JAPAN: Murder in the Kabuki

Discriminating geisha girls came near to swooning over him. Austere drama critics agreed that no Kabuki actor had mastered his art more perfectly. A great lover, onstage and off, lithe, handsome, 64-year-old Nizaemon Kataoka was Japan’s Van Johnson, Alfred Lunt and John Barrymore rolled into one.

In the complex hierarchy of Japanese drama, the Kabuki (literally “type of theater”), originated by Folk Dancer O Kuni in 1603, comes closest to the western theater. Less formal than the classical Noh drama, its stages extend into the audience like burlesque runways. Actresses are rare in Kabuki, and Nizaemon was equally at home in both male and female parts. As the leading lady in Akoya he had to perform expertly on three difficult musical instruments. His interpretation of the murdered warrior in The Story of the Soga was second to none.

Nizaemon was in his 50s when Japan’s top actor chose him as leading lady. This honor earned him the right at last to use his family’s famous stage name. He was at the height of his fame a decade later when he took up with the shapely, silk-skinned movie standin, Toshiko, and made her his mistress. Nizaemon’s adoring public could bear up under that. But when the Great Lover married his hussy and began uxoriously washing diapers and doing kitchen chores to please her, his prestige began to wane. Only his relatives and most ardent disciples, paying their ritual calls on the 1st and 15th of each month, remained faithful.

Last week they came as usual to the paper-windowed bungalow in Tokyo’s Harajuku district, but no one answered their knocking. They peeked inside. There, in a blood-soaked pile of quilts and blankets, lay Nizaemon, his wife, his baby, an old housemaid, and an 11-year-old servant girl. Tossed into Nizaemon’s garden was an ax, sticky with gore.

Tokyo’s police began diligently searching for a suspect. Conspicuously missing with 600 yen of Nizaemon’s postal savings was the servant girl’s brother, a pale, stringy youth named Iida who served as the actor’s make-up man.

Four days later police found Iida. He was calmly reading a newspaper account of the murder in an out-of-the-way country inn. Sure, he admitted, he did the job: Nizaemon had refused to let him use his sister’s 15,000-yen inheritance. It had taken him, he said, only one stroke of the ax to kill Nizaemon, but rather more to cut off his wife’s head. He never had liked her; she had refused to give him more than his regular ration for supper.

In the paper-windowed bungalow in crowded Tokyo, Nizaemon’s mourning relatives were already squabbling among themselves. Who was to get the vacant house?