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insisted on the substitution of antiquarian authenticity for the numerous historical inaccuracies in the plays. Mokuami, as the leading playwright of the day, was their pet scapegoat. The prospectus of the Society for the Reformation of the Drama, which was issued in 1886, read in part, ". . . we believe that the ugliness or beauty of a play depends to a large extent upon the skill of the writer. Granting this, we observe not a single gentleman of learning among our playwrights. They all attract the lower classes merely by a facile patchwork of stale ideas."

      Sensing the winds of change, Mokuami announced his retirement, and in 1881, at the age of sixty-five, completed what he believed would be his last play. In it, characteristically, all of the main characters were criminals. He gave the name of Kawatake Shinshichi to his leading disciple and took the name Mokuami. This name has a special significance. It comes from the expression moto no Mokuami ("back to the old Mokuami") and refers to a humble person who, like the original Mokuami, a blindman forced by circumstances to impersonate a feudal lord, returns voluntarily to his former state. But it was not possible for a writer of Mokuami's stature and ability to retire completely. Theater owners and actors persuaded him to continue writing.

      Mokuami had been stung by the disparagement of the critics. He now wrote plays, characterized by historical accuracy, which were called "living history plays." They were so real they expired out of sheer dullness. Mokuami also wrote domestic plays with a contemporary background, but they were only superficially modern. The male characters wore their hair in the new western style, but in spirit they were similar to the characters in Mokuami's earlier plays. The theater-goers demanded plays with scenes laid in the nostalgic past. It is with these that Mokuami achieved his greatest successes in the Meiji period. Kikugorō V, an actor whose style owed much to Kodanji IV, appeared in many of these. It was for him that Mokuami wrote his last piece before suffering the stroke that paralyzed his left side and led to his death on February 22, 1893. His death poem read:

      In vain it has waited

       For the flowering spring:

       The old plum tree

       That withers from one branch.

      The Love of Izayoi and Seishin is a domestic play, or, more accurately, a sub-class in the domestic play. The three main classifications in kabuki drama are the history play, the domestic play, and the dance narrative. In the history play the characters are of the warrior class. The language is formal and the acting is stylized. In the domestic plays the characters are from the townsman class, mainly well-to-do merchants. Chikamatsu (1653—1725) originated this style for the puppet theater. The dialogue is in the vernacular and the acting is realistic. The subclass in the domestic play is the "raw" domestic play. This label derives from the fact that the plays are populated by characters from the lowest strata of the plebeian class. Namboku IV pioneered this style and Mokuami brought it to perfection. The Love of Izayoi and Seishin is typical of Mokuami's "raw" domestic plays. The plot revolves around a dishonored Buddhist monk turned thief, and a prostitute who casts her lot in with him.

      The play was first given in 1859. It had a different title and was performed in seven acts. One of the conventions in the kabuki by this time was that a play had to be in several acts which alternated in the history-play and domestic-play styles. The second, fourth, sixth, and seventh acts of this play were in the "raw" domestic play style and proved to be more popular than the history acts. It is these four acts which make up the play popularly known as The Love of Izayoi and Seishin. It is not, however, a completely self-contained play. Occasional references are made to events in the history scenes, and in the last act a character from the history section appears. (For the sake of clarity, brief synopses of the omitted acts are given on page 21.)

      The play had a great success, but because the two leading male characters were based on actual persons and insufficiently disguised, the censors demanded that deletions and revisions be made. A dissolute priest at the Kan'ei Temple in Ueno had suggested the character of Seishin to Mokuami. This priest, after numerous lapses in conduct, had turned thief and earned the name of Seikichi the Devil Priest. In 1806, at the age of twenty eight, he was arrested in Kyoto, brought back to Edo, tried, and decapitated. Hakuren, the other leading character in the play, was modeled after the thief who broke into the shogun's treasury in 1855 and made off with 4000 gold coins. Mokuami was inconsistent in his observance of the regulation against too close historical verisimilitude. He used the conventional aliases (which fooled nobody in the audience): Kamakura stood for Edo; the Inase River for the Sumida; the Hanamizu Bridge for the Eitai or Ryogoku; Minamoto Yoritomo (1147-1199), the founder of the Kamakura shogunate, for Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616); and Ōiso for the Yoshiwara. But Mokuami also mentions actual place names in Edo like Broad Avenue, which was near Ryogoku Bridge, and the Hundred Piles on the Sumida River. It was only after the fall of the Tokugawa government that this and other ordinances could safely be ignored and plays given as written.

      The play exemplifies many of Mokuami's characteristics and style and embodies the philosophy which underlies most of his "raw" domestic plays. The theme is retribution. A series of events carries the action forward and illustrates this theme; a man's circumstances and all his acts are governed by the Buddhist law of karma, or the law of cause and effect. Since every cause has an effect and every effect a cause, a man's reward or punishment in this world has a direct relation to his deeds here and in a previous existence. Every act in this world is therefore preordained. This theme is reiterated at intervals throughout the play. The initial robbery is justified by Seishin on the grounds that it was the victim's predestined misfortune to be at a particular place at a particular time, carrying a substantial sum of money. Seishin sees his own suicide at the end of the play as having been predetermined. This tenet in popular Buddhism was an important part of the mental baggage of the Edo townsman (as to some extent it still is of the modern Japanese), and was a valid theme for a play. The nature of this theme also explains what might be taken as lack of dramatic ingenuity, namely, the various coincidences which occur at crucial moments. (Seishin unknowingly is accessory to the death of his brother-in-law, and later unwittingly exposes his brother as a thief.) But these incidents are the dreadful tightening in the net of circumstances inexorably closing in on Seishin, and they are made more moving to Japanese audiences for their being beyond his control.

      Implicit in the play was the didactic thesis of "promoting good and chastising evil." This edifying idea had been siezed on by playwrights of the late seventeenth century to justify the existence of kabuki. At this time the theatre had become the target of the shogun's Confucian advisers, who looked upon the kabuki as being on a par with brothels as sources of immorality and extravagance. The dramatists had stilled criticism by promising to point up the moral that good always triumphed over evil. This was perhaps not so much the hindrance that it would seem to be at first glance. There was the other side of the coin: the most licentious scenes could be played and the most heinous crimes committed on stage so long as the criminals repented and paid for their deeds.

      Among such crimes in Mokuami's "raw" domestic plays was murder. Namboku's murder scenes are brutal and savage, but the horror in Mokuami's bloody scenes is greatly ameliorated by the poetic language employed and by the use of music and stylized, almost choreographic, movements. (In this play, Motome dies of a self-inflicted injury, but Seishin believes himself to be the boy's murderer; he also causes the death of Izayoi.) Another crime-extortion figured so frequently in late Tokugawa domestic plays that the term "extortion scene" came into existence. (In the present play, it occurs at the beginning of Act VI where Seishin and Izayoi blackmail her former protector. Their scheme is successful but it ends with an ironic twist of fate: their victim is exposed as a thief and it is his long-lost brother who does this.) And so many robbers figure in Mokuami's plays that he was known as "the thieves' playwright."

      Some remarks must be made about the language and stylistic devices used by Mokuami. In the scenes leading up to a climax the speeches are all in the vernacular. In the climactic scenes they are written in the consciously heightened form of poetry, and in classical Japanese this means the use of the basic pattern of alternating lines in five and seven syllables; the "pivot word," which runs together, with no hint of transition, two separate ideas; and "related words," which are words related to one another by class or quality and are woven into the text. An example of the pivot word is found in the opening line of the Kiyomoto

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