experiment was not repeated. The Japanese stage betook itself to its wonted sights and sounds, and the play-going public was again happy and contented.
By a curious fatality, Japan has just (1903-4) lost all her greatest actors within a few months of each other,—Danjūrō, Kikugorō, and Sadanji. Among the lesser men, their survivors, Shikwan and Gatō perhaps rank highest. The actress of most repute is Kumehachi, a woman of over sixty, who excels in young men's roles. "Sada Yakko" was not locally known, except as a singing-girl, till the echoes of her successes on the Parisian stage in 1900 reverberated on Japanese shores.
Of European authorities on the subject of the Japanese drama, there are few to mention. Aston's History of Japanese Literature will be found helpful, as usual, within the limits of a narrowly restricted space. Florenz's Japanische Dramen may be recommended to those who read German, together with the same author's versions of two dramas,—Asagao and Terakoya. The late T. R. McClatchie, the one European who made a speciality of the Japanese stage, produced nothing, in his Japanese Plays Versified, but some English pieces in "Ingoldsby Legend" style on four or five of the chief subjects treated by the native dramatists. Though extremely entertaining, they bear but the faintest resemblance to their so-called originals. Unfortunately, Japanese plays are apt to run to extreme length,—five, seven, twelve, even as many as sixteen acts. Adequately to translate them presupposes an intimate knowledge, not only of several phases of the language, but of innumerable historical and literary allusions, obsolete customs and superstitions, etc. Even to understand, or at any rate to relish, such translations when made, would demand considerable local knowledge on the part of the European reader. For all these reasons, doubtless, this field has been comparatively neglected hitherto. The Nō, though more ancient and to the Japanese themselves far more difficult, are in a way easier to bring before the foreign public, because of their concise, clear-cut character. The present writer, in the
