LADY.
There’s no help now. (She weeps bitterly.)
CHORUS.
LADY.
Evening Mist, are you not sad that Hatsuyuki has gone? ... But we must not cry any more. Let us call together the noble ladies of this place and for seven days sit with them praying behind barred doors. Go now and do my bidding.
(EVENING MIST fetches the NOBLE LADIES of the place).
TWO NOBLE LADIES (together).
(They pray.)
(The prayers and gong-beating last for some time and form the central ballet of the play.)
CHORUS (the bird’s soul appears as a white speck in the sky).
THE BIRD’S SOUL.
Drawn by the merit of your prayers and songs
CHORUS.
By SEAMI
The Chinese poet Po Chü-i, whom the Japanese call Haku Rakuten, was born in 772 A. D. and died in 847. His works enjoyed immense contemporary popularity in China, Korea and Japan. In the second half of the ninth century the composition of Chinese verse became fashionable at the Japanese Court, and native forms of poetry were for a time threatened with extinction.
The Nō play Haku Rakuten deals with this literary peril. It was written at the end of the fourteenth century, a time when Japanese art and literature were again becoming subject to Chinese influence. Painting and prose ultimately succumbed, but poetry was saved.
Historically, Haku Rakuten never came to Japan. But the danger of his influence was real and actual, as may be deduced from reading the works of Sugawara no Michizane, the greatest Japanese poet of the ninth century. Michizane’s slavish imitations of Po Chü-i show an unparalleled example of literary prostration. The plot of the play is as follows:
Rakuten is sent by the Emperor of China to “subdue” Japan with his art. On arriving at the coast of Bizen, he meets with two Japanese fishermen. One of them is in reality the god of Japanese poetry, Sumiyoshi no Kami. In the second act his identity is revealed. He summons other gods, and a great dancing-scene ensues. Finally the wind from their dancing-sleeves blows the Chinese poet’s ship back to his own country.
Seami, in his plays, frequently quotes Po Chü-i’s poems; and in his lament for the death of his son, Zemparu Motomasa, who died in 1432, he refers to the death of Po Chü-i’s son, A-ts’ui.
PERSONS
Scene: The coast of Bizen in Japan.
HAKU.
I am Haku Rakuten, a courtier of the Prince of China. There is a land in the East called Nippon.[188] Now, at my master’s bidding, I am sent to that land to make proof of the wisdom of its people. I must travel over the paths of the sea.
So swiftly have I passed over the ways of the ocean that I am come already to the shores of Nippon. I will cast anchor here a little while. I would know what manner of land this may be.
THE TWO FISHERMEN (together).
THE OLD FISHERMAN.
THE TWO FISHERMEN.
HAKU.
I have borne with the billows of a thousand miles of sea and come at last to the land of Nippon. Here is a little ship anchored near me. An old fisherman is in it. Can this be indeed an inhabitant of Nippon?
OLD FISHERMAN.
Aye, so it is. I am an old fisher of Nihon. And your Honour, I think, is Haku Rakuten, of China.
HAKU.
How strange! No sooner am I come to this land than they call me by my name! How can this be?
SECOND FISHERMAN.
Although your Honour is a man of China, your name and fame have come before you.
HAKU.
Even though my name be known, yet that you should know my face is strange surely!
THE TWO FISHERMEN.
It was said everywhere in the Land of Sunrise that your Honour, Rakuten, would come to make trial of the wisdom of Nihon. And when, as we gazed westwards, we saw a boat coming in from the open sea, the hearts of us all thought in a twinkling, “This is he.”
CHORUS.
HAKU.
Stay! Answer me one question.[190] Bring your boat closer and tell me, Fisherman, what is your pastime now in Nippon?
FISHERMAN.
And in the land of China, pray how do your Honours disport yourselves?
HAKU.
In China we play at making poetry.
FISHERMAN.
And in Nihon, may it please you, we venture on the sport of making “uta.”[191]
HAKU.
And what are “uta”?
FISHERMAN.
You in China make your poems and odes out of the Scriptures of India; and we have made our “uta” out of the poems and odes of China. Since then our poetry is a blend of three lands, we have named it Yamato, the great Blend, and all our songs “Yamato Uta.” But I think you question me only to mock an old man’s simplicity.
HAKU.
No, truly; that was not my purpose. But come, I will sing a Chinese poem about the scene before us.
How does that song please you?
FISHERMAN.
It is indeed a pleasant verse. In our tongue we should say the poem thus:
HAKU.
How strange that a poor fisherman should put my verse into a sweet native measure! Who can he be?
FISHERMAN.
A poor man and unknown. But as for the making of “uta,” it is not only men that make them. “For among things that live there is none that has not the gift of song.”[192]
HAKU (taking up the other’s words as if hypnotized).
“Among things that have life,—yes, and birds and insects—”
FISHERMAN.
They have sung Yamato songs.
HAKU.
In the land of Yamato ...
FISHERMAN.
... many such have been sung.
CHORUS.
CHORUS (changing the chant).
FISHERMAN.
CHORUS.
Truly the fisherman has the ways of Yamato in his heart. Truly, this custom is excellent.
FISHERMAN.
If we speak of the sports of Yamato and sing its songs, we should show too what dances we use; for there are many kinds.
CHORUS.
Yes, there are the dances; but there is no one to dance.
FISHERMAN.
Though there be no dancer, yet even I—
CHORUS.
FISHERMAN.
And the land of Reeds and Rushes....
CHORUS.
Ten thousand years our land inviolate!
[The rest of the play is a kind of “ballet”; the words are merely a commentary on the dances.]
FISHERMAN (transformed into SUMIYOSHI NO KAMI, the God of Poetry).
(He dances the Sea Green Dance.)
CHORUS.
THE GOD.
CHORUS.
Of the plays which are founded on the Ise Monogatari[195] the best known are Izutsu and Kakitsubata, both by Seami. Izutsu is founded on the episode which runs as follows:
Once upon a time a boy and a girl, children of country people, used to meet at a well and play there together. When they grew up they became a little shame-faced towards one another, but he could think of no other woman, nor she of any other man. He would not take the wife his parents had found for him, nor she the husband that her parents had found for her.
Then he sent her a poem which said:
And she to him:
So they wrote, and at last their desire was fulfilled. Now after a year or more had passed the girl’s parents died, and they were left without sustenance. They could not go on living together; the man went to and fro between her house and the town of Takayasu in Kawachi, while she stayed at home.
Now when he saw that she let him go gladly and showed no grief in her face, he thought it was because her heart had changed. And one day, instead of going to Kawachi, he hid behind the hedge and watched. Then he heard the girl singing:
And he was moved by her song, and went no more to Takayasu in Kawachi.
In the play a wandering priest meets with a village girl, who turns out to be the ghost of the girl in this story. The text is woven out of the words of the Ise Monogatari.
Kakitsubata is based on the eighth episode. Narihira and his companions come to a place called Yatsuhashi, where, across an iris-covered swamp, zigzags a low footpath of planks.
Narihira bids them compose an anagram on the word Kakitsubata, “iris,” and some one sings:
The first syllables of each line make, when read consecutively, the word Kakitsubata, and the poem, which is a riddle with many meanings, may be translated:
“When he had done singing, they all wept over their dried-rice till it grew soppy.”
In the play, a priest comes to this place and learns its story from a village-girl, who turns out to be the “soul of the iris-flower.” At the end she disappears into the Western Paradise. “Even the souls of flowers can attain to Buddhahood.”
By KWANAMI; REVISED BY SEAMI
Before he came to the throne, the Emperor Keitai[197] loved the Lady Teruhi. On his accession he sent her a letter of farewell and a basket of flowers. In the play the messenger meets her on the road to her home; she reads the letter, which in elaborately ceremonial language announces the Emperor’s accession and departure to the Capital.
TERUHI.
(She slips quietly from the stage, carrying the basket and letter. In the next scene the EMPEROR[198] is carried on to the stage in a litter borne by two attendants. It is the coronation procession. Suddenly TERUHI, who has left her home distraught, wanders on to the stage followed by her maid, who carries the flower-basket and letter.)
TERUHI (speaking wildly).
MAID.
Madam, from these creatures we shall get no answer. Yet there is a sign that will guide our steps to the City. Look, yonder the wild-geese are passing!
TERUHI.
Then follows the “song of travel,” during which Teruhi and her companion are supposed to be journeying from their home in Echizen to the Capital in Yamato. They halt at last on the hashigakari, announcing that they have “arrived at the City.” Just as a courtier (who together with the boy-Emperor and the two litter-bearers represents the whole coronation procession) is calling: “Clear the way, clear the way! The Imperial procession is approaching,” Teruhi’s maid advances on to the stage and crosses the path of the procession. The courtier pushes her roughly back, and in doing so knocks the flower-basket to the ground.
MAID.
Oh, look what he has done! O madam, he has dashed your basket to the ground, the Prince’s flower-basket!
TERUHI.
What! My lord’s basket? He has dashed it to the ground? Oh hateful deed!
COURTIER.
Come, mad-woman! Why all this fuss about a basket? You call it your lord’s basket; what lord can you mean?
TERUHI.
What lord should I mean but the lord of this land of Sunrise? Is there another?
Then follow a “mad dance” and song. The courtier orders her to come nearer the Imperial litter and dance again, that her follies may divert the Emperor.
She comes forward and dances the story of Wu Ti and Li Fu-jēn.[199] Nothing could console him for her death. He ordered her portrait to be painted on the walls of his palace. But, because the face neither laughed nor grieved, the sight of it increased his sorrow. Many wizards laboured at his command to summon her soul before him. At last one of them projected upon a screen some dim semblance of her face and form. But when the Emperor would have touched it, it vanished, and he stood in the palace alone.
COURTIER.
His Majesty commands you to show him your flower-basket.
(She holds the basket before the EMPEROR.)
COURTIER.
His Majesty has deigned to look at this basket. He says that without doubt it was a possession of his rural days.[200] He bids you forget the hateful letter that is with it and be mad no more. He will take you back with him to the palace.
By SEAMI
The play is written round a story and a poem. A man came to the capital and was the lover of a woman there. Suddenly he vanished, and she, in great distress, set out to look for him in the country he came from. She found his house, and asked his servants where he was. They told her he had just married and was with his wife. When she heard this she ran out of the house and leapt into the Hōjō River.
GHOST OF THE LOVER.
GHOST OF GIRL.
GHOST OF LOVER.
Such is the story upon which the play is founded. The poem is one by Bishop Henjō (816-890):
Hito toki, “one while,” is the refrain of the play. It was for “one while” that they lived together in the Capital; it is for “one while” that men are young, that flowers blossom, that love lasts. In the first part of the play an aged man hovering round a clump of lady-flowers begs the priest not to pluck them. In the second part this aged man turns into the soul of the lover. The soul of the girl also appears, and both are saved by the priest’s prayers from that limbo (half death, half life) where all must linger who die in the coils of shūshin, “heart-attachment.”
By KWANAMI; REVISED BY SEAMI
Lord Yukihira, brother of Narihira, was banished to the lonely shore of Suma. While he lived there he amused himself by helping two fisher-girls to carry salt water from the sea to the salt-kilns on the shore. Their names were Matsukaze and Murasame.
At this time he wrote two famous poems; the first, while he was crossing the mountains on his way to Suma:
When he had lived a little while at Suma, he sent to the Capital a poem which said:
Long afterwards Prince Genji was banished to the same place. The chapter of the Genji Monogatari called “Suma” says:
Although the sea was some way off, yet when the melancholy autumn wind came “blowing through the pass” (the very wind of Yukihira’s poem), the beating of the waves on the shore seemed near indeed.
It is round these two poems and the prose passage quoted above that the play is written.
A wandering priest comes to the shore of Suma and sees a strange pine-tree standing alone. A “person of the place” (in an interlude not printed in the usual texts) tells him that the tree was planted in memory of two fisher-girls, Matsukaze, and Murasame, and asks him to pray for them. While the priest prays it grows late and he announces that he intends to ask for shelter “in that salt-kiln.” He goes to the “waki’s pillar” and waits there as if waiting for the master of the kiln to return.
Meanwhile Matsukaze and Murasame come on to the stage and perform the “water-carrying” dance which culminates in the famous passage known as “The moon in the water-pails.”
CHORUS (speaking for MURASAME).
There is a moon in my pail!
MATSUKAZE.
Why, into my pail too a moon has crept!
(Looking up at the sky.)
One moon above ...
CHORUS.
Their work is over and they approach their huts, i. e., the “waki’s pillar,” where the priest is sitting waiting. After refusing for a long while to admit him “because their hovel is too mean to receive him,” they give him shelter, and after the usual questioning, reveal their identities.
In the final ballet Matsukaze dresses in the “court-hat and hunting cloak given her by Lord Yukihira” and dances, among other dances, the “Broken Dance,” which also figures in Hagoromo.
The “motif” of this part of the play is another famous poem by Yukihira, that by which he is represented in the Hyakuninisshu or “Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets”:
There is a play of words between matsu, “wait,” and matsu, “pine-tree”; Inaba, the name of a mountain, and inaba, “if I go away.”
The play ends with the release of the girls’ souls from the shūshin, “heart-attachment,” which holds them to the earth.
By SEAMI
The priest Shunkwan, together with Naritsune and Yasuyori, had plotted the overthrow of the Tairas. They were arrested and banished to Devil’s Island on the shore of Satsuma.
Naritsune and Yasuyori were worshippers of the Gods of Kumano. They brought this worship with them to the place of their exile, constructing on the island an imitation of the road from Kyōto to Kumano with its ninety-nine roadside shrines. This “holy way” they decked with nusa, “paper-festoons,” and carried out, as best they might, the Shintō ceremonies of the three shrines of Kumano.
When the play begins the two exiles are carrying out these rites. Having no albs[202] to wear, they put on the tattered hemp-smocks which they wore on their journey; having no rice to offer, they pour out a libation of sand.
Shunkwan, who had been abbot of the Zen[203] temple Hosshōji, holds aloof from these ceremonies. But when the worshippers return he comes to meet them carrying a bucket of water, which he tells them is the wine for their final libation. They look into the bucket and cry in disgust: Ya! Kore wa mizu nari! “Why, it is water!”
In a long lyrical dialogue which follows, Shunkwan, with the aid of many classical allusions, justifies the identification of chrysanthemum-water and wine.
CHORUS (speaking for SHUNKWAN.)