other events which must have caused a great excitement at the time. In these dramas, Chikamatsu could, by only taking the main incidents, give a free play to his imagination, and dealing as he was with contemporary life with which both he and his audience were equally familiar, he could present a complete picture of his time. The beauty of his style and diction is almost unsurpassed in Japanese literature; and such command had he over language that even scholars of the classical or Chinese school, who had little sympathy with him, could not withhold their admiration. The greatest and most perfect of the domestic dramas, as it is among his maturest, is perhaps the Tenno-Amijima, which describes the suicide of two lovers, a paper-dealer and a courtezan. It was written in 1720 in his sixty-eighth year.
One of Gidayu’s pupils, Toyotake Echizen, who formed a school of his own, put upon his puppet stage the plays of Ki no Kaion, a dramatist of high talent, who, however, was thrown into the shade by Chikamatsu’s surpassing fame. Chikamatsu’s worthiest successor was Takeda Izumo (1691–1756), who opened a puppet show in Osaka. From his time joint authorship in drama came into fashion. Izumo collaborated with two others in the production of his most celebrated plays. After they had fixed upon the general plot, they would apportion the whole play among themselves, each to write his part independently of the others, and afterwards bring them together for discussion. The play would be produced after they had thoroughly revised and brought those parts into order. Though something was to be gained from their collective efforts, the play was generally of unequal merit and suffered in continuity and harmony. Hence, most of these collaborated plays are but partially known, the gidayu-singer producing only the best and most popular acts; and the majority of his audience are ignorant of the unrecited parts of the plays in his répertoire. The most evenly constructed of these
