As if to console me on the evening of this departure, the kindly Kindayu family invited all their guests to a performance given by three local geisha in the principal room of the hotel. The chief musician was a masculine-looking woman of fifty, who thrummed a _kokyu_, or three-stringed fiddle, and broke in on the recitative of her young companions at unexpected moments with peculiar growls and sharp cries as of an animal in agony. When the narrative of the soloist took a tragic turn, these inhuman noises were so distressing that, without following the story, I experienced acute pain, while my neighbours of the more sympathetic sex were actually in tears. Had my musical education been more advanced, I should have realised that these were no singers of light Dodoitsu, but exponents of a far loftier type of entertainment, the _Gedayu_ or musical drama. It originated in the middle of the seventeenth century, and is sometimes called _Jōruri_ after a heroine of that name, whose tragic love for Yoshitsune is a favourite theme of composers. In fact, the geisha on this occasion were usurping the _rôle_ of _Jōruri-katari_ or dramatic reciters, whose chanted recitative formed the nucleus, first, of the marionette theatre, and, later, of the popular theatre, when dialogue and scenic art were superadded. In the absence of either human or wooden dolls, a most lugubrious effect was produced. At last, to my relief, a male performer, a _pince-sans-rire_, whose dry humour and staccato diction stamped him of the tribe of Grossmith, transformed the audience from weeping Niobes to effigies of mirth. In vain the polite little ladies tried to smother their smiles behind their raised _kimono_ sleeves: as the song proceeded they were vanquished by fits of laughter, and shook helplessly on their cushions. I possessed but one cue to this infectious merriment in the constantly recurring word _emma_, which on the lips of Mr. Dan Leno would have assuredly referred to his wife or his mother-in-law, those patient butts of music-hall humour, but which would only mean for Japanese ears the Buddhist Rhadamanthus, who pronounces sentence on all who enter hell. Considerably mystified, I turned to Tanaka Okusama, another visitor from Ashikaga, and inquired if “the honourable singer were really singing about hell-things.” He was. The song was an amusing but irreverent pastiche of social satire. It described the arrival in Hades of the bad judge, the cheating merchant, the false singing-girl; their confession and appropriate punishment. Again I missed the marionettes, for their presence would have recalled an exactly similar treatment of the same theme in a Montmartre puppet-show. And I remembered how the Parisian populace joined delightedly in the cry of “A la chaudière!” as the mimic devil chased lawyer and cocotte into a Punch-and-Judy Inferno. It was the mystery play of the Middle Ages, surviving as a crude comedy for the ignorant poor--a rough travesty of the theology in which their more instructed superiors still affect to believe.