Plays of Old Japan: The 'No'

by Unknown

5. Then there may be the ahi, or supplementary actor.

The actors do not perform many evolutions on the stage, and though their movements are in harmony with the story to some extent, they tend to remain more or less in the relative positions that are indicated on the plan of the stage facing p. [10].

Concerning the literary Style of the original texts of the Nō

The text of the Nō is composed of a mixture of somewhat stilted and archaic prose, incompletely phrased portions, and poetry in correct metrical form. The strictly compressed and regulated five and seven syllabled lines of the short, standard verses of Japan are here scattered somewhat irregularly. Indeed, the general text of the Nō may perhaps best be described as poetry but half dissolved in prose; or, to use another simile, as an archipelago of little islets of poetry in a sea of prose, each islet surrounded and connected by sandy shores and bars which have been reduced almost to sea level.

All through the pieces there is an immense number of plays upon words, of “pillow” and “pivot” words, of short quotations from and allusions to classical poetry, so that the text simply bristles with opportunities for literary “commentators.” The excessive amount of classical allusion and quotation, while it does not appeal at all to us, is one of the features which principally delights the Japanese literati. For this is considered not only to show the degree of knowledge which the author possessed, but also to add greatly to the richness and suggestiveness of the piece by bringing to the memory other cognate scenes and ideas. The merit of the frequent quotations being that they allow of great compression and terseness of style, so that in a few words an author can bring a series of scenes before the mind of his audience.

Plate 5.

SŌSHIARI-GOMACHI

This plate, taken from a Japanese coloured woodcut, illustrates the Nō of which Komachi is the heroine. She was a poetess of great beauty and poetic gifts, and many distinguished poets were very jealous of her. On the occasion of one of the competitions of verse before the Emperor (the figure on the extreme right with scarlet skirts) one of her enemies attempted to prove that her verse was plagiarized and that he had it already in his own collection. She proves his fraud by washing out the verse which he had just written into his book after hearing it, showing that it was not printed with the rest. This she is about to do in the picture. The story continues that after his exposure he tried to commit suicide to escape disgrace, but she generously prevented him. The mask worn by the actor who takes her part well illustrates the classic type of beauty in Japan. The eyebrows are shaved off, and painted on high upon the forehead beneath the hair. In the action she uses a fan to express the business of washing out the interpolated verses (see p. [16]). The oblong article to the right represents the table on which a copy of her verses was laid in the competition.

So much we can understand, but the “pillow” and “pivot” words are without parallel in our own language. By means of them the subject may be diverted to some idea which appears, to our way of thinking, totally unconnected. For instance, in the Sumida River (see p. [83]) the use of the root word for repute by the Ferryman makes the Mother, in the following line, recall and quote a classic poem on quite another subject which has the same root word in it. The link connecting the two subjects being merely the one root word which is common to both, and which is called the pivot word, the value of which is, of course, entirely lost in translation. In English, unconnected ideas alone are left. Some examples of such devices are mentioned in the notes following the translations of the plays at the end of the book, but throughout the utai they are of perpetual recurrence and are far too frequent to be mentioned every time they appear. In his Classical Poetry of the Japanese, Prof. Chamberlain gives an account of the pivot words, and he admires their “dissolving view” effects, but Aston thinks them frivolous and a sign of decadence. These “pivot words” as well as the “pillow words,” though they are so prevalent in its literature, are not at all confined to the utai of the Nō, but are characteristic of the whole of the early Japanese verse. The “pillow words” (called makura-kotoba in Japanese) have been collected by Prof. F. F. V. Dickins[3] recently, and he says, “The makura-kotoba form the characteristic embellishment of the early uta of Japan, and of all subsequent Japanese, as distinguished from Japano-Chinese verse.”