The Noh Plays of Japan Read online

  The Noh Plays

  of Japan

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 USA and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167

  © 1921 by Arthur Waley

  © 1976 personal reminiscence and poem, The Locked Cemetery by Alison Waley

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 75-28969

  ISBN 978-1-4629-0363-4 (ebook)

  First Edition, 1921, by Unwin, London

  First Tuttle edition, 1976

  Distributed by

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  Printed in Singapore

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  CONTENTS

  KEY TO PLANS ix, x

  PLANS ix, xi

  INTRODUCTION xvii-xxix

  NOTE ON BUDDHISM xxx-xxxii

  CHAPTER I

  ATSUMORI 2-11

  IKUTA 12-17

  TSUNEMASA 18-23

  CHAPTER II

  KUMASAKA 28-37

  EBOSHI-ORI 38-51

  BENKEI ON THE BRIDGE 52-57

  CHAPTER III

  KAGEKIYO 60-70

  HACHI NO KI 71-84

  SOTOBA KOMACHI 85-97

  CHAPTER IV

  UKAI 101-107

  AYA NO TSUZUMI 108-115

  AOI NO UYE 117-127

  CHAPTER V

  KANTAN 131-142

  THE HōKA PRIESTS 143-153

  HAGOROMO 155-164

  CHAPTER VI

  TANIKO 167-173

  IKENIYE 174-180

  HATSUYUKI 181-184

  HAKU RAKUTEN 185-193

  CHAPTER VII

  SUMMARIES 219-235

  CHAPTER VIII

  FARCE (KYOGEN) 238-242

  SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY 243-244

  APPENDICES 245-252

  To Dōami

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  YOUNG WOMAN'S MASK Frontispiece

  YOUNG MAN'S MASK 40

  DEMON MASK 128

  THE ANGEL IN HAGOROMO 154

  IZUTSU 196

  THE DEAGON LADY IN AMA 214

  YūYA READING THE LETTER 219

  YAMAUBA (THE LADY OF THE MOUNTAINS) 229

  KEY TO PLAN I

  THEATRE SET UP IN THE RIVER-BED AT KYOTO IN 1464; ONAMI'S TROUPE ACTED ON IT FOR THREE DAYS "WITH IMMENSE SUCCESS."

  A The Shōgun.

  B His attendants.

  C His litter.

  D His wife.

  E Her ladies.

  F Her litter.

  G Auditorium.

  H Stage.

  I Musicians.

  J Hashigakari.

  K Gakuya, served as actors' dressing-room and musicians' room.

  KEY TO PLAN II

  MODERN STAGE

  A

  The Stage.

  B

  The shite's Pillar.

  C

  Shite's seat, also called "Name-saying seat."

  D

  Metsuke-bashira, Pillar on which the actor fixes his eye.

  E

  Sumi, the corner.

  F

  Waki's Pillar, also called the Prime Minister's Pillar.

  G

  Waki's seat.

  H

  Waki's direction-point. (The point he faces when in his normalposition.)

  I

  Flute-player's Pillar.

  J

  Atoza, the Behind-space.

  K

  Kagami-ita, the back-wall with the pine-tree painted on it.

  L

  The musicians. (Represented by the four small circles.)

  M

  The stage-attendant's place. (A stage-hand in plain clothes who fetches and carries.)

  N

  Kirido, "Hurry-door," also called "Forgetting-door" and "Stomach-ache-door"; used by the chorus and occasionally by actors making a hurried exit. Vide Hōkazō, p. 205.

  O

  Chorus, the leader sits near P.

  P

  The Nobles' door (now seldom used).

  Q

  The Hashigakari.

  R

  The kyōgen's seat.

  S

  The three pine-branches.

  T

  Shirasu, a gravel-path.

  U

  Kizahashi, steps from stage to auditorium, formerly used by an actor summoned to speak with the Shōgun.

  V

  Actors' dressing-room.

  W

  Curtain between Q and V.

  X

  Dressing-room window.

  Y

  Musicians' room.

  For this new edition of Arthur Waley's The Noh Plays of Japan, the publishers are privileged to include some personal reminiscences and a very moving poem, The Locked Cemetery, by Alison Waley.

  In 1929 I came 12,000 miles to England: a student who burnt all letters of introduction, took a bare office room at its gates and lived her days in the British Museum. In those days heads were bent over books, eyes unseeing, the air charged like a dynamo with private, individual minds at work—Havelock Ellis, Axel Munthe, James Joyce, the little James Stephens, Monro of the Poetry Bookshop...all absorbed, each with his esoteric thinking...the air electric...almost audibly ticking.

  At "break" we sat on steps, fed pigeons with our crumbs and talked the world about and about.

  But there was one figure in the come and go; diffident, monosyllabic, evasive.

  I took the hand of my nameless, and constant, companion.

  "Shall I show you the three things that matter, to me, most?"

  "Yes."

  We stood before a framed painting in the small Korean Gallery. It depicted a gentleman of great dignity seated on the raised platform before his frail-seeming house while, at a long, low table, delicacies were being placed before him by his servitors. Was it a portrait? I wondered.

  "Do you know it?"

  "Yes."

  We stood before the glass case in the Egyptian Room where lay the mummified figure of a young girl—a girl of perhaps 12—an "UNKNOWN PERSON—30 B.C.": her frail hands, each finger braided with gold, lifted palm upward as though she were about to rise.

  "Is she not more alive than anyone, here, agape, in this Gallery? Than you, than me?"

  "Not, I think, than you."

  We stood before a display case behind the glass of which stood the darkened figurine of an ancient woman.

  "This," I am saying, "is my best thing. The most beautiful. Her name is Komachi."

  "When she was young," he murmurs, "she was more beautiful than Narihira..."

  I looked in surprise.

  "I don't know about Narihira. Only that she could never have been more beautiful than she is now, in age. This small image
haunts me."

  He came to my bare room, took from his pocket a book and began to read. I sat on the floor on my heels as was my habit.

  "Like a root-cut reed,

  Should the tide entice,

  would come, I think; but now

  No wave asks; no stream stirs.

  Long ago I was full of pride...

  I walked like a young willow delicately wafted

  By the winds of Spring."

  His voice runs on, scarcely lifting. And I am in trance.

  ". . . lovelier than the petals of the wild-rose open-stretched In the hour before its fall. But now...

  Westward with the moon I creep

  From the cloud-high City of the Hundred Towers...

  I too am a poor withered bough.

  But there are flowers at my heart...

  It is my body that lingers...

  The cup she held at the feast

  Like gentle moonlight dropped its glint on her sleeve.

  Oh how fell she from splendour,

  How came the white of winter

  To crown her head?"

  Tears moved slowly down my cheeks.

  He paused, his book still open on his knee.

  "I think you are the most sensitive person I have ever met," he said.

  I took it as reproof.

  "You should not read me things so beautiful..."

  It was six weeks before, by a curious accident of circumstance, I came to know his name—and read it on the cover of the book from which he read: The Noh Plays of Japan.

  THE LOCKED CEMETERY

  It is not by my wish

  I come no longer to visit you

  but that the world has found ways of self-deceit,

  defiles that which is beautiful

  and no longer gives honor to that which is great.

  The Sumac tree that hid the sky

  itself now is hidden by bush and sapling.

  The single stick which marked your grave,

  broken and hidden deep in grasses

  is now hard to find.

  The open space

  where, your pockets heavy with books,

  you read to me the wisdom of Chuang and Meng,

  now is tangled alike with rose and blackberry.

  The ways we walked are difficult to find,

  difficult to find and hard to follow.

  In their green tunnels, tightly roofed,

  no breeze enters,

  no sound stirs by day;

  by night, the fox only.

  The Iron Gates are chained and bolted

  that none, living or dead, may now enter.

  Yet are tombs prised,

  bones scattered.

  Of the marble monuments,

  here and there

  fragments are used to stop a drain.

  Names are defaced.

  That is why you have a number,

  despoiled only by weed and weather.

  Do not think it is by my choice

  that I loiter long in the world of men,

  nor doubt that I shall forget our words,

  not come at last to lie beside you:

  that, beneath nettle and fern,

  promises kept,

  bones mingled,

  we shall care little at last

  which way blows the wind.

  INTRODUCTION

  The theatre of the West is the last stronghold of realism. No one treats painting or music as mere transcripts of life. But even pioneers of stage-reform in France and Germany appear to regard the theatre as belonging to life and not to art. The play is an organized piece of human experience which the audience must as far as possible be allowed to share with the actors.

  A few people in America and Europe want to go in the opposite direction. They would like to see a theatre that aimed boldly at stylization and simplification, discarding entirely the pretentious lumber of 19th century stageland. That such a theatre exists and has long existed in Japan has been well-known here for some time. But hitherto very few plays have been translated in such a way as to give the Western reader an idea of their literary value. It is only through accurate scholarship that the "soul of Noh" can be known to the West. Given a truthful rendering of the texts the American reader will supply for himself their numerous connotations, a fact which Japanese writers do not always sufficiently realize. The Japanese method of expanding a five-line poem into a long treatise in order to make it intelligible to us is one which obliterates the structure of the original design. Where explanations are necessary they have been given in footnotes. I have not thought it necessary to point out (as a Japanese critic suggested that I ought to have done) that, for example, the "mood" of Komachi is different from the "mood" of Kumasaka. Such differences will be fully apparent to the American reader, who would not be the better off for knowing the technical name of each kurai or class of Noh. Surely the Japanese student of Shakespeare does not need to be told that the kurai of "Hamlet" is different from that of "Measure for Measure"?

  It would be possible to burden a book of this kind with as great a mass of unnecessary technicality as irritates us in a smart sale-catalogue of Japanese Prints. I have avoided such terms to a considerable extent, treating the plays as literature, not as some kind of Delphic mystery.

  In this short introduction I shall not have space to give a complete description of modern Noh, nor a full history of its origins. But the reader of the translations will find that he needs some information on these points. I have tried to supply it as concisely as possible, sometimes in a schematic rather than a literary form.

  These are some of the points about which an American reader may wish to know more:

  (1) THE NOH STAGE

  Something of its modern form may be seen from Plate II and from the plans on pp. x-xi. The actual stage (A) is about 18 feet square. On the boards of the back wall is painted a pine-tree; the other sides are open. A gallery (called hashigakari) leads to the green-room, from which it is separated by a curtain which is raised to admit the actor when he makes his entry. The audience sit either on two or three sides of the stage. The chorus, generally in two rows, sit (or rather squat) in the recess (0). The musicians sit in the recess (J) at the back of the stage, the stick-drum nearest the "gallery," then the two hand-drums and the flute. A railing runs round the musician's recess, as also along the gallery. To the latter railing are attached three real pine-branches, marked S in the plan. They will be seen in Plate II. The stage is covered by a roof of its own, imitating in form the roof of a Shinto temple.

  (2) THE PERFORMERS

  (a) The Actors

  The first actor who comes on to the stage (approaching from the gallery) is the waki or assistant. His primary business is to explain the circumstances under which the principal actor (called shite or "doer") came to dance the central dance of the play. Each of these main actors (waki and shite) has "adjuncts" or "companions."

  Some plays need only the two main actors. Others use as many as ten or even twelve. The female roles are of course taken by men. The waki is always a male role.

  (b)The Chorus

  This consists of from eight to twelve persons in ordinary native dress seated in two rows at the side of the stage. Their sole function is to sing an actor's words for him when his dance-movements prevent him from singing comfortably. They enter by a side-door before the play begins and remain seated till it is over.

  (c) The Musicians

  Nearest to the gallery sits the "big-drum," whose instrument rests on the ground and is played with a stick. This stick-drum is not used in all plays.

  Next comes a hand-drummer who plays with thimbled finger; next a second who plays with the bare hand.

  Finally, the flute. It intervenes only at stated intervals, particularly at the beginning, climax and end of plays.

  COSTUME

  Though almost wholly banishing other extrinsic aids, the Noh relies enormously for its effects on gorgeous and elaborate costume. Some references to th
is will be found in Oswald Sickert's letters at the end of my book.

  Masks are worn only by the shite (principal actor) and his subordinates.

  The shite always wears a mask if playing the part of a woman or very old man. Young men, particularly warriors, are usually unmasked. In child-parts (played by boy-actors) masks are not worn. The reproduction of a female mask will be found on Plate I. The masks are of wood. Many of those still in use are of great antiquity and rank as important specimens of Japanese sculpture.

  PROPERTIES

  The properties of the Noh stage are of a highly conventionalized kind. An open frame-work represents a boat; another differing little from it denotes a chariot. Palace, house, cottage, hovel are all represented by four posts covered with a roof. The fan which the actor usually carries often does duty as a knife, brush or the like. Weapons are more realistically represented. The shortsword, beltsword, pike, spear, and Chinese broad-sword are carried; also bows and arrows.

  DANCING AND ACTING

  Every Noh play (with, I think, the sole exception of Hachi no Ki, translated on p. 71) includes a mai or dance, consisting usually of slow steps and solemn gestures, often bearing little resemblance to what is in America associated with the word "dance." When the shite dances, his dance consists of five "movements" or parts; a "subordinate's" dance consists of three. Both in the actors' miming and in the dancing an important element is the stamping of beats with the shoeless foot.

  THE PLAYS

  The plays are written partly in prose, partly in verse. The prose portions serve much the same purpose as the iambics in a Greek play. They are in the Court or upper-class colloquial of the 14th century, a language not wholly dead today, as it is still the language in which people write formal letters.