University of Virginia Library

FENOLLOSA ON THE NOH

The Japanese people have loved nature so
passionately that they have interwoven her
life and their own into one continuous drama
of the art of pure living. I have written elsewhere[1]
of the five Acts into which this life-drama
falls, particularly as it reveals itself in
the several forms of their visual arts. I have
spoken of the universal value of this special
art-life, and explained how the inflowing of
such an Oriental stream has helped to revitalize
Western Art, and must go on to assist in the
solution of our practical educational problems.
I would now go back to that other key, to the
blossoming of Japanese genius, which I mentioned
under my account of the flower festivals,
namely, the national poetry, and its rise,
through the enriching of four successive periods,
to a vital dramatic force in the fifteenth century.

Surely literature may be as delicate an exponent
of a nation's soul as is art; and there are several
phases of Oriental poetry, both Japanese and
Chinese, which have practical significance and
even inspiration for us in this weak, transitional
period of our Western poetic life.

We cannot escape, in the coming centuries,
even if we would, a stronger and stronger
modification of our established standards by
the pungent subtlety of Oriental thought,
and the power of the condensed Oriental forms.
The value will lie partly in relief from the
deadening boundaries of our own conventions.
This is no new thing. It can be shown that
the freedom of the Elizabethan mind, and its
power to range over all planes of human
experience, as in Shakespeare, was, in part, an
aftermath of Oriental contacts—in the Crusades,
in an intimacy with the Mongols such as Marco
Polo's, in the discovery of a double sea-passage
to Persia and India, and in the first gleanings
of the Jesuit missions to Asia. Still more
clearly can it be shown that the romantic movement
in English poetry, in the later eighteenth
century and the early nineteenth, was influenced
and enriched, though often in a subtle
and hidden way, by the beginnings of scholarly
study and translation of Oriental literature.

Bishop Percy, who afterwards revived our
knowledge of the mediaeval ballad, published
early in the 1760's the first appreciative English
account of Chinese poetry; and Bishop Hood
wrote an essay on the Chinese theatre, seriously
comparing it with the Greek. A few years later
Voltaire published his first Chinese tragedy,
modified from a Jesuit translation; and an
independent English version held the London
stage till 1824. Moore, Byron, Shelley, and
Coleridge were influenced by the spirit, and
often by the very subject, of Persian translations;
and Wordsworth's "Intimations of
Immortality" verges on the Hindoo doctrine
of reincarnation. In these later days India
powerfully reacts upon our imagination through
an increasingly intimate knowledge. . . .

I

A form of drama, as primitive, as intense,
and almost as beautiful as the ancient Greek
drama at Athens, still exists in the world.
Yet few care for it, or see it.[2] In the fifth century
before Christ the Greek drama arose out
of the religious rites practised in the festivals
of the God of Wine. In the fifteenth century

after Christ, the Japanese drama arose out of
religious rites practised in the festivals of the
Shinto gods, chiefly the Shinto god of the
Kasuga temple at Nara. Both began by a
sacred dance, and both added a sacred chorus
sung by priests. The transition from a dance
chorus to drama proper consisted, in both cases,
in the evolving of a solo part, the words of
which alternate in dialogue with the chorus.
In both the final form of drama consists of a
few short scenes, wherein two or three soloists
act a main theme, whose deeper meaning is
interpreted by the poetical comment of the
chorus. In both the speech was metrical, and
involved a clear organic structure of separate
lyrical units. In both music played an important
part. In both action was a modification
of the dance. In both rich costumes were
worn; in both, masks. The form and tradition
of the Athenian drama passed over into
the tradition of the ancient Roman stage, and
died away in the early middle ages fourteen
centuries ago. It is dead, and we can study it
from scant records only. But the Japanese
poetic drama is alive to-day, having been
transmitted almost unchanged from one perfected
form reached in Kioto in the fifteenth
century.

It has been said that all later drama has been
influenced by the Greek; that the strolling
jugglers and contortionists, who wandered in
troupes over Europe in the middle ages, constitute
an unbroken link between the degenerate
Roman actors and the miracle plays of
the church, which grew into the Shakespearean
drama. It is even asserted that, as the Greek
conquest gave rise to a Greco-Buddhist form
of sculpture on the borders of India and China,
Greek dramatic influence entered also into the
Hindoo and Chinese drama, and eventually
into the Noh of Japan. But the effect of
foreign thought on the Noh is small in comparison
with that of the native Shinto influences.
It is as absurd to say that the Noh is an offshoot
of Greek drama as it would be to say that
Shakespeare is such an offshoot.

There is, however, beside the deeper analogy
of the Japanese Noh with Greek plays, an
interesting secondary analogy with the origin
of Shakespeare's art. All three had an independent
growth from miracle plays—the
first from the plays of the worship of Bacchus,
the second from the plays of the worship of
Christ, the third from the plays of the worship
of the Shinto deities and of Buddha. The
plays that preceded Shakespeare's in England

were acted in fields adjoining the churches,
and later in the courtyards of nobles. The
plays that preceded the Noh, and even the
Noh themselves, were enacted, first in the
gardens of temples or on the dry river-beds
adjoining the temples, and later in the courtyards
of the daimio. On the other hand, the
actual modus of the Shakespearean drama is
practically dead for us. Occasional revivals
have to borrow scenery and other contrivances
unknown to the Elizabethan stage, and the
continuity of professional tradition has certainly
been broken. But in the Japanese Noh,
though it arose one hundred years before
Shakespeare, this continuity has never been
broken. The same plays are to-day enacted
in the same manner as then; even the leading
actors of to-day are blood descendants of the
very men who created this drama 450 years
ago.

This ancient lyric drama is not to be
confounded with the modern realistic drama
of Tokio, with such drama, for instance, as
Danjuro's. This vulgar drama is quite like
ours, with an elaborate stage and scenery, with
little music or chorus, and no masks; with
nothing, in short, but realism and mimetics
of action. This modern drama, a ghost of the

fifth period, arose in Yedo some 300 years ago.
It was an amusement designed by the common
people for themselves, and was written and
acted by them. It therefore corresponds to
the work of Ukiyo-ye in painting, and more
especially to the colour prints; and a large
number of these prints reproduce characters
and scenes from the people's theatre.

As the pictorial art of the fifth period was
divisible into two parts—that of the nobility,
designed to adorn their castles, and that of
the common people, printed illustration,—so
has the drama of the last 200 years been
twofold, that of the lyric Noh, preserved pure
in the palaces of the rich; and that of the
populace, running to realism and extravagance
in the street theatres. To-day, in spite of the
shock and revolution of 1868, the former, the
severe and poetic drama, has been revived, and
is enthusiastically studied by cultured Japanese.
In that commotion the palaces of the daimios,
with their Noh stages, were destroyed, the
court troupes of actors were dispersed. For
three years after 1868 performances ceased
entirely. But Mr. Umewaka Minoru, who
had been one of the soloists in the Shogun's
central troupe, kept guard over the pure
tradition, and had many stage directions or

"tenets" preserved in writing along with the
texts. In 1871 he bought an ex-diamio's
stage for a song, set it up on the banks of the
Sumida river in Tokio, and began to train
his sons. Many patient pupils and old actors
flocked to him; the public began their patronage;
he bought up collections of costumes
and masks at sales of impoverished nobles;
and now his theatre is so thronged that boxes
have to be engaged a week beforehand, and
five other theatres have been built in Tokio. . . .

For the last twenty years I have been studying
the Noh, under the personal tuition of
Umewaka Minoru and his sons, learning by
actual practice the method of the singing and
something of the acting; I have taken down
from Umewaka's lips invaluable oral traditions
of the stage as it was before 1868; and have
prepared, with his assistance and that of native
scholars, translations of some fifty of the texts.

II

The art of dance has played a richer part
in Chinese and Japanese life than it has in
Europe. In prehistoric days, when men or
women were strongly moved, they got up and
danced. It was as natural a form of self-expression
as improvised verse or song, and

was often combined with both. But the growing
decorum of a polite society tended to
relegate this dancing to occasions of special
inspiration and to professional dancers. These
occasions were roughly of two sorts—formal
entertainments at Court and religious ceremonial.
The former, which survives to this
day in the Mikado's palace, represented the
action of historic heroes, frequently warriors
posturing with sword and spear. This was
accompanied by the instrumental music of a
full orchestra. The religious ceremonial was
of two sorts—the Buddhist miracle plays in
the early temples and the god dances of the
Shinto.

The miracle plays represented scenes from
the lives of saints and the intervention of Buddha
and Bodhisattwa in human affairs. Like the
very earliest forms of the European play,
these were pantomimic, with no special dramatic
text, save possibly the reading of appropriate
scripture. The Japanese miracle plays were
danced with masks; and the temples of Nara
are still full of these masks, which date from
the eighth century. It is clear that many
popular and humorous types must have been
represented; and it is barely possible that
these were remotely derived, through Greco-Buddhist

channels, from the masks of Greek
low comedy. In these plays the god is the
chief actor, sometimes in dramatic relation to
a human companion. The god always wears
a mask. The solo part is established; and
herein the play differs from the Greek, where
the original rite was performed by a group of
priests, or (in the comedy) by goats or fauns.

The most certainly Japanese element of
the drama was the sacred dance in the Shinto
temples. This was a kind of pantomime, and
repeated the action of a local god on his first
appearance to men. The first dance, therefore,
was a god dance; the god himself danced,
with his face concealed in a mask. Here is a
difference between the Greek and Japanese
beginnings. In Greece the chorus danced,
and the god was represented by an altar. In
Japan the god danced alone.

The ancient Shinto dance or pantomime
was probably, at first, a story enacted by the
local spirit, as soloist—a repetition, as it were,
of the original manifestation. Shintoism is
spiritism, mild, nature-loving, much like the
Greek. A local spirit appeared to men in
some characteristic phase. On the spot a
Shinto temple was built, and yearly or monthly
rites, including pantomime, perpetuated the

memory of the event. Such things happened
all over the country; and thus thousands of
different stories were perpetuated in the dances
—hence the wealth of primitive material. The
thing can be seen to-day in every village festival.
Even in great cities like Tokio, every district
maintains its primitive village spirit-worship,
that of some tutelary worthy who enacts the
old story once a year on a specially made
platform raised in the street, about which the
people of the locality congregate. The plays
are generally pantomime without text.

In the Shinto dance the soloist has no
chorus. He performs some religious act of
the spirit, though this is often turned into
rude comedy. This dance takes the form of
a dignified pantomime. It is not an abstract
kicking or whirling, not a mere dervish frenzy,
but is full of meaning, representing divine
situations and emotions, artistically, with restraint
and with the chastening of a conventional
beauty, which makes every posture of
the whole body—head, trunk, hands, and feet
—harmonious in line, and all the transitions
from posture to posture balanced and graceful
in line. A flashlight glimpse across such a
dance is like a flashlight of sculpture; but
the motion itself, like a picture which moves

in colour, is like the art of music. There is an
orchestral accompaniment of flutes, drums, and
cymbals, slow, fast, low, passionate, or accented,
that makes a natural ground-tone. Akin to
these are the moving street pageants, which
are like early European pageants, or even those
of to-day in Catholic countries.

Thus the three sources of the Noh, all
belonging to the first period, are, in the order
of their influence, (1) the Shinto god dance,
(2) the warrior court dance, (3) the Buddhist
sacred pantomime.

As the old Chinese court dances were
modified in the aristocratic life of the second
period, it was natural that lovers of poetry
should begin to add poetical comment to the
entertainment. Thus the next step consisted
in the addition of a text for a chorus to sing
during the solo dance. They were already used
to accompany their verses with the lute.

In the first of the five periods, Japanese
lyric poetry reached its height. It was quite
different from the Chinese, as the language is
polysyllabic, the sentences long and smooth,
the tone gently contemplative. About the year
900, when the capital had been removed to
Kioto, the longer and straggling verse structure
went out of fashion. A tense stanzaic form

had come into almost universal use. This
fashion may be referred to Chinese influence.
Rhyme, however, was not introduced. The
lines, usually of five or seven syllables, are rich
and sonorous. Soon afterwards the passion for
composing and reciting this Japanese poetry
became so powerful among the educated classes,
especially in the cultured aristocracy at Kioto,
where men and women met on equal terms,
that the old court entertainments of dance and
music had to be modified to admit the use of
poetic texts. At first the nobles themselves,
at their feasts or at court ceremonies, sang in
unison songs composed for the occasion. The
next step was to write songs appropriate to
the dances; finally the chorus of nobles
became a trained chorus, accompanied by
court musicians. Thus by the end of the ninth
century there was a body of performers definitely
associated with the court, with a minister
in charge of it. There were two divisions.
The composition of the texts and the composition
of the music and dances were allotted
to different persons. At this stage the old
Chinese subjects fell into the background, and
subjects of Japanese historical interest, or of
more national and lyric nature, were substituted.

Thus arose the court entertainment called
Saibara, which ceased to be practised after the
twelfth century. Most of the details of it are
hopelessly lost, though a few texts remain
from a manuscript collection compiled about
the year 900. The music and dance are
utterly lost, except so far as we can discern a
trace of what they must have been, in the later
practices of the Noh. It is interesting to find
that the very names of some of the pieces in
Saibara are identical with those used in Noh
five centuries later. The Saibara pieces are
very short, much like the lyric poems of the
day; and they are often so lyrical or so personal
as hardly to suggest how they may have
been danced. It is also uncertain whether
these brief texts were repeated over and over,
or at intervals during the long dance, or whether
they were a mere introduction to a dance which
elaborated their thought.[3] The following Saibara
will serve as example:

This new combination of dance and song
soon spread from the court ceremonies to the
religious rites of the god dances in the Shinto
temples, not, however, to the Buddhist, which
were too much under the influence of Hindu
and Chinese thought to care for Japanese verse.
In Shinto dances the subject was already pure
Japanese and fit for Japanese texts; and it
may very well have occurred to some priest, in
one of the thousand Shinto matsuris (festivals)
going on all over the land, to sing a poem concerning
the subject of the dance. By the end
of the ninth century, in the second period, this
custom had become common in the great

Shinto festivals, in the Mikado's private chapel,
and at Kasuga. The texts were sung by a
trained chorus, and here is a second difference
from the line of Greek advance. In Greece
the chorus not only sang but danced; in
Japan the chorus did not dance or act, but
was merely contemplative, sitting at the side.
The songs so sung were called Kagura.

A few examples of these ancient Shinto
texts for Kagura have come down to us.
They are not exactly prayers; they are often
lovely poems of nature, for, after all, these
Shinto gods were a harmless kind of nature
spirit clinging to grottoes, rivers, trees, and
mountains. It is curious to note that the structure
of the texts is always double, like the
Greek strophe and antistrophe. They were
probably sung by a double chorus; and this
is doubtless the basis of the alternation or
choric dialogue.

Here is a kagura, sung by a priestess to her
wand:

III

We have now come to the point where we
can deal with this mass of playwriting as
literature. The plays are written in a mixture
of prose and verse. The finest parts are in
verse; ordinary conversation lapses into prose;
the choruses are always in verse.

It appears that the first period of Japanese
civilization supplied the chance elements for
the Noh, that is, the dances and certain attitudes
of mind. The second period supplied the
beginnings of literary texts. The third period,
dating from the end of the twelfth century, is
marked by the rise of the military classes and
supplied naturally a new range of dramatic
motives. The land was filled with tales of
wild achievement and knight-errantry and
with a passionate love for individuality, however

humble. The old court customs and
dances of the supplanted nobles were kept
up solely in the peaceful enclosures of the
Shinto temples. New forms of entertainment
arose. Buddhism threw away scholarship and
mystery, and aimed only at personal salvation.
As in contemporary Europe, itinerant monks
scoured the country, carrying inspiration from
house to house. Thus arose a semi-epic literature,
in which the deeds of martial heroes were
gathered into several great cycles of legend,
like the Carolingian and the Arthurian cycles
in Europe. Such were the Heike epic, the
Soga cycle, and a dozen others. Episodes
from these were sung by individual minstrels
to the accompaniment of a lute. One of the
most important effects of this new epic balladry
was to widen greatly the scope of motives
acceptable for plays.

As for comedy, another movement was
growing up in the country, from farmers'
festivals, the spring sowing of the rice, and the
autumn reaping. These were at first mere
buffooneries or gymnastic contests arranged
by the villagers for their amusement. They
were called Dengaku, a rice-field music. Later,
professional troupes of Dengaku jugglers and
acrobats were kept by the daimios in their

palaces, and eventually by the authorities of
the Buddhist and Shinto temples, in order to
attract crowds to their periodic festivals. Such
professional troupes began to add rude country
farces to their stock of entertainments, at first
bits of coarse impromptu repartee, consisting
of tricks by rustics upon each other, which
were probably not out of harmony with some
of the more grotesque and comic Shinto
dances. About the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries these two elements of comedy—the
rustic and the sacred—combined at the Shinto
temples, and actors were trained as a permanent
troupe. Such farces are called Kiogen. In
the later part of the fourteenth century, towards
the end, that is, of the third period, Dengaku
troupes of Shinto dancers advanced to the
incorporating of more tragic subjects, selected
from the episodes of the balladry. The god
dancer now became, sometimes, a human
being, the hero of a dramatic crisis—sometimes
even a woman, interchanging dialogue with
the chorus, as the two ancient Shinto choruses
had sung dialogue in the Kagura.

It was not till the fourth period of Japanese
culture, that is to say, early in the fifteenth
century, when a new Buddhist civilization,
based upon contemplative and poetic insight

into nature had arisen, that the inchoate
Japanese drama, fostered in the Shinto temples,
could take on a moral purpose and a psychologic
breadth that should expand it into a vital
drama of character. The Shinto god dance,
the lyric form of court poetry, the country
farces, and a full range of epic incident, in
short, all that was best in the earlier Japanese
tradition, was gathered into this new form,
arranged and purified.

The change came about in this way. The
Zen parish priests summoned up to Kioto the
Dengaku troupe from Nara, and made it play
before the Shogun. The head actor of this
Nara troupe, Kwan, took the new solo parts,
and greatly enlarged the scope of the music
of the other acting. During the lifetime of
his son and grandson, Zei and On, hundreds
of new plays were created. It is a question
to what extent these three men, Kwan, Zei,
and On, were the originators of the texts of
these new dramas, and how far the Zen priests
are responsible. The lives of the former are
even more obscure than is Shakespeare's. No
full account exists of their work. We have
only stray passages from contemporary notebooks
relating to the great excitement caused
by their irregular performances. A great temporary

circus was erected on the dry bed of the
Kamo river, with its storeys divided into
boxes for each noble family, from the Emperor
and the Shogun downwards. Great priests
managed the show, and used the funds collected
for building temples. The stage was a raised
open circle in the centre, reached by a long
bridge from a dressing-room outside the circus.

We can now see why, even in the full lyric
drama, the god dance remains the central
feature. All the slow and beautiful postures
of the early dramatic portion invariably lead
up to the climax of the hero's dance (just as
the Greek had planned for the choric dances).
This often comes only at the end of the second
act, but sometimes also in the first. Most plays
have two acts. During the closing dance the
chorus sings its finest passages, though it will
have been already engaged many times in
dialogue with the soloist. Its function is poetical
comment, and it carries the mind beyond
what the action exhibits to the core of the
spiritual meaning. The music is simple melody,
hardly more than a chant, accompanied by
drums and flutes. There is thus a delicate
adjustment of half a dozen conventions appealing
to eye, ear, or mind, which produces an
intensity of feeling such as belongs to no merely

realistic drama. The audience sits spellbound
before the tragedy, bathed in tears; but the
effect is never one of realistic horror, rather
of a purified and elevated passion, which sees
divine purpose under all violence.

The beauty and power of Noh lie in the
concentration. All elements—costume, motion,
verse, and music—unite to produce a single
clarified impression. Each drama embodies
some primary human relation or emotion;
and the poetic sweetness or poignancy of this
is carried to its highest degree by carefully
excluding all such obtrusive elements as a
mimetic realism or vulgar sensation might
demand. The emotion is always fixed upon
idea, not upon personality. The solo parts
express great types of human character, derived
from Japanese history. Now it is brotherly
love, now love to a parent, now loyalty to a
master, love of husband and wife, of mother
for a dead child, or of jealousy or anger, of
self-mastery in battle, of the battle passion
itself, of the clinging of a ghost to the scene of
its sin, of the infinite compassion of a Buddha,
of the sorrow of unrequited love. Some one
of these intense emotions is chosen for a piece,
and, in it, elevated to the plane of universality
by the intensity and purity of treatment. Thus

the drama became a storehouse of history, and
a great moral force for the whole social order
of the Samurai.

After all, the most striking thing about
these plays is their marvellously complete
grasp of spiritual being. They deal more with
heroes, or even we might say ghosts, than with
men clothed in the flesh. Their creators were
great psychologists. In no other drama does
the supernatural play so great, so intimate a
part. The types of ghosts are shown to us;
we see great characters operating under the
conditions of the spirit-life; we observe what
forces have changed them. Bodhisattwa, devas,
elementals, animal spirits, hungry spirits or
pseta, cunning or malicious or angry devils,
dragon kings from the water world, spirits of
the moonlight, the souls of flowers and trees,
essences that live in wine and fire, the semiembodiments
of a thought—all these come
and move before us in the dramatic types.

These types of character are rendered
particularly vivid to us by the sculptured
masks. Spirits, women, and old men wear
masks; other human beings do not. For the
200 plays now extant, nearly 300 separate
masks are necessary in a complete list of properties.
Such variety is far in excess of the

Greek types, and immense vitality is given to
a good mask by a great actor, who acts up to
it until the very mask seems alive and displays
a dozen turns of emotion. The costumes are
less carefully individualized. For the hero
parts, especially for spirits, they are very rich,
of splendid gold brocades and soft floss-silk
weaving, or of Chinese tapestry stitch, and are
very costly. In Tokugawa days (1602-1868)
every rich daimio had his own stage, and his
complete collection of properties. The dancing
is wonderful—a succession of beautiful poses
which make a rich music of line. The whole
body acts together, but with dignity. Great
play is given to the sleeve, which is often tossed
back and forth or raised above the head. The
fan also plays a great part, serving for cup,
paper, pen, sword, and a dozen other imaginary
stage properties. The discipline of the actor
is a moral one. He is trained to revere his
profession, to make it a sacred act thus to impersonate
a hero. He yields himself up to
possession by the character. He acts as if he
knew himself to be a god, and after the performance
he is generally quite exhausted.

IV

In Dojoji a girl is in love with a priest, who
flees from her and takes shelter under a great
bronze temple bell, which falls over him. Her
sheer force of desire turns her into a dragon,
she bites the top of the bell, twists herself
about the bell seven times, spits flame from
her mouth, and lashes the bronze with her tail.
Then the bell melts away under her, and the
priest she loves dies in the molten mass. In
Kumasaka the boy-warrior, Ushiwaka, fights a
band of fifteen giant robbers in the dark.
They fight with each other also. One by one,
and two by two, they are all killed. At one
time all are dancing in double combat across
stage and bridge. The Noh fencing with
spear and sword is superb in line. In the
conventional Noh fall, two robbers, facing, who
have killed each other with simultaneous blows,
stand for a moment erect and stiff, then slowly
fall over backward, away from each other, as
stiff as logs, touching the stage at the same
moment with head and heel.

In the play of Atsumori there is an interesting
ghost, taken from the epic cycle of the
Yoritomo. Atsumori was a young noble of
the Heike family who was killed in one of

Yoshitsumi's decisive battles. The priest who
opens the final scene tells the story thus:

During his prayer the boy hears a voice
which tells him to go to the forest of Ikuta;
and thither the priest and the boy journey.
On arrival they look about at the beauty of
the place, till suddenly nightfall surprises them.

"Look here, boy, the sun has set! What, is
that a light yonder? Perhaps it may be a
house? We will go to take lodging there."
A straw hut has been set at the centre of the
stage. The curtain in front of it is now withdrawn,
and the figure of a very young warrior
is disclosed, in a mask, and wearing a dress of
blue, white, and gold. He begins to speak to
himself:

They think him a man, but he tells them
he has had a half-hour's respite from hell. He
looks wistfully at the boy, who wishes to seize
him, and cries, "Flower child of mine, left
behind in the world, like a favourite carnation,
how pitiful to see you in those old black
sleeves!" Then the spirit dances with restraint,
while the chorus chants the martial
scene of his former death. "Rushing like
two clouds together they were scattered in a
whirlwind." Suddenly he stops, looks off the
stage, and stamps, shouting:

Among the most weird and delicately poetic
pieces is Nishikigi, in which the hero and heroine
are the ghosts of two lovers who died unmarried
a hundred years before. Their spirits are in
the course of the play united near a hillside
grave where their bodies had long lain together.
This spiritual union is brought about
by the piety of a priest. Action, words, and
music are vague and ghostly shadows. The
lover, as a young man, had waited before the
girl's door every night for months, but she,
from ignorance or coquetry, had refused to
notice him. Then he died of despair. She
repented of her cruelty and died also.

The play opens with the entrance of the
travelling priest, who has wandered to the
ancient village of Kefu in the far north of the
island. He meets the two ghosts in ancient
attire. At first he supposes them to be villagers.
He does not seem to notice their dress, or, if
he does, he apparently mistakes it for some
fashion of the province. Then the two ghosts
sing together, as if muttering to themselves:

Then the priest says:

Gradually they tell him the story—they do
not say at first that it is their own story. Two
people had lived in that village, one of whom
had offered the nishikigi, the charm-sticks, the
"crimson tokens of love," night after night
for three years. That was the man, of course;
and the girl, apparently oblivious, had sat
inside her house, weaving long bands of cloth.
They say that the man was buried in a cave
and all his charm-sticks with him. The priest
says it will be a fine tale for him to tell when
he gets home, and says he will go see the
tomb, to which they offer to guide him. Then
the chorus for the first time sings:

Then the hero, the man's ghost, breaks in
for a moment: "Oh how cold it is in these
evening dusks of autumn!" And the chorus
resumes:

After an interval, for the changing of the
spirits' costumes, the second act begins. The
priest cannot sleep in the frost, and thinks he
had better pass the night in prayer. Then the
spirits in masks steal out, and in mystic language,
which he does not hear, try to thank
him for his prayer, and say that through his
pity the love promise of incarnations long
perished is now just realized, even in dream.
Then the priest says:

Then follows a wonderful loom song and
chorus, comparing the sound of weaving to
the clicking of crickets; and in a vision is
seen the old tragic story, and the chorus sings

that "their tears had become a colour." "But
now they shall see the secret bride-room."
The hero cries, "And we shall drink the cup
of meeting." Then the ghostly chorus sings
a final song:

But now the wine-cup of the night-play is
reflecting the first hint of the dawn. Perhaps we
shall feel awkward when it becomes really morning.
And like a dream which is just about to break,
the stick and the cloth are breaking up, and the
whole place has turned into a deserted grave on
a hill, where morning winds are blowing through
the pines.