Kakemono

A room whose sloping floor is cut into chess-board squares; each square flat and matted, so that the back is twelve inches high and level with the front of the square above; a bare still wooden room long and crowded. Each matted square thick with kneeling men and women, the long-headed aquiline faces of the nobles and the samurai. At the end a platform with an opening vaguely leading from it. No scenery, no footlights, no curtain. It is the theatre for the performance of the Nō. Those sacred old world plays written many hundred years ago, acted by samurai for samurai, the religious mysteries and moralities of Japan.

In the West the theatre long ago shook off, escaped, forgot the Church. Here the elder child, the mother rather, still lives by the side of her offspring, and lives unchanged. The Nō to-day is as the Nō of five hundred years ago, the Nō which grew out of the sacred dances of an immemorable antiquity. Like the drama of the Greeks it has its choruses, its chants, its unities, its one or two actors masked, richly dressed, impressive, who move with a religious solemnity, and speak as voices, not as men. Its plays, too, are drawn from sacred legend, from the mythology of Shintō deities, from the mysteries of the Buddhist faith, and from the fairy tales of the race. Over it all there is a glamour as of a stolen glimpse into the buried past. To-day its language is archaic, but preserved by constant repetition, handed down from father to son in the families of nobles who, since Nō first began, have played in Nō, it remains the language and the speech of those dead Japanese, who towards the fourteenth century organised the Nō.

The chant is strange and piercing, its very notes and phrases are outside of all that we consider music, as unfamiliar as the speech of insects, or the song of the remotest fathers of mankind. It echoes like a voice from out the long dead worlds, piercing yet remote, and the tink of pipes dies out. There falls a stillness in the room.

It is the afternoon of the last day of the Iidamachi Nō. As in the theatres of Greece the plays, each of which lasts about two hours, are given one after another throughout the whole day, while between them comes the Kiogen (mad words), or folies dramatiques, farce-like, Greek-like comedies, shorter even than the Nō. Many of the spectators have been here since the morning, and on the matting of the shallow square boxes are lacquered trays of food, on all teapots and tobacco-stands; others come to see a special play or so and go away again; but to one and all it is not an amusement, it is a study, a homage paid to the past, a rite.

As the first notes of the strange piercing chant wail down the room, the pipes and cigarettes go out, the tiny tea-bowls are set down, and a silence falls.

The actors, in their rich brocaded robes of a make and texture of a long dead past, come slowly through the passage-way on to the platform. Their masks are made of lacquer, and they speak in a slow nasal deep voice that seems to come from the very back of their throats. They speak with every muscle strained and taut. It sounds almost as outside of speech as the chant is outside of music, and they move in strange long strides. Such movements are not merely for artistic effect, nor to mark agitation, or to reproduce nature; they are often used to mark the passing of a period of time.

For all its stiffness and its rigour, its archaic make-believes, its unnatural realities, there is an intensity and a thrill in it as of a living thing that matters. The strange music of the tambourine-like instruments, the thin wailing of the bamboo flute, the beating of the one small drum, shaped like an hour-glass with three supporting pillars, breaks in again and again upon the intoned speech of the actors with its repeated irregular cadences in notes outside of speech. And the long-robed figures, masked and rigid, stalk slowly across the stage; and the chant of the chorus, as in the plays of Greece, explains, comments, describes the action.

It is the story of the fisherman who found an angel’s robe of feathers on a tree, and would not give it back though the angel begged and begged. Without it she cannot reach her home in the blue of the heavens above, and for a heavenly spirit to stay for long on earth means death. Already the chorus is chanting her dirge when the fisherman, seeing her beauty fading and her life ebbing fast, relents. He will give back the robe if she will dance for him. She promises, but implores first her robe that the dance may be more perfect. The fisherman fears she will deceive him and fly back to heaven at once. But the spirit turns upon him.

“Fie on thee, fisherman,” she cries, “deception was born of man; the high heavens know not of it.”

And, touched, he gives back the robe. She dances, while the chorus sings the beauties of the landscape, of Japan. How

Here

Even the angel would stay awhile in a land so beautiful.

And still the angel dances, and the vision of Heaven descends upon earth. She sings,

Then the voices fall away. And to the strange, tuneless music, whose notes are not our notes, the spirit dances on, round and round in gliding circles, with the slow, smooth movements of the sacred Kagura.

The chorus sings again. And gliding round and round in circles ever smoother, ever slower, the spirit passes from the platform and up the vague passage-way that leads to the green-room beyond.

The fisherman starts. The play is ended. In long, stiff strides, so slow, so slow, that an appreciable space of time seems set around the movement of each muscle, the actor goes across the stage, up the vague passage-way, into the room beyond.

It is five minutes before the last slow solemn stride takes him beyond our sight. Then hour-glass drum, the flute, the two tambourine-like instruments that wail, shake out their last weird tuneless tune. The chant of the chorus ends on a note that to us is a middle—and stops.

My ears still wait the end of the phrase when the hush of intense silence dissolves. There is a rustle in each square shallow box, a lighting of tiny bronze pipes and cigarettes, a filling of tea-cups, a tapping of chopsticks.

The Nō is over.

Note.—In quoting from this Nō, “The Robe of Feathers,” I have followed Mr. B. H. Chamberlain’s translation in “The Classical Poetry of the Japanese.”