“I suppose the mask may have originated in a priest’s needing to impersonate an angel or a beautiful girl, or an evil spirit; but its justification, as against make-up, is absolute for the Nō purpose. I saw in the same week Funa Benkei, adapted for the theatre, at the Imperial and on a Nō stage. At the theatre, the part of Shizuka, the mistress whom Yoshitsune the pursued young lord is persuaded to send away, was taken by Baikō. It was one of his nights, and all the evening, as three different women and a ghost, he was so that I shall not again ever so much care about a beautiful woman taken by a beautiful woman. But in the theatre version of Funa Benkei, Shizuka wore no mask, and when she pleaded, Baikō, of course, acted; it was charming; but Heaven knows what words he was saying—certainly he was not turning the mind of his audience in upon any masterpiece of words, rhythm and poetical fancy. He was acting the situation. The Nō performer, on the other hand, is intensifying the poet’s fancy. From sight of the masks hung up alone, I had not imagined how well their mixture of vacancy and realism would do the trick. The masks are not wayward, not extravagant (even the devil’s masks are realistic); but they are undoubtedly masks tied on with a band, and they effect the purpose of achieving an impassive countenance of a cast suited to the character—impassive save that, with a good actor and a mask of a beautiful woman that just hits off the balance between too much and too little physiognomy, I’d swear that at the right moments the mask is affected, its expression intensifies, it lives.
“The costumes are tremendous, elaborate, often priceless heirlooms; but again they are not extravagant, ‘on their own,’ being all distinctly hieratic (as indeed is the whole performance, a feature historically deriving, maybe, from its original source among priests, but just what one would desiderate if one were creating a Nō performance out of the blue), because the hieratic helps to create and maintain a host of restrictions and conventions which good taste alone, even in Japan, could scarcely have preserved against the fatal erosion of reason.
“The masked actors of beautiful women are stuffed out and by some device increase the appearance of height, though all go in socks and apparently with bent knees. The great masked figure, gliding without lifting the heels, but with all the more appearance of swiftness, to the front of the stage, is the most ecstatic thing to sit under, and the most that a man can do to act what people mean by ‘poetical,’ something removed from reality but not remote, fascinating so that you fall in love with it, but more than you would care to trifle with. This movement occurs in the dances which come in some plays—I think always as dances by characters invited to dance—and which are the best moments for the stranger, since then alone does the rhythm of the drums become regular enough for him to recognize it. For that is really, I am sure, the bottom essential of the Nō representation—the rhythm marked by two drums. For quite long intervals nothing else occurs. No actor is on the stage, no word is uttered, but the sharp rap sounds with the thimbled finger as on a box and the stumpy little thud of the bare hands follows, or coincides, from the second drum and both players give a crooning whoop. In some way, which I can’t catch, that rhythm surely plays into the measure of the recitation when it comes and into the movements of the actors when they come. You know how people everywhere will persist in justifying the admirable in an art on the ground of the beautiful ideas it presents. So my friends tell me the drum beats suggest the travelling of the pilgrim who is often the hinge of the episode. I feel like a Japanese who wants to know whether a sonnet has any particular number of lines, and any order for its rhymes and repeats, and gets disquisitions on Shakespeare’s fancy which might also apply to a speech in blank verse. Anyway, it is ever so evident that the musicians do something extremely difficult and tricky. The same musicians don’t seem to play on through the three pieces which make a programme. As they have no book (and don’t even look at each other), they must know the performance by heart, and the stranger’s attention is often called by a friend to one or the other who is specially famous for his skill. Some one tried to explain the relation between the musicians and the actors by saying that a perpetual sort of contest went on between them. Certainly there seems to be in a Nō performance some common goal which has to be strained for every time, immensely practised though the performers are. During the dance this drum rhythm speeds up to a felt time, and at moments of great stress, as when an avenging ghost swims on with a spear, a third drum, played with sticks, comes in with rapid regular beats, louder and softer. Sometimes when the beats are not so followable, but anyway quicker in succession, I seem to make out that they must be involving themselves in some business of syncopation, or the catching up and outstripping of a slow beat by a quicker one. But the ordinary beats are too far apart for me to feel any rhythm yet.
“The best single moment I have seen was the dance of thanks to the fisherman who returns to the divine lady the Hagoromo, the robe without which even an angel cannot fly. It seemed to me an example of the excellent rule in art that, if a right thing is perhaps rather dull or monotonous lasting five minutes, you will not cure the defect by cutting the performance to two and a half minutes; rather give it ten minutes. If it’s still perhaps rather dull, try twenty minutes or an hour. This presupposes that your limitations are right and that you are exploiting them. The thing may seem dull at first because at first it is the limitations the spectator feels; but the more these are exploited the less they are felt to be limitations, and the more they become a medium. The divine lady returned on her steps at great length and fully six times after I had thought I could not bear it another moment. She went on for twenty minutes, perhaps, or an hour or a night; I lost count of time; but I shall not recover from the longing she left when at last she floated backwards and under the fatal uplifted curtain. The movements, even in the dance, are very restricted if one tries to describe or relate them, but it may be true, as they say, that the Nō actor works at an intense and concentrated pitch of all his thoughts and energies, and this tells through his impassive face or mask and all his clothes and his slow movements. Certainly the longer I looked at the divine lady, the more she seemed to me to be in action, though sometimes the action, if indeed there, was so slight that it could be that she had worked us up to the fine edge of noticing her breathing. There was only one memorable quick motion in the dance, the throwing of the stiff deep gauze sleeve over the head, over the crown with its lotus and bell tassels. My wife has no inclination to deceive herself with the fascination of what she can’t explain, and she agreed that this was the most beautiful thing that had ever been seen.
“You will see the two drum players in many of the cards. With them sits the player on the fue, a transverse flute, who joins in at moments with what often is, if you take it down, the same phrase, though it sounds varied as the player is not often exactly on any note that you can take down. The dropping of the flute’s note at the end of the phrase, which before always went up, is the nearest approach to the ‘curtain’ of the theatre. It is very touching. The poem has come to an end. The figures turn and walk off....
“I have been to more Nō performances, always with increasing recognition of the importance attaching to the beat, a subject on which I have got some assurance from an expert kindly directed to me by a friend. From beginning to end, all the words of every Nō play fit into an 8-beat measure, and a performer who sat in the dark, tapping the measure while skilfully weaving in the words, would give a Nō audience the essential ground of its pleasure. If they are not actually being followed on books, in which they are printed as ticks alongside the text, the beats are going on inside (often to the finger tips of) all the people whom I notice to be regular attendants at Nō performances. I saw a play (not a good one) at the Kabukiza in which a Nō master refuses a pupil a secret in his art. For some reason the pupil attaches importance to being shown the way in this difficult point. The master’s daughter takes poison and, in fulfilment of her dying request, the master consents to show the pupil. It was no subtlety of gesture, no matter of voice or mask, that brought things to such straits. The master knelt at his desk, and, beating with his fan, began reciting a passage, showing how the words were distributed in the beat.
“It is very seldom that every beat in the eight is marked by a drum. I don’t think this happens save in those plays where the taiko (the real drum played with sticks) takes part, generally in an important or agitated dance. In the ordinary course, only certain of the eight beats are marked by the two players on the tsuzumi (one held on the knee, the other over the shoulder). The Japanese get much more out of subtleties of rhythm (or, rather, out of playing hide-and-seek with one simple rhythm) than we do and are correspondingly lax about the interval between one note and another. I don’t believe a European would have thought of dividing the drum beats between two instruments. It must be horribly tricky to do. This division gives variety, for the big tsuzumi yields a clack and the small yields something between a whop and a thud.
“As for masks, one would have to see very many performances, I fancy, and think a lot, before one got on to any philosophy of their fascination and effectiveness. I am always impressed by the realism, the naturalness of the Nō mask. It is not fanciful in any obvious sense. After a few performances, I found I knew when a mask was a particularly good one. My preferences turned out to be precious heirlooms two hundred years old. In one instance when, for a reason I don’t yet understand, Rokurō changed his mask after death for another of the same cast, I could not say why the first was better than the second—certainly not for a pleasanter surface, for it was shining like lacquer; I noticed the features were more pronounced. We were allowed the thrill of being let into the room of the mirror, immediately behind the curtain, and saw Rokurō have his mask fitted and make his entry after a last touch by his brother Mansaburō. These brothers are Umewaka, belong to the Kwanze School, and have a stage of their own. I am told that my preference for them is natural to a beginner and that later one likes as much, or better, the more masculine style of the Hōshō. At present Nagashi (Matsumoto), the chief performer of this school (which has a lovely stage and a very aristocratic clientèle), seems to me like an upright gentleman who has learned his lesson, while Rokurō and Mansaburō are actors. Both brothers have beautiful voices. The Hōshō people speak with a thickness in the throat. But I know it is absurd for me to feel critical about anything. Moreover, Rokurō and Nagashi would not take the same parts.
“MIIDERA. A mother, crazed by the straying away of her little boy, is advised by a neighbour any way to go to Ōtsu, for there stands the temple of Mii which she had seen in a dream.
“The priests of Miidera, with the little boy among them, are out in the temple yard viewing the full autumn moon. The attendant tolls the great bell, whose lovely note wavers long over the lake below. The mad mother appears on the scene, and, drawn to the bell, makes to toll it. The head priest forbids her. There follows an argument full of bell lore, and its effect on troubled hearts. She tolls the bell, and mother and son recognize each other.