Bandô Tamasaburô playing the geisha Inabaya Okô in an undated performance of Izumi Kyôka's Shinpa play Nihonbashi (Nihonbashi Bridge) at the Kabukiza. Ohkura Shunji further describes the psychology of the characters: "Katsuragi Shinzô is searching for his sister, who became someone's mistress in order to support his schooling [a typical feature of self-sacrificing Kyôka heroines] but has now disappeared. His yearning for her has caused him to become involved with a geisha who resembles her, Kiyoha. However, Kiyoha rejects him because she has herself become the mistress of a wealthy man for the sake of her own sister (now deceased) and has vowed to remain faithful to her patron. Enter, another geisha, Okô, who has the strange habit of loving men who have been abandoned by Kiyoha--Igarashi Dengo before and now Katsuragi Shinzô. The reason Okô does so is because she is in love with Kiyoha. She fantasizes Kiyoha as a gentle young man and herself as a vivacious young girl. For Okô, Katsuragi is a substitute for Kiyoha. When Katsuragi is told this by Igarashi, he breaks up with Okô. Abandoned by Katsuragi, Okô goes mad, because by this time she is genuinely in love with him. In Nihonbashi the characters are all doubled: Kiyoha and Okô, Katsuragi and Igarashi, the sister of Katsuragi and the sister of Kiyoha. Everyone's love is unrequited, because everyone is longing for the one person they can't have....In the final scene, Okô presses her cheek against the cheek of the apprentice geisha Ochise. She is enacting the fantasy that she is Katsuragi and Ochise is Kiyoha. Okô is a woman given to such fantasizing, and that strangeness is brought to life by Tamasaburô." (Ohkura Shunji, Onnagata, unpaginated, translation modified)

Source: Bando Tamasaburo: Onnagata, 1983