• Noh: 盛久, 山姥  (Morihisa, Yamamba)

3/20/22 (Sun), Umewaka Noh Theater

The shows today were both cerebral Buddhist-inflected pieces appealing more to Noh lovers than general audiences. The theater was limited to 50% capacity and didn’t even manage to fill that, a sharp contrast with the packed house at the Kanze Noh Theater a week earlier even allowing for Kanze’s more audience-friendly program. I wonder if the undue precautions at some locations actually make audiences more fearful and deter them from coming.

Morihisa: Long on talk and short on action, but an intriguing show. Morihisa, a defeated Heike warrior, has been captured by the Genji clan and is being taken to Kamakura, the capital at that time. A devoted Buddhist, he asks to pray to Kannon, the goddess of mercy, at Kiyomizu Temple, then discusses Buddhism with his captors on the path to his death. In the end, as the executioner raises his sword for the beheading, he is blinded by a light emanating from the sutra scroll in Morihisa’s hands and drops the sword, which falls to pieces. Yoritomo, the general who had ordered the execution, reveals that he had a dream that Morihisa would be saved and instantly frees the prisoner. Morihisa dances in celebration.

The text is interesting, and the idea of achieving salvation from devotion to Buddha’s mercy is appealing. Morihisa notes that he is not praying to save his life but for Buddha to spare him torment after death. That is, he is mentally prepared to die and to place himself in heaven’s hands, trusting the way of God. This is a genzai Noh centering on living beings rather than the yugen types featuring ghosts, but the theme of life and death is similar.

The play incorporates a well-known sutra often performed independently from the rest of the long Kannon Sutra as well as a popular travel song of the day called “Togoku Kudari” (東国下, From Kyoto to the East). The travel song lists various points along the way to Kamakura that Morihisa is seeing for the last time, giving the story an added poignancy. As the song was not originally written for the Noh stage, it is said to be in a style difficult for Noh singers, maybe one of the reasons the show isn’t staged too often. (It was composed by the person who introduced Noh’s founders Kan’ami and Zeami to the shogun, which must have made it particularly meaningful for the author, Zeami’s son Motomasa.) In any event, the travel portion is one of the highlights of the otherwise talky show, accompanied by a spin around the stage as the famous sites along the way are named.

The other big scenes were the execution, when the would-be killer, dazzled by the sutra’s light, drops his sword dramatically, and especially (after a brief costume change) the climactic joyful otokomai (男舞) dance at Kamakura’s Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine by the reprieved Morihisa. I like the ending as well, when Morihisa says he mustn’t stay too long and slips calmly away – probably a good idea before Yoritomo changes his mind.

The show gets off to a slow start with little movement early on (though Morihisa gets a nice entry accompanied by the guards), but picks up nicely once the travel scene starts. This is not a good show for beginners because of its static talk for most of the play, but it’s an interesting piece on its own terms.

Yamamba (The Mountain Crone): A dancer famous for her depiction of mountain crones is on a pilgrimage with companions to Nagano’s Zenkoji Temple. Arriving at the crossroads of three paths, she takes the one most direct but most difficult as an expression of her deep faith. Night comes suddenly, and she and her group encounter a woman who offers shelter. The latter then reveals herself as an actual mountain crone and implicitly criticizes the dancer for profiting off of the crone’s name. She says that she made the sun set early in order to lure the dancer here and orders the frightened woman to perform. At that point, the crone disappears briefly, then reemerges in her true form. Eventually it is she herself who dances, telling of her journey in the mountains and preaching about Buddhist thought. At the end, she vanishes without a trace.

The crone suffers for her continued fixation on her reputation and wanders aimlessly in the mountains in a metaphor for the endless cycle of life and rebirth. The text is astonishingly rich in ideas, but that doesn’t translate to much excitement in the visuals. Her philosophical musing about the duality of all things – gods and humans, evil and goodness, fixation and enlightenment, the crone and her imitator – is contained in a very dense script that’s hard to absorb in the theater, at least in a single viewing; it’s more mind game than drama. In some versions, the crone and dancer apparently dance together, which sounds like an appealing variation, but today’s version was less focused on entertainment than on Buddhist beliefs. The crone does perform an exciting kuse dance in the second half with a fan and staff, and I wish there was more of that in the show as a whole. Yamanaka Gasho was near perfect in the difficult lead role. The piece is not uninteresting but definitely requires work on the part of the audience.