• Noh: 定家、殺生石 (Teika, Sesshoseki)

10/3/20 (Sat), Tokyo

It was encouraging to see a nearly full house for live theater — that is, the available tickets (50% of capacity) were nearly sold out. People are definitely hungry for entertainment. Tokyo actually now allows shows to perform at full capacity, which some productions (such as the sold-out Japanese version of the musical Billy Elliot) are taking full advantage of. But the Noh world remains conservative and cautious, maybe because of the higher average age of the audience.

Teika: Traveling monks taking shelter from the rain meet a woman who recounts the story of the great 12th/13th-century poet Fujiwara Teika and his lover Princess Shokushi, the emperor’s third daughter, who is a priestess and accomplished poet in her own right. (Teika’s real-life diaries include numerous accounts of his visits with the princess, but whether they were actually lovers remains conjecture.) The princess in this telling killed herself after Teika stopped coming to see her. The poet was grief stricken by her death and visited her grave regularly. The woman takes them to the grave, which is covered by a vine known as the Teika vine, named after the poet. She turns out to be the soul of the princess, whose obsession has bound her to this place. When she disappears into the grave, the monks recite a sutra to pray for her salvation. This causes the smothering vine to loosen its grip, and she emerges joyously from the tomb in her true form as the princess. After a dance of gratitude, however, she finds the pull of her passion still too deep to resist and ends up returning to the grave, where the vine again tightens its hold.

This was an intriguing piece in which the woman wins the chance at enlightenment, usually the entire point of these plays, but chooses willingly or otherwise to return to her obsessed state. In other words, her fanatical love for the poet blinds her to the promise of eternal bliss. That’s not very Buddhist and is a considerably different message from other Noh plays. The author Konparu Zenchiku, Zeami’s son-in-law no less, is either an iconoclast or saw a market for plays about unredeemed souls (his Ninomiya has a similar ending). I suppose it could also be about the positive power of love, especially as the ardent feeling between the woman and lover seems to be mutual. But that would be swimming against the tide in its day. Certainly a very different and provocative approach and well worth seeing. It could stand some cutting from its unduly long 140-minute playing time, especially in the first half. Hope to see a condensed version of this interesting show someday.

Sesshoseki (The Killing Stone): A priest notices that birds are dropping from the sky as they fly over a certain stone. He comes upon a woman who tells him that the stone is haunted by the soul of Tamamo-no-mae (Lady Tamamo), the incarnation of an evil fox spirit, and will kill anything that wanders near. When she disappears, the priest prays for the rock’s spirit. That causes the rock to break open and the spirit to spring forth. Overwhelmed by the prayers, she promises to halt her murderous actions and transforms herself into a rock.

As with the previous show, the main character is not exactly redeemed, but she does see the light and agrees to stop killing, which is sporting of her. Rocks are considered spiritual objects in traditional Japanese belief along with people, animals, trees and other natural objects, as seen in the film Spirited Away. The fox spirit’s boast of her mischief in the guise of a beautiful woman in China and India (the rest of the known world to Japanese at the time) was fun, and the moment when the large rock splits to reveal the spirit inside was nicely done. The show was brief at around one hour. The legend at the heart of the play seems well known: there’s an actual “killing stone” in Tochigi Prefecture that’s now a tourist spot (it’s mentioned by the poet Basho in his classic “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (奥の細道)), and the genno (玄翁) hammer is named after the play’s priest. Enjoyable.