The Noh Plays of Japan (22 page)

A boat at sea

That would anchor near us in the dawn.
Over the sea from the far side,
From China the journey of a ship's travel
Is a single night's sailing, they say.
And lo! the moon has vanished!

HAKU

I have borne with the billows of a thousand miles of sea and come at last to the land of Nippon. Here is a little ship anchored near me. An old fisherman is in it. Can this be indeed an inhabitant of Nippon?

OLD FISHERMAN

Aye, so it is. I am an old fisher of Nihon. And your honor, I think, is Haku Rakuten, of China.

HAKU

How strange! No sooner am I come to this land than they call me by my name! How can this be?

SECOND FISHERMAN

Although your honor is a man of China, your name and fame have come before you.

HAKU

Even though my name be known, yet that you should know my face is strange surely!

THE TWO FISHERMEN

It was said everywhere in the Land of Sunrise that your honor, Rakuten, would come to make trial of the wisdom of Nihon. And when, as we gazed westwards, we saw a boat coming in from the open sea, the hearts of us all thought in a twinkling, "This is he."

CHORUS

"He has come, he has come."
So we cried when the boat came in
To the shore of Matsura,
The shore of Matsura.
Sailing in from the sea
Openly before us—
A Chinese ship
And a man from China—
How could we fail to know you,

Haku Rakuten?

But your halting words tire us.
Listen as we will, we cannot understand

Your foreign talk.

Come, our fishing-time is precious.

Let us cast our hooks,
Let us cast our hooks!

HAKU

Stay! Answer me one question.
*
Bring your boat closer and tell me, Fisherman, what is your pastime now in Nippon?

FISHERMAN

And in the land of China, pray how do your honors disport yourselves?

HAKU

In China we play at making poetry.

FISHERMAN

And in Nihon, may it please you, we venture on the sport of making "uta."
*

HAKU

And what are "uta"?

FISHERMAN

You in China make your poems and odes out of the Scriptures of India; and we have made our "uta" out of the poems and odes of China. Since then our poetry is a blend of three lands, we have named it Yamato, the great Blend, and all our songs "Yamato Uta." But I think you question me only to mock an old man's simplicity.

HAKU

No, truly; that was not my purpose. But come, I will sing a Chinese poem about the scene before us.

"Green moss donned like a cloak
Lies on the shoulders of the rocks;
White clouds drawn like a belt
Surround the flanks of the mountains."

How does that song please you?

FISHERMAN

It is indeed a pleasant verse. In our tongue we should say the poem thus:

Koke-goromo
Kitaru iwao wa
Samonakute,
Kinu kinu yama no
Obi wo suru kana!

HAKU

How strange that a poor fisherman should put my verse into a sweet native measure! Who can he be?

FISHERMAN

A poor man and unknown. But as for the making of "uta," it is not only men that make them. "For among things that live there is none that has not the gift of song.
*

HAKU
(taking up the other's words as if hypnotized)

"Among things that have life—yes, and birds and insects—"

FISHERMAN

They have sung Yamato songs.

HAKU

In the land of Yamato...

FISHERMAN

...many such have been sung.

CHORUS

"The nightingale singing on the bush,
Even the frog that dwells in the pond—"
I know not if it be in your honor's land,
But in Nihon they sing the stanzas of the "uta."
And so it comes that an old man
Can sing the song you have heard,
A song of great Yamato.

CHORUS
(changing the chant)

And as for the nightingale and the poem it made—
They say that in the royal reign
Of the Emperor K
ō
ren
In the land of Yamato, in the temple of High Heaven
A priest was dwelling.
*
Each year at the season of Spring
There came a nightingale
To the plum-tree at his window.
And when he listened to its song
He heard it singing a verse:

"Sho-y
ō
mei-ch
ō
rai

Fu-s
ō
gem-bon sei."

And when he wrote down the characters,
Behold, it was an "uta"-song
Of thirty letters and one.
And the words of the song—

FISHERMAN

Hatsu-haru no
Of Spring's beginning

Ashita goto ni wa
At each dawn

Kitaredomo Though I come,

CHORUS

Awade zo kaeru
Unmet I return

Moto no sumika ni.
To my old nest.

Thus first the nightingale,
And many birds and beasts thereto,
Sing "uta," like the songs of men.
And instances are many;
Many as the myriad pebbles that lie
On the shore of the sea of Ariso.
"For among things that live
There is none that has not the gift of song."

Truly the fisherman has the ways of Yamato in his heart. Truly, this custom is excellent.

FISHERMAN

If we speak of the sports of Yamato and sing its songs, we should show too what dances we use; for there are many kinds.

CHORUS

Yes, there are the dances; but there is no one to dance.

FISHERMAN

Though there be no dancer, yet even I—

CHORUS

For drums—the beating of the waves.
For flutes—the song of the sea-dragon.
For dancer—this ancient man
Despite his furrowed brow
Standing on the furrowed sea
Floating on the green waves
Shall dance the Sea Green Dance.

FISHERMAN

And the land of Reeds and Rushes...

CHORUS

Ten thousand years our land inviolate!

[The rest of the play is a kind of "ballet"; the words are merely a commentary on the dances.]

ACT II.

FISHERMAN
(transformed into
SUMIYOSHI NO KAMI,
the God of Poetry).

Sea that is green with the shadow of the hills in the water!
Sea Green Dance, danced to the beating of the waves.

(He dances the Sea Green Dance.)

Out of the wave-lands,
Out of the fields of the Western Sea

CHORUS

He rises before us,
The God of Sumiyoshi,
The God of Sumiyoshi!

THE GOD

I rise before you
The god—

CHORUS

The God of Sumiyoshi whose strength is such
That he will not let you subdue us, O Rakuten!
So we bid you return to your home,
Swiftly over the waves of the shore!
First the God of Sumiyoshi came.
Now other gods
*
have come—
Of Isé and Iwa-shimizu,
Of Kamo and Kasuga,
Of Ka-shima and Mi-shima,
Of Suwa and Atsuta.
And the goddess of the Beautiful Island,
The daughter of Shakära
King of the Dragons of the Sea—
Skimming the face of the waves
They have danced the Sea Green Dance.
And the King of the Eight Dragons—
With his Symphony of Eight Musics.
As they hovered over the void of the sea,
Moved in the dance, the sleeves of their dancing-dress
Stirred up a wind, a magic wind
That blew on the Chinese boat
And filled its sails
And sent it back again to the land of Han.
Truly, the God is wondrous;
The God is wondrous,and thou, our Prince,
Mayest thou rule for many, many years
Our Land Inviolate!

occurrence of place-names and plays of word on such names makes it impossible to translate.

Footnotes

*
Here follows a long lyric passage describing their journey and ascent. The frequent

*
I have only summarized the last chorus. When the pilgrims reach the summit, they pray to their founder, En no Gy
ō
ja, and to the God Fud
ō
that the boy may be restored to life. In answer to their prayers a Spirit appears carrying the boy in her arms. She lays him at the Priest's feet and vanishes again, treading the Invisible Pathway that En no Gy
ō
ja trod when he crossed from Mount Katauragi to the Great Peak without descending into the valley.

*
The play is given in a list of Seami's works composed on the authority of his great-grandson, Kwanze Nagatoshi, in 1524. Owada gives it as anonymous.

*
"Wakare no tori," the bird which warns lovers of the approach of day.

*
Turn it into a Buddha.

*
The fact that Haku is a foreigner is conventionally emphasized by his pronunciation of this word. The fishermen, when using the same word later on, called it "Nihon."

*
The Chinese call him Fan Li. He lived in China in the fifth century
B.C.
Having rendered important services to the country of Yiieh (Etsu), he went off with his mistress in a skiff, knowing that if he remained in public life his popularity was bound to decline. The Fishermen are vaguely groping towards the idea of "a Chinaman" and a "boat." They are not yet consciously aware of the arrival of Rakuten.

*
Haku throughout omits the honorific turns of speech which civility demands. The Fishermen speak in elaborately deferential and honorific language. The writer wishes to portray Haku as an ill-bred foreigner.

*
"Uta," i.e. the thirty-one syllable Japanese stanza.

*
Quotation from the Preface to the
Kokinsh
Å«
("Collection of Songs Ancient and Modern"). The fact that Haku continues the quotation shows that he is under a sort of spell and makes it clear for the first time that his interlocutor is not an ordinary mortal. From this point onwards, in fact, the Fisherman gradually becomes a God.

*
The priest's acolyte had died. The nightingale was the boy's soul.

*
They do not appear on the stage.

OF
the plays which are founded in the
Ise
Monogatari
*
the best known are
Izutsu
and
Kakitsubata,
both by Seami.
Izutsu
is founded on the episode which runs as follows:

Once upon a time a boy and a girl, children of country people, used to meet at a well and play there together. When they grew up they became a little shame-faced towards one another, but he could think of no other woman, nor she of any other man. He would not take the wife his parents had found for him, nor she the husband that her parents had found for her.

Then he sent her a poem which said:

"Oh, the well, the well!

I who scarce topped the well-frame Am grown to manhood since we met."

And she to him:
"The two strands of my hair That once with yours I measured,
Have passed my shoulder;
Who but you should put them up?"
^†

So they wrote, and at last their desire was fulfilled. Now after a year or more had passed the girl's parents died, and they were left without sustenance. They could not go on living together; the man went to and fro between her house and the town of Takayasu in Kawachi, while she stayed at home.

Now when he saw that she let him go gladly and showed no grief in her face, he thought it was because her heart had changed. And one day, instead of going to Kawachi, he hid behind the hedge and watched. Then he heard the girl singing:

"The mountain of Tatsuta that rises
Steep as a wave of the sea when the wind blows
Tonight my lord will be crossing all alone!"

And he was moved by her song, and went no more to Takayasu in Kawachi.

In the play a wandering priest meets with a village girl, who turns out to be the ghost of the girl in this story. The text is woven out of the words of the
Ise Monogatari.

Kakitsubata is based on the eighth episode. Narihira and his compamons come to a place called Yatsuhashi, where, across an iris-covered swamp, zigzags a low footpath of planks

Narihira bids them compose an anagram on the work
Kakit-subata,
"iris," and someone sings:

"Kara-goromo
Ki
-tsutsu nare-ni-shi
Tsu
ma shi areba
Bar
u-baru ki-nuru
Tab
i wo shi zo omou."

The first syllables of each line make, when read consecutively, the word
Kakitsubata,
and the poem, which is a riddle with many meanings, may be translated:

"My lady's love
Sat close upon me like a coat well worn;
And surely now
Her thoughts go after me down this long road!"

"When he had done singing, they all wept over their dried-rice till it grew soppy."

In the play, a priest comes to this place and learns its story from a village-girl who turns out to be the "soul of the iris-flower." At the end she disappears into the Western Paradise. "Even the souls of flowers can attain to Buddhahood."

HANAKATAMI
(THE FLOWER BASKET)
By Kwanami; Revised By Seami

B
EFORE
he came to the throne, the Emperor Keitai
^†
loved the Lady Terubi. On his accession he sent her a letter of farewell and a basket of flowers. In the play the messenger meets her on the road to her home; she reads the letter, which in elaborately ceremonial language announces the Emperor's accession and departure to the Capital.

TERUHI

The Spring of our love is passed! Like a moon left lonely

In the sky of dawn, back to the hills I go,

To the home where once we dwelt.

(She slips quietly from the stage, carrying the basket and letter. In the next scene the
EMPEROR
*
is carried on to the stage in a litter borne by two attendants. It is the coronation procession. Suddenly
TERUHI, who has left her home distraught, wanders on to the stage followed by her maid, who carries the flower-basket and letter.)

TERUHI
(speaking wildly)

Ho, you travelers! Show me the road to the Capital! I am mad, you say?

Mad I may be; but love bids me ask O heartless ones! Why will they not answer me?

MAID

Madam, from these creatures we shall get no answer. Yet there is a sign that will guide our steps to the City. Look, yonder the wild geese are passing!

TERUHI

Oh well remembered! For southward ever
The wild geese pass
Through the empty autumn sky; and southward lies
The city of my lord.

Then follows the "song of travel," during which Teruhi and her companion are supposed to be journeying from their home in Echizen to the Capital in Yamato. They halt at last on the
hashi-gakari,
announcing that they have "arrived at the City." Just as a courtier (who together with the boy-Emperor and the two litter-bearers represents the whole coronation procession) is calling: "Clear the way, clear the way! The Imperial procession is approaching," Teruhi's maid advances on to the stage and crosses the path of the procession. The courtier pushes her roughly back, and in doing so knocks the flower-basket to the ground.

MAID

Oh, look what he has done! O madam, he has dashed your basket to the ground, the Prince's flower-basket!

TERUHI

What! My lord's basket? He has dashed it to the ground? Oh hateful deed!

COURTIER

Come, mad woman! Why all this fuss about a basket? You call it your lord's basket; what lord can you mean?

TERUHI

What lord should I mean but the lord of this land of Sunrise? Is there another?

Then follow a "mad dance" and song. The courtier orders her to come nearer the Imperial litter and dance again, that her follies may divert the Emperor.

She comes forward and dances the story of Wu Ti and Li Fu-jen.
^†
Nothing could console him for her death. He ordered her portrait to be painted on the walls of his palace. But, because the face neither laughed nor grieved, the sight of it increased his sorrow. Many wizards labored at his command to summon her soul before him. At last one of them projected upon a screen some dim semblance of her face and form. But when the Emperor would have touched it, it vanished, and he stood in the palace alone.

COURTIER

His Majesty commands you to show him your flower-basket.
(
She holds the basket before the
EMPEROR.)

COURTIER

His Majesty has deigned to look at this basket. He says that without doubt it was a possession of his rural days.
*
He bids you forget the hateful letter that is with it and be mad no more. He will take you back with him to the palace.

OMINAMESHI
By Seami

T
HE
play is written round a story and a poem. A man came to the capital and was the lover of a woman there. Suddenly he vanished, and she, in great distress, set out to look for him in the country he came from. She found his house, and asked his servants where he was. They told her he had just married and was with his wife. When she heard this she ran out of the house and leapt into the H
ō
j
ō
River.

GHOST OF THE LOVER

When this was told him,
Startled, perturbed, he went to the place;
But when he looked,
Pitiful she lay, Limp-limbed on the ground.
Then weeping, weeping—

GHOST OF GIRL

He took up the body in his arms,
And at the foot of this mountain
Laid it to rest in earth.

GHOST OF LOVER

And from that earth sprang up
A lady-flower
*
and blossomed
Alone upon her grave.
Then he:
"This flower is her soul."
And still he lingered, tenderly
Touched with his hand the petals' hem,
Till in the flower's dress and on his own
The same dew fell.
But the flower, he thought,
Was angry with him, for often when he touched it
It drooped and turned aside.

Such is the story upon which the play is founded. The poem is one by Bishop Henj
ō
(816-890):

O lady-flowers
That preen yourselves upon the autumn hill,
Even you that make so brave a show,
Last but "one while."

Hito toki,
"one while," is the refrain of the play. It was for "one while" that they lived together in the Capital; it is for "one while" that men are young, that flowers blossom, that love lasts. In the first part of the play an aged man hovering round a clump of lady-flowers begs the priest not to pluck them. In the second part this aged man turns into the soul of the lover. The soul of the girl also appears, and both are saved by the priest's prayers from that limbo (half death, half life) where all must linger who die in the coils of
sh
Å«
shin,
"heart-attachment."

MATSUKAZE
By Kwanami; Revised By Seami

L
ORD
Y
UKIHIRA
,brother of Narihira, was banished to the lonely shore of Suma. While he lived there he amused himself by helping two fisher-girls to carry salt water from the sea to the salt-kilns on the shore. Their names were Matsukaze and Murasame.

At this time he wrote two famous poems; the first, while he was crossing the mountains on his way to Suma:

"Through the traveler's dress
The autumn wind blows with sudden chill.
It is the shore-wind of Suma
Blowing through the pass."

When he had lived a little while at Suma, he sent to the Capital a poem which said:

"If any should ask news,
Tell him that upon the shore of Suma
I drag the water-pails."

Long afterwards Prince Genji was banished to the same place. The chapter of the
Genji Monogatari
called "Suma" says:

Although the sea was some way off, yet when the melancholy autumn wind came "blowing through the pass" (the very wind of Yakihira's poem), the beating of the waves on the shore seemed near indeed.

It is round these two poems and the prose passage quoted above that the play is written.

A wandering priest comes to the shore of Suma and sees a strange pine-tree standing alone. A "person of the place" (in an interlude not printed in the usual texts) tells him that the tree was planted in memory of two fisher-girls, Matsukaze, and Murasame, and asks him to pray for them. While the priest prays it grows late and he announces that he intends to ask for shelter "in that salt-kiln." He goes to the "waki's pillar" and waits there as if waiting for the master of the kiln to return.

Meanwhile Matsukaze and Murasame come on to the stage and perform the "water-carrying" dance which culminates in the famous passage known as "The moon in the water-pails."

CHORUS
(speaking for
MURASAME
)

There is a moon in my pail!

MATSUKAZE

Why, into my pail too a moon has crept!

(Looking up at the sky.)

One moon above...

CHORUS

Two imaged moons below,
So through the night each carries
A moon on her water-truck,
Drowned at the bucket's brim.
Forgotten, in toil on this salt sea-road,
The sadness of this world where souls cling!

Their work is over and they approach their huts, i. e., the
"waki's
pillar," where the priest is sitting waiting. After refusing for a long while to admit him "because their hovel is too mean to receive him," they give him shelter, and after the usual questioning, reveal their identities.