Chapter XV: Appendix: I

MODERN NŌ LETTERS FROM JAPAN

The fact that Nō did not disappear with the overthrow of the Shogun in 1863 was almost solely due to the efforts of Umewaka Minoru (1828-1909), whose ancestors had for generations played _tsure_ parts in the Kwanze theatre. When the Mikado was restored in 1868 Kiyotaka, head of the Kwanze line, was convinced that an art so intimately connected with the Shōgunate must perish with it, and fled to Shizuoka where the fallen Shōgun was living in retreat.

Minoru alone remained behind, built himself a theatre[218] (1869-70) and “manned his lonely rampart.” When confidence was re-established the other “troupes” soon returned, so that henceforward five theatres existed, the four of earlier days and that of Umewaka as a fifth. Minoru was succeeded by his brilliant sons, Mansaburō and Rokurō, who in 1919 opened a new Umewaka theatre. As a compliment to the Umewaka family and a tribute to its services, actors of the three other “schools” took part in the opening ceremony, but the Kwanzes refused to do so. The dispute turns on the right to grant certificates of efficiency (_menjō_) which, according to the Kwanzes’ claim, belongs only to Motoshige, the head of their school. Such certificates have, in fact, been issued successively by Minoru, his sons and the “renegade” Kwanze Tetsunojō, who sides with the Umewaka. The validity of Minoru’s certificates was, I believe, never disputed during his lifetime.

To complete this note on modern Nō I include the following extracts from letters written in 1916 by Mr. Oswald Sickert to Mr. Charles Ricketts. The sender and recipient of the letters both authorized me to use them, and for this permission I am deeply grateful. But I wish that Mr. Sickert, whose memories of Nō must already be a little dimmed, had had the leisure to write a book of his own on the two dramatic arts that so deeply interested him in Japan, the Nō and the Kabuki.

“It’s odd if people describe the Nō performance as a thing that
is simple or unsophisticated or unelaborated. The poem, to begin
with, is not simple, but it has a lyrical slenderness which
wouldn’t one would say, lead anybody to think of going such lengths
as to distribute its recitation among a chorus and actors, thus
requiring perhaps eleven men to say the words, with two or three
drums and a flute added, and masks and costumes fit for a museum
and angelic properties, and special stages, and attendants to wipe,
in this hot weather, the sweat from immovable hands and from under
chins. The volume of what goes to a performance is large, but it’s
all cut down outwardly and bent inwards. As for the recitation, the
first necessity is to eliminate direct expressiveness in the saying
of the words. This seems obvious in the saying of any good poetry.
The chorus chants (it’s rather like a Gregorian chant), the actors
intone. Both may come to singing, only not with any tune that might
carry you off by itself. Yet, within the limitations of intoning,
with some turns, the actor taking the women’s parts will achieve a
pitch of pathetic intensity beyond the reach of one who sings words
to an air that has an existence of its own, or who recites with
meaning. The Nō actor is not directly expressive, it’s always the
poem he is doing and throwing you back on.

“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.

“One of the cards I sent shows the mother tolling the bell. She
comes on first in a red flowered robe, is advised by the neighbour
and goes off. The priests come on. The sounding of the bell is
the hinge of everything, a thing of great sentiment. As it is, in
reality, one of the most touching things in the world, it seemed
to me clever that there was no attempt to represent it. On the
contrary, the action centred in the toller, a cheery old gossiper
used to the job, who more or less spat on his hands and said Heave
ho as he swung the imaginary horizontal beam. Only when he had
done so, he continued his Heave ho in a kind of long echoing hum.
Then he danced. The mad mother came on in another dress, very
strange, light mauve gauze over white, no pattern, and the bough
in her hand. Why, when the old man had already tolled, for one’s
imagination, a non-existent bell in the real way with a heavy
beam, the mother should actually pull a coloured ribbon tied to an
elaborate toy, it is hard to say. But it is right.

“I saw this taken by Mansaburō, who, like his brother Rokurō, has
a beautiful voice. The singing is so unlike ours, that at first
one feels nothing about it. But after three or four performances
one notices, and I recognized the beauty of both these brothers’
voices before I knew they were brothers, or, indeed, that they were
noted in any way. In fact I was still in the state when I had not
yet realized that one might come to discussing the merits of these
players hidden in robes and masks as hotly as one discusses the
qualities of the favourites on the ordinary theatre.

“I don’t know if you know about the curtain. Every subsidiary
detail of the performance possesses, I don’t know how to say, but
a solidity. It’s there. God knows how it came there; but there it
is, and it’s not a contrivance, not an ‘idea.’ The entry to the
stage, as you know, is by a narrow gallery, beside which three
little pine-trees rise like mile-stones. This gallery ends with a
single heavy curtain, which does not rise as ours do, or draw aside
or fall as in the Japanese theatre. It sweeps back, only bellying a
little. It is, in fact, as I saw when I was allowed behind, lifted
by poles fixed to the bottom corners.

“The poles are raised rapidly by two men kneeling a good way
behind. Suddenly the curtain blows back as by a wind, and the
expected figure, whom you know must be coming or something, i. e.
suspense is prepared by what has already happened, is framed in the
opening, and there pauses an instant. I am speaking, not of the
first entry, but of the second one, when the person who aroused the
pilgrim-visitor’s curiosity as a temple-sweeper or a water-carrier,
and vanished, reappears as the great General or princely Prime
Minister he once was. The stage-wait necessitated by the change of
costume and mask is filled in by an interminable sayer of short
lines, with the same number of feet, each line detached from the
next as if the speaker were going from one afterthought to another.
He is a bystander--perhaps a shepherd in one play and a fisherman
in another--who knows something, and dilates on it to fill in time.
The musicians lay aside their drums. Everybody just waits. Up
sweeps the curtain, and with the re-entry of the revealed personage
comes the intenser and quicker second part for which the slow first
part was a preparation.”

FOOTNOTE:

[218] Or, according to Fenollosa, bought a stage belonging to an ex-daimyō.