of a mountain convent. The vanity of worldly things—often enough expressed by the Heian aristocrats but seldom very seriously—acquired meaning in the days of destruction and disaster; in Kamo no Chōmei’s “Account of My Hut” we hear a cry from the heart of medieval darkness.
Separation is a contant theme in the writings of the Japanese medieval period—the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Several emperors were driven into exile, and the account of their misfortunes is the chief theme of the “Masukagami” or “The Clear Mirror,” one of the important historical romances of the time. For sixty years after the beginning of the Muromachi Period sovereigns of the legitimate line were cut off from the capital (where there was a rival court) and forced to live in the mountains of Yoshino. In addition to those who were compelled by stronger adversaries to leave the capital, there were also many men who fled the world in disgust, voluntarily seeking refuge in one or another remote place. “Essays in Idleness” by Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) is one of the most cheerful examples of the writings of a medieval recluse, and indeed suggests at many places comparison with “The Pillow Book” of Sei Shōnagon, but a note of death is struck over and over, in a manner foreign to the Heian writer.
Death and the world of the dead figure prominently in the Nō play, one of the most beautiful of Japanese literary forms. In most of the plays there are ghosts or spirits, and in all of them is a sense of other-worldly mystery. The greatest master of the Nō, Seami Motokiyo (1363–1443), describing the three highest types of Nō performances, cited these verses: “In Silla at midnight the sun is bright”; “Snow covers the thousand mountains—why does one lonely peak remain unwhitened?”; “Snow piled in a silver bowl. With these three verses he attempted to suggest the essential qualities of the Nō—its other-worldliness, its profundity, and its stillness.
In contrast to the Nō are the kyōgen plays, brief comedies which came to be performed in conjunction with the Nō. Sometimes the kyōgen parody the tragic events of the Nō plays they follow, but more often they depend for humor on the situations in which such stock characters as the clever servant or the termagant wife find
