Nō drama is a six-hundred-year-old performance art devoted in large part to the inner lives of ghosts and spirits. The very idea that ghosts might have lives is disconcerting; admittedly, those lives are really afterlives, with a retrospective view of a life before death, so in a certain sense we introduce some distortion by insisting on “the lives of ghosts.”
In this section
- Shite and waki
- Kan’ami and Zeami
- Play types: mugen – “dream” plays
- Play types: genzai – “contemporary” plays
1. Shite and waki
All the same, in many nō plays a ghost or spirit is the central figure, or shite (pronounced “sh’tay”), and however distant in time the events that formed that ghost’s prior life, they remain at the forefront of the shite’s mind and motivate his or her appearance in the dramatic present of the play. The most important character after the shite is an interlocutor, known as the waki. The waki’s appearance is usually the first thing that happens, and the interaction of the shite and waki provides the kernel of paradox that sets a typical nō play in motion. A play may feature other characters. The shite and waki may each appear with companions (tsure and wakizure, respectively). Often another character, the ai-kyōgen (or simply ai, appears about three-quarters of the way through a play (usually while the shite has retired backstage for a costume change) to give an account in simpler language of events already discussed or enacted. In some plays a child (kokata) may appear. There is always a chorus (jiutai), usually of eight voices, which chants descriptive texts or takes over the shite’s or waki’s lines at certain important points (in particular, when the shite is dancing).
An instrumental ensemble (hayashi), consisting of a flute and either two or three drums, completes the cast. It provides accompaniment to the chanting of the shite, waki, and chorus (and more rarely the ai) or performs strictly instrumental music, especially when the shite is dancing. Finally, there are several stage assistants (kōken), who sit on stage and manage props, occasionally helping to straighten costumes and such.
Although nō and kyōgen come from the same roots, they are distinguished in performance today and have different stage conventions. The main character in a kyōgen play is, as in nō, termed the shite; however, the secondary character is not called the waki, but rather the ado. Though it is unusual for secondary characters on the noh stage to take the roles of antagonists, the ado may well take an adversarial role vis-a-vis the shite of a play. There may be tsure and kokata in kyōgen, as in noh, and occasionally a musical ensemble, but only rarely is there a chorus. Kyōgen plays are far more concerned with living characters than nō, and ghosts are much rarer.
The aesthetics of nō and kyōgen have been maintained from the late 1300s by performance guilds, or schools. The conventions of performance, costuming, choreography, the choice of masks, and many other performance details that shape the character of nō are dependent upon the judgments made over the centuries by influential members of these schools.
Naturally, nō has changed over the centuries, but the performance tradition reaches from the modern stage deep into the heart of medieval Japan. This lineage can be traced, through the names of historically identifiable individuals, as far back as the middle of the fourteenth century. [Link to database of performer lineages in Japanese] Earlier than that, though the tradition was no less established, it is almost entirely anonymous.
2. Kan’ami and Zeami
The two people responsible for the formation of nō, at the time called sarugaku, were Kan’ami Kiyotsugu (1333-1384) and his son, Zeami Motokiyo (c. 1363-C. 1443). By all evidence, Kan’ami was a uniquely successful and beloved performer, a large man who could nonetheless carry off the roles of beautiful women and young boys convincingly. He particularly valued the roles of madwomen and demons. Zeami, his son, was also a renowned performer and the author as well of a majority of the most celebrated plays in the repertory. Zeami had important ideas about training, performance, aesthetics, philosophy and, in the end, about being itself.
Zeami’s writings on the composition of nō plays demonstrate that his deepest interest was in human subjects. He wrote plays about gods, bodhisattvas, and other supernatural beings, but his most celebrated works and the comments he made about acting in the critical commentaries he left behind point to a fascination with the emotional lives of people, from warriors to ladies of the old court to mothers in the marketplace. He harbored serious reservations about the unrefined demonic roles that had been so important to his father. When he wrote about demons, he gave them a human sensibility.
3. Play types: mugen – “dream and illusion” plays
Many noh plays about ghosts make it explicit that the ghosts are appearing in dreams. This has given birth to the major genre called mugen (“dream and illusion”) nō. Plays featuring ghosts, very likely the invention of Zeami, represent a considerable portion of the repertory.
A good example of a mugen nō play is Matsukaze, which had been popular on the sarugaku stage even before Zeami brought it to its contemporary form. It is the story of two peasant sisters, Matsukaze (Pining Wind) and Murasame (Sudden Shower), who make a precarious living by extracting salt from seawater on the Suma seacoast. In the play, they are created as lovers of the historical aristocrat, Ariwara no Yukihira, when he was exiled to Suma. In the dramatic present of the play, the sisters reappear as ghosts on the Suma coast to relive their longing for Yukihira, who had long since returned to the capital. The climax occurs when Matsukaze, the elder sister, imagines that Yukihira has come back in the form of a pine tree on the beach. This scene, a favorite throughout the history of nō, embodies the genre’s legacy of women possessed by an obsession and is, indeed, one of the finest “mad” pieces. Matsukaze’s madness, however, is in some interpretations a more accurate assessment of reality than the conventional perspective of her more pragmatic sister, Murasame. The play culminates in a pervasive meditation on the complexity of perception and emotion, and as Matsukaze comes to an end, Matsukaze and Murasame disappear in a sudden shower, leaving only the wind soughing through the pines. The entire play finally seems merely a dream in the mind of the waki, but no less significant for that.
In one scene the two sisters are dipping brine from the sea into a cart. The props are delicate and colorful, but the text tells us that the labor is exhausting. Despite the drudgery of the work, the sisters’ thoughts move from their weariness to recollections of the poems their lover once recited, and to images of moonlight on the waves. Although they are peasants, they embody the refinement of a centuries-old courtly aesthetic; though ghosts, their emotional worlds could hardly be more vital and human.
In the nō of Zeami’s day clothing became an adjunct to identity. In two of the most celebrated plays of the time, Matsukaze and Izutsu (The Well-Curb), the central characters (beautiful women living at the seaside and in the country) envelope themselves in keepsake court robes as a means of achieving an ecstatic unity with long-gone lovers. In modern performances of these plays, robes known as chōken are employed: when the women put on their lovers’ chōken and court hats, they are possessed by them; in a sense, they become them. It is not clear if the chōken proper existed in Zeami’s time, but the plays in question make clear that a garment of some sort was used for the same purpose.
In another important play, Aoi-no-ue (“Lady Aoi”), we find a major character who is represented only by a robe (in this case a kosode). This play is a variation on a famous incident in the Tale of Genji where the hero’s principal wife, the Lady Aoi of the title, becomes possessed by a number of malevolent spirits while in labor. One spirit is particularly tenacious. It turns out to be – quite literally – the embodied jealousy of another of the hero’s lovers, a woman called Lady Rokujō. Lady Rokujō is the central character in the play; the title character appears only in the form of the kosode. Aoi-no-ue most likely dates from the late fourteenth century, and along with plays such as Matsukaze and Izutsu, it emphasizes the importance of attire in nō, even if the precise nature of the costumes used at the time is not known.
By having ghosts as central characters, Zeami established a religious or philosophical viewpoint that could be evoked onstage through the enactment or focus on signal moments selected retrospectively from the character’s life. In this process the main characters come to a clearer awareness of their identity, their significance, their loves and hates. Plays of this type often end with the implicit assumption that the subject has moved on spiritually to a new understanding, or even to enlightenment.
4. Play types: genzai – “present time” plays
In contrast to mugen nō, plays about characters who are alive during the dramatic present of the play are termed genzai (present time) nō. Part of the repertory from the start, they became more dramatically staged and mainstream in the hands of Zeami’s successors, such as his grand nephew Kanze Kōjirō Nobumitsu (1435?-1516).
The genzai nō play Ataka, one of Nobumitsu’s greatest successes, was named after the barrier that was meant to stop the hero Yoshitsune from escaping serious charges brought slanderously against him in the court of his half-brother, the shogun Yoritomo.
Yoshitsune is played by a child actor. The shite is his senior retainer, the brawny warrior Benkei. Nine additional actors join their retinue in tsure roles with others onstage with the waki. Such numbers lend an entirely different air to this play than a typical Zeami or Zenchiku production. The text makes it clear that this is a battle of good versus evil, a great adventure in the saga of an ill-starred hero who will eventually – as the audience knows – meet a tragic end. In Ataka, Yoshitsune’s party is victorious through guile, and they escape. In the course of the events leading to the escape, though, Yoshitsune, the lord and master of the group, must pretend to be a common laborer, and Benkei is forced to beat him before the barrier guards to give credence to the pretense. The play gives only a limited perspective on the interior lives of its characters, a relatively set vision of feudal loyalty and solidarity. It is nonetheless an exciting drama, exhibiting a sophisticated understanding of how the space of the nō stage can be used to great dramatic effect. Ataka seems psychologically simpler than earlier, shite-centered dramas, and points ahead to the kabuki and the puppet theater of the Edo period (1615-1 868). When recreated as a kabuki play centuries later, Ataka found a wildly appreciative audience under the title Kanjinchō (“The subscription list”).
Contributor: *Adapted from: Thomas Hare. “Rituals, Dreams, and Tales of Adventure: A Material History of Noh Drama” in Miracles and Mischief: Noh and Kyōgen Theater in Japan (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002). Other portions of the essay appear in the History module.