realism; but the Zen monks had no use for icons or statues of Buddhist saints, and by the beginning of the Ashikaga era Japanese statuary was essentially a thing of the past. However, the Japanese genius for wood carving had a second life in the No masks. No plays required masks for elderly men, demons, and sublime women of all ages. (The No rigidly excluded women from the stage, as did the Kabuki until recent times.)
No masks, especially the female, have a quality unique in the history of theater: they are capable of more than one expression. No masks were carved in such a way that the play of light, which could be changed by the tilt of the actor's head, brought out different expressions. It was a brilliant idea, completely in keeping with the Zen concept of suggestiveness. No companies today treasure their ancient masks, which frequently have been handed down within the troupe for centuries, and certain old masks are as famous as the actors who use them.
For reasons lost to history, the masks are somewhat smaller than the human face, with the unhappy result that a heavy actor's jowls are visible around the sides and bottom. They also cup over the face, muffling to some extent the actor's delivery. The guttural No songs, which are delivered from deep in the chest and sound like a curious form of tenor gargling, are rendered even more unintelligible by the mask. This specialized No diction, which entered the form after it had passed from popular entertainment to courtly art, is extremely difficult to understand; today even cognoscenti resort to libretti to follow the poetry.
The slow-motion movement around the stage, which goes by the name of "dance" in the No, is one of its more enigmatic aspects for Western viewers. As R. H. Blyth has described it, "the stillness is not immobility but is a perfect balance of opposed forces."1 Such movements as do transpire are subtle, reserved, and suggestive. They are to Western ballet what the guarded strokes of a haboku ink landscape are to an eighteenth-century oil canvas. They are, in fact, a perfect distillation of human movement, extracting all that is significant—much as a precious metal is taken from the impure earth. The feeling is formal, pure, and intense. As described in a volume by William Theodore de Bary:
When a No actor slowly raises his hand in a play, it corresponds not only to the text he is performing, but must also suggest something behind the mere representation, something eternal—in T. S. Eliot's words, a "moment in and out of time." The gesture of an actor is beautiful in itself, as a piece of music is beautiful, but at the same time it is the gateway to something else, the hand that points to a region as profound and remote as the viewer's powers of reception will permit. It is a symbol, not of any one thing, but of an eternal region, of an eternal silence.2
The evocation of an emotion beyond expression—of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"—is the special Zen aesthetic realm of yugen. The quality, heightened to almost unendurable levels by poetry, is that of a Zen landscape: sparse, monochromatic, suggestive. Universal human emotions are cloaked in obscurity rather than set forth explicitly. The passion is open-ended, a foreboding sonnet with the last line left for the listener to complete. Zeami and other No poets believed that the deepest sentiments cannot be conveyed by language; the poetry merely sets the stage and then sends the listener's imagination spinning into the realm of pure emotion, there to discover an understanding too profound for speech. In Western terms, if King Lear were a shite, he would speak in understated terms of the darkness of the heath rather than chronicle his own anguish.
The concept of yugen, the incompleteness that triggers, poetic emotions in the listener's mind is, as has been previously noted, an extension of the Heian concept of aware. Like yugen, aware describes not only the properties of some external phenomenon but also the internal response to that phenomenon. Aware originally meant the emotional lift and sense of poignancy experienced in contemplating a thing of beauty and reflecting on its transience. Yugen extends this into the realm of eternal verities; not only beauty but all life fades, happiness always dissolves, the soul passes alone and desolate. In an art form that transmits yugen, none of this is stated; one is forced to feel these truths through suggestion, the degree of feeling depending, of course, upon the sensitivity of the individual. One can find excellent examples of yugen in almost any No drama of the fifteenth century, like the following from "The Banana Tree" (Basho), by Komparu-Zenchiku:
Already the evening sun is setting in the west,
Shadows deepen in the valleys,
The cries of homing birds grow faint.3