University of Virginia Library

KOMACHI ON THE GRAVEPOST
(Sotoba Komachi: a fourth-category play)

Komachi on the Gravepost is a play of such astonishing contrasts that one can feel hard put to make of them a whole. Komachi is here, as in Komachi at Gateway Temple, a hundred-year-old crone, but she still debates brilliantly with two monks from the Shingon center of Mount Kōya. Hardly has she triumphed, however, and confessed her name, when she is savagely possessed by the spirit of a former suitor who re-enacts, through her body, his fruitless courtship of her. At last the spirit leaves Komachi and she vows to enter the path of enlightenment (which, in the first half of the play, she seemed to have traveled to the end) by accumulating such countless little acts of devotion as are mentioned in the Lotus Sutra. This sutra says that even children who make sand towers (mud pies) in the name of the Buddha accumulate by this act incalculable merit. Thus, at the very end of Komachi on the Gravepost there is a hint of the innocence that pervades Komachi at Gateway Temple. Perhaps the whole play suggests that knowledge is nothing without love, and that humility is greater than pride. Perhaps when Komachi reminds the monks that 'Back links it is that lift one high' (for 'back link' and 'right links,' see Glossary), she is saying more than even she realizes at the time.

Komachi's suitor is Shii no Shōshō, also known as Fukakusa no Shōshō, the 'Captain from Deepgrass.' According to legend, Komachi promised Shōshō she would yield to him if he would appear before her house each night for a hundred nights. He was to record his visit by cutting a notch on the shaft-rest there, the wooden support for the

shafts of a carriage. Shōshō came faithfully, night after night; he even missed Toyo no Akari, the Harvest Vigil Festival that no courtier would normally dream of missing. But on the ninety-ninth night, one night short, he died. One is reminded on the imperfect magic rock bridge alluded to in The Boat Bridge, and also of the old saw, 'It's love that makes the world go round.' For not only has Shōshō kept Komachi bound to the wheel of birth-and-death, but it is desire's endless pursuit of ever elusive perfection that keeps the wheel turning. (In Granny Mountains, Granny Mountains herself is the desire and the turning wheel.) The wheel of Dharma is whole, but for incarnate beings it appears cut by a gap that can be bridged only by love, not by the flesh.

The gravepost which is at issue in Komachi's triumphant debate is a sotoba, in Sanskrit stūpa. A stūpa is usually a mound consecrated to the Buddha, so that the mud pies mentioned above are a form of stupa. What Komachi sits on, though, is not a mound but a plank. A Shingon grave monument of this kind displays the symbolic shapes of the five elements or 'five wheels' which are the constituents of matter.

Zeami attributes Komachi on the Graveposts to his father Kannami, although he says that the present version is his own condensation of what had been a very long nō.