Many of us will be aware of the Okuni statue that stands near Shijo Bridge. The statute shows her cross-dressed as a samurai, in acknowledgement of the plays she put on at the riverbank that became the starting point for kabuki. It’s well-known that she was a miko (shrine maiden) from Izumo, though not everyone will be aware of the details of her life. In a letter to his friend, the great Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain, Lafcadio Hearn disputes the harsh description of Okuni that Chamberlain gave in Things Japanese. Hearn here casts Okuni in a more sympathetic light as a poet as well as a dancer (Kizuki is a term locals used for Izumo.)

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The reference to O-Kuni seems to me extremely severe; for her story is very beautiful and touching. She was a miko in the Great Temple of Kizuki, and fell in love with a ronin named Nagoya Sanza, and she fled away with her lover to Kyōto. On the way, another ronin, who fell in love with her extraordinary beauty, was killed by Sanza. Always the face of the dead man haunted the girl. At Kyōto she supported her lover by dancing the Miko-kagura in the dry bed of the river Kamogawa. Then they went to Tōkyō (Yedo) and began to act. Sanza himself became a famous and successful actor. The two lived together until Sanza died. Then she came back to Kizuki. She was learned, and a great poet in the style called renga. After Sanza’s death she supported herself, or at least occupied herself, in teaching this poetic art. But she shaved off her hair and became a nun, and built the little Buddhist temple in Kizuki called Renga-ji, in which she lived, and taught her art. And the reason she built the temple was that she might pray for the soul of the ronin whom the sight of her beauty had ruined. The temple stood until thirty years ago. Nothing is now left of it but a broken statue of Jizō. Her family still live in Kizuki, and until the restoration the chief of the family was always entitled to a share of the profits of the Kizuki theatre, because his ancestress, the beautiful miko, had founded the art.”

(from The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn by Elizabeth Bisland)*

In Things Japanese, Chamberlain had written disparagingly of Kabuki as a vulgar and lower form of theatre compared to Noh. As can be seen it was hardly complimentary to Okuni:

It was in the sixteenth century that this class of theatre [Kabuki] took its rise. Oddly enough, though the founders of the Japanese stage were two women named O-Kuni and O-Tsu, men alone have been allowed to act at the chief theatres, the female parts being taken by males as in our own Shakespeare’s age, while at a few inferior theatres the roles are reversed and only women appear. It would seem that immorality was feared from the joint appearance of the two sexes, and in sooth the reputation of O-Kuni and her companions was far from spotless.

An asterisk attached to later editions says, ‘Mr Lafcadio Hearn writes to us to remonstrate on this reference to O-Kuni as needlessly severe, given her story which is, as he says, both picturesque and touching. It may be taken as typical of a whole class of Japanese love-tales.’ He then includes the whole of Hearn’s piece in the footnote, a mark of the respect with which he held his contemporary despite the latter’s relative lack of Japanese language ability. Indeed, the extent of Hearn’s research in this regard is truly remarkable.