Koinyōbō Somewake Tazuna
or
The Loved Wife’s Parti-Colored Leading-Rope
and the Final Piece Played in the Same Production
Yoshitsune Senbon-Zakura
or
Yoshitsune of the Thousand Cherry-Trees
Kawarasaki-za, Fifth Month of 1794
Numbers 13 to 22a
Outline of the Plot
Loyalty is the chief motive of the Japanese stage and in a large proportion of the Kabuki plays the dramatic conflict is between devotion to a feudal lord and that more personal devotion which centers upon wife or child or mistress. The women in these plays are bound by loyalty as the men are, and when a man wrecks himself for that virtue the women go uncomplainingly down the road of sorrow with him.
Nearly a hundred years before the time of Sharaku the distinguished dramatist Chikamatsu had written the story of Yosaku and Shigenoi for the puppet stage. It became very popular, and was adopted into the Kabuki repertory—as usual with changes.
The early versions are comparatively simple. The husband and wife, Yosaku and Shigenoi, love one another, and Yosaku, who had been reduced to earning his living as a driver of pack-horses, symbolized the intertwining of his life with that of Shigenoi by using a leading-rope of different colored strands inextricably intertwined. The dramatic conflict centered around the character of Shigenoi, who was torn between personal devotion to her husband and her own son on the one hand, and, on
74
