VII Playwrights of Meiji and Taisho Kawataki Mokuami was not only the representative playwright of Meiji, he was the last of the Kabuki sakusha. After him theatre conditions changed rapidly, the good relations between sakusha and yakusha that had so long endured were destroyed, and peace and harmony between them have not yet been restored. To such an extent does the modern stage owe allegiance to Mokuami that there is hardly a month that does not see a production of one of his plays in Tokyo, and as he wrote some three hundred plays, there seems no danger that the supply will run out for some time to come. He was essentially a Yedoko, for he came of five generations of a Yedo family which lived in Nihonbashi, the centre of the metropolis, and the headquarters of the national domestic trade. His plays show wide familiarity with the lower and middle classes of Yedo, and are a mirror of his times. He was a precocious youth, and early started to indulge in dissipation. As he seemed disinclined to stop his irregular life, his father disinherited him—a younger brother succeeding as head of the family. Mokuami had little education, and began to associate early with the people of shibai, becoming an apprentice to drama at the age of 20, and dying in the middle of the Meiji period at 78. When the seventh Danjuro returned to Yedo after his long exile, Mokuami wrote the piece played by this member of the Ichikawa family as a sign of his thankfulness that he had been able to return to the Yedo stage. For Danjuro, the ninth, Mokuami also wrote some of his best plays. He saw Yedo change to Tokyo; composed realistic Yedo plays for Kodanji, who was active in the early years of Meiji; and in his old age collaborated with Fukuchi in the writing of _Botan Doro_, or The Peony Lantern, one of Kabuki’s best ghost plays. So repeatedly did Mokuami choose highwaymen and thieves for the characters of his plays that he was sometimes called the dorobo, or robber, playwright. He was also fond of priests, and the scenes of his plays pass from robbers’ dens, reminiscent of Oliver Twist, to temples and lonely graveyards. Through the whole series runs the contrast between the richly clad priest and the sinister robber. The night side of Tokyo life was often his theme, but frequently he portrayed the lower classes in their struggle against injustice and oppression. His zampatsumono, or cropped-hair plays, are a study of the disordered times when the impact of the West upon Japan caused the two swords as well as the queue to be discarded, and show the comic as well as tragic side of life in this transitional period.