Abstract
The matter of authorship and literacy is used to set up this chapter which is primarily about plays written in the first half of the fifteenth century. After looking at what little is known about plays by other prominent performers, attention turns to the plays of the kind generally known as Zeami’s style. These are exemplified through representative works: five by Zeami and one by each of his pupils, Kanze Motomasa and Konparu Zenchiku. These are organized to show the basic structure of the plays in Zeami’s style and to trace how that structure developed into something more complex. Questions of audience reception at the time are discussed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Pinnington, “Early History,” 179–190.
- 2.
Reproduced in Omote Akira and Getsuyōkai, eds. Zeami Jihitsu nōhonshū.
- 3.
Sandō, ZZ, 143.
- 4.
Which can result in a circular reasoning, whereby a playwright becomes associated with a style, which then justifies attributions of other plays to him. A case of this might be the attributions commonly made to the actor Konparu Zenchiku.
- 5.
For example, Zeami recalls how as he got into costume for the play Tango Monogurui he had a sudden new idea about how to do it, and the new structure he performed then became the established version. Sarugaku Dangi, ZZ, 287.
- 6.
For the relationship between the diction of noh plays and renga digests, see Goff, Noh Drama and the Tale of Genji.
- 7.
Which might explain why there are no comments by diarists on the quality of plays, and why patronage invariably went to individual actors.
- 8.
Sarugaku Dangi, ZZ, 263.
- 9.
Sarugaku Dangi, ZZ, 264.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
This play is discussed in detail in Brown, Theatricalities of Power, 67–87, where he also translates several passages into English. For another translation, see Goff, Noh Drama and the Tale of Genji, 134–139.
- 12.
See Zeami’s remarks in Go on, ZZ, 206, translated in Chap. 4, in the section titled “Noh and the shoguns.”
- 13.
Sarugaku Dangi, ZZ, 263.
- 14.
See discussion in Yamanaka Reiko, “The Tale of Genji and the Development of Female-Spirit Nō,” in Haruo Shirane, ed., Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 81–100, 86–7.
- 15.
Zeami’s evaluations of Zōami are recorded in Sarugaku Dangi, ZZ, 262–263.
- 16.
See Shinkei’s memories of great artists of the Ōei era, in Hitorigoto in Hayashiya Tatsusaburō, ed., Kodai Chūsei Geijutsuron, NST vol. 23, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973), 474.
- 17.
See discussion in Yokomichi et al., Nō no Sakusha to Sakuhin</Emphasis>, 153–155 and Itō Kiyoshi, Ashikaga Yoshimochi, 195–217.
- 18.
Entries for Eikyō 4.3.14 and 15 in Kanmon Nikki taken here from NGK 1260. I have added the names of later plays thought to be the same and their traditionally supposed authors, for reference.
- 19.
This programme was discovered in 1999 by Yashima Sachiko and discussed by her in “Ōei Sanjūyonen Ennō Kiroku</Emphasis> ni tsuite,” Kanze, no. 8 (2000): 50–56. The list (50) contains the following play titles: Saohime, Soga Tora, Morihisa , Shūten Dōji</Emphasis>, Hotoke no Hara, Ebira no Ume, Shōjō</Emphasis></Emphasis>, Jinen Koji , Narihira, Tadanobu, Komachi Shōshō</Emphasis></Emphasis>, Utaura, Sakahoko , Matsuyama, Aya no Tsuzumi. For discussion, see Quinn, Developing Zeami, 31–33 and for identification of the plays and responses to the document, see Omote Akira, “Kanze ryū shi sankyū (sono jūni): Zeami shukke chokugo no Kanze za, Ōei sanjūyonen ennō kiroku o megutte,” Kanze, 10, (2000), 27–32 and Takemoto Mikio, “Zeami bannenki no nō to nōsakusha,” Nō to Kyō</Emphasis>gen</Emphasis>, 1/1, (April 2003), 123–37.
- 20.
See his remarks in the section “Noh and the shoguns,” earlier in this chapter. On the one hand, he appears there to be talking about his father’s singing style, but then he refers to Sandō, his work on writing plays. He claims that that work represents his father’s legacy, but the structures it recommends are quite different from those of Kan’ami’s plays.
- 21.
As is generally evident in records and also clear in Zeami’s early listing of the different troupes (in Fūshikaden, ZZ, 41).
- 22.
Donald Keene, Nō And Bunraku: Two Forms of Japanese Theatre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 19.
- 23.
See discussion of production changes in Chap. 6.
- 24.
ZZ, 133–144. Hare’s Zeami’s Style includes a close study of this work, and his Zeami, Performance Notes, provides a discussion and somewhat idiosyncratic translation (150–164). Shelley Fenno Quinn also provides an annotated translation in “How to Write a Noh Play: Sandō,” Monumenta Nipponica, 48:1, Spring 1992, 53–88. A plainer and perhaps easier-to-read translation of the work can be found in Rimer and Yamazaki, On the Art of Nō Drama, 148–162.
- 25.
Sandō, ZZ, 142.
- 26.
See Hare, Zeami’s Style, 65–7, for discussion.
- 27.
Zeami describes the first play type as jofū no nō sugata, glossed by Omote Akira in Zeami, Zenchiku as “the first noh in a day’s performance” (Sandō, ZZ, 137).
- 28.
The first type of play, featuring the elderly (rōtai, what Hare calls the “Aged Mode” and Quinn, the “old man”) was the traditional opening play, but Inuō in the previous generation had also introduced into noh a special dance of a heavenly female (tennyo no mai) (what Hare calls a “Heavenly Maiden”), which Zeami too adopted in his repertoire. Being thought auspicious, plays featuring this dance became popular opening pieces. For this reason, Zeami mentions “heavenly females” here, but the image of these roles is hardly that of an elderly woman, but rather of a beautiful maiden. See Takemoto Mikio, “Tennyomai no Kenkyū,” Nōgaku Kenkyū 4 (1978): 93–158.
- 29.
Derived from its use in the foundational Mahayana text: The Awakening of Faith (Daijō kishinron).
- 30.
Quinn, in her Developing Zeami, calls the three roles three “styles”: see, for example, 5.
- 31.
See Brown, Theatricalities of Power, 23.
- 32.
See also Karen Brazell ed., Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 29).
- 33.
Some Western scholars have chosen to treat these two further types of plays as “miscellaneous roles” (see for example, Quinn, Developing Zeami, 122). A reading of the passages in question should remove this misapprehension, for just like the preceding three types of plays, Zeami provides a standard arrangement of sections for these plays too. He then uses all five types to classify his list of exemplary plays. See Sandō, ZZ, 139–140 and 142.
- 34.
The plays in the list ascribed to Zeami (lit., “arranged by Zeami”) are (1) old person plays: Yawata (=current Yumi Yawata), Aioi (=current Takasago ), Yōrō, Oimatsu, Shiogama (=Tōru?), Aridōshi; (2) woman plays: Hakozaki (no longer performed), Unoha (no longer performed), Mekurauchi (unknown), Matsukaze Murasame (=Matsukaze), Hyakuman, Higaki no Onna; (3) warrior plays: Satsuma no Kami (= Tadanori ), Sanemori, Yorimasa, Kiyotsune, Atsumori ; (4) wandering performers: Kōya (=Kōya Monogurui), Ōsaka (=Ōsaka Monogurui, no longer performed); (5) People in demonic states: Koi no Omoni, Sano no Funabashi (=Funabashi), Taisanmoku (Taisanpukun).
- 35.
Itō Masayoshi, Yōkyokushū 2, 284. The quotation marks indicate the citation of a waka poem.
- 36.
Margaret H. Childs characterizes the combination as “the erotic potential of powerlessness.” See her “The Value of Vulnerability: Sexual Coercion and the Nature of Love in Japanese Court Literature,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58/4, (November 1999), 1059–1079.
- 37.
In plays where the secondary characters are doubled, or in a group (e.g., Kureha), they all see the same vision, which implies that it is not intended to be a personal fantasy.
- 38.
Itō Masayoshi, Yōkyokushū 3, 483–485. For an English-language investigation of the background to this play, and translation, see Royall Tyler ed. and trans., Japanese Nō Dramas, (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 183–192.
- 39.
This was expressed in terms of Confucian political theories. Similar constraints applied in renga too.
- 40.
Zeami may have been preceded by Seiami, who wrote the play Michimori , but otherwise he seems to have been the sole author of this group of warrior plays. Later warrior plays were different in character.
- 41.
Ichiko, Heike Monogatari vol. 2, 226–9. See also McCullough, trans., The Tale of the Heike, 313–4.
- 42.
Yukikurete konoshita kage o yado to seba hana ya koyoi no aruji naramashi. The blossoms represent poetic culture. The trees could be singular or plural; in the play he is considered to be referring to a particular tree.
- 43.
Ichiko, Heike Monogatari vol. 2, 232–6. See also McCullough, trans., The Tale of the Heike, 315–7. In reality, Kumagai became a priest on losing a claim to a plot of land.
- 44.
See Koyama Hiroshi, ed. Yōkyokushū 1 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1973), 223–236.
- 45.
Pinnington, “Early History,” 174–5.
- 46.
See Sarugaku Dangi, ZZ, 286–7 and Go on, ZZ, 206–231. For attributions to Zeami, see Yokomichi et al., Nō no Sakusha to Sakuhin, 178–9 and to Motomasa, ibid., 228–9.
- 47.
The way is often referred to as michi, or dō, found in such later compounds as “sadō,” the way of tea, or “jūdō,” the yielding way. For a study of the rapprochement of Buddhism and the arts, see Rajyashree Pandey, Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chômei (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998).
- 48.
For a more detailed analysis, see Noel Pinnington, “Buddhist Structures and Secular Themes in Zeami’s Narrative Style,” Journal of Religion in Japan, vol. 2 (2013), 195–221.
- 49.
As related in section 9 of Ise Monogatari. See translation in Helen Craig McCullough (trans.), Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 76.
- 50.
For Zenchiku’s life, see Pinnington, Traces in the Way, 48–62.
- 51.
For a study of Zenchiku’s plays, see Paul S. Atkins, Revealed identity: The Noh Plays of Komparu Zenchiku (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2006).
- 52.
See Donald H. Shively, “Buddhahood for the Nonsentient: A Theme in nō Plays,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20, no. 1/2 (1957): 135–61.
- 53.
Konishi Jin’ichi. “Nō no Keisei to Tenkai,” in Yokomichi Mario, Furukawa Hisashi, eds., Nō Meisaku Shū, Kyōgen Meisaku Shū (Koten Nihon Bungaku Zenshū 20) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1975), 370–382.
- 54.
Tyler, Japanese Nō Dramas, 193. See also Karen Brazell, “Unity of Image: An Aspect of the Art of Noh” In Judith Mitoma Susilo, ed., Japanese Tradition: Search and Research, 25–43. Los Angeles: University of California, Asian Performing Arts Summer Institute, 1981.
- 55.
As reflected in such studies as Quinn, Developing Zeami, and Raz, “The Actor and His Audience.”
- 56.
In the early twentieth century it was assumed that the style of performance in Zeami’s time was the same as that in the modern period, because of the ethos of strict methods of training which emphasized the reproduction of the teacher’s example. This ethos in fact probably did not become established until the seventeenth century, and even so, as is characteristic of oral traditions generally, likely allowed steady modification.
- 57.
Klein, 2013, “Nō as Political Allegory: The Case of Haku Rakuten.” In Elizabeth Oyler and Michael Watson, eds. Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō Plays of the Genpei War, Ithaca, New York: East Asia Program Cornell University, 2013, 399–442. See also Yip, Leo Shingchi, China Reinterpreted: Staging the Other in Muromachi Noh Theater, 131–150, for further contexts.
- 58.
Nishimura Satoshi, “Ōharano hanami to Ashikaga Yoshimasa,” in Ishikawa Tōru, Okami Kōdō, and Nishimura Satoshi, eds., Kamakura Muromachi bunbaku ronsan: Tokue Gensei taishoku kinen (Tokyo: Miyai shoten, 2002), 320–341.
- 59.
Susan Blakeley Klein, Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater (awaiting publication), Chap. 6.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pinnington, N.J. (2019). The Classic Noh Plays. In: A New History of Medieval Japanese Theatre. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06140-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06140-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-06139-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-06140-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)