As you cannot understand what they say, you notice more particularly how they say it. At first their elocution will seem both painful and artificial: the tones are too shrill or too gruff, equally removed from the diapason of natural speech. But that is because the traditional _samisen_, a three-stringed guitar, follows the performer like a curse from start to finish. Unless he pitched his voice above or below its notes, he could not be heard. Even so, the author complains that his words receive inadequate attention from either player or playgoer, for the former relies chiefly on pose and facial expression to score his points, while the latter obediently admires the methods of acting to which he has always been accustomed. It cannot be denied that these methods are effective. I have seen the feminine part of the audience infected with such violent emotion by the agonised play of mobile features as to rush for relief to the “Tear-Room,” where they can cry to heart’s content without inconveniencing more stoical neighbours.
Though the actor’s tone is disagreeably unnatural, his articulation is both clean-cut and sonorous. The syllables crack on the ear like pistol-shots, sharply distinct. I imagine that he is seldom inaudible. It is a great pity that convention, if not law, still forbids the appearance of men and women on the same stage, since the mimicry of one sex by the other, triumphantly deceptive in other particulars, breaks down at the point of vocal imitation. The eye is tricked, but not the ear. Yet peculiar attention is given to the training and discipline of _onnagata_, or impersonators of female parts. Formerly they were not only given the outward semblance of women by every contrivance which the costumier and coiffeur could supply, but were required to spend their lives from childhood in feminine costume and society, that their masculine proclivities might be as far as possible obliterated. Even now their names stand first on the programme, their dressing-rooms are locked on the inside, their influence is paramount in the Actors’ Guild. The supremacy of Mr. Danjuro is due in no small degree to his ability to play both male and female characters with equal _éclat_. Notwithstanding every precaution and privilege, the actor cannot acquire the intonation of an actress. His reedy falsetto is a poor parody of the musical tones in which Japanese women converse, and the loss to a public which has never been caressed by Sara Bernhardt’s golden voice or thrilled by Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s may be sympathetically imagined. But, though Tōkyō has no actresses, the Women’s Theatre in Kyōto, in which are no actors, might seem a partial set-off to this deficiency. In fact, however, though the women are extremely clever in simulating the gait and gestures of men--if I had not been taken behind the scenes, I should have believed myself in the wrong theatre--they are hopelessly handicapped by physical weakness. The stage is so enormous, and the performance so long, that an artist may reckon on walking ten miles in the course of the day, while the voice is severely taxed by the prolonged stridency of declamation.