For all its stiffness and its rigour, its archaic make-believes, its unnatural realities, there is an intensity and a thrill in it as of a living thing that matters. The strange music of the tambourine-like instruments, the thin wailing of the bamboo flute, the beating of the one small drum, shaped like an hour-glass with three supporting pillars, breaks in again and again upon the intoned speech of the actors with its repeated irregular cadences in notes outside of speech. And the long-robed figures, masked and rigid, stalk slowly across the stage; and the chant of the chorus, as in the plays of Greece, explains, comments, describes the action. It is the story of the fisherman who found an angel’s robe of feathers on a tree, and would not give it back though the angel begged and begged. Without it she cannot reach her home in the blue of the heavens above, and for a heavenly spirit to stay for long on earth means death. Already the chorus is chanting her dirge when the fisherman, seeing her beauty fading and her life ebbing fast, relents. He will give back the robe if she will dance for him. She promises, but implores first her robe that the dance may be more perfect. The fisherman fears she will deceive him and fly back to heaven at once. But the spirit turns upon him. “Fie on thee, fisherman,” she cries, “deception was born of man; the high heavens know not of it.” And, touched, he gives back the robe. She dances, while the chorus sings the beauties of the landscape, of Japan. How “Heaven has its joys, but there is beauty here, Here Where the moon in bright unclouded glory Shines on Kigomi’s lea. And where on Fujiyama’s summit hoary The snows look on the sea.” Even the angel would stay awhile in a land so beautiful. “Blow, blow ye winds that the white cloud-belt driven Around my path may bar my homeward way, Not yet would I return to Heaven.” And still the angel dances, and the vision of Heaven descends upon earth. She sings, “And from the cloudy spheres, Chiming in unison the angels’ lutes, Tabrets and cymbals, and sweet silv’ry flutes Ring through the heav’n that glows with purple hues.” Then the voices fall away. And to the strange, tuneless music, whose notes are not our notes, the spirit dances on, round and round in gliding circles, with the slow, smooth movements of the sacred _Kagura_. “Fragrant and fair--too fair for mortal eyes.” The chorus sings again. And gliding round and round in circles ever smoother, ever slower, the spirit passes from the platform and up the vague passage-way that leads to the green-room beyond. The fisherman starts. The play is ended. In long, stiff strides, so slow, so slow, that an appreciable space of time seems set around the movement of each muscle, the actor goes across the stage, up the vague passage-way, into the room beyond.