Sketches of Tokyo Life/Chapter 1
ENTRANCE OF A STORY-TELLERS’ HALL.
CHAPTER I.
The Story-tellers’ Hall.
Japanese street is remarkable for nothing so much as the multiplicity and variety of the sign-boards which line its sides. These are usually wooden boards, plain or lacquered, hung from the eaves of the first or second storey, parallel or at right angles to the frontage, and with their lengths horizontal or perpendicular, so that there is ample scope for ingenuity in the disposal of these boards. Similar to the sign-board in its use is a square-framed lantern papered on all sides, and as diversified in its position. Eating-houses, especially of the lower class, which are comparatively more numerous in Tokyo than in any other Japanese city, invite customers with these lanterns, the forms of which have by usage become so fixed that it is generally possible to infer from their appearance the speciality of the eating-houses where they are hung. The largest of these lanterns, however, is used by the story-tellers’ hall. It hangs at the entrance, at right angles to the street, so that its two flat faces covered with the names of the entertainers of the evening may be seen by any one making for the place from either end of the road, while on the narrow outward strip is found the name of the hall. Within the wide door-way of the hall is a small court, on the walls of which are rows of pegs for hanging the clogs, sandals, or shoes of the audience; and when they are hung there, wooden checks with the numbers of the pegs are given in exchange. After putting down the entrance-money which is usually four or five sen, the spectator passes into a large matted hall, at the furthest end of which is a
A STORY-TELLERS’ PLATFORM.
platform or dais, about four feet high, where the story-teller takes his seat. Cushions and “fire-boxes” for lighting tobacco are supplied at a trifling charge; the receipts, however, from the loan of these articles and the sale of tea and confectionery are no inconsiderable items in the hall-proprietor’s income. Though the evening performance opens at about half-past six or seven, it is not until an hour later that the hall begins to fill. Meanwhile, a supernumerary, a story-teller in his novitiate, is seated on the dais and tells a story, with which he manages to amuse the indulgent audience more by his buffoonery than by the hackneyed jests which he scatters broadcast. After this lever de rideau, more skilled story-tellers appear in succession until, when five or six have each had his turn, there is an interval of some ten minutes at nine or half-past. Then comes the pièce de résistance of the evening, when the star of the troupe takes his seat on the dais, though sometimes he is preceded by another. The performance concludes at ten o’clock or a little later. On the dais there is a cushion for the story-teller, with a brazier and a kettle in winter on his right, and a lighted candle before him on either side. Every story-teller, to break the ice upon his appearance on the dais, invariably snuffs the candles and sips a cup of hot water with the object, apparently, of prolonging the suspense of his audience. Some have peculiar habits, most of them purposely acquired, which are obtrusively exhibited to excite the laughter of their patrons, such as sneezing, rubbing one’s nose, making grimaces, etc.
All this is not high class; but it is not for refinement that one turns to the story-tellers’ hall. The theatre is open in Japan for the better part of a day and is, moreover, an expensive amusement. The great mass of the people who live by daily toil cannot naturally afford to visit a play-house except at rare intervals, and it is to these, the busy and slender-pursed, that the story-tellers’ hall appeals. Artisans and small-tradesmen, with their families, and students seek at the hall a relaxation from the hard day’s work; and as they are after all no unimportant sections of the city population, the influence of these halls on Tokyo life cannot be overlooked. Newspapers are, it is true, now leavening the whole society; but it is still from the halls that the artisan to-day gets all his knowledge, meagre as it is, and to the same source may be traced his familiarity with the notable events and heroes in the history of his country. In its educating influence, then, the story-teller’s profession is an important one, and though it must be owned that few of his tales are edifying, his confrères in the front rank of their profession deserve better of their countrymen than has hitherto been their lot. A just combination of amusement and instruction needs so much tact and judgment that few story-tellers care to attempt it: and most of them prefer dropping into a broad and often senseless farce to making a dry sermon of their tales, which would have the effect of emptying the hall in an instant; but taken even at their own valuation, story-tellers are among the most influential of the multitude who live to please.
A STORY-TELLER SNUFFING THE CANDLES.
Popular as are the story-tellers’ halls, they are of comparatively recent origin; but the art appears to have been appreciated from the oldest times. Emperor Toba, for instance, who reigned in the earlier half of the twelfth century, used, we are told, to order his courtiers to tell stories by turns while his physician burnt pinches of moxa on his back; but history does not record whether His Majesty actually forgot his pain in the interest of their narratives. This story-telling in rotation was popular and has in one form at least survived to the present day. In a large hall where many young men are assembled at night with closed doors, a hundred wicks are lighted, one of which is blown out as soon as a ghost story is concluded; and when a hundred such tales have been told in turn, the room is in total darkness, whereupon, it is said, some of the ghosts, which figured in those tales, are sure to make their appearance there. Sometimes the process is varied, as when the more timid among the assembly are sent on sleeveless errands through graveyards and other equally uncanny places.
Though people in old times took kindly to story-telling, we seldom hear of any noted raconteur, or of professional men in that line. There are still extant works written half a dozen centuries or more ago, that contain anecdotes or short tales, but they are now read for their style and other literary qualities rather than for their intrinsic interest. The most attractive tales that have come down to us are now the sole property of children. Their authorship is unknown as well as the age that gave them birth. Some of the most popular nursery tales were first told as allegories or in allusion to passing events; but they lost their underlying meaning by degrees as they were handed down from generation to generation; some are, again, Japanese versions of Chinese tales, while others are quaint pictures of the unquiet times which called them into existence, and came in course of time to be implicitly taken for history by some and derided by others as old women’s tales for frightening children. Thus in Japan as everywhere else, myths took shape and grew by identical processes.
The history of Japan is full of intestine wars. Among the most important are the long feuds between the rival clans of Taira and Minamoto, which eventually ended in the establishment by the latter in 1185 of the Shogunate or that feudal system which lived through all its modifications until 1868. The fortunes of the Taira clan, its triumph and prosperity, its arrogance and pride of power, its final fall and extermination, are touchingly told in the Heike Monogatari, the rhythm and pathos of which made it a favourite with blind musicians who sang its most poetic passages to the accompaniment of the biwa, a four-stringed lute. This was the origin of the Japanese lyrical drama. A century and a half after the fall of the Taira clan, when the Hojo family who had usurped the authority of their liege, the Minamoto shogun, began to decline, an attempt was made to uphold the supreme power of the Emperor in fact as well as in name; but just when success seemed within reach of the loyalists, the Ashikaga family deserted the Imperial cause and seized the Shogunate, which they held for two centuries. This war for the supremacy of the rightful Emperor, with its numerous romantic incidents, is recounted in the Taiheiki, a work of little historical value though written by one who lived in those times, which, however, being composed in an elegant and poetical style and teeming with adventures of every kind, became a favourite alike with the scholar and the soldier. This book was often read to young men of the military class to incite them to the emulation of the heroes of the valorous deeds recorded therein. In course of time, the recital of this and similar works became a regular profession.
Hideyoshi, better known as the Taiko, who had risen from the ranks to be the most powerful general in the latter half of the sixteenth century, was intimate with artists, poets, and other men of peaceful calling, whose society he sought in his leisure hours. Among the best known of these associates were Rikiu, the first master of the tea ceremony in his day, and Sorori, a man of great wit, whose position in the Taiko’s court was almost identical with that of jesters in the courts of mediæval Europe. Numberless anecdotes, for the most part apocryphal, are told of Sorori’s ready wit, and many a witticism, of which he was innocent, is fathered upon him and, on the strength of his traditional reputation, passes current. When the country recovered peace under the Tokugawa shogun, the daimyo’s household was incomplete without a master of the tea-ceremony, an elaborate system of forms regulating the making, serving, and drinking of that beverage, once considered an indispensable accomplishment by men of gentle breeding, and the master regaled his lord with his endless store of anecdote in the intervals of tea-drinking. It helped to beguile the long days of forced leisure to which the daimyo was condemned in those uneventful times.
THE TAIHEIKI READER’S SHED.
Early in the seventeenth century, we find the Taiheiki reader already established in Yedo, for in a picture published in 1630, he is to be seen sitting in a shed of reed-screens. He is beating with a fan on a book-rest before him to give emphasis to his speech, while rows of benches are set in front for the audience. The earliest known of these readers in Yedo was Seizaemon, of the Castle-gate, as he was called. He had come from his native city of Kyoto to present a petition to the Feudal Government; but on its rejection after three years of waiting, he was ashamed to return home, and being a man of some culture, took up his position on a little knoll near one of the castle-gates, where he read the Taiheiki and explained its difficult passages. Daily he drew crowded houses and soon was followed by many imitators. Before long, however, the Taiheiki ceased to be the only text-book. Other and less known works on martial subjects were also read, and in time these readers did not hesitate to draw more freely upon their imagination and publish works of their own, in which fiction far outweighed fact. The more fictitious the works, the greater was the avidity with which they were read by the public. The Taiheiki was eventually superseded by such worthless romances, the popularity of which, however, was next threatened by a new style of story-telling.
While stories of war and warriors did much to foster and maintain a military spirit in the nation, the effect of which is still great at the present day, and their public recital was in demand with the military class and the stouter hearts among the people, they could not appeal with equal force to the masses generally, as in the peace the country enjoyed under the Tokugawa family, there was nothing to arouse their interest in such subjects. Most people, moreover, frequented the story-tellers’ booths for mere amusement and not for instruction. There arose, then, a new class of story-tellers who avoided serious subjects and made it their sole object to amuse and excite laughter. These are called rakugoka or narrators of stories ending in a word-play. The elasticity of an agglutinative language like the Japanese makes it a very easy vehicle for the punster’s wit. The word-play often takes an important part in a serious poem or a prose passage, which sometimes owes its whole pathos to the aptness of the double-entendre it contains. By the jester this quality is fully availed of; but the rakugoka is not always a mere quibbler, for not a few of his tales teem with pathos, their chief distinction from the tales of his more martial confrères being that to him love is a more congenial theme than war. Love and humour he makes his domain. Being of a later birth than the kodanshi as the Taiheiki-reader’s successors are called, he was long looked upon as an intruder upon their preserves, and ranked lower in the popular estimation, but of his greater popularity there can be no question. In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, Anrakuan Sakuden, a noted raconteur of the time, wrote for a nobleman his Cure for Drowsiness, a book of anecdote, upon which rakugoka have all freely drawn for their subjects; and a quarter of a century later, appeared the first professional rakugoka. The new profession soon gained members; but it was Fukai Shidoken, who first gave it its great popularity. Shidoken had been brought up in a temple, but being driven thence by his fellow-acolytes’ jealousy of his ability, he turned an itinerant priest. He was, however, disgusted with the crass ignorance and hollow pretences of the priesthood wherever he went, and he abandoned that calling for the occupation of a story-teller. His tales were disfigured with obscenities, but he drew large crowds as his priestly lore served him in good stead in embellishing his stories with saws and instances from classical and canonical literature. No other story-teller of his time was at once so humorous and erudite. He died in 1764 at the age of eighty-three. At his death, his profession was fully established and recognised as a legitimate calling.
The yosé, or regular story-tellers’ halls, were first built about a century ago. There were in Yedo seventy-five yosé in 1815, which increased in ten years by fifty; but a famine and, later, the prohibition of female singers by the Government reduced the number of these halls to seventy-six; and eventually they were closed altogether. But as the prohibition of public halls was evaded by holding nominally private meetings for the purpose, the Government relaxed the stringent law and permitted fifteen halls to be
A GHOST AT A STORY-TELLERS’ HALL.
opened. Even this concession was insufficient, for street story-tellers arose on all sides and blocked the traffic on public thoroughfares. Perceiving the futility of attempts to repress the public curiosity, the Government repealed the law altogether in 1851. The halls prospered through the years of internal disturbances; but on the establishment of the Imperial authority in 1868, the Tokyo Police Board exercised jurisdiction over all places of amusement and put an effectual stop to the narration of obscene tales, to theatrical performances in the halls, and to the darkening of the auditorium, when ghosts used to appear over the heads of the spectators. The entertainments were further restricted to the war stories and other serious discourses of the kodanshi, the humorous tales of the rakugoka, singing of lyrical dramas or gidayu, singing in general, musical performances, conjuring tricks, magic lantern séances, and puppet shows. Among these kinds of entertainments, the first three take the precedence in popular favour, and of these again the rakugoka’s tales are the most widely patronised.
The gidayu-singer is, however, almost as great a public favourite as the rakugoka. The gidayu, or lyrical drama, owes its rise to puppet-shows, and as the earlier dramatists wrote exclusively for these shows, it was the gidayu-singer’s duty to speak for the puppets and
THE GIDAYU-SINGER AND THE MUSICIAN.
explain their movements and emotions in song. The singer is in Tokyo without puppets when he appears at the halls. The best puppet-shows are now to be seen in Osaka, the home of the gidayu. The singer sometimes plays himself, but is more frequently accompanied by a samisen player, who sits on his left. He always sings in the old formal dress called kamishimo, with the libretto on the book-rest before him. A single performance consists of one act of a play or even one portion of an act. In a gidayu entertainment, six or seven performances are given, the singers appearing in order from the lowest to the highest in the company.
The rakugoka are very numerous. They are subdivided into many families, of which the largest are the Sanyutei and Yanagiya; and as in most other professions in Japan they form a guild. Every family of rakugoka has a chief whom the rest acknowledge as their master when they assume the family name; and they remain his disciples throughout their professional career unless they renounce the name and the connection, or are expelled from the family through misconduct or insubordination. The rakugoka, who has no disciple of his own or at least none of any repute, generally calls to his assistance rakugoka of other families, gidayu singers, conjurers, singers of popular songs, or musicians. As first-rate story-tellers are comparatively few, these variety entertainments are the rule in the rakugoka’s halls in Tokyo. Story tellers, however, prefer where possible to employ their own disciples from pecuniary considerations as well as for the sake of the obvious advantages of their close relations in the management of the company. A story-teller opens a hall usually on the understanding that the entrance-charges be divided equally between himself and the proprietor of the hall, though if he is a public favourite, he can command a larger share. Out of his share, however, he pays his company by giving them a fixed sum or a percentage of his profits. The latter course is taken in the case of the more important members of the company, though the actual percentage is, other things equal, larger for outsiders than for his own disciples, who thus give him a wider margin of profit. The supernumeraries who only help to kill time till the hall fills are paid a trifle for the whole run. As the entrance-money is very small, being usually four or five sen, except in special cases, the receipts are not large though the audience may number two or three hundred or more; and to increase their incomes, story-tellers generally appear at two or more halls in one evening. A run at these halls lasts a fortnight so that there are two runs every month. As thus the programme at a hall is changed twice a month and most story-tellers visit two or more halls every evening, their engagement becomes a very complicated affair, which story-tellers cannot settle for themselves without interfering with each other's interests; and the entire arrangement of their engagement and hours of appearance at the halls is left in the hands of a specialist, who receives a small recompense from every story-teller whose services are thus allotted. This specialist’s income is materially augmented by douceurs from third or fourth rate men who are naturally anxious to join a public favourite’s company. It is only first-rate story-tellers who can make their own arrangements without consulting him.
Besides his receipts from the halls, a popular story-teller has a fair income from the munificence of his patrons, who call him for amusement to their houses, or more often to tea-houses. Indeed, the degree of his popularity with the general public may be fairly gauged by the frequency with which lie is engaged for such private entertainments. The supernumerary’s income from the halls is insufficient to keep body and soul together; but he has often another calling or another source of revenue, so that he is not totally dependent for livelihood on the halls to which he appears to be drawn by sheer love of hearing his own voice. We knew a jinrikisha-man, who was in daytime harnessed to his vehicle and in the evening took to the story-tellers’ dais as a relaxation from his severe labours.
The rakugoka’s répertoire is not extensive. His stock stories do not far exceed a score which he trots out again and again with slight variations as he knows that however hackneyed his jokes may be, his audience are never too critical nor chary of laughter. Since he appears only for a fortnight at any single hall, which he may not revisit for months or even years, it is really enough for him to be possessed of fourteen tales, each to take up about half an hour for narration, though it would be well for him to have a few more in reserve in case others in his company should forestall any of his own intended tales. A story-teller, however, of the better class narrates a single continuous story through the whole run; but he too frequently adds much superfluous
DROPPING THE SCREEN AT THE END OF A GIDAYU PERFORMANCE.
matter to enliven the subject and practises the feuilletoniste’s trick of breaking off at the most exciting point. When a serial story is being told by a first-class story-teller, many persons attend the hall every night of the run. The story is usually a new version of an old tale, or an exaggerated account of the latest newspaper sensation.
Story-tellers are without exception men, and we find the other sex among gidayu and other singers only. Of recent years, female gidayu-singers have come into great favour, especially among students and other young men. So extensive is the patronage of the young blades that these singers now occupy more than half the halls of Tokyo, completely putting the rakugoka and others into the shade. Their personal charms have incidentally led to a better appreciation of the beauties of lyrical plays, the recognition of which as an important branch of the national literature has only been brought about tardily enough by the perception of the esteem and honour in which great dramatists are held among the Western nations.
