Seiseiin Ihara, who has made exhaustive researches concerning O-Kuni, finds many conflicting statements in the old books, which were written without much care for accuracy regarding names and dates. _Kabuki Koto Hajime_, or Beginnings of Kabuki, says that Yoshiteru, one of the last Ashikaga Shoguns, summoned her to dance in his presence several times and praised her. But this is somewhat imaginary, since in such a case she would have appeared in Kyoto many years previous to 1596, in which year, most of the records agree, she began to practise the new art. _Kabuki Koto Hajime_ also says that Sansaburo was in the service of the Shogun Yoshiteru, as was O-Kuni, that they fell in love, were dismissed and became ronin, which is one of the many improbable tales related of the pair. Another book says O-Kuni went to Sado Island, following the report that gold had been discovered there. This is quite possible, but on the strength of this story some writers state that she was a native of Sado, which is certainly not true. Other writers are so mixed up in their dates, that they make out there was a wide gulf in years between O-Kuni and Sansaburo, and that it was impossible that he should have married a woman so much his senior, while others declare that it was O-Kuni’s daughter that Sansaburo married. In _Tokaido Meishoki_, or Noted Places of the Tokaido (the great highway between Kyoto and Yedo), O-Kuni is said to have married a Nō Kyogen actor, and there are other misleading and confusing stories. One of the most interesting of these is attributed to Lafcadio Hearn. He objected to the account of O-Kuni in _Things Japanese_ by Basil Hall Chamberlain, especially to that sentence where it is written that the reputation of O-Kuni and her companions was far from spotless. Hearn’s story is to the effect that O-Kuni was a priestess in the great temple of Kitsuki, and she fell in love with a swashbuckler, Nagoya Sansaburo, and fled to Kyoto with him. On the way her extraordinary beauty caused another soldier of fortune to make love to her; Sansaburo killed him, and the dead man’s face haunted the girl. She supported her lover by giving dances on the bank of the Kamo River, and he became a famous actor. When he died she returned to Kitsuki, becoming a nun, and built a temple that she might pray for the soul of the man who had been killed. Hearn’s love of the ghostly carried him very far away from the true facts, but nevertheless he felt the romance of the O-Kuni legend strongly enough not to wish to tarnish her name, as the more matter-of-fact Mr. Chamberlain does so lightly. It was long after O-Kuni’s day, when the second and third O-Kuni were carrying on her traditions, and this woman’s stage employed mixed players, that the laxity of morals set in. CHAPTER VIII ONNA KABUKI: THE WOMAN’S STAGE Companies headed by women were formed in imitation of the O-Kuni Kabuki.