Japanese Plays Read online

  Japanese Plays

  A.L. Sadler (1882-1970) was Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney for 26 years, as well as Professor of Japanese at the Royal Military College of Australia. Among his other works are Shogun: The life of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese Tea Ceremony: Cha-no-ya, and Japanese Architecture: A Short History.

  Paul S. Atkins is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Washington, Seattle. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he was educated at Stanford University, where he completed a Ph.D. in Japanese. His field of expertise is premodern Japanese literature, drama, and culture. Professor Atkins is the author of Revealed Identity: The Noh Plays of Komparu Zenchiku and numerous articles on medieval Japanese theatre, fiction, poetry, poetics, and literary history.

  Japanese Plays

  Classic Noh, Kyogen and Kabuki Works

  A.L. SADLER

  with a new foreword by

  PAUL S. ATKINS

  T U T T L E P U B L I S H I N G

  Tokyo • Rutland, Vermont • Singapore

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 U.S.A. and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167

  Copyright ©2010 Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sadler, A. L. (Arthur Lindsay), b. 1882.

  Japanese plays : Noh, Koygen, Kabuki / translated by A.L. Sadler ; with a new foreword by Paul Atkins.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-4-8053-1073-1 (pbk.)

  1. Japanese drama--Translations into English. I. Atkins, Paul S. (Paul Stephen), 1969- II. Title.

  PL887.S3 2010

  895.620822--dc22

  2009030878

  ISBN 978-4-8053-1073-1

  Distributed by

  North America, Latin America & Europe

  Tuttle Publishing

  364 Innovation Drive

  North Clarendon, VT 05759-9436 U.S.A.

  Tel: 1 (802) 773-8930; Fax: 1 (802) 773-6993

  [email protected]

  www.tuttlepublishing.com

  Japan

  Tuttle Publishing

  Yaekari Building, 3rd Floor

  5-4-12 Osaki, Shinagawa-ku

  Tokyo 141 0032

  Tel: (81) 03 5437-0171

  Fax: (81) 03 5437-0755

  [email protected]

  Asia Pacific

  Berkeley Books Pte. Ltd.

  61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12

  Singapore 534167

  Tel: (65) 6280-1330

  Fax: (65) 6280-6290

  [email protected]

  www.periplus.com

  13 12 11 10 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in Singapore

  TUTTLE PUBLISHING® is a registered trademark of Tuttle Publishing, a division of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD vii

  INTRODUCTION xi

  NOH PLAYS

  Tadanori 3

  Kakitsubata 9

  Iwabune 15

  Tamura 18

  Tomoe 24

  Hatsu-Yuki or Virgin-Snow 31

  Oyashiro or the Great Shrine 33

  Ko-kaji 39

  Murōzumi 44

  The Shōjo and the Big Jar 47

  Kamo no Chomei 50

  Dōjōji 57

  KYOGEN OR COMIC INTERLUDES

  The Bag of Leave-Taking 65

  Ebisu and Daikoku 69

  The Second-Class Master Blindman and the Monkey 71

  The Stone God 77

  Hana-Ko 80

  The Six Shavelings 86

  Asahina 93

  The Persimmon-Seller 97

  Pins and Needles 101

  The Stag Hunter 104

  The Thief and the Child 109

  The Fowler 111

  The Priest’s Staff 114

  Under the Hat 118

  The Ointment Vendor 124

  Raku-ami 128

  The Acolyte’s Water-Drawing 131

  The Cuttle-Fish 134

  Dontaro 137

  The Liquor-Pipe 141

  The Gargoyle 147

  Tsu-en 149

  The Buddha-maker 152

  Akutaro 157

  KABUKI

  The Cherry Shower 161

  The Potter Kakiēmon 203

  The Village of Drum-Makers 251

  Raizan 274

  FOREWORD

  Arthur Lindsay Sadler’s volume of translations Japanese Plays was originally published in 1934 by Angus & Robertson of Sydney, Australia. It contains English versions of forty plays from the traditional noh, kyogen, and kabuki theaters. The original edition is difficult to obtain, having been out of print for many years, so this reissue by Tuttle is a very welcome development.

  The three dramatic forms represented in this volume may be grouped together under the category of premodern, classical, classic, or traditional Japanese drama, but they are quite different genres. Noh is the oldest, being amply documented from the fourteenth century. It is renowned for its unique staging, which includes the use of masks that are regarded in their own right as works of art; a spare and carefully polished stage made of cypress wood; stylized gestures and movement; and pacing that is typically far slower than the modern theatregoer is accustomed. Some noh plays move quickly, especially at the end, but in most cases it takes ninety minutes or more to perform ten pages of text. This is due to the long dances, pauses between the various parts of the play, and the common use of an interlude between the two acts to allow the principal actor to change masks. Noh music, which requires at minimum a chorus of eight to ten singers, a flutist, and two drummers (a third if a taiko drum is used), forms its own branch of traditional Japanese music. Sadler included few stage directions in his translations of the noh plays (the kyogen and kabuki plays seem more heavily annotated in this regard), suggesting that he may have regarded them more for their literary, as opposed to dramatic value.

  Next in length of pedigree is kyogen, a comic form that developed alongside the somber noh. Kyogen actors appear in noh plays as villagers or in other minor roles, but they have their own repertory of delicious farces, the plot of which often involves an inversion of social hierarchies. A servant outwits his master, or a husband tries to deceive his domineering wife. In the end, all is revealed, and the scoundrel is chased off the stage.

  Lastly, the kabuki theater, which largely attained its current form in the seventeenth century, is characterized by its sense of visual spectacle and over-the-top acting techniques. As in noh, female roles are played by male actors (although female actors have appeared at times in both genres over the centuries). In the noh, the male actor makes little effort to appear female, but in kabuki, one can hardly tell one is looking at a man at all. The large orchestra, the rotating sets, and the hanamichi (a strip of the stage that runs through the audience) all contribute to the thrills of watching kabuki. Such elements are enhanced by a style of acting that often emphasizes stylized bravado. It climaxes periodically when actors assume mie, fixed poses (which sometimes entail crossing the eyes) that are held for a few seconds as connoisseurs in the audience shout out the actor’s sobriquet.

  The Second World War is one of the fault lines in the history of Japan. Sadler wrote this book before the war, during a time when Japan was under the control of right-wing military nationalists, but before it joined Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy i
n the Axis Pact. Needless to say, much has changed since then. Noh, which has almost always been highly regarded, has been enshrined as one of the defining traditional Japanese art forms both inside and outside Japan and has become an indispensable element of world theater. Kyogen too has benefited, enjoying in recent years a boom in popularity thanks to the charisma and hard work of some star performers. Kabuki has managed to survive the competition of film and television and, although its audiences are not as large as they were in Sadler’s day, its prestige has risen; like opera, it is no longer theater for the masses. Distinguished actors from all the traditional forms receive public stipends and the official status known commonly as Living National Treasure. Noh, kyogen, and kabuki troupes regularly tour overseas, typically with heavy governmental sponsorship, contributing to the cultivation of Japan’s “soft power.”

  Sadler’s choices of plays are intriguing. Although the volume is titled simply Japanese Plays, all of the works included are from premodern genres; there are no plays from the emerging shingeki (New Drama) movement that originated in the late nineteenth century during the period of intense cultural contact between Japan and the West. But, to be fair, modern Japanese drama did not really hit its stride until after the Second World War.

  The decision to exclude works of the bunraku, or puppet, theater (also known as jōruri) is also interesting, as is the inclusion of only later kabuki plays, from the early twentieth century. All of the four kabuki plays included were written by either Takayasu Gekkō (1869-1944) or Enomoto Torahiko (1866-1916). Moreover, the selection seems to reflect Sadler’s personal inclination toward medieval Japanese culture, as reflected in his other volumes of translations. His kabuki protagonists tend toward master craftsmen, elegant recluses, tea masters, and other persons of exquisite taste and accomplishment.

  Of the three genres represented in this book, it seems that noh plays have received the most attention from translators over the past few decades, yet five of the dozen noh plays here have still never been translated anywhere else. Eight of the twenty-four kyogen plays have never been translated elsewhere either, and a few more have not been translated since Sadler. It seems that all of the kabuki translations are unique as well. Anyone wishing to sample readable translations from noh, kyogen, and kabuki may read this volume with profit and delight, but it is simply indispensable for reconstructing, to the extent possible, the respective canons of these dramatic forms in English translation.

  Even the works that have been translated elsewhere are very much worth reading in Sadler’s renditions. His literary style is elegant, robust, and of another age; he also clearly knew Japanese quite well (the same cannot be said for many in the early generation of Japanese-English translators), making for a rare combination of gifts. Earlier translations from Japanese literature possess an inimitable patina in English that is especially fitting to the tone of the original and is especially effective in the lyrical noh drama. One hears verbal music in even the most mundane lines of dialogue, as when in Tadanori the woodcutter describes the toil of finding wood to burn to make salt: “To feed it I must tramp to fetch the fuel.” Such lines can no longer be written in English without irony or archaism. The lines that still seem contemporary to my ear are also often superb, as in Tomoe, when the ghost of the title character sings,

  The falling flowers confess the vanity of things,

  The water flows indifferent to our fate,

  Yet is a symbol of the lucid mind.

  Paul S. Atkins

  INTRODUCTION

  This small collection of translations of dramas belonging to the three types which such compositions assume in Japan was put together with a view to supplying some material for those interested in the subject and which perhaps does not exist in the compass of one volume. The specimens presented are, I think, fairly representative, though several of them were translated more from interest than any other reasons. So far as I am aware only one or two of these Noh texts have been previously rendered into English, namely, Hatsu-yuki, very admirably and accurately done by Waley in his volume of Noh translations, and Kakitsubata and Tamura which are to be found in that of Fenollosa and Pound, but in a version which, though elegant in parts, bears little relation to the Japanese text, as was only to be expected considering the circumstances under which the book was compiled. I have tried to make all the translations as literal as may be, though it is impossible to reproduce the verbal embroideries of the Noh, depending as they do on puns and homophones peculiar to the structure of the Japanese language. Moreover, they largely consist of devices such as the telescope word, reception of the same sound within in the space of two or three words, and the intertwining of two sentences in one that are rather unpleasing in English. Gilbert’s writing sometimes contains just this sort of device that the Noh authors delight in; e.g. this passage:

  But each a card shall draw,

  And he who draws the lowest

  Shall (so ’twas said)

  Be thenceforth dead—

  In fact, a legal ’ghoest

  (When exigence of rhyme compels

  Orthography foregoes her spells

  And ghost is written ’ghoest!).

  Where the commentator would be able to point to the double meaning of “spells” and the propriety of the extra letter in ghost since he (or she) is one who “ghoest.” And when Gilbert referred to himself, as he is said to have done, “as a hard-boiled egoist,” he was indulging in the adroit overworking of one syllable of a word, which may be found on every page or two of the Noh texts. Perhaps it is the national feeling for economy that makes Japanese writers so fond of this trick. The style of the Noh is archaic and conventional, but not very difficult after some familiarity has been gained with it, owing to the repetition of the same phrases and devices. A Japanese commentator describes it as made up of famous excerpts from classical literature of all periods from the most ancient times up to the civil wars of the twelfth century, representing on the one hand the aesthetic feelings, and on the other the philosophy of these past ages, since it is mainly composed of poetical matter embellished with Buddhist discourses. But these Buddhist quotations, too, are somewhat circumscribed, and like the Chinese texts were doubtless familiar enough to the literate of all periods, while on the other hand they were a source of information to those who were not quite so literate. And the study and chanting of the texts or Utai, quite apart from their performance on the Noh stage, is a favorite hobby among the educated of Japan today as it has been in the past. And people do not go to see a performance of Noh unless they have taken lessons in it or otherwise studied it, and even then they take the text with them and follow it. As Noh stages are only to be found in big cities, and boxes in them must be taken for a period, comparatively few can see the full performance, but everywhere there are readers of Utai so that the texts are well known.

  The Noh performance is somewhat the equivalent of opera, though it avoids the artistic defect of this form of entertainment, the attempt to combine first-class singing with acting of the same grade and at the same time fitness for the part. Thus one does not find in the Noh a middle-aged and far from slender person taking the part of a young heroine because he or she has the required fine voice that seems seldom separated from a well-developed figure. The use of the mask and the measured chant, somewhat like plain-song, obviated this discord, while the performers in the Noh, as in all other dramatic performances in Japan, are all male. Perhaps the Noh is more like an oratorio in which the singers dress for their parts, though there are only three or four of them assisted by the chorus, and supported in its turn by the efforts of one flute and a drum and two “tsuzumi.”*

  The diagram of the Noh stage will explain the arrangement, and this is no more than the Kagura stage still to be seen in front of the Great Shinto Shrines, such as Isumo, Kasuga, and Itsukushima, where the Miko or dancing-girls of the Deities posture before them on festivals and other occasions, since they appreciate this kind of entertainment as much as their worsh
ippers. As is demonstrated by the story of the first dramatic performance given by a certain goddess on an upturned tub in order to bring forth the Sun-goddess from the cave into which she had retired owing to the rude conduct of her brother, thus plunging the world into darkness and the rest of the divinities into perplexity. It will be observed that actresses have been confined to this Kagura or divine drama ever since.

  To this stage is attached a dressing-room connected with it by a covered way on which some of the performance takes place, for as soon as the players emerge from the green-room on to this gallery they are liable to begin to posture and chant. For their guidance, three pine-trees are planted along this covered way in the court outside. As the stage was usually built in the courtyard of a mansion facing the Great Reception Chamber it continued to have its own separate roof, and the distinguished audience, after paying their respects to their host as he sat in state on the dais, would then turn round and watch the performance across the courtyard through the opened-out side of the apartment.

  As to the origins of the Noh, there had existed from early days both the Dengaku or Rice-field Dance, a rhythmic posturing and song given by the farmers to lighten the labor of planting out the rice-shoots, and also the Sarugaku,† an earlier form, part of which was humorous. From these elements were derived much of the chant and movement, while the stories were supplied by the Heike ballads sung to the accompaniment of the “biwa” or lute, the Genji Monogatari, Chinese texts, and the myths and histories that centered in the shrines and temples. The first Noh were compiled from these sources in the days of the Ashikaga Shogun Yoshimitsu (1367-1408) by the actor-composers Kwanami Kiyotsugu, his son Se-ami Motokiyo, his son-in-law Komparu Ujinobu, and others. From this time onward the Noh pieces continued to be selected and composed until the early Tokugawa era about 1600, when its canon was definitely closed. The last Noh extant must be that entitled Toyokuni Mode, describing respect paid to the deified dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi by envoys from the sovereigns of his own country and of China. The performance of these dramas was entirely restricted to the Five Families of Komparu, Kwanzei, Hosho, Kongo, and Kita, of which Komparu claims the greater antiquity. These houses were originally engaged in the production of the Sarugaku given at the two Great Shrines of Kasuga at Nara, and Hiyoshi on Mount Hiei near Kyoto, and the tradition in the house of Komparu is that they were descended from an official appointed by Prince Shotoku (d. 621), to play the Dengaku which he wrote. The first Kwanzei also descends from a Shonagon or Court Councillor Tomonobu, himself fifth in line from the Emperor Kwammu, and Tomonobu is the ancestor of Kwan-ami Kiyotsugu. This house of Kwanzei was in the early seventeenth century made chief of the Five Families and official Noh teacher to the Shogun by the fifth Tokugawa Shogun Tsunayoshi, a great enthusiast for this and other arts. Thus it is apparent that the atmosphere of Noh is entirely aristocratic and largely Shinto.