Introductory Remarks
This short history of noh tells the story of the development of a group of performance arts and plays in medieval Japan. These traditional performances have been handed down to the present day and are generally known in the West by the term noh.1 They consist of three genres: okina sarugaku, celebratory and ritual performances featuring masked old men; noh plays proper, elevated and serious plays usually focusing on a major character and including musical accompaniment, singing, and dancing; and kyōgen plays, shorter comic performances. These three genres (and local versions of them) are the only dramatic performances originating in medieval Japan that have survived as continuous traditions to the present day (some 600 years later).2
In their current guise, all three genres are acted on a stage of about 5.4 m2 against a backdrop bearing a design of a pine tree. Musicians seated on stools at the back play a flute with a discordant overblow ( nōkan ), a hip drum ( ōtsuzumi ), a shoulder drum ( kotsuzumi ), and sometimes a stick drum ( taiko ). A chorus of men in formal dress (jiutai) kneel in two rows to the right of the stage. A bridge on the left connects a changing room to the stage, and it is from here that actors make their entrances and exits. Actors belong to one of three specializations: shite (main), waki (side), and kyōgen (comic).3 Shite and kyōgen main actors can wear masks, which are often specific to roles or generic roles. Okina sarugaku too has its own genre of masks. Noh actors only perform in Okina and noh plays, but kyōgen actors appear in all three genres.
Noh plays last between one and two hours, and are slow moving, with the actors gliding over the stage with a unique sliding gait. The delivery of the words of the play accords with a number of particular song types and singing styles such as declamation, recitative, nonrhythmic, and rhythmic melody. At the professional level, these parts are generally sung by men, with a deep-voiced vibrato. The general impression for newcomers is that of an ancient ritual.
For a long time, it was assumed that noh is performed today much as it was when it was established in the fourteenth century, but it has become clear that this is not the case. Like many theatres, the words, in so far as they have been recorded in writing, have changed less, while the production elements that are difficult to record—dance, song, gesture, pace, and vocal style—have been more fluid. Even the words in the early days were not fixed—each generation of actors adjusted the scripts to their taste. The significance or purpose of noh in the different periods of its history has also varied. For example, the entertainment of kyōgen, a brisker art form than the noh plays, broadly understood as comedy at the present, had other kinds of emphases in the medieval period, being possessed of religious, terpsichorean, lyrical, as well as satirical qualities.
This book is a history of the noh arts. All histories interpret extant materials and this study is no exception. I have visualized this book as to some degree an updating of O’Neill’s Early Nō Drama (published in 1958), but covering the longer period that scholars now realize is necessary to embrace the establishment of the art and also reflecting recent discoveries and changing intellectual assumptions.4 I expand the subject matter to include the art of kyōgen, the study of which has often been left in the shade by its sister art. Moreover, I wish to broaden the readership of this work beyond that of O’Neill’s volume (which was for experts on Japan and others with specialist interests in the Far East) to the wider audience of those interested in theatrical and performance arts throughout the world. To that end, while I fully document my sources, Japanese as well as others, I also embrace the insights of modern conceptions of theatre historiography, and moreover, I endeavour not to assume a knowledge of Japanese terminology and history.5 It is particularly with this broader readership in mind that I make this first chapter an overview of the historical and other contexts in which these medieval Japanese performance arts developed.
Most histories of noh concentrate on individuals—listing leading performers and playwrights and describing their interactions with their wealthy patrons.6 This to some extent reflects the historical evidence that survives. The primary example of this tendency is the concentration of studies on the performer and playwright Kanze Zeami (1363–1443).7 Many of his writings were preserved in his family line, and he performed before or associated with powerful people who appear frequently in diaries from the time. His writings are the source of most of what we know of the life of performers in his time. Scholarly writing starts with the interpretation of data, and as a result, studies of noh give the impression that Zeami was the dominant actor of the medieval period, if not of all periods. Of course, reflection persuades us that very likely there were numerous other fascinating actors who left behind fewer traces of their existence.
The idea that Zeami was the dominant figure in his time was the result in part of the amount of information that survived about him, but there has also been a hagiographical tendency in Japan that has ascribed everything good or interesting in the tradition to him. I have endeavoured to be aware of gaps in the record, and to search for broader contexts and conditions than simply the thoughts and talents of prominent individuals. We have, nevertheless, while there are no time machines, no choice but to reflect the disposition of sources in our writing.
A history of a performance art should discuss not only actors, audiences, and their worlds, but also the development of genres, exemplified by specific performances or plays, and this I have tried to do. Another topic of great importance to noh is the development of theories about acting and training methods. A good deal of theorizing by actors from the medieval age survives. Indeed, many people find early writings by actors about noh more interesting than the plays themselves.8 Although my own interest began with those writings, I refrain from giving them a prominent position in this book, for that would make it overwhelmingly long. The central concerns of this book will be the history of performers, performances, and plays.
Historical Conditions
The Japanese word chūsei, usually translated as “medieval” or “middle ages,” was first used systematically in Japan in the late nineteenth century to designate a historical period (although the word itself has older uses). It is now usually taken to refer to the interim between the Heian period, when the Heian court administered the country from the capital now known as Kyoto (from the early ninth to the late twelfth century), and the Tokugawa or Edo period, when the Tokugawa lineage of shoguns ruled Japan from Edo, now known as Tokyo (from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth century).9 This long interim, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, is a fascinating time for those interested in Japanese culture. On the one hand, it described a steady drawn-out descent into social chaos and fragmentation after the relative peace of the Heian polity. On the other, it contained the origins of much of what we now see as traditional Japanese culture. In broad terms, misery after misery afflicted ordinary Japanese, with famine, disease, and war following one after the other, and many Japanese seem to have taken refuge in escapist philosophies focused on avoiding hellish afterlives. The collapse of a vertical social order eventually generated a spirit of ruthless violence which swept away much of the old religious world. Fierce power struggles among warlords led to the centralizing of power under a dictator in the late sixteenth century, which in turn brought another long era of relative peace, albeit subject to an extraordinary totalitarian vision.
Nevertheless, there was much that was positive in the medieval period. It was a time of expanding population and great cultural vigour, starting out with the establishment of a new national legal system run by an idealistic warrior government in the seaside town of Kamakura, a spread of literacy among middle as well as upper classes, the establishment of a national culture including many of the forms that are thought of today as characteristic of Japan (tea ceremony, the architecture based on tatami and tokonoma, black and white ink painting, the formulation of martial arts like kendō and kyūdō, flower arrangement, noh theatre, Zen gardens, etc.). Central to the cultural story were the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The period known as the Northern and Southern courts, 1333–1392, was a watershed for Japan.10 A new organization of society began to form, where individuals in similar situations or localities banded together to resist the demands of the powerful and distant, taking advantage of numbers and solidarity. It is again easy to fall into the trap of assuming that what becomes apparent in records reflects changes in society—it may well be that social patterns in the provinces that were invisible before the medieval period merely became increasingly visible as time passed. Still the power of numbers over class ( gekokujō ) was seen in a series of prominent medieval social phenomena. In the performance arts of the time, the comic genre kyōgen (which we discuss in Chap. 7) reflected a new consciousness in the lives of the ordinary and rural classes.
Political Conditions
Early in the medieval period, power shifted from an aristocratic civilian government surrounding an emperor to military bureaucrats led by warrior leaders. The system of a lineage of hereditary emperors was probably originally modelled on Chinese examples, but unlike China, the Japanese managed to maintain a single dynasty, providing “emperors” (as they are called, although a more appropriate term would be “divine sovereigns”) from before the seventh century to the present day. Histories declared this line to have descended directly from the sun goddess Amaterasu. At certain times it was believed that the emperors incarnated characteristics of this divine ancestor and hence were themselves “gods.” From the eighth century, the line of emperors was at the centre of a court administration of the country again based on Chinese examples, known as the ritsuryō legal codes. From 1185 until 1333, however, the emperor’s court in Kyoto was forced to share its rule of the country with a military council or shogunate, based in the Eastern seaboard town of Kamakura. Powerful families became distinguished into two groups: the aristocracy, associated with Kyoto, and a warrior class, whose power base lay in the provinces. The leaders of the warrior class, in Kamakura, saw their shogunate as an organ serving the imperial court in Kyoto by policing the provincial middle class and adjudicating rural and military disputes, mainly relating to landholdings. There was a continuous friction between civil and military administrations in the period, exacerbated by the dissatisfactions of other powerful social groups, which resulted in a civil war in the 1320s and 1330s. The side led by the emperor (Go-Daigo) won in the end, whereas many of the warriors who remained loyal to the Kamakura regime either died in battle, committed mass suicide, or were executed. For a few years Emperor Go-Daigo held undivided power, but his actions alienated loyal warriors, and competition between his and a competing imperial line resulted in a further long series of conflicts lasting until the latter half of the fourteenth century. During the war, Go-Daigo had employed as his shogun (or general) Ashikaga Takauji. Takauji founded a hereditary line of shoguns. The third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), at long last brought the war between the two imperial courts to a settlement in 1392 and established another military government, this time in the Muromachi district of the capital Kyoto: hence the name generally given to the 15 successive Ashikaga shoguns—the Muromachi shogunate.11
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu made no pretence that he was a servant of the imperial court. His ascendency over the emperor was symbolized by the fact that his Muromachi residence, built in 1379, was far larger than the imperial palace situated nearby.12 Yoshimitsu was a polymathic, “Henry VIII”-type of figure, equally active politically, diplomatically, in the literary arts, and in religious matters. His education was symbolic in this regard; he was trained in aristocratic culture by courtiers like the leading aristocrat Nijō Yoshimoto, who bore in himself and in his hand-copied library the inheritance of the ancient court tradition; but he was also close to priests of the recently imported Zen sect, like Gidō Shūshin and Shun’oku Myōha, who taught him not only meditation but also the Chinese literary culture of the Song (960–1279), whe...