was announced that the great Kago, the dean of the most aristocratic of the hereditary No schools, was coming down to sing at the Nigitsu shrine. On the day before the performance there was an exhibition of the costumes, the fans, and the masks-in all, one of the most marvelous collections in the whole world. There were perhaps a hundred kimonos, each one a miracle of the weaver's and dyer's art; stiff brocades of faded rose and lemon yellow and fathomless blacks; stuffs in strange greens and incredible blues; silken fabrics in vivid scarlets heavy with dragons of gold: a tropical luxuriance of fadeless hues. Some of the kimonos had been executed by special order of Empresses now dead, wrought by secrets of the weaving craft now lost. One faded and frayed garment had been worn by the great Hideyoshi-that genius who had consolidated mediaval Japan. The fans were of lacquer and gold-leaf, and heavy with brilliant pigments of vermilion and emerald green and powdered gems. Over the masks bent engrossed little synods of horn spectacled lieorati, whose visions were trained to see wonders in the subtlety of modeling and vitality of line to which the uninitiated are blind. Some of these masks had been warmed by the faces of the greatest personages of Japanese history; some were Imperial treasures that all our Western wealth would be powerless to acquire. Devil masks in red and in black lacquer were there, and divinely reposeful whitened faces of Empresses and Buddhist angels, a smiling confidence in the voluptuous fullness of the mouth, but with all the mystery of death lurking in the inscrutable apertures of the eyes. It seems superfluous to say that, like the Greck tragedy, the Nō is always played in mask; and the fan is made infinite in its expressiveness, articulating by its pantomime now the flowing of water, now the furling of a sail, now the withering of flowers, now the passage of a bird overhead.

Next morning-a perfect June day-a little before ten there came the ringing of jinrikisha bells at my gate; it was Mr. Fujiwara and his family come to conduct me to the No. Mrs. Fujiwara in her somber crape kimono, her three smooth little boys upright with philosophic decorum and smiling at me from the wells of their huge black eyes, Mr. Fujiwara with a pile of librettos on his lap; this was the party. With the jolly ringing of the rikisha bells to warn the children who in multitudes had tumbled out into the mid

dle of the narrow streets, we crossed over Kyobashi, on under the two great stone tori, to the steps that lead up into the inclosure where the No theater lies.

A great canopy had been spread out from the stage to protect the audience from the sun, and around the spectators was drawn a huge strip of heavy bunting as a protection from gaping passers-by. Around the entrance idled many servants discoursing on international affairs. Just inside were rows on rows of ticketed clogs, for you must check your shoes before you enter. The play had started, and from within came the shrill call of flutes and the sharp beating of drums and the solemn chant of the actors.

We settled ourselves on the floor in our six-by-six square stall, and it took me some minutes to compose myself-with the five Fujiwaras in this small space. The stage

was a square room open on all sides but one, the side of the square being about eighteen feet. The stage was sheltered by a roof built somewhat in the Buddhist style. To the left a gallery about nine feet wide led off to the greenroom. In brilliant emerald green a severely conventionalized pine tree was painted on the beautifully dressed satinlike wood that formed a wall on the back of the stage, the only side not open to the air. The audience sat on three sides of the stage.

Our box was somewhat towards the back, directly in front of the stage; but the whole theater was a stage to me, and the audience was not less a part of the spectacle than the actors in their gorgeous brocades. Apparently the élite of Hiroshima had turned out in families to see the No. The men of each family sedately followed the text of the play in ancient-looking volumes. The children, comfortably tucked up like sleepy kittens, when not intent upon the devouring interests of their own small persons, studied the actors-and the strange, "outlandish "foreigner too with fixed eyes and preoccupied detachment. The wives and grandmothers, when not watching the play, sought what diversion they could, either in sipping tea, or smoking their miniature pipes, or exchanging confidences among themselves in smothered whispers. Squat little theater-maids glided silently among the boxes, furnishing little charcoal braziers and small trays of tea to all newcomers, and offering a variety of spiced rice wrapped in seaweed, and raw fish, and boiled bamboo shoots, and fried eels to whoever cared to eat. I had just settled myself

to study the actors when the first play came to an end.

In his staccato English-and under the smiling elaboration of his wife, a woman who had lived in the West-Mr. Fujiwara explained to me that between each No, to relieve the tension, is given a broad farce, a Kyogen, or "mad words." These Kyogen are very different from the Vo in that there is neither chorus nor dancing, and the dialogue is in the unadorned colloquial of the time. The Kyogen, it would seem, are slight enough, as a comic interlude should be. A well-to-do small landholder desires to indulge in philanthropy and sends out word that he will give

employment to the unfit. Three wags appear, the first pretending to be blind, the second halt, and the third dumb. These three are made retainers of the small landholder, who goes away, intrusting his belongings to this trio of rogues. In the absence of the master these three break into the wines, and, having imbibed freely, begin to dance and sing. The master returns unexpectedly, and the piece closes with his apoplectic rage. The audience roared with laughter at plays upon words that are utterly lost to a foreigner. and over bits of Oriental waggery that I failed to grasp.

The next piece was a No-" Aoinoueni ".

with Kago himself, a well-known actor, in the chief rôle. From a curious little square opening in the back of the stage emerged three men with strange small lacquer drums tied with vermilion tassels; these were followed by another man with a bamboo flute and a chorus of six others, all of whom squatted on the right side of the stage and for a space talked quietly among themselves.

There was a long plaintive minor note from the flute, and the audience grew immediately hushed. The square brocade before the greenroom raised itself like a door swung on magic hinges from above, and out along the gallery leading to the stage with slow processional glide moved the figure of a feudal lord. The chorus broke into a frenzy of curiously syncopated yelps, and the sharp, hard tap of the drums fell in complex rhythm. In deep Gregorian-like chant the actor declaimed to the chorus, who answered back in severely melodic litanies. Again the greenroom door swung quivering up, and in a kimono of more gorgeous fabric than any other I have ever seen, his face hidden behind a mask of the most poignant sorrow, and with incomparable deliberate refinement in every stately movement, Kago, the Lady Aoi, slid slowly along the gallery and out onto the stage. The chorus wailed in largo

monotones.

The mother of Lady Aoi is sick unto death, and with anguish too deep for tears she entreats her lord for leave to travel only this time to her home to see her mother's ashes to the grave. But her lord is stern. He takes her out into all the ravishment of spring, out among the wind-herded cherry petals, and with deepest sorrow he explains that even as the unsubstantial flowers, so transitory is mortal life, and grief even at one's mother's death is a thing silently to be borne and accepted unmoved, as all the other sorrows of this sad and fleeting world. There was no action, and, except for a geometrical cherry tree. wheeled out by an attendant in the middle of the piece, no scenery. I did not understand ten words during the forty minutes through which the performance lasted. Yet the miracle of the gorgeous costuming, the weird incantations of the chorus, the noble dignity of the slowly shifting postures of the actors, the rich, vibrant quality of Kago's voice, the strange, inhuman, baffling beauty of the masks-all of these combined to make this piece moving to the intensest degree. Kago is now an old man, and the constant

quiver of his hands worked only to heighten the impression of the grief-stricken despair of Lady Aoi.

The greenroom curtain rose; that greenroom curtain fell. No followed Kyogen, Kyogen followed Nō. Pale empresses and the spirits of murdered warriors, devils in hideous masks and with hair scarlet like the maples of November, ghosts of dead lovers, and fiend-haunted spiders, and monsters from the deep, came and went with all the mysterious inevitableness of a dream. And, with that disregard of realism so common in our phantom life, an arbor-like structure was wheeled in to represent a hut, a few rough laths did service for a ship, and sticks were placed across the stage to represent streams and mountains; now an attendant in the middle of the play would come forward to aid a dancer to emerge, chrysalis-like, from a somber surcoat into a butterfly robe, or else to hold a little black curtain between the audience and a supposed corpse while the latter removed itself. Warriors swayed and turned and tossed their sleeves and stamped occasionally on the hard floor, which gave out a hollow answer to the beating of the drums. Devils swirled in mad and grotesque contortions, the drums beat wildly, the chorus yelped in leaping frenzied crescendoes, the shrill flute shrieked above the clamor and the din.

The day had grown

It was three o'clock. hot, and a sleepy buzz was blown to us from the city that lay across the river beyond. I had been squatting in our cramped box for five hours-and the performance was not nearly at an end. My legs tingled in their numb stiffness and my eyes were heavy and tired. I struggled heroically with an irresistible desire cavernously to yawn.

"Do you know," whispered Mrs. Fujiwara to me, with a delicate whimsicality that eludes the printed word, "the first time that I heard grand opera in the West, it was in New York. I heard-Melba, is it?-in-I have forgot the name of the piece. But I was a silly girl, and whenever she sang I wanted to giggle. I knew, of course, that this would be disgracefully improper, so I sat as serious as a Buddha-and with such success that after the first hour I began to get dangerously sleepy. Come! If you are not tired, your first grandmother was the Sun Goddess. Let us go home and discuss if those poets are not provincial who say that music is a universal language."