Still another play of the people is that of Sakura Sogoro. He was the headman of a village not far from Tokyo. The people were oppressed by the feudal lord, and groaned under the taxes imposed until famine and destitution stared them in the face. Sogoro decides to go to Yedo to present a petition to the Shogun, knowing that his life will be forfeit for this act of insubordination. When he returns, his wife and four sons are executed at the command of the daimyo. He bids good-bye to his wife on a snowy evening, and tries to induce her to accept a divorce, and so escape the punishment that is bound to overtake the family. But this she refuses to do, preferring to share his fate. Sogoro trudging through the snow-drifts, with his eldest son clinging to him, and his wife and little ones looking forth from the open shoji, is a typical Kabuki farewell scene. He knocks at the rude hut, where an old watchman is trying to sleep beside a few embers of charcoal, and guarding the boat that is chained to a stake just below on the marshy lagoon—or blue and white cotton cloth which represents the historical watercourse that bore Sogoro away on his desperate mission. Sogoro is recognised with joy by the watchman, who tries his best to dissuade him from going, but at last agrees to row him on his way, and breaks the chain, thus defying the law of the daimyo. The direct appeal is made when the Shogun, after a hawking expedition, stops to rest at the shrine sacred to his ancestors in what is now known as Uyeno Park (Tokyo). The retinue is passing over a bridge connecting two red-lacquered buildings. Sogoro throws his petition, which a sympathetic follower of the Shogun secretes in his sleeve, and the procession passes on, leaving Sogoro bound, a martyr to the cause of the suffering country people. Whenever this play is produced in Tokyo, the actors taking part repair to the district of Sakura where Sogoro lived and pay their respects to his shrine, likewise a little shrine is erected within the theatre where offerings of sake, fruit, and vegetables are made before the spirit of the man who died that the wrongs of the people might be righted. [Illustration: Nakamura Kichiyemon as Sakura Sogoro, the Village Head who sacrificed his life for the good of the people.] VII Love tragedies were in high favour, as may be seen by the number of plays produced that have for motive shinju, or the double suicide of unfortunate lovers who hope by departing this life to obliterate their sins and omissions and to be united in the after-world. Invariably the settings of these romances were the immoral quarters. Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote several pieces of this character, and they were so popular that they had a great deal to do with the encouragement of young people to become partners in the shuffling-off of this mortal coil.