, strewing the steps with cherry-blossom and waving provocative clusters in the faces of the spectators as they pass, the double stream of geisha flows back with graceful whirls and eddies between banks of deafening minstrelsy; the curtains rustle down, the fires flicker out; the Miyako-odori is no more.
As I ponder on this fascinating little spectacle, planned by artists and presented by fairies, the memory returns of a ballet, incalculably more magnificent, which the rich municipality of Moscow organised in honour of Nicholas II., Emperor of all the Russias, on the occasion of his coronation. I remember that thousands of roubles were expended; that the decorations and costumes blazed with ostentation; that armies of halfdressed women performed acrobatic feats in searching electric light. If any flowers of imagination had bloomed in the contriver's mind, they had been pitilessly crushed by costumiers, scene-painters, and ballet-masters. The result was a meretricious chaos of meaningless display. Hidden from the eyes of Moscow merchants and revealed to the patient artisans of Kyōto is that spirit of beauty, which, out of cotton and paper and Bengal lights can fashion a poem, so lovely that its simple schemes of form and colour haunt the memory like music, so profound that the deepest instincts of the beholder may be stirred by communion with the faith in which his fathers laboured and died.
It may well have been, however, that the shaven stripling beside me who so kindly unravelled threads of occasional doctrine from the glistening web of Terpsichore was almost alone in his desire to be edified. As he formally took his leave, most of the pittites rushed with laughter up the hill to the Chionin Temple, before which stands a marvellous and patriarchal cherry-tree. Lamps were hung in its far-reaching boughs, and all night long the light-hearted Kyōto citizens chattered and sang beneath its multitudinous blossom.
The connection between Buddhism and geishadom was recalled to me in a much less poetic setting by a peculiar play, which for seven nights filled the commodious theatre of Tsuruga, a delightful port overlooking the finest harbour on the Sea of Japan. The piece was called "Shimazomasa," and the audience was moved to extraordinary demonstrations of delight by a very long soliloquy delivered for at least ten minutes by a Buddhist priest, who, seated on a mat in the centre of the stage and tapping his knees with a fan, excited my liveliest curiosity as to the purport of his tirade. Could it be a parody on pulpit eloquence? Would these pious townsmen, whose bay was lined with temples, tolerate such mockery of sacred things? The curtain fell and drew up again: the actor was forced to repeat his glib soliloquy. Then, to my extreme bewilderment, the priest was no more seen, and a tortuous but intelligible melodrama ensued, revealing the thefts and treacheries of a geisha, who came in the last act to a miserable end. The next night I returned, and being in time for the first act, which I had missed on the previous occasion, discovered that the plausible preacher was the geisha disguised. She had escaped from prison, and was recounting to herself the advantages which she expected to reap from the garb of a friar." Young girls will come to me, craving amulets and charms for their lovers. Thus I shall know the names of honourable young men, who will not be slow to make my acquaintance. And, when we have sipped tea and talked of many pleasant things together, at the right time I shall whisper that it is no priest who is honoured by their august friendship, but Shimazomasa, the geisha. Moreover, I am sure to succeed, for a preacher ought to be a good-looking man. It is then easier for the hearers to keep their eyes fixed on his face; otherwise their eyes wander and they forget to listen." It has been pointed out to me since that passages in this delectable sermon were taken bodily from the "Makura Zoshi" ("Pillow Sketches"), the work of a lady-novelist of the eleventh century. But plagiarism is no sin in the eyes of a Japanese dramatist, and the great merit was to have hit on an original situation. The manager of the theatre was so conscious of this, that, when a second play, entitled "Pistorigoto" ("Robbery under Arms"), failed to draw as well as its predecessor, he boldly transferred the incident without rhyme or reason to the plot, which was neither improved nor worsened by the addition. I was grateful, too, to the author of "Shimazomasa" for a touch of fancy, which redeemed the realism of his sensational story. During a love scene between three suitors and the heroine, who had regained for a time prestige and prosperity, a symbolic geisha, bearing no relation to the personages of the piece, chanted in an upper barred chamber, adjoining the outer wall of the tea-house in which the action was proceeding, snatches of erotic song, praising the joys of love but foretelling the heavy Nemesis which, sooner or later, overtakes light women. In a play of Æschylus this would have been Erinyes on the Atridean roof, terrible and invisible, presaging doom. But I fear that he who wrote "Shimazomasa" had no deeper design than the interpolation of a taking song, since popular drama is as untroubled as the popular mind by haunting shadows of death and destiny.