Noh stage with chorus
The Ashikaga age of Zen art is remembered today not only for gardens, painting, and architecture but also for drama and poetry. The leading political figure of the era, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, was himself an accomplished poet in the short verse forms once so popular with Heian courtier-aesthetes. But the most exalted poetry of the age was that written for the No drama, a literary art form born of Zen and at once as austere as a stone garden and as suggestive as a monochrome painting. The No is performed today virtually as it was six hundred years ago, and in its ritual symbolism it seems at times a cross between the Christian Mass and an Aeschylean tragedy. The essence of Zen aesthetic theory is evoked throughout its haunting poetry, its understated but intense style of acting, its delicately carved masks, and its mournful music and songs.
Like other Zen arts, the No was fashioned out of materials from distant times and places. The first Japanese dramatic arts were derived from various forms of Chinese farces and court dances. The farces, or gigaku, were popular with the Nara aristocracy, while the dances, or bugaku, came into favor with the more refined Heian court. Although the bugaku form undoubtedly influenced Japanese ideas on the blending of drama and dance, by the end of the Heian era it had become a lifeless ceremony for the emperor and his court—a role it still enjoys on occasions when performances are staged for the imperial family.
The real origins of the No are traceable to a somewhat lustier Chinese import, a circus-type entertainment called by the Japanese sarugaku. In addition to the display of various physical feats of daring, the sarugaku included farcical playlets and suggestive, sometimes indecent dances. A common theme seems to have been the lampooning of clergy, both Buddhist and Shinto. (In this respect, the development of native drama in Japan ran parallel with the resurgence of dramatic art in Europe after the Middle Ages, as citizens on both sides of the globe taunted the theological enslavement of feudal society by burlesques and dances ridiculing hypocritical authority figures.)
The studied indecency of early sarugaku was undoubtedly intended to parody the pomposity of Shinto rituals. But as time went by, the rustic dance-stories evolved into a more structured drama, the sarugaku-no-No, which was the thirteenth-century Japanese equivalent of the European morality play. The earlier farces were transformed into comedies known as kyogen (in which wily servants repeatedly tricked their masters), which today serve as interlude pieces to relieve the gravity of a program of No plays, just as the early Greek satyr plays were performed after a trilogy of tragedies in the Athenian theater.
In the early versions of the sarugaku-no-No, the performers sang and danced, but as the form matured a chorus was added to supply the verses during certain segments of the dance. By the middle of the fourteenth century, about the time of Chaucer's birth, Japanese No was already an established dramatic form, containing all the major elements it has today. It was, however, merely village drama, and so it might have remained except for a chance occurrence in the year 1374.
In that year Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, already shogun at age seventeen, attended a performance of the sarugaku-no-No for the first time. The entertainment was a great favorite with his subjects, and he was trying to establish himself as a man of the people. A particularly well-known actor was scheduled to perform in Kyoto, and Yoshimitsu went to see him. The actor was Kannami (1333-1384), today famous as the father of the No. Yoshimitsu was excited by Kannami, but he was even more enthralled by the actor's handsome eleven-year-old son Zeami (1363-1444), who also appeared in the play. Yoshimitsu became Kannami's patron, but young Zeami he took to his couch (a common enough occurrence in samurai circles of the age). Zeami was devoted to the No, even as Yoshimitsu became devoted to Zeami, and thus began the long marriage of Zen culture and the No theater.
Through Yoshimitsu the sarugaku-no-No came under the influence of the circle of Zen aesthetes surrounding him, and what had once been a broad popular entertainment became an aristocratic art. Supported by Yoshimitsu's patronage, Zeami became the Shakespeare of the No, writing the finest plays in the repertoire as well as several volumes of essays on aesthetic theories and acting technique. Although Zeami claimed to have learned everything from his father, the austere and poetic No that came to perfection during the Ashikaga was largely his own creation. His poetry has never been equaled, and his handbook of technique has remained the No actor's bible. Yet he might never have been heard of had it not been for Yoshimitsu, who, in the words of Donald Keene, found the No brick and left it marble.