University of Virginia Library

PINING WIND
(Matsukaze: a woman play)

In Pining Wind, the mood of autumn deepens. This play about love's unquenchable longing is wonderfully moving even if one hardly 'understands' it at all: it is a fine example of how a pattern, once traced, can be apprehended in many ways. Together with "Yuya," Pining Wind is traditionally the most popular play of all. Both together have been called what amounts to the actor's bread and butter.

Pining Wind was apparently written by Kannami, then reworked by Zeami. Though the story is found nowhere else, Yukihira, Pining Wind's beloved, did in fact exist. He lived from 818 to 893, and was a brilliant courtier and poet. Yukihira's older brother, Narihira, is Yukihira's counterpart in The Well Cradle. Yukihira may actually have been exiled to Suma, a section of shore not far from the modern Kōbe, and certainly the fictional hero Prince Genji spent several melancholy years there. Pining Wind often echoes the Suma chapter of the Tale of Genji. Prince Genji too had a purification rite performed at Suma on the day of the Serpent, early in the third moon of the year.

It is possible to translate the name Pining Wind because the same double meaning exists both in English and in Japanese: matsu means 'to wait' and 'pine tree.' Thus, 'pining wind' really has four meanings: wind blowing through pine boughs; the wind's sound; wind that waits in longing; and finally (taking 'to pine' as a verb that means 'to be a pine') wind that is a pine. This last meaning is danced out near the end of the play.

Pining Wind has told in full her love for the long dead Yukihira and has evoked his presence by putting on, as though compelled, the hat and cloak he left her as keepsakes. She has impersonated him. Now, unable to do more, she collapses in despair and sings of Three Shallows River (Mitsusegawa), the river that surrounds the underworld; her spirit has sunk down to hell. But as the lowest leads to the highest, Pining Wind raises her head again to see Yukihira (a pine tree) standing before her in the flesh. He is as much a 'Vert Galant' as the God of Sumiyoshi in Takasago, and he has come instantly, as he promised he would, to Pining Wind's cry of total yearning. When Pining Wind dances around him, she in her human form is wearing his clothes, while he in his pine form sings the song which is of her, the wind. He really is a 'wind-bent pine.' As the moon is the visible sign of wisdom, so the pining wind is the audible sign, or pattern, of divine love.

As Yukihira and Pining Wind merge, so do their colors. Near the start of the play, the Sideman says, 'A pine, one lone tree, leaves a green fall.' ('A pine, one lone tree' is matsu hito ki, which can also mean 'the pining one comes.') One sees a pine standing green amid the changing colors of fall, especially the reds and golds of the momiji, the maple leaves—for maple leaves are as much the mark of fall in Japan as in New England. Pining Wind's dance around the tree is the same picture, for her color is that of expanding energy, of burning, of love. Red is indeed the color of a beautiful woman in nō, and the costume for such a role is said to 'contain red.'

Sudden Rain, the Second, also has an eloquent name. In Japanese,

murasame means a quick, hard shower. So unlike Pining Wind, who is continuous, Sudden Rain is stop-and-start. She forgets while Pining Wind remembers. Appropriately, it is she who introduces the Sideman into the salt shed, and again she, not the pining wind, who disappears in the end. The dialogue between Pining Wind and Yukihira really goes on forever; it is Sudden Rain who is the passing storm which is the play. She is like a sudden whitecap that opens one's eyes to the whole rolling sea.

Salt-making, the livelihood of Pining Wind and Sudden Rain, is often mentioned in poetry, and in fact the play contains a tsukushi, or 'inventory,' of places associated with salt-making. (Another 'inventory,' on trees,will be found in The Golden Tablet.) Such a passage means relatively little, but plays a great deal with pun and allusion. It is like a rocky section of stream which effectively prepares one to appreciate the smoother flow beyond. As for salt-making itself, the process it involved (gathering seaweed, pouring brine over it, roasting it, steeping the roasted seaweed in more brine, then finally drawing the liquid off and boiling it down) was more complicated than one might expect.