JAPANESE NŌ DRAMAS

General Introduction

The Japanese nō theatre is one of the great achievements of civilization. No art is more sophisticated than this intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume, and language, nor does any uphold higher ideals. Nō plays, like those of other theatres, were written to be performed, but some can stand as literature beside any play ever put between the covers of a book. The aim of Japanese Nō Dramas is to demonstrate that this is so and to convey all that the printed page can convey of the beauty of nō.

Nō, which means ‘accomplishment’ or ‘perfected art’, is no doubt an expression of practical as well as aesthetic ambition. The actors and musicians of the early fifteenth century, when nō achieved its classic form, needed audiences and patronage. In those days, their theatre was known more often as sarugaku (a word that does not lend itself to useful translation), so that sarugaku no nō meant something like ‘sarugaku of the best sort’. Having been enshrined long ago as a cultural treasure, modern nō no longer needs to make any claims. But despite its present, rather esoteric reputation, at home as well as abroad, it was once simply the theatre of its time.

The choice of plays

Since the twenty-four nō plays in this collection were chosen for their literary interest, they are not a representative sampling of the whole modern repertoire, which includes well over two hundred works. Some plays in the repertoire make good theatre but unsatisfactory reading; others have only modest virtue of any kind; while a few – depending on one’s own tastes – are deplorable. For every masterpiece of the order of The Fulling Block, there are several unabashed melodramas; for every ‘warrior play’ of the quality of Tadanori, there are several martial thrillers. Some plays have lovely dances but only a slight text. In short, not all nō plays are worth translating for a wide audience. This selection represents only those that are.

 Seeing and reading

Although the introductions, notes, stage directions, etc. surrounding these translations acknowledge matters of performance, they treat the plays above all as literary texts. This approach is not self-evident. The best Japanese authorities on nō, especially before the Second World War, have held that since the plays exist only in performance, they cannot be considered literature in any sense, and this opinion remains influential. Japan has had no tradition of reading nō as literature. By now, some critics do write literary essays on various plays, but the approach is not yet fully developed. One champion of literary analysis (Tashiro Keiichirō) has cited foreign translations, and their reception as literature, in defence of his own work.

English speakers first met nō in books, thanks to Ezra Pound’s beautiful paraphrases made from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, or to the fine translations by Arthur Waley. Yeats’s interest in what he knew of nō sealed the literary reputation of nō in the English-speaking world. However, the many translations published since then have been made by translators increasingly familiar with nō not only as text but as theatre. In the last twenty years or so, many English-speaking students of nō, impressed by the difference between seeing and reading, have concerned themselves especially with performance. Some have in their turn adopted the position that nō exists only on the stage. Consequently, many recent translations are meant above all to guide the spectator or the drama student. Meanwhile, nō plays by now have been done by English-speaking actors in all sorts of styles, from modern dance with electronic music to faithful reproductions (in English or the original) of a Japanese performance. One can also find ‘fusion’ productions that combine nō techniques with Western ones.

Anyone interested in the plays in this book should of course see them performed, if possible. However, reading does have its place, for nō texts are so difficult to follow in performance, even for the Japanese, that they must be studied separately. Besides, some performances can be disappointing and some plays (like Komachi at Seki-dera) are rarely performed. In any case, nō can seldom be seen outside Japan’s major cities, let alone abroad. For most people, reading is the only way to approach nō at all.

For reasons like these, Japanese Nō Dramas provides a certain amount of technical information about the plays for those readers who need it,  but leaves many technical terms undefined. It would not help to give brief definitions of musical forms or dance types and patterns. These things must be not only seen and heard, but learned in practice.

 The Playwrights

The theatre now called nō began to reach its present form in the mid fourteenth century. It was then a provincial theatre, centred mainly in the Yamato region south of Kyoto. Four touring troupes were affiliated with Kōfuku-ji, a great temple in the old capital of Nara, in Yamato. Komparu Gonnokami (fl. mid 14th c), the original author of The Diver, was among the actor-playwrights of the Yamato troupes. Another was Kan’ami (1333–1384), who made key contributions to early nō. Among these was his use in plays of the kusemai, a song and dance  form that survives in the important kuse section of most nō plays. Another was simply that he fathered Zeami.

Zeami (1363–1443) was the genius who created classic nō. Nothing untouched by him or his influence survives from early nō, not even the plays written by his father. Certain extant plays used to be identified with Kan’ami, even though it was recognized that Zeami must have reworked them extensively. However, the most recent scholarship suggests that Kan’ami’s literary traces have all but vanished.

Zeami remembered his father’s acting talent with awe, as his writings show, and Kan’ami’s contemporaries appear to have been similarly impressed. In 1374, Kan’ami received the signal honour of being invited to perform nō for the first time before the shogun, die young Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), in Kyoto. Zeami, then a boy, also appeared on stage. Yoshimitsu instantly fell in love with him, removed him from his father’s care, and brought him up at his court. This son of a provincial actor was now the protégé of the most powerful man in Japan, and he received his education from the greatest men of letters of his time.

Zeami’s ability was equal to the challenge. Thanks to such patronage, he developed a theatre of beauty and grace (which were not always what country audiences called for), and could stage the most elevated works. He had a superb mind and great warmth of feeling, as this collection shows. Beside his many plays (no one can say for certain how many) he also wrote penetrating treatises on the arts of acting and playwriting. Like Shakespeare or Molière, Zeami was the master of his own troupe and an all-round man of the theatre.

Later in life, Zeami suffered severe reverses. After 1429, he and his eldest son, Motomasa (c. 1400–1432), were barred by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori (1394–1441) from the shogunal palace and from all the great performance occasions in the capital. In 1430, his second son gave up nō to become a monk, and in 1432 Motomasa died. (This book includes Motomasa’s most famous play, The Sumida River.) Then in 1434 Zeami was exiled, for reasons unknown, to the remote island of Sado. He returned to Kyoto only a few years before his death.

Despite Zeami’s pre-eminence in the history of nō, his only personal successor was his son-in-law, Komparu Zenchiku (1405–1468), the grandson of Komparu Gonnokami. Zenchiku was active not in Kyoto but in Nara, where the relatively small Komparu school of nō is based even today. Zeami thought highly of him. Few plays can be attributed to him on the basis of solid documentary evidence, but there is reason  to believe that The Kasuga Dragon God, The Wildwood Shrine, and Tatsuta are his. These show him to have been an excellent playwright. Zenchiku, like his father-in-law, left behind several critical writings.

The latest playwright represented here is Kanze Nobumitsu (1434– 1516), the author of Benkei Aboard Ship, although the latest play in the book is probably the anonymous The Feather Mantle. Nobumitsu was in the lineage of Zeami’s nephew, the actor On’ami (1398–1467) who, thanks to Ashikaga Yoshinori’s patronage and much against Zeami’s own will, continued the formal line of succession from Kan’ami. (The name Kanze is made up of the first syllables of Kan’ami’s and Zeami’s names.) He was a fine playwright, too, but by his time the style of nō had changed. Benkei Aboard Ship is more frankly dramatic, colourful theatre than the other plays in this book.

Some plays still in the modern repertoire were probably written in the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century, and at least one (Kusu no tsuyu) dates from the late nineteenth. However, many of the late works have little to do with those in this book, beyond the basic performance techniques that distinguish nō from other theatres. Hundreds, if not thousands of other plays exist outside the repertoire, including some by Zeami himself. Meanwhile, new ones are still being written for special occasions, and formally correct nō plays have even been written in English and other languages.

Dramatic Roles and their Language

All the roles in nō are performed by male actors. Women study nō singing or dancing and may perform whole plays as amateurs, but even now there are not many professional women actors. Most plays have at least one masked role, unless the face of a mature man – the actor – is suitable for that of the main character. Nō masks are often very beautiful, and a fine mask may be the very soul of a performance. The costumes of nō, too, are impressively lovely. Actors playing feminine roles do not ‘impersonate’ women in any obvious way, for acting in nō is on an entirely different plane from ordinary acting as the term is now understood. Gestures are restrained and miming highly abstract.

At the beginning of each play in this book, a list of ‘Persons in order of appearance’ gives the name or description of each person in  the play, together with the name of the mask, when one is used. Opposite the person’s name appears the name of the corresponding role-type, as defined by Japanese usage: waki, wakizure, shite (often subdivided into maeshite and nochijite), tsure, kokata, or ai. Modern Japanese editions of the plays all identify speakers by role-type rather than name, although some of the earliest nō manuscripts use names or descriptive words. The idea that role-type overrides the passing identity of a figure in a single play is characteristic of nō. Music, dance, and text are similarly built up of established ‘modules’. Consequently, although each performer (whether an actor or a musician) learns his part separately, nō performances are hardly rehearsed. All the parts fit together precisely, because of their modular structure.

The waki and wakizureIn most plays, the first person to appear is the waki (‘person on the side’ or ‘witness’). It is difficult to generalize about the waki’s identity or function, since these differ visibly from play to play. (In some later plays, the differences of function between all these role-types break down.) In principle, however, the waki watches, from the side, the display of the shite. The Monk in The Well-Cradle perfectly follows the theoretical model of a waki. Often, the waki is accompanied by companions or attendants who are called wakizure (‘companions to the waki’). These generally have little to say.

Waki and wakzure roles are performed by lineages of actors that are quite distinct from the shite lineages. Waki actors never perform shite roles. In theory, the reverse is true as well, but in fact, for various reasons, shite actors do sometimes perform as waki.

Waki figures speak in both verse and prose. Verse will be covered below, in connection with the language of the shite. As to prose, the waki’s self-introduction, at the start of the play, is a good example, and Benkei’s prose speeches, in Benkei Aboard Ship, illustrate the style at length. It is often weighty, with a high ratio of bulk to semantic content. In performance, these passages are impressive to listen to. The translator’s main difficulty is to make them sound suitably formal without allowing them to become unbearably stiff.

 The shite and tsureThe shite (‘actor’) is the centre of attention in any play that follows the classic form. The role may be subdivided into maeshite (‘shite in part one’) and nochijite (‘shite in part two’). It is the shite who is masked, and who sings and dances. Some plays have more than one, shite-like figure, and in these cases, one is the shite and the others, defined as subordinate, are called tsure (‘companion’). Tsure figures, too, can be masked, although they do not normally wear so fine a mask as the shite. Shite actors also perform tsure roles. Their major lineages are known as the five ‘schools’ of nō, discussed below. An amateur who studies nō singing (utai) and dancing (shimai) studies them as they apply to the shite roles.

Like the waki, the shite may speak either in prose or in verse, but verse dominates. Actually, the distinction between prose and verse, in most passages that involve the shite, is not nearly as clear as it is in English. There are several intermediate styles of sung prose or quasi-verse.

One of these intermediate styles is epic prose of the kind found in Heike monogatari. Another is the style used for passages that are, or that are meant to resemble, Japanese translations of Chinese poetry. In this book, passages of such language are laid out like verse, but against the left-hand margin of the text.

Most of the shite’s sung passages, in most plays, are in the metre of classical Japanese poetry: alternating five- and seven-syllable phrases. As a rule, the more intense the emotion, the more regular the metre. The waki sometimes sings similar verse or enters into sung verse dialogue with the shite.

The true poetry of nō can be extraordinarily dense and complex, even though its vocabulary is relatively restricted. The difference between the lyrical prose and the poetry of nō is roughly that between the poetry of Walt Whitman and that of Hart Crane, or between Charles Péguy and Stéphane Mallarmé. Cascades of images, telescoped into one another far beyond the limits of consecutive grammar, like double and triple exposures on film, and echoing each other in an inspired play of precise conventions, render the very concept of literal translation meaningless. The translator simply does his best (I speak of myself), sometimes not even understanding how it is that he grasps the heart of such poetry. Among these translations, Pining Wind probably comes the closest to conveying a glimpse of this kind of language.

Only one device of nō verse has been regularly attempted in these  translations, and especially in Pining Wind. This is the ‘pivot word’ (kakekotoba. A word, or even a part of a word, may mean one thing when taken with what precedes it and something else when taken with what follows. The meaning ‘pivots’ on that word. There also exist what one might call ‘pivot phrases’ or ‘pivot lines’ that go both with what precedes and what follows, although these, unlike the pivot word, do not involve a double meaning. A particularly common pivot word in these translations is ‘pine’ (‘pine tree’ and ‘to pine’), since this word corresponds precisely to the double meaning in Japanese. However, there are far more pivot words than this in the originals.

In these translations, passages originally in verse, regular or irregular, are centred on the page. Passages that look like verse but are aligned against a narrower left-hand margin are, as already explained, translated from one style or another of lyrical prose. The short passages of verse which are indented to the right of the median are poems or parts of poems quoted directly from earlier sources. A full poem makes five short lines.

The Chorus

To one side of the stage sits a chorus of about eight people. It has no identity of its own, even when it sings lines that do not clearly belong to any single figure on stage. Usually, it sings for the shite and occasionally, especially in part two of a play, for the waki. The language of chorus passages is lyrical, sung prose, or verse. Members of the chorus are all shite actors, sometimes senior ones. The chorus may have been less prominent than now in the early period of nō.

The kokataSome plays have roles for children (kokata.) These are always boys, and as a rule they are the sons of professional shite actors, in training to become professionals themselves. Kokata may have to remain silent and immobile for a long time, but when their turn comes to speak, they deliver their lines in ringing tones.

The aiMost plays include a role-type known as the ai. The word can perhaps be taken to mean, literally, ‘interlude’, since the ai’s major function is  usually to perform the interlude between parts one and two of the play. The principal purpose of this interlude is to fill in the interval while the shite actor changes costume and mask in preparation for part two. Most ai characters are local villagers.

Ai actors are not nō actors at all. Their main speciality is performing the comedies (kyōgen, ‘mad words’) that are traditionally done between nō plays. As a result, their bearing, dress, and language are quite different from those of either a shite or a waki. In the hierarchy of the nō world, the shite actor is supreme, but the waki has his own dignity. In comparison with either, the ai role is on a distinctly lower plane.

The sections of a nō play that involve the ai are not considered a part of the text proper. They are the province of the kyōgen actors, and in the past, printed nō texts omitted them entirely. Nowadays they are generally included in annotated editions, but in smaller type, and the stereotyped dialogue surrounding the ai’s major speeches may be left out. The full text of an interlude may compare in number of words with a major section of a nō play, but it goes by more quickly and is usually far less absorbing. Since print can exaggerate the ‘weight’ of an interlude, the size used for interludes here is smaller than that of the main text.

The language of the ai lacks the formality of the waki’s prose but is none the less ceremoniously verbose. Moreover, most ai speeches are delivered in an intentionally monotonous manner quite unlike the same actor’s delivery in a kyōgen play. A shite actor may scold an overly animated ai for upstaging him. A translation that conveyed the combined impact of the ai’s language and usual delivery would be unreadably dull. In these versions, the tone of the ai speeches follows the overall tone of the play. The colloquial tone adopted for the ai parts in Chikubu-shima, Benkei A board Ship, and The Mountain Crone is in keeping with the way these exceptionally lively passages are done in performance. In Benkei Aboard Ship, in particular, it is essential to convey a difference of weight and dignity between the waki, Benkei, and the ai, the Boatman.

Persons speaking for one another; inconsistencies of grammatical person

Japanese avoids specifying grammatical subject, verbs are invariant as to person or number, and nouns have no plural form. This may make the subject of a verb difficult to determine with certainty. Moreover, in  texts like these the very concept of ‘person’ may at times seem to be indistinct, or at least different from what one assumes to be normal in English. Sometimes the waki and shite seem to speak for one another, although inevitable choices of grammatical person obscure this phenomenon in English. In some Chorus passages, the reader or translator must decide from line to line who is really speaking. Finally, a speaker who seems to be in a first-person mode may suddenly shift to a third-person point of view in order to narrate his or her own actions. Various explanations of this phenomenon have been offered, but the best solution is simply to accept it.

ROYALL TYLER, educated partly in France, graduated from Harvard and obtained a doctorate in Japanese literature from Columbia University. After teaching in Canada, the United States and Norway, he moved to Australia and taught until retirement at the Australian National University. His other books include Japanese Tales (1987), French Folktales (1989), The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity (1990) and, also in Penguin Classics, The Tale of Genji (2001).