Nagawa Tokusuke gave up the priesthood to become a playwright. He had been connected with a country temple, and went to Osaka to learn how to write. There were so few sakusha at this time, that the third Nakamura Utayemon invited him up to Yedo, and was so anxious to encourage him, hoping that he would prove to be a goose to lay golden eggs in the way of popular plays for the actors, that he bestowed upon Tokusuke the precious family pen-name of Issen, used by the first Utayemon when he signed his poetry. One of his plays was a failure, which disconcerted the actors to a considerable degree. He returned the literary _nom de plume_ with which his patron Utayemon had honoured him, and departed whence he had come. Thereafter he wrote pieces for side-shows, set up along the banks of rivers, on temporary sites in the compounds of shrines, or at cross-roads. At last he shaved his head and retired as the keeper of a tea-house in Kyoto, dying at 79. So the sakusha, like the yakusha, had their falls from favour, and their lives often ended in disappointment. The third Utayemon wrote his own plays, but did not have good luck in the sakusha whom he engaged to help him,—Nagawa Seisuke. He did his best with Nagawa’s poor compositions, but the latter possessed inferior ability. On one occasion the playwright became angry because his ideas had not been carried out properly, and he drew his sword to kill Utayemon, when he was stopped. Tsuruya Namboku stands out from among these unsatisfactory writers, and several of his plays are regular features of the modern stage. He was the son of a dyer in Yedo, wrote especially for the third Bando Hikosaburo, and was particularly successful in ghost plays. Onoe Matsusuke and Onoe Kikugoro, who were in their element when playing ghostly rôles, shone in Namboku’s compositions. The most familiar of his plays to modern audiences is _Yotsuya Kaidan_, or The Ghost of Yotsuya, the latter a certain quarter of Yedo that remains to-day one of the thriving centres of Tokyo. Namboku was a genius in the invention of stage apparatus to make his supernatural characters more gruesome, and _Yotsuya Kaidan_ is an example of his skill in overcoming mechanical difficulties. He caused O-Iwa, the weird heroine of this play, to make her entrance upon the scene through a large lighted lantern, and disappear through the solid wall, etc. Once he pasted black paper all over the stage to fashion the body of a whale, and a Jonah-like actor stepped out of it carrying a crown. The audiences of his time were quite carried away by the boldness of his ideas, and his works have a lasting quality, for their power to make the flesh creep is undiminished.