The art history course here at IUC is going wonderfully. I love talking about art, hanging out with art people, being a part of an art community, even though I am finding it increasingly difficult to continue to sit on the fence between art (or art history) and history as I progress forward in my academic/professional career.
Each class, one student provides a brief introduction of a work or artist, and another student leads the remainder of the two hours, on a separate topic of their choosing. It’s great fun, and I’ve gotten introduced to a wonderfully wide variety of topics; people here are not just straight-arrow art historians working on paintings or prints or sculpture. We have people who focus on Noh, a fashion/kimono design, Buddhist art, classical music in Japan, and a handful of other topics.
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Hanna, of While the Mountain Sleeps, led the class last Thursday, talking about Noh, and certain aspects of the difficulties presented by trying to maintain the tradition today. From the reading she selected, one passage in particular caught my eye:
「一生は旅」だと思って「高砂」の次第を謡った能役者は、能の長い歴史のなかで一人もいなかっただろう。そこが梅若実のもっていた近代性であり、梅若実が現代に生きている意識であった。その意識こそ能を演劇としてとらえる契機でもあった。「高砂」に人生を感じるとは、その人生のドラマを演じるということにほかならないからである。そこで能はギリシャ悲劇やシェイクスピアやラシーヌと同じ演劇になった。
In all of Noh’s history, there has probably not been a single Noh actor who performed “Takasago” and believed that “life is a journey.” That is the modernity of Umewaka Minoru, the consciousness of Umewaka who lived in the modern era. It is precisely because of that consciousness that Noh has come to be seen as theatre/drama. That one can sense a feeling of all of human life in “Takasago” is only because the drama of human life is performed. In that, Noh has become the same as Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, or Racine.1
I’d be curious to know Hanna’s views on this, as she is far more of a Noh expert than myself; I tend to lean towards kabuki myself. But from what I know of Noh, having taken an excellent course with Drew Gerstle last year, and having read “Takasago” among a number of other plays, this comment confuses me considerably.
The author of this statement, Shirasu Masako, an art collector and essayist, seems to be simultaneously saying that Noh both lacks the deeper meaning that those of a modern consciousness might read into it, and that it is deeper, better, greater, than mere theatre or drama.
Let us put aside all the truly deep and serious questions this paradox evokes, and focus on the first sentence – the assertion that the “life is a journey” theme is an invention of the modern era and was not truly present in traditional Noh. I find this very hard to believe, since so many Noh plays, indeed just about all that I have ever read or seen, feature a waki2 who is a monk on a pilgrimage, or otherwise someone in the middle of a journey. Certainly, the theme of journeys is stronger in some plays than in others – the plot of “Takasago” involves more travel than most plays, though I can see how it might be argued that this is not the primary theme – but even so, the notion of life as a journey is, as far as I am concerned, one of the essential themes of all of Noh.
Journey is also a major theme in jôruri (puppet theatre) and kabuki, where it often serves, as it does in Western literary tradition, to represent not only a physical, geographical, journey, but a spiritual or personal journey as well. It is not uncommon for the fourth act of a five act jôruri or kabuki play to be a michiyuki (道行) scene – a journey – during which the characters are transformed from weak or lost to noble and determined. Consider the example of Chikamatsu’s “Love Suicides at Amijima” (心中天の網島, Shinjû Ten no Amijama), in which Jihei and Koharu, fleeing their homes, despondent and lost over their situation of being deeply in love but being forbidden to ever truly be together, journey across many bridges until they finally commit double suicide, transforming, one might argue, from a poor shopkeeper and prostitute with nothing going for them in this world, into ennobled lovers who make the ultimate sacrifice, dying so that they can be together forever. The michiyuki of “Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura” (義経千本櫻) works in a similar way, as Genkurô, a kitsune (fox-spirit) who has been torn up inside, longing for 400 hundred years to get a particular drum, made from the skins of his parents, and kept in the Imperial Palace all that time, journeys with Shizuka Gôzen, who carries the drum. Angry, lost, desperate for this drum, in which the spirits of his parents continue to reside, Genkurô transforms over the course of the journey, and finally reveals his true identity and his story, in the end saving Yoshitsune’s life and, one might say, changing roles from the suspicious shapeshifting mischievous spirit to a loyal magical ally, and most importantly coming to terms with the death of his parents and the fate of the drum.
Noh is strongly founded in Buddhist beliefs and themes, and the karmic cycle appears in many plays. Whether this, or the examples in kabuki and jôruri can truly be said to represent precisely the same “life is a journey” theme seen in the West is not entirely clear, but the notions of an eternal journey through the karmic cycle, of physical, geographical journey as a metaphor for spiritual or religious journey, seem perfectly obvious, even if the Noh does not quite feature the same kind of journey one sees in Joseph Campbell’s discussions of the Quest, the Hero’s Journey.
To put it plainly, Journey as a theme features too heavily in Noh for me to believe that it does not have a deeper meaning. Everything in Noh is symbolic of something; everything has a deeper meaning.
The question of whether Noh should be characterized as “theatre” or “drama” according to Western (or “modern”) conceptions of the meanings of those words is something I shall leave for another time.
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1 Watanabe Tamotsu. Butai wo Miru Me (The Eye that Watches the Stage). Tokyo: Kadokawa Gakugei Publishing, 2008. p14.
2 Waki (脇 or ワキ, lit. “side”) is one of a handful of standard role types in Noh. Serving something of the role of a protagonist, the waki is generally the character the audience might identify with as he, in the midst of a journey, comes across the main character (the shite role) and witnesses the main plot of the play. In “Takasago”, the waki is a journeying priest who comes across an old man (the shite role) who later is revealed to be the ancient god of a sacred pine tree. Though the action and plot is generally focused on the shite, the waki serving as little more than a witness, a spectator, I nevertheless think of the waki as the protagonist, as he represents the audience member, also a spectator, a witness, to the events of the play’s plot.
