Japanese Literature/Chapter 3

by Donald Keene

III. THE JAPANESE THEATRE

The drama is the branch of Japanese literature which has attracted the widest attention in the West, meriting the praise it has won by its beauty and by a diversity scarcely to be matched in any other country. At least four major types of theatrical entertainment exist today: the Nō, with a repertory chiefly of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century plays; the puppet theatre, for which Japan’s most celebrated dramatists wrote in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the kabuki, or lyrical drama, which was the popular theatre from the seventeenth century to recent times; and, finally, the modern drama, written at first largely under Western influence, but now independent, and possessing considerable merit.

Of these four types of theatre, the Nō has most interested Western readers, largely as a result of the translations of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley. It was to the Nō that the poet Yeats turned about 1915 for a form of drama “distinguished, indirect and symbolic”, as he put it, and the continued interest in the Nō is reflected by performances during recent years in Paris and Berlin. But before discussing those qualities in the Nō which have most appealed to Western readers and audiences, some word must be said about the history of this dramatic form.

The name Nō itself means “talent”, and by a derived association, the exhibition of talent, or a performance. It was not by this name, however, that the theatre was generally called until recent times. Previously, this most aristocratic of theatrical mediums was known as sarugaku, or “monkey-music”, a name perhaps indicative of its origins. The earliest mentions of this “monkey-music” show that it was a lively mixture of song and dance combined with a certain amount of miming. Some people believe that there was Chinese influence in the naming of this entertainment, if not in its form as well, but the early “monkey-music” was of so elementary a nature that it is almost impossible to prove whether or not it underwent foreign influence. Performances under this name go back at least as far as the tenth century A.D., and there no doubt were similar forms of entertainment for many years previous. There was also a rival school of theatrical performances called dengaku, or “field-music”, which flourished especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and which seems to have had its origins in the festivities attending harvest celebrations and other agricultural holidays. “Field-music” came to be associated with various shrines and consisted of elaborate programmes of dancing and singing, together with playlets acted by the dancers. Our knowledge of the theatre of the thirteenth century and before is so imperfect that we are unable to ascertain just what relationship existed between the “monkey-music” and the “field-music”, and in fact it is often difficult to distinguish the two, for both came to be performances of much the same nature. What is perhaps most significant is that the Nō drama, in spite of its later themes, was apparently of secular origin, although it undoubtedly underwent some religious influence through the “field-music” and other dramatic forms.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the Nō had assumed much of its present shape; that is, it was a combination of singing, dancing and music, differing from earlier dramatic forms chiefly in that it had plots which unified the three elements. By the end of the same century this rather simple entertainment had been lifted to its highest powers of expression by two men: Kanami Kiyotsugu (1333–84) and his son Seami (or Zeami) Motokiyo (1363–1443). The Nō play, as it took final form in their hands, had a principal dancer (or protagonist), and assistant (or deuteragonist), and various accompanying personages, usually not more than four or five actors in all, plus a chorus. The texts of the individual plays are short, generally not even so long as a single act of a normal Western play, but the singing and dancing made them take about an hour to perform. I think that the best introduction to the technique of a Nō play is the brilliant pastiche of one written by Arthur Waley on the subject of the Duchess of Malfi.

“The persons need not be more than two—the Pilgrim, who will act the part of the waki [or deuteragonist], and the Duchess, who will be shite or Protagonist. The chorus takes no part in the action, but speaks for the shite while she is miming the more engrossing parts of her role.

“The Pilgrim comes on to the stage … and then names himself to the audience thus (in prose):

“ ‘I am a pilgrim from Rome. I have visited all the other shrines of Italy but have never been to Loretto. I will journey once to the shrine of Loretto.’

“Then follows (in verse) the Song of Travel in which the Pilgrim describes the scenes through which he passes on the way to the shrine. While he is kneeling at the shrine, the Protagonist comes on to the stage. She is a young woman dressed, ‘contrary to the Italian fashion’, in a loose-bodied gown. She carries in her hand an unripe apricot. She calls to the Pilgrim and engages him in conversation. He asks her if it were not at this shrine that the Duchess of Malfi took refuge. The young woman answers with a kind of eager exaltation, her words gradually rising from prose to poetry. She tells the story of the Duchess’s flight, adding certain intimate touches which force the priest to ask abruptly, ‘Who is it that is speaking to me?’ And the girl, shuddering (for it is hateful to a ghost to name itself), answers: ‘Hazukashi ya! I am the soul of the Duke Ferdinand’s sister, she that was once called Duchess of Malfi. Love still ties my soul to the earth. Pray for me, oh, pray for my release!’

“Here closes the first part of the play. In the second the young ghost, her memory quickened by the Pilgrim’s prayers … endures again the memory of her final hours. She mimes the action of kissing the hand, finds it very cold. And each successive scene of the torture is so vividly mimed that though it exists only in the Protagonist’s brain, it is as real to the audience as if the figure of dead Antonio lay propped upon the stage, or as if the madmen were actually leaping and screaming before them. Finally she acts the scene of her own execution:

Heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes’ palaces; they that enter there
Must go upon their knees. (She kneels.)
Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet.

(She sinks her head and folds her hands.)

“The chorus, taking up the word ‘quiet’, chant a phrase from the Lotus Sutra, ‘In the Three Worlds there is no quietness or rest’. But the Pilgrim’s prayers have been answered. Her soul has broken its bonds; is free to depart. The ghost recedes, grows dimmer and dimmer till at last it vanishes from sight.”^[1]

In many respects the Nō resembled the Greek drama. First of all, there was the combination of text, music and dance. Secondly, both theatres used a chorus, although in the Nō the chorus never takes any part in the action, confining itself to recitations for the principal dancer when he is in the midst of his dance. Again, the Nō uses masks, as did the Greek drama, but their use is restricted to the principal dancer and his companions, especially when they take the parts of women. Mask-carving has been considered an important art in Japan, and together with the gorgeous costumes, the masks add much to the visual beauty of the Nō. In contrast, the scenery is barely sketched, consisting usually of no more than an impressionistic rendering of the main outlines of the objects portrayed. The music, at least to a Western listener, is not of great distinction, very rarely rising to the level of melody, and most often little more than an accentuation of the declaimed or intoned word. A flute is played at important moments in the play, and there are several drums, some of which can serve to heighten the tension of the audience. The actual theatres in which the Nō plays are performed are small. Their most striking features are the hashigakari, a raised passage-way leading from the actors’ dressing-room through the audience to the stage, and the square, polished-wood stage itself. The audience sits on three, or sometimes only two, sides of the stage, which is covered by a roof of its own like that of a temple. The actors make their entrances through the audience, but above them, and pronounce their first words before reaching the stage, an extremely effective way of introducing a character.

The performances in a Nō theatre last about six hours. Five Nō plays are presented in a programme, arranged as established in the sixteenth century. The first play is about the gods, the second about a warrior, the third about a woman, the fourth about a mad person, and the final play about devils, or sometimes a festive piece. Each of the plays in the Nō repertory is classified into one of these groups, and the purpose of having this fixed programme is to achieve the effect of an artistic whole, with an introduction, development and climax. The third, or woman-play, is the most popular, but to present a whole programme of such plays would mar the total effect as much, say, as having an Italian opera with five mad scenes sung by successive coloratura sopranos.

The tone of the Nō plays is serious, and often tragic. To relieve the atmosphere, the custom arose of having farces performed in between the Nō dramas of a programme, often parodies of the pieces that they follow. It might be imagined that the alternation of mood from the tragic tone of the Nō to a broad farce and then back again would prove too great a wrench for the sensibilities of the audience. This is not merely a case of comic relief in the manner of Shakespeare, for the farces last almost as long as the serious parts, and often specifically deride them. But the Japanese audiences have apparently enjoyed the very sharpness of the contrast between the two moods.

On the whole, however, the humour of the Japanese farces is not very interesting to us, and when a Western reader thinks of the Nō theatre, it will be of the tragedies. What are the qualities most to be admired in these works? There is first of all the poetry. This is written in alternating lines of 7 and 5 syllables, like most other Japanese verse, but in the plays attains heights otherwise unknown in the language. The short verses are sometimes miracles of suggestion and sharp imagery, but, at least for a Western reader, lack the sustained power of the greatest poetry. The Nō provides a superb framework for a dramatic poet. It is in some ways an enlarged equivalent of the tiny haiku, portraying only the moments of greatest intensity so as to suggest the rest of the drama. Like the haiku also, the Nō has two elements, the interval between the first and second appearance of the principal dancer serving the function of the break in the haiku, and the audience having to supply the link between the two. Sometimes there is also the intersection of the momentary and the timeless which may be noted in many haiku. Thus, for example, in the first part of the play Kumasaka, a travelling priest meets the ghost of the robber Kumasaka, who asks him to pray for the spirit of a person whom he will not name. Later that night the priest sees the robber as he was in former days, and the robber rehearses the circumstances of his death in impassioned verse, ending:

“Oh, help me to be born to happiness.”
(Kumasaka entreats the Priest with folded hands.)
The cocks are crowing. A whiteness glimmers over the night.
He has hidden under the shadow of the pine-trees of Akasaka,
(Kumasaka hides his face with his left sleeve.)
Under the shadow of the pine-trees he has hidden himself away.”^[2]

In this play the meeting of the priest and robber is fortuitous, the happening of a moment, but the desperate struggle of the robber to escape from his past into the path of salvation goes on and on.

Behind these plays, as behind the haiku, were the teachings of Zen Buddhism, whose greatest influence is probably found in the form of the Nō itself—the bareness of the lines of the drama, and the simplicity of the stage and sets. These teachings, which inspired so much of Japanese literature and art in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, probably came to the Nō largely with Kanami and Seami, who were closely associated with the court of the shoguns, which was deeply influenced by Zen masters. The use of Zen ideas takes various forms in the plays. In most of them the secondary character (the waki) is a priest, and sometimes he uses the language and ideas of Zen Buddhism. In the play Sotoba Komachi, one of the greatest, it is the poetess Komachi who voices the Zen doctrines, rather than the priests. She declares, confounding them:

	“Nothing is real.
	Between Buddha and Man
	Is no distinction, but a seeming of difference planned
	For the welfare of the humble, the ill-instructed,
	Whom he has vowed to save.
	Sin itself may be the ladder of salvation.”
(Chorus)	So she spoke, eagerly; and the priests,
	“A saint, a saint is this decrepit, outcast soul.”
	And bending their heads to the ground,
	Three times did homage before her.[3]

The same play contains some of the most beautiful lines of the entire body of Nō plays. This is the story of the poetess Komachi, who when young was noted for her beauty and for the cruelty she showed to her lovers. In the play she is a hag, abandoned by the world, who suffers for her cruelty of former days. The chorus recites of her:

The cup she held at the feast
Like gentle moonlight dropped its glint on her sleeve.
Oh how fell she from splendour,
How came the white of winter
To crown her head?
Where are gone the lovely locks, double-twined,

The coils of jet?
Lank whisps, scant curls wither now
On wilted flesh;
And twin-arches, moth-brows tinge no more
With the hue of far hills. “Oh cover, cover
From the creeping light of dawn
Silted seaweed locks that of a hundred years
Lack now but one.
Oh hide me from my shame.”^[4]

It is such poetry as this, and the hard and formal structure of the plots, which have most attracted Western readers to the Nō. Yeats, in explaining why he had adopted the form of the Nō for his series of plays on Irish legends, declared, “It is natural that I go to Asia for a stage-convention, for more formal faces, for a chorus that has no part in the action … A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of some commonplace player … the fine invention of a sculptor. A mask … no matter how close you go is still a work of art … and we shall not lose by staying the movement of the features, for deep feeling is expressed by a movement of the whole body.”^[5] In the poetry itself, as revealed to him in translation, Yeats discovered patterns of symbols which also attracted him greatly. But not even in Waley’s fine translations can the full power of the poetry of the Nō be revealed, and judgments on its quality must be based on the originals.

In the styles used in the Nō plays we have another parallel with the Greek theatre. There is a marked difference in the language of quiet and emotionally important scenes, a difference like that between the iambics and the choral songs of a Greek drama. The quiet scenes are in prose which must have been very close to the colloquial of the time, but the poetry of the sung parts is of extraordinary complexity and difficulty. It abounds in allusions and puns, and especially in the kakekotoba or “pivot-words” already discussed above.^[6] As an example of the poetry of a Nō play, we may consider a short passage from Matsukaze, written by Kanami and revised by Seami. This is the story of two fisher-girls, Matsukaze and Mutasame, who long ago in the past were befriended by a nobleman banished to their lonely shore. In the first part of the play a travelling priest asks shelter at their house after seeing them dip water from the sea. He discovers their identities, and, in the second part, Matsukaze, the chief dancer, appearing in the hunting-cloak left behind by the nobleman, enacts their story. During one part of her dance the chorus recites for her:

okifushi wakade	Awake or asleep,
makura yori	From my pillow
ato yori koi no	And in my footsteps
semekureba	Love pursues me.
semukata namida ni	Helpless, in tears
fushi shizumu	I fall and sink
koto zo kanashiki	O sorrowful.

This passage depends for its full effect on the recognition of an allusion and on a “pivot-word”. The allusion is to a poem in the Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry of 905 A.D.:

makura yori	From my pillow
ato yori koi no	And from the foot of the bed
semekureba	Love comes pursuing.
semu kata nami zo	What am I to do?
tokonaka ni oru	I’ll stay in the middle of the bed.

The allusion to this gay poem in a moment of extreme distress is a psychologically effective device; a similar use of incongruous poetry is found in Ophelia’s mad scene, and, in our own day, in The Waste Land, where Eliot quotes Ophelia’s “good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”, after a sordid lower-class scene.

The “pivot-word” in the passage I have cited is one of the best, a splendid example of the use of this device. The words semukata nami mean “helpless”; by addition of the syllable “da”, we got the word namida, “tears”. Thus the bridge is made between the helplessness of the girl and her tears, the meaning shifting imperceptibly from one image to the other.

It may be wondered to what degree such passages were intelligible to the audience. Arthur Waley has contended that general familiarity with the old poems, especially in the form of songs, must have made comprehension far more general than we might suppose. Nevertheless, it is true that the Nō increasingly became the pastime of the court aristocracy, the group best trained in recognizing poetic allusions and feats of verbal dexterity. The middle and lower classes had to wait until the end of the sixteenth century for forms of theatrical entertainment which were designed primarily for their tastes. These new forms included the kabuki, a brilliant dramatic, but essentially not a literary, art, and the jōruri, or puppet theatre, in my opinion a far more important literary medium. Japan is far from being the only country in which the puppet theatre has a long history, but elsewhere it is seldom considered a very exalted form of art. The puppet-plays produced in Europe are usually either adaptations of plays originally written for actors, or else are trifles calculated to delight or amuse by their ingenuity. In Japan the puppet theatre has been a serious medium for creative artists; in fact, the greatest Japanese dramatist, Chikamatsu (1653–1725), wrote all of his famous plays for the puppets, and even today, when this theatre has fallen rather out of public favour, it remains at an artistic level probably unequalled by the theatre of living actors.

The jōruri would have been impossible without the Nō before it, even though the methods of the two are in some ways so dissimilar. The tradition of masks made it easier for audiences to accept the expressionless faces of the puppets, and the chorus reciting for a Nō dancer led the way to a chanter delivering lines for voiceless puppets. Indeed, in its early days the jōruri was not only easier to understand, but more realistic than the Nō, in spite of the fact that the puppets were rather crudely made. This is indicated by the account we possess of a performance of 1647. A philosopher visited a theatre where he saw wooden puppets dressed as “men, women, monks or laity, immortals, soldiers, horsemen and porters. There were dancers and musicians who beat time with fans and drums. Some leapt about and some rowed boats and sang. Some had been killed in battle, and their heads and bodies were separated. Some were dressed in the clothes of the gentry. Some shot arrows, some waved sticks, and some raised flags or bore aloft parasols. There were dragons, snakes, birds, arid foxes that carried fire in their tails, at which all the spectators marvelled. … The puppets were just as if they were alive.”^[7] Certainly this performance sounds more lively than a Nō tragedy, with its gloomy poetry and slowly executed dancing. The tricks of the puppet-operator, such as having fire in the foxes’ tails as in Japanese ghost stories, were undoubtedly meant to capture the interest of the audience by their realism. The philosopher declared that the puppets seemed to be alive. However, although such facile realism undoubtedly appealed to the audiences, it was rejected by all the men who contributed importantly to the advance of the art of the puppet theatre, and the history of the development of this art might almost be made in terms of steps away from realism. Take, for instance, the technique of handling the puppets. At first the operators were hidden in such a way that the audience could see only the puppets, which were either manipulated by strings from above, like our marionettes, or, more commonly, held up from below by an operator with his hands inside the puppet’s body. The chanter was also concealed, to increase the illusion that it was the puppet who was acting and talking by himself. As time went on, however, the size of the puppets increased until they were about two-thirds that of the operators, and various developments made it necessary for three men to work each of the important puppet figures. This they did in full view of the audience. The chanter also emerged from his place of concealment. When we see pictures of the puppet theatre with the three men clad in bright or sombre costumes standing beside each puppet and the row of musicians seated to the side, it seems impossible that any semblance of dramatic illusion could be preserved. Why, we may wonder, did a great dramatist like Chikamatsu, who had already written successful plays for actors, choose this unlikely form, and why did the Japanese public, for at least a century, find the puppet theatre more enjoyable than any other? The answer may be found in the fact that although in Europe the attempt has been to make puppets seem as lifelike as possible, in Japan actors to this day imitate the movements of puppets. It was only by turning its back on realism, as the Nō before it had also done, that the puppet theatre could achieve its high dramatic purpose. The best European marionettes are almost human. This means that the more proficient the operators get the less point there is in having marionettes, except as a pure exercise in manual dexterity. In depriving the marionettes of their unreality, they forfeit every artistic possibility. As Yeats said, “all imaginative art keeps at a distance, and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world.” This is the secret of the Nō and the puppet theatre. By keeping us at a distance from the stage the Japanese dramatists admit us to their special domain of art. What the puppet theatre can mean to a sensitive Western observer, is revealed by this statement of the French poet Paul Claudel: “The living actor, whatever his talent may be, always bothers us by admixing a foreign element into the part that he is playing, something ephemeral and commonplace; he remains always a man in disguise. The marionette, on the other hand, has no other life or movement but that which it draws from the action. It comes to life with the story. It is like a shadow that one resuscitates by describing to it all it has done, which little by little from a memory becomes a presence. It is not an actor who is speaking; it is a word which acts. The creature made of wood is the embodiment of the words spoken for it. … By other means the jōruri arrives at the same result as the Nō.”^[8]

It is not really to be wondered at, in view of the effect Claudel describes, that Chikamatsu preferred to write for the puppet theatre. It appears that he wanted first of all a dramatic form which would free him from the liberties taken with his texts by actors, who regarded their parts merely as vehicles for the exhibition of their special talents. His understanding of the potentialities of the puppet stage convinced him that he could better entrust his plays to dolls than to human beings. But Chikamatsu was well aware that the puppet theatre required a special type of writing. He said, “Jōruri differs from other forms of fiction in that, since it has primarily to do with puppets, the texts must be alive and filled with action. Because jōruri is performed in theatres that operate in close competition with those of the kabuki, which is the art of living actors, the author must impart to lifeless wooden puppets a variety of emotions, and attempt in this way to capture the interest of the audience.” That Chikamatsu had mastered the requirements of the puppet theatre was demonstrated by the series of plays he wrote between 1705 and 1725, the most brilliant period in the history of the jōruri.

There must have been in Chikamatsu’s day critics who believed that realism was the one thing most to be sought by dramatists and producers. Chikamatsu understood that realism ran counter to the art of the puppet theatre and the kabuki as well, as the following account of one of his conversations demonstrates.

“Someone said, ‘People nowadays will not accept plays unless they are realistic and well reasoned out. There are many things in the old stories which people will not now tolerate. It is thus that such people as kabuki actors are considered skilful to the degree that their acting resembles reality. The first consideration is to have the retainer in the play resemble a real retainer, and to have the daimyō look like a real daimyō. People will not stand for the childish nonsense they did in the past.’ Chikamatsu answered, ‘Your view seems like a plausible one, but it is a theory which does not take into account the real methods of art. Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal. Of course it seems desirable, in view of the current taste for realism, to have the retainer in the play copy the gestures and speech of a real retainer, but in that case should a real retainer of a daimyō put rouge and powder on his face like an actor? Or, would it prove entertaining if an actor, on the grounds that real retainers do not make up their faces, were to appear on the stage and perform, with his beard growing wild and his head shaven? This is what I mean by the slender margin between the real and the unreal. It is unreal, and yet it is not unreal; it is real, and yet it is not real. Entertainment lies between the two.

“ ‘In this connection, there is the story of a certain court lady who had a lover. The two loved each other very passionately, but the lady lived far deep in the women’s palace, and the man could not visit her quarters. She could see him therefore only very rarely, from between the cracks of her screen of state at the court. She longed for him so desperately that she had a wooden image carved of the man. Its appearance was not like that of any ordinary doll, but did not differ in any particle from the man. It goes without saying that the colour of his complexion was perfectly rendered; even the pores of his skin were delineated. The openings in his ears and nostrils were fashioned, and there was no discrepancy even in the number of teeth in the mouth. Since it was made with the man posing beside it, the only difference between the man and this doll was the presence in one, and the absence in the other, of a soul. However, when the lady drew the doll close to her and looked at it, the exactness of the reproduction of the living man chilled her, and she felt unpleasant and rather frightened. Court lady that she was, her love was also chilled, and as she found it distressing to have the doll by her side, she soon threw it away.

“ ‘In view of this we can see that if one makes an exact copy of a living being, even if it happened to be Yang Kuei-fei, one will become disgusted with it. Thus, if when one paints an image or carves it of wood there are, in the name of artistic licence, some stylized parts in a work otherwise resembling the real form; this is, after all, what people love in art. The same is true of literary composition. While bearing resemblance to the original, it should have stylization; this makes it art, and is what delights men’s minds. …”^[9]

In his puppet-plays Chikamatsu knew exactly how to keep within the slender margin between reality and unreality. In his most popular work, The Battles of Coxinga, there are scenes of horror which are tolerable to the audience only because of the stylization afforded by the puppets; if it were believed for one moment that these events were actually taking place in the theatre, only a person with a very strong stomach could bear them. On the other hand, Chikamatsu could induce a suspension of disbelief with the same means, thus producing an effect of reality within basic unreality. (The suspension of disbelief is, of course, nothing new to Western audiences.) For example, in The Battles of Coxinga there is a fight between the hero and a tiger. Such a scene is unconvincing in print, and would be ludicrous on the stage, where the spectator would be conscious of the two men inside the tiger skin, and could not take seriously the hero’s wrestlings with so ungainly a creature. Such a spectacle would be unreal without the admixture of the real that Chikamatsu insisted on. In the puppet theatre, however, the tiger is no less realistic than the hero, and there is no reason why a spectator who accepts the initial unreality of a puppet performing as a man should be unable to accept a puppet tiger as well. Thus, in the same play the puppets could bring unreality to a scene which would otherwise be too painful to watch, or reality to a scene which would otherwise merely be comical. In neither case is the effect achieved either reality or unreality, but that in-between state that Chikamatsu sought or that Yeats meant when he spoke of the distance that imaginative art kept from the audience.

The puppet theatre, as might be deduced from the above, is an extremely demanding medium. As long as the texts of the plays are first-rate, their value is enhanced by having them performed by puppets which are, as Claudel said, the embodiment of the words. However, the faults in any second-rate play become all too apparent under such treatment. It is like having a company of actors whose exclusive concern is to pronounce the lines of a play perfectly, without any attempt at interpretation or characterization, thus suppressing their own personalities for the sake of the texts. If the plays thus being performed are by Shakespeare, they may well gain a great deal, but most plays will not stand up to such treatment. This is always true of the puppet theatre, for none of the charm or individual talent of the accomplished actor can save the faulty text.

The texts of Chikamatsu’s plays, masterpieces though some of them are, do not always read very well because they were designed with the special requirements of the puppet stage in mind. In contrast with the muted world of the Nō drama, we find elaborately framed speeches and descriptive passages, well suited to puppet performance. However, Chikamatsu wrote not only heroic plays like The Battles of Coxinga, but also domestic tragedies based on incidents of contemporary life. The principal characters of these plays are from the middle and lower classes—merchants, clerks, bandits, prostitutes. Although these are unmistakably puppet-plays, the subjects and the texts lend themselves far more readily to adaptation by actors than those of the heroic plays, as may easily be imagined. A battle between a man and a tiger can scarcely be made credible on a normal stage, but the tragic story of the love of a debt-ridden tradesman for a prostitute, when performed by actors, can acquire additional pathos by reducing the distance between the audience and the character. The danger here is that the appetite for realism will be whetted by this first concession, and that the poetic dialogue will be replaced by more “natural” prose, that the conventional dramatic usages such as the journey of the two lovers will be suppressed; in short, that the play as conceived by Chikamatsu will disappear in favour of a work possessing the kind of realism he so deplored.

In Chikamatsu’s own day, the most popular of his works by far was The Battles of Coxinga, one of his most imaginative creations. It is estimated that it was seen by 240,000 people at one theatre alone during the 17 months of its initial run—this in a city whose population did not exceed 300,000. The play was imitated by various other writers, and in due course it was adapted for use by actors. But it was from about this time that the actors began to imitate the movements of the puppets, thus attempting to preserve some of the stylization. Yeats was fascinated when he saw a Japanese actor perform in this manner, and noted in the stage direction to his own play At the Hawk’s Well that all the persons of the work should suggest marionettes in their movements.

The puppets eventually lost in popularity to the actors in Japan, although the art continues to be practised on a small scale, chiefly, like the Nō, for the enjoyment of connoisseurs. Comparing the two, the Nō is clearly more poetic, and altogether couched on a higher aesthetic plane than the jōruri. It is noble and remote—one might almost say Aeschylean. Or, to give an analogy drawn from Western music, the Nō is like the operas of Monteverdi or Handel—beautiful and expressive, but not particularly dramatic. The slow miming and dancing which usually so weary the foreign visitor to a Nō performance have the same function as one of Handel’s long arias; not to advance the action of the play, but to communicate to us something more than words alone can express about the character who is singing or dancing. With the jōruri we move to a world like that of the operas of Gluck or Mozart. It is interesting, in this connection, that some of Mozart’s earlier operas have successfully been performed with marionettes, and critics often say of Cosi Fan Tutti, that it seems to have been written for them. In these operas, as in the jōruri, there is a greater fusion of the words and the music, a more obvious attempt to interest the audience in what will happen next. But there is still a stylization and a nobility which vanish in later operatic developments, just as these qualities in jōruri tended to disappear in the kabuki. Thus, Eurydice, insisting that Orpheus turn around to look at her, remains distant and beautiful, while Fricka arguing with Wotan in Valhalla is somehow commonplace.

We need not push this parallel any further—it is not an exact one in any case. Although the Nō and the jōruri plays can be appreciated fully only in performance, they are not merely the libretti of essentially musical productions. They are works of poetic drama, and at a time when our playwrights seem increasingly to be turning to this medium, they may well find help if not inspiration in the achievements of the Japanese theatre.

1. Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan, pp. 53–4.
2. Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan, p. 101.
3. Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan, p. 155.
4. Ibid., pp. 156–7.
5. Yeats, introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan, p. vii.
6. See above, p. 5.
7. Quoted in Keene, The Battles of Coxinga, p. 20.
8. Claudel, introduction to Contribution à l’Etude du Théâtre des Poupées, pp. xii–xiv. (Quoted in Keene, p. 93.)
9. Quoted in Keene, pp. 95–6.