Buddhist Structures and Secular Themes in Zeami’s Narrative Style

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/22118349-12341258

Journal of Religion in Japan 2 (2013) 195-221 brill.com/jrj

Buddhist Structures and Secular Themes in Zeami’s Narrative Style

Noel J. PinningtonUniversity of Arizona, Tucson, USA

[email protected]

AbstractThis study is a contribution to the question of the Buddhist character of medieval Nō drama. Previous studies have analyzed references to Buddhism or expressions of Buddhist practices in Nō plays. This study, however, focuses on the discourse through which plays tell their stories. It asks how the stereotypical structure for plays established by Zeami enabled the expression of voices conceived of within a Buddhist world-view. First, techniques used in some early plays to describe Buddhist ideas are considered. Next, the structural conventions developed by Zeami to portray similar subjects are investigated. It is shown how, in plays in which ghosts appear to Buddhist priests (mugen nō), Zeami’s system was well suited to expressing the contrast between the minds of beings on the Buddhist path and those trapped in delusion. Finally, three plays are explored which used these same conventions to repre-sent more complex characters. These can be understood as exhibiting the adequacy of the Buddhist world-view to the expression of wider themes. The last play considered, which describes an elderly poetess, is the most successful. In it, Zeami’s conventions produce both a recognizable portrait of an old woman, whilst at the same time exposing analogies between her predicament and that of deluded ghosts.

KeywordsBuddhism, Nō, Kyōgen Kigo, Zeami, Buddhist confession, poetics

Introduction

Several scholars have written about Buddhism and the Nō play, to the point that it may seem that little remains to be said. From Waley’s distinction between the Amidist content of Nō and the “Zen-tinged” language of its theory, to Royall Tyler’s detailed analysis of religious elements found in the plays, the subject would seem to have been exhaustively covered (Waley 1921: 31-33; Tyler 1987: 19-52). However, most such studies are based on a

196 N. J. Pinnington / Journal of Religion in Japan 2 (2013) 195-221

consideration of explicit references in Nō plays to Buddhist terms, individ-uals and practices. One wonders whether there can be a different kind of presence of Buddhism in Nō, that is, in the way Nō tells its stories or presents its personages, in its formal and narrative structures. The relation between form and content in literary arts is notoriously difficult, but it must be com-mon among those familiar with Nō to find themselves reflecting that its structure and conventions seem to imbue any topic with Buddhist ideas. This is particularly true of the fukushiki mugen 複式夢幻 (two-part phan-tasm) style of play, commonly used in the portrayal of ghosts. For example, if we were to imagine a Nō play about Elvis Presley, we might think of him appearing as an overweight old man with a curling lip in the first parts of the play and being eventually reconstituted as a slim American youth in a later section, singing and re-enacting his early performance style after which he would fade out regretting the loss of his former charm. This would, of course, be a Buddhist narrative, illustrating basic elements of the Bud-dhist world-view—attachment leads to suffering, identity is unstable, all conditions are transient.

Not all Nō plays, however, represent deluded ghosts; indeed Nō is remark-able for the variety of beings that it features. Some roles have pronounced Buddhist associations, for example monks—“professional” Buddhists, or otherworldly beings like demons who emerge from the rokudō 六道 (the six realms) and present their predicaments in Buddhist terms. But there are many plays in which beings appear who are represented in ways that have no particular Buddhist connotations, for example, plays about dancing girls, weaving spirits, elderly women, or benevolent kami 神.

Despite the variety of roles, the Nō plays associated with Zeami1 and his pupils, show them to the audience through a set of formal verbal patterns associated with predictable content and in a fairly predictable order. The precise structure may differ at various points, but the audience generally knows what kind of person will come on and when, and what songs are likely to occur and in what sequence. For example, at the opening of a play,

1 Zeami Motokiyo 世阿弥元清 (1363-1443) was an actor, playwright and theorist who is generally considered to have brought the Nō play to its finest form. Among his pupils in the next generation his sons, Motomasa 元雅 and Motoyoshi 元能, and his son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku 金春禅竹, wrote plays reflecting his ideals, and in later generations, Zenchiku’s grandson, Zenpō 禅鳳, to some degree continued the tradition.

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one knows that the first actor to come on will represent an adult male, be unmasked and will not dance, and one can expect him to identify himself in one particular song (nanori 名ノリ, or “name telling”), and to then sing a song of his arriving (tsuki zerifu 着キゼリフ, or “words of arrival”) at the par-ticular location that is the setting for the play. Such modular patterns as these, made up from particular song types and associated conventional contents, are strung together throughout the plays, and were referred to in Zeami’s writings as if they were commonly known and accepted by his readers, other actors. They constituted an almost formulaic framework and palette of means by which playwrights could generate plays to represent numerous persons and stories.

The origins of this set of patterns, and the overall structure of their arrangement, so characteristic of the plays of Zeami and some of his pupils that it might be referred to as “Zeami’s style,” are unclear.2 They are not found in earlier plays, for example, those by Zeami’s father, Kannami 観阿弥, which are much freer in form. The precise character of earlier plays is dif-ficult to assess, for actors up to Zeami’s time normally altered received works. However, particularly in the case of Kannami’s surviving plays, the basic style and structure is quite different from Zeami’s. What evidence we have of even earlier plays indicates that they were even more formally free. The new framework must have developed sometime between Kannami’s and Zeami’s generation, and indeed is generally ascribed to Zeami’s own creative refinement of his father’s tradition (although it seems likely that the connoisseurs in the orbit of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 足利義満 contributed to the process). It may be that Zeami started with a structure common among congratulatory plays, featuring deities that appear on the stage to bless the world, and then developed the structure further when he was composing plays about the ghosts of Heike warriors. This theory would explain the fact that the structure is particularly well designed to por-tray the predicaments of the dead and the fact that the Heike monogatari 平家物語 (The Tale of the Heike) itself is so imbued with a Buddhist outlook explains its potential for expressing fundamental Buddhist conceptions.

This good fit between the formal conventions of Zeami’s style and the portrayal of a Buddhist viewpoint needs to be shown, but once it is, the

2 Borrowing the term “Zeami’s style” from the title of Thomas Hare’s study of the applica-tion of the plan in question (Hare 1986).


question arises whether there are any consequences for plays written in the same style that do not highlight specifically Buddhist questions, or that fea-ture living beings facing secular predicaments. How did Zeami and others modify those conventional structures to portray those neither suffering delusion nor seeking spiritual salvation, or those perhaps partly doing both at once? Do any of the narrative expectations of plays about the dead leak out into the fabric of other plays? Plays were always performed in groups in a day’s program. Did their structural similarity result in analogies being per-ceived between the several types of plays, and was this in some way able to unite the worlds of Nō under one over-arching Buddhist world-view?

Before exploring such questions here, some earlier plays will be briefly looked at to see the kinds of techniques that were used in them to express Buddhist perspectives. In particular, Kannami seems to have had an unu-sual interest in addressing religious questions in his plays. It will be seen that he developed a particularly poetic style of voice in his plays to express higher Buddhist insight which he set in contrast to the prosaic utterances of other roles, whose grasp of life was more superficial. Work by another playwright from before Zeami’s time, Enami Saemon Gorō 榎並左衛門五郎, will also be looked at for the techniques used to portray the consciousness of the dead trapped in hell, understood in terms of Buddhist conceptions.

In a second section, the discussion will turn to a classic play by Zeami, also describing the predicament of a deluded ghost, and will show how the new formal conventions, which we are calling here “Zeami’s style,” sup-ported the contrast between enlightened and deluded approaches to the world, operating through different attitudes to identity, time, space and language. It shall be seen that Zeami unexpectedly reversed Kannami’s lin-guistic system, so that poetic language, with flows of association, allusion, and polysemy, became the mark of delusion, whereas the remorseless pro-saic questioning of priests on the path was used to point the way to Bud-dhist truth.

The third section of this essay will investigate three more plays which follow similar structural and formal conventions, but which put them to the task of portraying quite different subjects. In each case, the problems posed by the form and the way in which the playwright attempted to deal with them will be discussed along with the relationship between the themes of the plays and those of plays about ghosts.


Buddhist Voices in Kannami’s Plays

Although we might look for Buddhism in Nō, plays rarely explore Buddhist ideas directly. Two plays by Kannami, however, are exceptional for they can read as incisive critiques of common conceptions of the nature of Bud-dhist action and knowledge.

There is little sign of anything similar in plays from before Kannami’s time. What is known of earlier works is, unfortunately, limited. But in the first explicit record of the contents of plays, the 1349 Kasuga rinji sai 春日臨

時祭 (Special Kasuga Festival) performances, the themes are limited to the composition of poems by poets, and heroic deeds from the legendary past (see O’Neill 1958-1959). There are indications in later records that another genre of plays probably existed portraying the expulsion of demons, an old Yamato tradition, perhaps deriving from representations of the exorcisms of jushi 呪師 (reflected in a tradition of demon masks). And it seems likely that there was also a tradition of congratulatory plays, precursors of waki Nō, given the eulogistic character of Shikisanban 式三番 (Pinnington 1998). Kannami’s use of Nō plays to discuss Buddhist questions seems to have been something particular to him.3

The two plays are Jinen Koji 自然居士 (The Lay Priest Jinen) and Sotoba Komachi 卒塔婆小町 (Komachi at the Stūpa) and they both enact direct collisions of viewpoint, with elements of resistance and partial resolution. This in itself is uncommon among Nō plays. The structures of the plays also have unusual characteristics when compared to the later conventions. In Jinen Koji, the main role is a Buddhist priest—which is rare—and the first person on the stage is an ai kyōgen 相狂言 actor.4 In Sotoba Komachi there

3 The purpose of these remarks is to underline the fact that there is little to support the commonly held belief that Nō plays were originally intended to communicate Buddhist teachings.

4 In Zeami’s time a convention began to be established whereby actors in Nō plays were determined to be of three types: shite シテ, waki ワキ and ai kyōgen (also known as ai アイ). This division came to correspond with lineages that have persisted to the present time. In the play structure that Zeami established roles acted by waki came on in the first scene, and those of the shite came on in the second. Apart from these main roles, there are minor ones; child shite roles are called kokata 子方, subsidiary shite roles are called tsure ツレ and sub-sidiary waki roles are called wakizure ワキヅレ.


were originally three scenes. Zeami revised both plays, perhaps more thor-oughly in the case of Sotoba Komachi.5

Jinen Koji concerns an event in the life of the Kamakura Zen priest, Jinen. Jinen was a kanjin hijiri 勧進聖, a priest who traveled the provinces raising money for good works. He was noted for his use of song and dance to attract people to his meetings. When the play opens, Jinen is embarking on the last day of a week’s program of ritual preaching put on to raise funds for the rebuilding of the temple Ungoji 雲居寺. While he is making preliminary invocations for the ceremony, he is interrupted by a request from a young girl to make a special prayer for her deceased parents. The girl has brought a fine robe to donate to the temple in return. Jinen reads out the girl’s prayer and all are deeply moved by her longing to join her parents in the next world. Suddenly two men appear, searching for the girl. They see her and forcefully march her off. A layman who is helping Jinen alerts him to what has happened, and Jinen guesses that the men must be slave merchants to whom the girl has sold herself in exchange for the robe (which she used to get Jinen to pray for her parents). Jinen cancels his preaching and goes off to the nearby port determined to swap back the robe and set the girl free. At the port, Jinen spies the slave-trader’s boat and after an argumentative exchange during which he wades through the water, grabs the side of the boat, throws the robe at the men, and is threatened in turn with consider-able violence, he persuades the slavers to back down and give up the girl. They cannot bear to lose face, however, and insist that Jinen, who they know is a famous performer, dance for them before they make a final deci-sion. He does so, singing two kusemai 曲舞 (expository songs), and then takes the freed girl off with him to the capital.

Early in the play there is a dialogue between the preacher Jinen and a lay follower about the appropriateness of abandoning the Buddhist ritual to rescue the girl. Jinen says:

Even if one listened to the teaching of the dharma for a hundred or a thousand days, the purpose would still be to distinguish good and bad. The girl is a good person, the trad-ers are bad people, aren’t these extremes of good and bad?6

5 Those aspects quite unlike Zeami’s style are taken to be Kannami’s. In the case of Sotoba Komachi, Zeami’s amendments include the excision of the last scene.

6 Iyaiya seppō wa hyakunichi sennichi kikoshimesarete mo, zennaku no futatsu o wakimaen tame, ima no onna wa zennin akubito wa akunin, zennaku no nidō koko ni kiwamatte sōrō wa ika ni いやいや説法は百日千日聞こしめされても、善悪の二つを弁へんため、今の


This exchange sets up a straightforward contrast between a Buddhist out-look allied with the good, represented by Jinen, and evil voices in the form of human traffickers, who have legal possession of the girl in question.

Jinen’s statements in the play employ a kind of open-ended grammar derived from linked verse. The characteristic style is shown in a passage which follows the above example. Jinen says:

We, who have abandoned our body to practice the Buddhist path, must help others / We must help the one who has abandoned her own life on behalf of the Buddhist path.7

There is an instability of subject in the passage that renders its meaning ambiguous so that phrases could refer to the priest or the girl. Jinen over-laps his own “abandoning one’s body to practice the Buddhist path” with the girl’s “abandoning of her body (=self)” to rescue her parents in the after-life, in effect identifying himself and the girl, again aligning them on one side and placing the child traders on the other.8

Similar diction is used in the subsequent series of exchanges between Jinen and the traders. The traders go down to the shore and attempt to get away with the girl in a boat. Jinen follows them and addresses them with three overlapping phrases: “As I have no boat, I cannot stop you on the route quickly traveled” is joined to “I have brought my mind to stillness in the dharma that I preach” and “you must stop the boat.”9 This combination implies that, despite his lack of a boat to follow them, by means of his Bud-dhist achievement, Jinen will cause the traders to stop. As his expression is indirect operating through wordplay, Jinen cannot be called on it directly; there is nothing for him to explain or defend.

Jinen uses the same style of speech in the remaining dialogues. His pro-test that hitokai 人買ひ／ひと櫂 (buying people / a single rowing) was not meant to signify slaver traders, but simply the act of rowing away, highlights

女は善人、商人は悪人、善悪の二道ここに極まつて候ふはいかに (Itō 1986: 134). Quo-tations from plays have all been taken from Itō (1983, 1986 or 1988). Translations into English are my own. Note that pronunciation in Nō is sometimes non-standard.

7 Butsudō shugyō no tame nareba, mi o sute hito o tasukubeshi 仏道修業のためなれば、身を捨て人をたすくべし (Itō 1986: 134).

8 This passage links back to earlier wordplay on the term minoshiro, both signifying a type of robe and pawning oneself for money.

9 Fune naku totemo tokunori no michi ni kokoro o tomeyokashi 舟なくとてもとくのりの道に心を留めよかし (Itō 1986: 135).


the shamefulness of the profession of slaver. A double implication of cloth (koromo 衣) links the return of the robe with which the slavers bought the girl, to the karmic consequences of striking a “man of the cloth” (koromo ni osorete 衣に恐れて). The existence among slavers of a “great law” (taihō 大法) not to return a person once bought, is made parallel to Jinen Koji’s “ultimate religious practice” that if he meets someone who cannot take care of his or herself, he cannot leave until he has helped that person. In a final double reading, the physical torment threatened by the slavers is made equivalent to ascetic practices chosen freely by the Buddhist aspirant (Itō 1986: 135-137). In each case, the slavers use ordinary prosaic language to argue, refuse or threaten, and Jinen foils them with linguistic ambiguities.

In effect, a spectacular display of polysemy, whether through kakekotoba, or overlapping phrases with double meanings, is used to establish a higher Buddhist outlook on the world that trumps the complacent self-justifica-tions of the traders. Naturally, one can see a putative Buddhist significance in Jinen’s exploitation of wordplay, which operates in parallel with its roots in the literary tradition. It is not simply a series of puns. Verbally, meaning is dependent on context. The same world appears in different ways to dif-ferently conditioned consciousnesses.

Sotoba Komachi also uses wordplay in argument to establish the central character’s voice. In its original form, the play was longer than the version we have now. The original has been reconstructed as follows. Two Shingon priests see a poor elderly woman leaning against the remains of an old stūpa, a kind of grave-marker. They advise her to rest somewhere else, as a stūpa is a symbol of the sacred body of the Buddha. In an unexpected turn of events, the old woman resists and initiates a series of polemical exchanges. One of the priests, impressed by her spiritual knowledge, asks who she is, and she admits to being Ono no Komachi 小野小町, the former aristocratic poetess and beauty, now reduced to begging in rags. At this point Komachi’s character changes. Annoyed that the priests do not give her alms, she threatens them, and then announces, “I will meet Komachi.” She is no longer herself, but has been possessed by a ghost—the spirit of a frustrated former lover, Captain Fukakusa (Fukakusa no shii no shōshō 深草の四位の

少将). Through her body, the ghost of Fukakusa now rages to his fill, com-plaining of his unsatisfied lust and unassuaged bitterness. At last Komachi returns to herself and goes before the nearby shrine of Tomatsu Island to offer sacred cloth to the patron deity of poetry. The deity then appears before her in the form of the crow.


As the extant play is evidently a more extensive revision of Kannami’s original than is Jinen Koji, a close analysis to discover a contrast with those of Zeami’s plays could be misleading. Still, the exchanges of the first section are likely close to the original. The contrast of voices this time is not between “good” and “bad,” but rather between two different conceptions of Bud-dhism. On the one hand are traveling priests, who complacently believe themselves wise because they are monks and have adopted the conven-tional attitudes of monks. On the other is the elderly Komachi, who, reduced from her former state of wealth and beauty to one of miserable poverty, has experienced the transience of life directly, and has been brought thereby to her own personal wisdom. The dialogue between these two sides will not be analyzed closely here; suffice it to say that it uses many of the techniques seen in Jinen Koji (Itō 1986: 255-257). The two priests, tied to prosaic expres-sion, distinguish between Komachi, whose physical appearance makes her look to them like a low class and vulgar old tramp, and a stūpa, which they perceive to be a representation of the Buddha’s body. They thus thought-lessly apply superficial social distinctions. Komachi, however, despite vari-ous kinds of evasions and resistances, has a higher level of insight, expressed through word-play and allusion, which sees no distinction between the body of any living being and the body of the Buddha. The identity of Komachi’s body and that of stūpa is interestingly supported by the fact that the stūpa, like Komachi, is rotting by the side of the road, and the signs of its character when it was new are hardly discernible, just as the signs of her former glory have all but disappeared.

The dialogue between the monks and Komachi is technically similar to that between Jinen and the traders, but it also has other interesting charac-teristics of its own. First, the individual exchanges get progressively shorter, and as they do so, the positions of each side approach agreement. Secondly, an important element of the dialogue is Komachi’s resistance and final admission of her identity. This admission induces in her a feeling of shame, the cause of which appears to be the contrast between her beauty and wealth in her youth, and her current fallen status. It is impossible to know which of these characteristics were original to Kannami’s version, but in plays of Zeami’s style similar patterns were regularly employed to express a progressive convergence of knowledge, a breakthrough, and a transition from resistance to shame.

The third pre-Zeami play considered here, Ukai 鵜飼 (The Cormorant Fisher), rather than exploring Buddhist attitudes through dialogue, portrays


the inner life of a ghost trapped in hell, an important theme of the later tradition. Its primary technique is its repeated return to a central image that gathers a number of interpretations as the play progresses. Ukai in its current form has two independent scenes that were probably put together later. The first is of interest here. The scene opens with two priests look-ing for a place to stay. They are recommended to try a shrine overlook-ing the river, known to be haunted by a strange light. An old man then appears brandishing a pine torch. After discussion he admits to being the ghost of a cormorant fisherman drowned by the villagers for his evil profes-sion (taking life). He is persuaded by the priests to enact his crime before them as a form of confession after which they will pray for him. He dances and sings of fishing with cormorants and then departs miserably back to hell.

The method of cormorant fishing is to go out on the river on a moonless night with a flaming brand. This attracts fish to the surface of the water. The cormorants are then released to catch the fish. A small ring around the neck of the birds prevents them swallowing. They are pulled back to the boat with a cord linked to the ring, and made to regurgitate the fishes from their gullets.

An interesting aspect of the dramatization of the ghost’s inner life in the play emerges in the dialogue section between the priests and ghost. An attempt is made to finesse the seemingly opposite demands of religion and entertainment. By suggesting that the ghost replay his sin, the priest is ostensibly providing him with an occasion to confess and free himself of attachment. Confession (zange 懺悔) played an important role in Buddhist life, and was seen as a means to purify oneself and also to be reabsorbed into the community of the good. It has been analyzed into two compo-nents, asking for forgiveness and repentance, that must be accompanied by shame (Marran 2012: 2). Thus the play can be understood as representing the correct path by which the fisherman attempts to undo his evil deeds. At the same time the priest himself is excited by the opportunity to view the enactment of cormorant fishing, and this presumably corresponds with the audience’s attitude, too. The exploitation of the Buddhist tradition of con-fession to enable a voyeuristic observation of the private sins of others is a mark of medieval revelatory tales, so-called zange mono 懺悔もの (Marran 2012: 4). This dual consciousness is common in Nō; audiences come to see what is exciting and beautiful, but Buddhist attitudes in the plays repeat-


edly point out that it is attachment to those very things that are the causes of suffering.

The dialogue in Ukai, like Sotoba Komachi, includes a moment of self-identification, but there is little indication of resistance on the part of the ghost, nor of any particular shame when he admits who he is. The core of the play, however, is the cycle of pleasure and regret, which is not expressed through the short sections of dialogue, but rather in the confessional song, when the ghost describes his changing emotions as he acts out the proce-dure of cormorant fishing:

Oh, how exciting! The fish in the depths, surprised by the light of the torch, are chased round and round, the birds diving down and scooping them up, gulping them down without pause, the pleasure makes me forget the sin, and its punishment in the next world. The river is in full flood, no still waters for carp to swim upstream, but young sweetfish, as you might see in the River Tamashima, flit here and there through the racing shallows. Not a moment to waste, they will be gone in a flash! But how strange, the fiery torch still burns, but its reflection fades. Oh, I see, the moon has risen; oh the sadness when the fishing comes to an end! (Itō 1983: 120-121).

This is a fine scene, linguistically fairly straightforward, despite the deploy-ment of various poetic tropes. It links to other expressions by the fisherman at different points in the play through the unifying image of the torchlight. This image gathers more than one reading: of course it is used to attract fish and enables the fisherman and cormorant to see them, at the same time, in contrast to the darkness of the later regret, it is the thrill of a pleas-ure yielded to, and in contrast to the darkness of the soul after death pro-gressing towards hell, it is the brightness of this world being left behind. The torchlight is also compared to the moon. It is the false happiness of worldly pleasure whereas the moon is the true happiness of the state of desirelessness.

Ukai in this way explores an interesting issue in medieval Buddhism. The basic trope is that one who kills living beings will suffer in hell after death. There is a host of literary and other evidence that this caused considerable anxiety to members of the warrior class. There is a shift in the medieval period from the emphasis on crude physical tortures of the kind seen in Nihon Ryōiki 日本霊異記 (Record of Miraculous Events in Japan) to the idea that it is the mental orientation of the evil-doer that constitutes their hell. The repeated enactment of the sin in the other world is the punishment


that results from unsatisfied desire. This is what happens here. The fisher-man repeatedly traces a cycle of anticipation, excitement, pleasure fol-lowed by fear and regret.

In the first two plays above, the primary expression of voice is through the contrasting views shown in dialogue, aided on one side by poetic tech-nique, predominantly polysemy. In the third, the instability of mind through time is expressed by confessional re-enactment, and the multiple interpre-tation of a pervasive image. When we come to Zeami’s plays, we find that a series of such modular patterns, verbal, musical and terpsichorean, have been organized into a standard structure that is then modified to suit a number of topics. Among the types of plays to which this structure is applied is the typical ghost play known as fukushiki mugen, that is one in which an apparently ordinary person is revealed in dialogue to be a ghost, and then appears in his or her real original guise in a dream or vision. In such plays, usually the contrast is between the voice of a priest and that of the ghost. A striking difference between such plays in Zeami’s style and those of Kannami, is that the poetic verbal play that Kannami used to express a kind of higher insight, is used rather to express the delusions and attachments of the unhappy dead, whereas the prosaic voice by which Kan-nami expressed a superficial and worldly understanding is used by Zeami for the rational and detached mind of the Buddhist priest.

Form and Voice in Izutsu

Zeami describes his recommended play structure in his guide Sandō 三道 (The Three Paths). This structure or plan prescribes not only a series of roles, entrances, songs, and actions, but also assumes associated with them certain characteristic contents, so that particular modules suitable for par-ticular tasks come in a prescribed sequence. At the most general level he divides the play into three successive modes, jo 序, ha 破 and kyū 急, that is, a slow introduction, a quickening of tension, and finally an intense denoue-ment. He defines a basic structure of five scenes, the first being in jo mode, the next three being in ha mode, and the last being kyū. Each of these scenes are to be constructed out of a conventional series of subsections, nowadays referred to as shōdan 小段. As shall be shown below, the structure Zeami describes is particularly well designed for expressing the voices of dead women trapped in hell by their amorous attachments to the past and the


priests to whom they appear in their search for salvation. In such ghost plays these elements are used particularly to establish contrasting orienta-tions of the two voices to time, place and identity, making them expressive of central conceptions of the human predicament.

The classic case of such a play is Zeami’s own Izutsu 井筒 (The Well-Curb), a fukushiki mugen play which closely fulfills his prescriptions in Sandō (see Hare 1986: Ch. 4). Izutsu opens with a priest visiting a temple where the celebrated lover, Ariwara no Narihira 在原業平 (the “man of old”), was buried. A woman appears making an offering at a grave. On being questioned by the priest she eventually admits to being the ghost of a woman with whom Narihira had a long relationship and leaves the stage. The priest settles down to sleep preparing to dream about her and she reap-pears wearing Narihira’s clothes, left to her as a keepsake. She recalls pain-ful events in their life and looking in the well for a moment mistakes her reflection for the reappearance of her ancient lover. The priest’s dream breaks up as dawn comes.

The main character in Izutsu could be described as an individual called Aritsune’s daughter, or the “Izutsu lady.” But the play is not really about any such person’s character or personality. It does tell her story, but “her story” is no more than a set of circumstances in which certain poems were composed as described in the narratives of Ise Monogatari 伊勢物語 (The Tales of Ise). Ultimately, it is the emotions expressed in the poems that constitute the Izutsu lady portrayed in the play, but at the same time, on stage, the vehicle by which such poems are made available to the audience is the presentation of the Izutsu lady as a ghost who, through her attach-ment to the emotions embodied in the poems, is stuck in a kind of limbo, confused about her identity, unable to detach herself and move on, and looking for spiritual guidance. It is in this presentation, which is in some ways quite separate from the individuality that the particular set of poems express, that we can see her fulfilling a Buddhist conception of the predica-ment of living beings.

In the following tables the voices of the roles in Izutsu are organized dia-grammatically to exhibit the play’s formal structure.

The shite (Izutsu lady) and waki (priest) in the play represent two con-trasting types of human consciousness: the sufferer seeking release from attachment, and the seeker on the path who has renounced attachment. The contrast is not between good and bad, but rather between the direc-tions in which two people are tending; one is trapped in a cycle of suffering


and one is on the way out of it. Poetic rhetoric, primarily polysemy, in Izutsu, is used to express the suffering ghost’s confusion and attachment. The prosaic voice of the waki however expresses the remorseless logic of one who is unattached and clear, one who understands the world to consist of chains of cause and effect.

To explain Table 1: the shite is tied to place by attachment to a series of events that took place there in a specific time long past, expresses itself through poetic allusion and similar styles that we have seen above, is evasive and resistant concerning its identity, experiences unhappi-ness and is self-obsessed; in contrast, the waki moves freely through space, lives in a present where it is free to follow impulse, prosaic in lan-guage, rational, generic in identity (having “left the household,” shukke 出家, and become a priest), inquisitive about what it sees, and oriented towards concern for others. (The ai is included in the diagram as the representative of yet another kind of voice the analysis of which is not pursued in this essay).

The construction of the voice of shite and waki is achieved formally as follows (see Table 2). The waki introduces himself in the first section. In the conventional nanori passage, he announces his identity: a Buddhist priest. He then relates his connection to the location: it is Ariwara temple (Ariwa-radera 在原寺), and he is just passing through. He knows about the place, however, and, in a characteristic song, he recalls the love affair associated with the place and expresses his determination to comfort the spirits of the dead associated with those events. In the second section the shite enters as

Table 1. Contrasting voices in Izutsu

Role Place Time Language Identity Consciousness

Shite Tied to place

Attached to the past

Poetic associative

Unstable / False

Suffering / Self focused

Waki Traveler Freely moving in the present

Prosaic logical

Generic / Persistent

Inquiry / Other focused

Ai Knowledge Present Oral Generic / Social

Sardonic


a young woman. Her self-introduction is different but parallel to that of the priest. While she refrains from identifying herself directly, she opens her declaration with a series of poetic links that express her attachment to the place. Her song moves from elements of the surrounding scene (her offer-ing of water, the autumn night, the moon) by polysemy and other verbal associations, to statements about confusion of mind, memory and hopeless love. Then in a new song she expresses her hope that the power of the Bud-dha Amida 阿弥陀 might bring release. She returns finally to an analysis of the scene: the restless sounds of nature indicate the transience of phenom-ena, but what sound will bring salvation?

In the third and fourth sections of the play, the two voices interact in dialogues that take the format noted above in Sotoba Komachi, where the length of each utterance gets progressively shorter, leading to a moment of breakthrough, a mini-climax. In each case the monk10 asks questions and the woman evades straight answers, but is compelled eventually to admit the truth. The monk’s tone is one of detached reasoning. The woman, how-ever, uses polysemy to divert the conversation, but at the same time, verbal associations constantly draw her back to her preoccupations with the past

10 In the second dialogue the monk’s place is in current performance taken by the chant-ing of the chorus.

Table 2. Sections of the play Izutsu

Section

1 Jo Enter priest Identify oneself, sing of travel and arrival at a location, and discuss one’s relation to the dead (one of knowledge)

2 Ha 1 Enter woman Scenery, troubled mind, longing for salvation, scenery

3 Ha 2 Dialogue Leading to woman’s narrative of past events in the location

4 Ha 3 Dialogue Leading to woman’s shameful admission of identity with a participant in the events in the past

5 Kyū Dream Reenacting painful elements of the past with dances and monologue


and draw her into coming clean. The first of these dialogues converges on the identity of the ancient lover associated with the temple, the “man of old,” the mysterious object of her obsession, which leads into a richly poetic and allusive account of the original love affair. The second dialogue con-cerns the woman’s identity, and this time converges on the shite’s admis-sion that she is the ghost of the woman in the story. As in other examples, the admission of identity is accompanied by shame.

At this point, the shite actor fades from the stage to reappear in a final fifth scene, apparently in the dream of the monk. In this scene the shite reenacts the past events to which the ghost is attached, again through allu-sions to the past, but this time also expressed through dance. Finally, she merges with the sounds of nature as dawn breaks, and the priest wakes up.

The arrangement of songs and their conventional content in the play Izutsu seem particularly well suited to the two contrasting voices in the play. Both detached and deluded attitudes to self, time and place, and the contrasting rhetoric of plain reasoning and poetic figurative language are supported by the songs expected to appear in scenes one and two and they are further worked out in the combative dialogues of scenes three and four and the sustained monologues and dances of scene five. The techniques of poetry associated with the ghost’s lines include associations of polysemy, parallelism between human feeling and natural phenomena, allusion to songs and to the past, and various symbolic images.

Uses of the Structure for Non-Buddhist or Otherwise Complex Voices

The question now arises how these stereotypical scenes and language styles operate when applied to other types of subject. Plays in Zeami’s style gener-ally open with declarations of identity, and generic songs of travel and arrival are used to establish place. The shite generally enters second and describes the scene before digressing into personal matters. Dialogues include the question and answer form, and the specific pattern of increas-ingly short exchanges generally leads to emotional breakthroughs of some kind. Often this includes the shite’s admission of identity and expression of shame. Shite, as main roles in Nō, generally indicate their states of mind through poetic association, in which natural imagery is linked to felt emo-tion, whereas waki generally proceed along rational prosaic lines in their


pronouncements, and are persistent in their questioning. How are these arrangements applied to the representation of those who are not confused ghosts? Let us explore this question with three examples: Saigyōzakura 西行桜, Kureha 呉服, and Sekidera Komachi 関寺小町.

In Saigyōzakura (Saigyō’s Cherry Tree), there are essentially three types of voice: that of Saigyō 西行 (1118-1190), the storied hermit poet; those of visitors who have come to see the cherry tree in Saigyō’s hermitage; and that of the spirit of the cherry tree. Saigyō’s identity is problematic in terms of Zeami’s play structure, for he is both a priest and a poet. Zeami’s struc-ture, by distinguishing between a dispassionate, prosaic voice for priests, and an attached and emotional poetic voice for deluded ghosts, distin-guished the two voices. As a priest, then, Saigyō might be expected to have occupied the waki role, expressing himself in a prosaic and logical fashion, but as a poet, he would have been appropriately performed by a shite, who would have the opportunity to use the language of emotion and associa-tion. In Zeami’s solution to this problem, Saigyō is performed by a waki actor, but the duality in his character is evident in the structure of the play, for in his meeting with the visitors, Saigyō adopts the rhetoric of a shite, expressing his attachment to place and resulting emotions of resistance and longing. On the other hand, later in the play, when he appears in dia-logue with the tree-spirit, he becomes the inquiring Buddhist interlocutor, similar to the waki priest in Izutsu (in fact, his role approximates that of the priest found in a similar genre, that in which the spirits of trees and plants seek enlightenment). Hence in a first half Saigyō plays the shite to the visi-tor’s waki, whereas in the second half, the tree spirit plays the shite to Saigyō’s waki.

This set of relations is achieved by an interesting variation on the order of the stereotypical elements we saw above (in Table 2). Saigyō comes on first, as is expected for the waki role. After a discussion with his manserv-ant, which establishes that he dislikes being disturbed, some visitors, in the form of wakizure, appear and follow the usual succession of songs of identi-fication, travel and arrival sung by waki actors in Zeami’s plan (see section 1 in Table 2). After a dialogue between the visitors and the manservant, Saigyō appears, and, like the Izutsu lady in section 2, through a song of poetic associations based on elements of the natural scenery, he indicates his mental disturbance and attachment. The difference, however, is that this time his preoccupation is not with his love for someone in the past, but


with spiritual questions connected to his attachment to his hermitage. The third section is the usual one of dialogue in which the collision of voices is expressed in a typical series of shortening exchanges. The visitors delight in the blossoms in the garden, but Saigyō resists their viewpoint, countering with his experience of nature as the realm of transience. The convergence of the dialogue expresses the convergence of the two standpoints, pressing Saigyō to an admission—not this time of his identity, but rather to the real character of his hermitage. It is in fact a hut close to the capital and not an isolated hermitage at all. Moreover, he must accept that the distinction between worldliness and renunciation is false, as they are both situated in one world. As the visitors leave, Saigyō intones the poem that is probably the inspiration for the play, which expresses his irritation that his cherry tree attracts unwanted people. This sets the stage for the second dialogue session, this time between the spirit and the tree.

The spirit emerges and hints at his displeasure at the poem. The roles are now switched. A long exchange between the Saigyō and the tree spirit has Saigyō asking the questions, and the spirit making an admission of identity. As usual the admission is accompanied by shame, but this time an explana-tion is offered, the sparsity of blossom on a old tree: “How ashamed I am! That flowers on this old tree are so few” (Itō 1983: 86). Once the spirit is identified, the two voices are set into the mould of benevolent priest and seeking spirit, with the spirit drawing spiritual comfort from the man of the cloth.

The play can be seen as a combination of two constructions of voice par-alleling the types seen in Izutsu: in the first the visitors are free of ties to time and space and outward looking, marked by curiosity, and so on, whilst Saigyō is attached to his hermitage, and anxious about its character, reflect-ing various inner conflicts he has in relation to reclusion; in the second Saigyō adopts the stance of a detached figure, and the spirit of the cherry blossom takes on that of a confused spirit seeking release. In each part, the work is done by the same conventional combinations of formal elements found in Izutsu. Indeed, much of the character of the play can be thought of as the result of formal needs; if Saigyō was not disturbed by some emotional issue, the earlier sections would be difficult to write; it even seems possible that the playwright had to invent the story of Saigyō’s attachment to the hermitage and refusal to face its proximity to the capital, for the exchanges with the travelers to fit the conventions of his style.


It is interesting to contrast the treatment of Saigyō here and Kannami’s representation of Jinen in Jinen Koji. Both Saigyō and Jinen were symbolic figures in the long-standing controversy in late Heian and medieval times about the compatibility of Buddhism and poetry (poetry increasingly came to be seen in this regard as representative of performative arts in general) (Pinnington 2006: 150-153). This controversy was commonly referred to through the phrase kyōgen kigo 狂言綺語 (wild words and fancy phrases). This phrase derived from a passage by the celebrated Chinese poet Bai Juyi 白居易 (772-846), in which he characterized his own literary activity as being in conflict with various Buddhist injunctions against inappropriate speech. Kyōgen kigo came to represent in Japan the incompatibility of poetry and Buddhism. However, the image of poetry itself began to change in the late Heian period from an association with eros and sensual pleas-ures to one of higher wisdom, and Bai Juyi’s words were re-interpreted as indicating the possibility that the way of poetry, and of other arts, could be transformed into a path to enlightenment.11 Jinen as a cultural figure repre-sented just such a rehabilitation of artistic activity. He was one of a group of priests known as kanjin hijiri who used performance arts to attract audi-ences to his preaching and to solicit money for good works. Generally, Nō understood itself too as possessing the transformative possibilities of kyōgen kigo, and so it is no surprise that Kannami represented Jinen’s poetic abilities as key to his capacity for Buddhist action. Saigyō was also a central figure in the rapprochement between Buddhism and poetry, as is reflected in his poems themselves as collected in Sankashū 山家集, and also in the legend of his life, found in Saigyō monogatari 西行物語. It is thus rather unexpected that this hero of the poetic arts in medieval Japan should have been turned into something of a figure of fun in Zeami’s play. Zeami’s plan for the construction of plays, however, clearly aligns poetic devices, espe-cially the exploitation of polysemy, allusion and distorted or open-ended grammar, with delusion, and assigns rational detached prose to those on the Buddhist path.

It is not clear whether this association actually reflects Zeami’s own views on the kyōgen kigo issue. After all, he had artistic reasons for wanting his heroines to be poets, singers and dancers, and so, if they also happened

11 For a detailed study of this process, see Pandey (1998: 9-55).


to be deluded ghosts, their poetic voices were bound also to reflect that delusion. Nevertheless, it is plausible that Zeami might have had doubts about the compatibility of the arts and Buddhism. He belonged to a Sōtō sect temple in Nara, and the Sōtō sect was notably associated with argu-ments against literary practices. Moreover, he remarked in old age, recorded in Kyakuraika 却来華 that he saw his own “excessive concern with the way of performance art” as “sure to become an obstacle to me at the moment of death” (Pinnington 2006a: 1).

The next play considered here has neither priests nor poets among its dramatis personae. Kureha is a waki Nō (that is, a god play), featuring spir-itual beings and aristocratic visitors. Again, the question asked here is how the construction of the voices are related to the formal requirements of Zeami’s plan. The textual history of Kureha is complex, for in its early guise it was primarily a vehicle for a particular dance, the tennyo no mai, but the dance was later changed. It features both shite and tsure, and at one time they both appeared in the dream scene, but now only the shite does. The script shows signs of a half-hearted revision to accommodate this change. Otherwise the action of the play itself is probably little altered from when it was performed at the shōgun’s stable grounds in 1428.12

Kureha primarily features the spirits of weaver maidens who brought Chinese weaving to Japan in the reign of Emperor Ōjin. The waki roles (waki and wakizure) represent traveling court officials and two shite roles (shite and tsure) represent the weaver maidens. In the first part of the play, the maidens appear as local girls to the court officials, but in a final scene they show their true guise as protective deities in a dream vision. The structure is therefore that of fukushiki mugen play, but its mood is one of blessing and eulogy, quite different from that of plays about suffering ghosts. The formal elements of each scene, which in Izutsu seemed so well bring out the con-trasting voices of the shite and waki, as a consequence here seem somewhat less effective.

The waki and his companions are traveling on pilgrimage, but they are court officials rather than priests—as is characteristic of plays which fea-ture deities. The shite and tsure, while they appear in disguise in the first half, do so not to express there psychological unease, but rather to praise

12 For an account of the textual history, see Tyler (1992: 171).


the current reign. The primary contrast of attitudes to location and time are managed as expected (court officials are traveling, spirits are attached to the location, a village called Kureha, site of their importation of weaving from China), but the freedom of movement of the court officials is less fun-damental to their sense of who they are, and in fact, it is rather the spirits who are travelers, as they are symbolic of the ancient flow of culture from China to Japan. When the spirits come on stage, they sing of their close relationship to the village, but that is not expressed in terms of attachment in its Buddhist sense, that is, a cause of suffering, for the role of spirits in a god play is to bless the world. Although the spirits were once alive on earth, after death they went to heaven as deities, and then subsequently reap-peared in Kureha, becoming the objects of worship of two shrines dedi-cated to them. The indirect poetic language of word-play and allusion that is so effective in Izutsu to conceal and yet hint at instability of the shite’s identity, is put in Kureha to a different task, that is to give the eponymous village a mysterious identity with the Chinese state of Wu (the character 呉 that in the name Kureha is read Kure, is read in Chinese Wu). A series of references to alternative names of China are strung together in one song, and a number of words related to cloth and weaving in another. Having sung their songs, the girls start to weave on a loom.

As the girls appear in different guises in the two halves of the play, there is a need for their identities to be discovered in the first half. The officials see that the girls are too beautiful to be villagers and ask who they are. The girls directly own up to being the deities, but at the same time voice their embarrassment at being discovered. Even the waki comments on this, won-dering why they feel ashamed. Presumably if there is an explanation, it is that, as spirits, their enactment in the real world of their original weaving is illicit. Still the shameful disclosure of identity under questioning seen in ghost plays, associated perhaps with ideas of Buddhist confession as men-tioned above, seems to have been included merely for conventional rea-sons, having no essential relation to the issues at hand.

The remainder of the play follows the standard plan: there is a conver-gent dialogue of progressively shorter elements, but it is between the shite and the tsure, as frequently happens in plays with pairs of girls, and it con-verges on compliments to the courtly establishment. Chinese brocade is characterized as a worthy offering to the Yamato court. In a final scene, the girls somehow manage to reappear as spirits in the shared dreams of the


court officials and dance, closing with various eulogistic remarks. Clearly the primary goal of the play is not to portray the inner worlds of the two girl spirits. Generally, the structures that manage to do that so well in plays like Izutsu, seem less effectively employed. There is no real contrast of the states of mind of the officials and the girls, the word-play of their poetic flights is primarily concerned with place names and weaving (admittedly matters of some interest in the poetic tradition), the dialogues reflect no significant breaking down of resistances, and thus the admission of identity and asso-ciated shame has little impact. The appearance of the girls in the dreams, again, has little dramatic point, beyond the manifestation to audiences of heavenly beings.

The final example to be taken up here is Sekidera Komachi (Komachi at Sekidera), another play conforming to Zeami’s five-fold plan, featuring the elderly poetess Komachi. In Sekidera Komachi, she is living incognito as an elderly hermit in a hut below the temple Sekidera. It is the evening of the Tanabata 七夕 festival, which is a celebration of poetic arts and of the meet-ing of lovers. The abbot of the temple, hearing that the old lady living nearby is a poet, takes some acolytes to her hut for guidance in the way of poetry. She emerges and, in poetic language, regrets the passing of her youth. The priest asks instruction for the boys and she gamely complies with refer-ences to the preface to the Kokinshū 古今集. Naturally, as a leading poet of the Kokinshū, critically assessed in its preface, she ends up commenting on her own poetry. She unwittingly hints that she is the poet concerned. Pressed, she admits her identity, and launches into a monologue, interwo-ven with allusions to a number of her poems, describing her longing for the past and feeling of shame for the mean state to which she has been reduced. The monks go off to celebrate the festival and take her with them. Carried away by sake and the atmosphere, she dances. She does her best, but she is too old and cannot remember the steps. Suffused with embarrassment she totters back to her hut.

This old woman is the same Ono no Komachi that appeared in Kanna-mi’s play, Sotoba Komachi. Again there is a striking contrast between Kan-nami’s and Zeami’s treatment of a famous poet of the past. In Kannami’s interpretation, Komachi’s life experience and her poetic awareness com-bine to allow her to trounce two priests in Buddhist polemic. In Zeami’s presentation of the elderly Komachi, on the other hand, her poetry is part of a dream of a former age now vanished, and has been reduced to a pedantic


series of clichés, while her longings for her former beauty, wealth and erotic experiences prey on her mind, causing her to feel ashamed of what she has become. In other words, poetic talent, far from aiding her in the under-standing of Buddhist truth, is part of her clinging to the past.

The story is set within the formal structure that was so effective in repre-senting the inner lives of ghosts. The result is that we can see it as creating interesting parallels between the situation of the elderly and that of the dead. These seem deliberately constructed: the waki and wakizure are priests, albeit accompanied by a child, a kokata. The shite is the elderly Komachi. She is not in hell, but her hut is “below the temple.” The priests identify themselves, the location of the hut, and the fact that they are traveling to it. In fact, they are dropping by on a whim on the way to the Tanabata festival. Komachi for her part lards her speech with allusions to Chinese and Japanese poetry, hinting at her identity, but she also opens with a poetic passage in which elements of her surroundings lead through association to a fundamental longing for the past. In ghost plays, such long-ing would be for a time when a profound attachment was established that was never given up, but here, while retaining something of that character, it is primarily the longing of the elderly for the time of their youth. The series of dialogues are then enacted, with a contrast between the prosaic rationality of the inquiring priest, and the allusive and indirect language of Komachi, which both touches on her textual presence in classic literature, in the kana preface and so on, and presents her mental state as one of attachment or obsession. At the same time, there is an amusingly pedantic feeling to her remarks, typical perhaps of elderly literary scholars. She is also evasive and embarrassed when pushed to admit her identity—the ele-ment of resistance in being subject to questioning can be read, however, not so much as unwillingness of a spirit to come into the light, but rather as the obstinacy of the old. Her shame is not that of a spirit embarking on a confession, but one resulting from the contrast between her present state and how she used to look. At the end of this part of the play, Komachi is invited to accompany her visitors to the Tanabata festival. In a final section, instead of a dance by the spirit reenacting its obsession with the past, there is an interesting scene in which the elderly Komachi, carried away by the sight of a boy dancing, also trips a few steps. This is of course a kind of re-enactment, that is of her accomplishments in her youth, but it is hardly a confession, rather it is the characteristically embarrassing behavior of old


people, with which the young are all familiar. Finally the old woman totters off to her hut embarrassed by the spectacle she has made of herself.

Here the overlap of the structural elements is particularly successful, the parallel between the situation of the elderly and ghosts of course makes sense from a Buddhist perspective. There was a belief in both Heian and medieval Japan that people when they neared death should attempt to cut their attachments to the world, particularly those of the family. This was particularly associated with the idea, central to Pure Land thought, that the state of mind at the moment of death was a key factor in one’s destination thereafter. Hence, both for ghosts and elderly, a renunciation of attach-ment, a recognition and acceptance of the impermanence of human rela-tions and identity, was the key to moving on to a better place. At the same time, the ordinariness of the plight of the elderly converts what might be a gloomy didacticism about attachment into an amusing and recognizable image of a confused old woman.

Concluding Remarks

When one reads the prescription of a standard plan for plays in Zeami’s Sandō it seems at first sight surprisingly formulaic, which is presumably why that work is commonly explained as an abc guide for beginning play-wrights. But the fact is that the series of stereotypical modules of song types and scenes that it lays out are characteristic of the great plays of Zeami’s era. In the next generation new playwrights are seen stretching and compli-cating the method in various ways, although by later generations, quite dif-ferent structures become common.13 As Zeami has been so highly regarded in the twentieth century, however, plays in Zeami’s style are the ones that are most familiar to modern audiences.

The idea that form should bring with it expectations for content should be no surprise today, for it is quite clear that something very similar happens

13 Zeami’s pupils continued to use the structure of play that he recommended, but by the sixteenth century a number of other styles had also become established. On the one hand more dramatic plays became popular, in which the distinction between waki and shite was lessened, and the diction relied less on poetic rhetoric. On the other, a type of play was developed which emphasized spectacle. In both cases, Zeami’s standard five-part structure, with its predictable succession of entrances and events, was abandoned.


in popular American films. How formulaic their structures are becomes apparent if one reads any of the many guides for playwrights trying to get their film scripts accepted by Hollywood. And if one considers the matter further, it is striking how the stereotypical stories embodied in the films which do get accepted feature Christian themes; there can hardly be a vio-lent thriller out there in which one of the key final scenes shows the hero prepared to “lay down his life for his friends” or at least for his beliefs.

By constructing his model for the play around certain central contrasts, Zeami made them particularly appropriate for Buddhist themes. In the first place the primary contrasts made are between detached and attached rela-tions to place and time. Seeing human life in terms of attachment is of course fundamental to Buddhist discourse, in which according to the four noble truths attachment, arising from desire, is the primary cause of suffer-ing, and consequently detachment the way to happiness. The characteristic waki figure in his plan is a traveler—a traditional symbol of spatial and temporal detachment. He is drawn to the location of the action by curiosity and a desire to honor the past, but not by need or longing. It is clear that he will soon be moving on. The shite, on the other hand opens with a song that describes the present scene and then transitions by associative links to expressions of personal feeling. This structure works very well to describe attachment to place and consequent feelings of anxiety. Another impor-tant element of Buddhist discourse is the impermanence of self, which is connected to the doctrine of anatta. The waki’s entrance has a place for self-identification, but it is often detached and generic, a priest or an aristo-crat. The shite’s self-identification, on the other hand, is postponed until the dialogue section, when it comes at the end of a question and answer session, after some resistance, implying both its importance to the shite character and also a sense of illicitness. It is usually accompanied by expres-sions of shame. This contributes to the subsequent recollection of the past. In many plays these combine to make a kind of confessional scene, parallel-ing the zange tradition, in which past misdeeds are confessed, shame felt, and forgiveness sought. This reliving of the past is generally accompanied by a dance, a climax that entertains the audience, but at the same time was understood as an expression of deep emotion.

As seen above, with this structure, Zeami implicitly associates poetry and the arts of song and dance, with delusion or emotional disturbance, and rational prose with detachment and clarity of mind. This can be seen as


an embrace of the Buddhist traditional exhortation of plain speech, but it interestingly works against the alternative medieval tradition which saw the ways of the arts as paths to a kind of universal knowledge.14

The assumption of a contrast between Buddhist and poetic conscious-ness posed problems for the satisfactory representations of those who par-ticipated in both. The play Saigyōzakura, in effect, had to divide itself into two separate parts to express the two sides of Saigyō’s life, with ultimately negative consequences for his heroic image. In plays in which the contrast between detachment and attachment was essentially irrelevant, on the other hand, like Kureha, the structure seemed pointless and flat, with odd elements, like the shame the two deities felt at being identified, not con-necting with the intent of the work. In a way, the final play looked at here was the most successful, for the common structure between ghost plays and the play about the elderly Komachi living below Sekidera quite con-sciously made them analogous, and that in itself implied that the same Buddhist prescription that could help ghosts could be helpful to those in the world. Their happiness too could be found by detachment from the past and acceptance of the transitoriness of identity.

References

Hare, Thomas Blenman. 1986. Zeami’s Style: The Nō Plays of Zeami Motokiyo. California: Stan-ford University Press.

Itō, Masayoshi 伊藤正義. 1983. Yōkyokushū 謡曲集, vol. 1. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.——. 1986. Yōkyokushū 謡曲集, vol. 2. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.——. 1988. Yōkyokushū 謡曲集, vol. 3. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.Marran, Christine. 2012. 懺悔 / Zange: Buddhism, Gender and Meiji Literary Confession. UC

Berkeley: Center for Japanese Studies. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7qg8j2kg (accessed 11 September 2013).

O’Neill, Patrick Geoffrey. 1958-1959. “The Special Kasuga Wakamiya Festival of 1349.” Monu-menta Nipponica 14(3-4): 408-428.

Pandey, Rajyashree. 1998. “Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chōmei.” Ann Arbor, Michigan: Center for Japanese Studies.

14 A contrast might be felt here with Zeami’s own theoretical works about performance art, in which he exploited parallels between the terms and structures of Buddhist, poetic and performance paths, but it is notable that he never assumes that the goals of art and religion are the same. For a study of the uses of the Buddhist path in Nō acting theories, see Pinnington (2006b).


Pinnington, Noel. 1998. “Invented Origins: Muromachi Interpretations of okina sarugaku.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61(3): 492-518.

——. 2006a. Traces in the Way: Michi and the Writings of Komparu Zenchiku. Ithaca, New York: Cornell East Asia Series.

——. 2006b. “Models of the Way in the Theory of Nō.” Japan Review 18: 29-55.Tyler, Royall. 1987. “Buddhism in Nō.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 14(1): 19-52.——. 1992. Nō Dramas. New York: Penguin Books.Waley, Arthur. 1921 [1976]. The Nō Plays of Japan. Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo: Charles E.

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Buddhist Structures and Secular Themes in Zeami’s Narrative Style

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