The transaction over between O-Tsuya and Tomozo, the ghosts make their way towards Shinsaburo’s house, but they cannot enter unless the Buddhist charm above the doorway is removed. This Tomozo accomplishes, and immediately as the two weird shapes vanish, a peony lantern is seen to rise mysteriously from mid-stage and without the aid of hands, sail through the air and enter an open space over the door. Shinsaburo is now left to the mercy of the ghosts, who claim him as their own and take him away from the land of the living. There is a superstition concerning The Peony Lantern to the effect that actors who play the ghosts’ rôles soon pass away. This was brought home when the play was presented at the Imperial Theatre in August 1919. During the performances two of the most promising young actors of Tokyo, taking the rôles of mistress and maid, took ill and died within a week of each other. Nightly they had been seen, pale-faced, the hair worn long and dishevelled, the maid with the ghostly lantern in hand, moving behind the willow tree. Soon they were to become like the shades they impersonated, no longer of the earth, earthy. V The frequency with which heads—the variety that Salome bore on a charger when she danced before King Herod—enter into Kabuki plays would seem to bear out the pronouncement made by the late William Archer that the Japanese drama was “barbaric and insensate”. This was the impression made upon a Western critic on first contact with Kabuki during a brief visit to Japan. Considering, however, the wide range of Kabuki plays, this sweeping statement revealed but half-knowledge. Even as the unnatural crimes in Shakespeare’s plays pleased the Elizabethans, so the playwrights of Old Japan provided strong fare for their feudal audiences. Unless the abstract motive of loyalty is recognised, the significance of a head symbol as a stage accessory is lost. One of the best of many such loyalty pieces is Omi Genji, by Chikamatsu Hanji and Miyoshi Shoraku. Two brothers, Moritsuna and Takatsuna, descendants of the Genji clan, live near the lake of Omi. They are on different sides, one for the Shogun, the other a rebel. Moritsuna holds his brother’s son, Koshiro, as a hostage and tells his venerable mother to instruct the lad to commit harakiri that Takatsuna may be influenced to take an honourable course of action.