University of Virginia Library

THE WELL CRADLE
(Izutsu: a woman play)

The Well Cradle is a most delicate play, like a fresh-water version of Pining Wind. Quite naturally the last lines speak of 'the plaintain leaf dream': a plantain (bashō) leaf is enormously long and graceful, but it tears into tatters in the wind.

It is the play's mood of childlike innocence that encourages the translation of the title. The railing around the mouth of a well is not normally a 'well cradle' in English, but however izutsu is translated, it must sound pleasing. The key poem of the play makes of this word almost a chant as it begins, Tsutsu izutsu izutsu no. . . ('Cradle well cradle well cradle that. . .'). In context, the music of these sounds is wonderfully fresh and lovely.

The poem itself is by Ariwara no Narihira (825-880), and the story of Narihira and of a lady known only as Ki no Aritsune's daughter is told in a chapter of the Ise monogatari. Each chapter of the Ise monogatari starts with the words Mukashi otoko. . . ('A man of old. . .'). Hence Narihira, who is thought to be the hero of the whole romance, acquired these words as a nickname. Narihira, like Komachi, was one of the Six Immortals of Poetry of his time, and the preface to the Kokinshū appraises him as follows: 'Ariwara no Narihira has too much heart and too few words. He is like a withered flower whose color is gone but whose fragrance lingers.'

There are several places in The Well Cradle where 'long ago' and 'now' are suggestively juxtaposed, as they are, for example, in Mouth-of-Sound. The Sideman, too, speaks of turning his sleeves back, or inside out: this is a device to bring on a dream vision, especially one of the past. But The Well Cradle stops carefully short of the climax of Pining Wind. The Lady of the Well Cradle does not mistake the face she sees in the well for flesh, even though the vision is deeply moving, Phantom she is, but her appearing and her disappearing are subtle indeed.

The Buddha the Lady prays to at the beginning of The Well Cradle is Amida, whose vow is to save all weak and sinful beings from suffering. His Pure Land Paradise is in the West. To one who has faith in his all-saving grace, Amida, the Lord of Infinite Light, offers a five-colored cord by which the soul can be drawn into the Pure Land. A dying believer would often be given such a cord to hold; the other end would be attached to Amida's hand in an icon representing Amida's welcome to the soul. He would be shown rising like the full moon over mountains, attended by a pair of Bodhisattvas; or again, he might be seen coming straight toward the believer, attended as before and riding on a cloud.