Playlist: Medieval Japan: Noh Drama

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Donald Keene: The Noh drama began quite early. We don't know just when it began, but probably as early as the eleventh century. However, most of the repertory, the plays that are performed today, are works that were written in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century.

These plays are short — to read them would only take a few minutes — but in performance, a play that you can read in ten minutes may take an hour. The performance is slow, deliberate, but more than that, it's intended to represent more than you actually see with your eyes.

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Robert Oxnam: The dramatic form of Noh, which developed in medieval Japan, is replete with Buddhist sensitivities. The playwright Zeami [Zeami or Kanze Motokiyo; c. 1363-c. 1443] is most associated with the development of the formal structure of Noh in these years.

Donald Keene: The characters in the play — usually no more than three or four actors plus a chorus — and one of the actors — there's a main actor, but the secondary actor is generally a Buddhist priest.

Haruo Shirane: What happens in the Noh play is that, there's a priest who travels to a particular place, usually in the provinces, and he meets someone—what's called a "person of the place," and as he's speaking to that "person of the place," it turns out that that person is in fact a spirit or ghost of someone long ago, whose spirit still lingers because he or she cannot attain salvation, and who speaks about some traumatic experience of the past.

So, this whole drama is kind of cathartic, in that the protagonist speaks about the past and thereby liberating himself or herself from it.

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Donald Keene: The simplicity of the stage, the bareness of the stage itself, is at once very close to Japanese ideas of aesthetics: The simplicity of the scene; nothing extraneous; not one thing on the stage which isn't necessary at that moment. If the actor has a sword and drops the sword, a stage assistant will remove the sword as an unsightly object.

Everything must be absolutely simple, clean. And the music, which suggests another world, it's not sweet music — the kind we might have in an opera — or even violent music. It's otherworldly music. It's provided by a single flute and then two or three different kinds of drums.

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Donald Keene: One of the features that everyone who has been to a Noh play will notice is the similarity to Greek theater. That is to say, there are masks, there's a chorus, and there are dancers. All that we know about the Greek theater makes us think that the Noh and the Greek theater and very similar. In fact, there have been studies to show the similarities.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Noh plays is the masks. The masks may originally have been intended to provide realism, to make the actor — all parts are taken by men — to make the actor look like a beautiful woman, or an old man look like a young man, or a young man look like an old man. And in this sense they are more realistic. But, I think, with time the masks became more schematized, more abstract, and stopped looking like particular people, or even looking like people you might see normally, but they became embodiments of certain qualities — beauty or ugliness or whatever.

And in the case of the really beautiful masks — the kind of masks that would be used for the young women in the plays about young women, or for example, about Atsumori, a young man, in the play about him — these masks are magnificent examples of the carver's art. Some of them are Japanese national treasures. They are superb examples of artistic product. They're not simply coverings for the face. And in this sense, perhaps, they are more advanced artistically than what we know about the Greek masks.

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Donald Keene: Atsumori is the name of a young general. He's described in the work, The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari), which in turn describes the warfare in Japan at the end of the twelfth century.

In the original text, we have him as a young warrior who is on a horse and is galloping away from the scene of battle, where his forces have been defeated.

Another man on a horse comes after him, and he says, "Stop, don't be a coward, fight."

And the two men fight, and in the course of the fighting, the young man is knocked off his horse, knocked onto the ground, and the other man tears off the young man's helmet, sees he's a boy of sixteen, and he doesn't want to kill him. His own son, who had been wounded that day, was miraculously saved. He's thinking, these boy's parents, they'll be thinking about him, I don't want to kill him.

But he sees other men of his side come, and then he thinks well, I haven't got any choice. And he says, "Tell me who you are. I would like to save you, but I can't. Tell me who you are."

And the young man is insolent. He's lying there with the sword pointed at his throat, but he says, "Oh, cut off my head and show it to the people on my side. They'll tell you who I am."

And in the end, the warrior, the older warrior, cuts off the head of this young man. But the experience has so horrified him that he becomes a priest, and he is resolved to pray for the salvation of the man that he killed.

So the central figure [in the Noh version of the play] is Atsumori himself — a young warrior. At first we see him as a reaper, with a group of other reapers, in the field. The priest [the older warrior who killed Atsumori] sees them, and he wonders who they are, and one of them seems a little bit different [to him]. He has a flute with him and seems unusual. And he talks to him, and gradually, he becomes aware that this is, in fact, the young man he killed [that is, the strange reaper is Atsumori], and this is a ghost he's talking to.

In the second part of the play, the young man [Atsumori] comes back in his splendid uniform, the form in which he was seen, and he thinks, "Now is my chance to get even. I've come back to the world, and now I can get even." But at that moment, they realize that the only salvation for them is if they both becomes priests, to be born again in the same lotus paradise. And this is one example of how Buddhism showed itself in the Noh plays.

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Donald Keene: The Noh plays are written in very difficult Japanese. Nevertheless, I think that the Noh has never been more popular than it is today.

If you try to get a ticket at the national Noh theater — a most beautiful building — it's very difficult to get one except if you try well in advance. And sometimes, the very first day they're all gone. And it's not only old scholars of Japanese who go, but young people too. And some of the young people may at their universities be engaged in studying the text, singing the text, or playing the musical instruments associated with them.

The Noh, I think, contrary to what most people would have prophesied fifty years ago, is now enjoying a period of great popularity, a real renaissance of the Noh.