#262: GETTING TO NŌ.  “The Japanese nō theatre,” Royall Tyler writes, “is one of the great achievements of civilization.  No art is more sophisticated than this intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume and language, nor does any uphold higher ideals.  Nō plays, like those of other theatres, were written to be performed, but some can stand as literature beside any play ever put between the covers of a book.  The aim of Japanese Nō Dramas is to demonstrate that this is so and to convey all that the printed page can convey of the beauty of nō.”  Kenneth Rexroth called the nō “one of the three most remarkable dramatic traditions that man has ever evolved.”

      Since Japanese Nō Dramas was published by Penguin in 1992, the internet, Youtube

particularly, has made recorded versions of many of the plays in Tyler’s book available for people to get an idea of what the stage setting of a nō play looks like, what the masks and costumes look like, the deliberate and stylized movement, and the distinctive aural elements—the unearthly and alarming wailing, the shrill flutes, the punctuating drum beats.  On the other hand, whether the plays as performed works of art—the real experience of them--have been made available, I have my doubts.  Decades ago, by a fluke of luck, I had a chance to see a nō play performed live, in Boston; I remember being entranced by it—despite its having been about as much unlike a naturalistic Western play as can be imagined—and some of the gestures as having been quite astonishingly beautiful.  The recorded versions I’ve found online, in contrast, are visually dead, the camera unmoving, the whole sense of the stage space lacking.  The plays are short—a standard afternoon program of nō consists of three plays, interspersed with the more knockabout kyōgen plays in the intervals—but I rarely made it through the videos.  For the most part Western readers, I fear, will have to tackle the nō dramas as literature.

      This is not the disappointment you might think.  Selections from the nō repertoire, consisting of some two thousand separate works, entered the English language via Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s 1915 collection Noh Theatre of Japan, and, in 1921, Arthur Waley’s Noh Plays of Japan.  These, Donald Keene’s anthology Twenty Plays of the Noh Theatre, and Tyler’s collection, are all worth reading and will give you an experience of the genre’s distinctive ploys: the address to the audience, the descriptive passages, the use of the chorus, and that sense of a ghostly world very, very near to our own.   Some of this comes from the Buddhist background of the plays—that sense of impermanence and unreality—but it is distinctively Japanese as well.                             

      Fenollosa’s translations were of great influence on William Butler Yeats, some of whose plays come as close to the nō as anything in Western theatre; but Kenneth Rexroth caught the difference, and in the process defined something specific to the no: “The typical nō play contains no action at all but rather the recollection of action, and although it commonly culminates in a dance, the dance is not a climax but the manifestation of the crystallization of the realization that has grown and pervaded the play. Many nō plays concern revenants — ghosts who are bound by passion to re-enact the critical moment of bygone lives — critical not in a dramatic sense, but in the sense of decisive karma. At the end the prayers of a pilgrim priest, who has encountered a long-dead hero and heroine in a windy nightfall on a lonely moor, release them from the endless re-enactment of dead fate and consequence. They are unbound, and reciprocally, realization of the meaning of being itself pervades and saturates the minds of the audience, and precipitates a crystal called release.”  He continues: “Perhaps we can learn most about Buddhism by studying the beautiful objects it has produced, the frescoes of Ajanta and Horyuji, statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, poems of Ono no Komachi and Bashō, novels like The Tale of Genji, and perhaps its finest esthetic distillate of all, the greatest nō plays.”  Surely the greatest of the nō plays express the compassion that is the defining virtue of Buddhism every bit as fully, as movingly, as the old sutras themselves.

---Japanese Nō Dramas, edited and translated by Royall Tyler.  Penguin, 1992.

---Fenollosa and Pound’s Noh Theare of Japan has been reprinted by Dover, and Waley’s Noh Plays of Japan is reprinted by Tuttle.

---Twenty Plays of the Noh Theatre, by Donald Keene.  Columbia University Press, 1970.  Out of print but you can find copies online without selling your children into slavery. 

---The Plays of William Butler Yeats is volume two of the Collected Works, from Scribner.

---The great dramatist of the nō was Zeami Motokiyo, whose works are numerously featured in all the anthologies of the form.  His great treatise Fushikaden, which speaks practically and eloquently of those “higher ideals” Tyler remarked on, has been freshly translated by William Scott Wilson and is published as The Spirit of Noh (Shambhala, 2013).

---The quotes from Kenneth Rexroth are from an essay in The Elastic Retort. Seabury Press, 1973.