University of Virginia Library

TAKASAGO
(A god play)

Takasago, by Zeami, is perhaps the best loved of all the god plays. Its clear tone will endure, all but forgotten, until it is reaffirmed in a burst of energy at the close of the demon play—here The Watchmen's Mirror.

Takasago actually means "dune." The area is now an industrial city on the Inland Sea, but the Takasago Shrine is still there. Takasago has been famous in poetry since ancient times, and famous especially for the Takasago Pine. This pine is said to be paired with the Suminoe Pine, but Sumiyoshi (Suminoe is simply an older form of the same name) is far to the east, in the neighboring province, and one wonders how the two pines really can be paired. The answer is that their perfect attunement frees them from space. Moreover, the Paired Pines are free of time as well, since one is the distant past and the other the present.

Nō plays often hint that past and present can be one. In Takasago, the past is called the time of the Man'yōshū, a great anthology of the earliest Japanese poetry compiled in the eighth century; and the present is called the time of the Kokinshū, another basic anthology compiled during the Engi era, in the early tenth century. It is tactful convention that makes the Engi era the present in Takasago; no never treats the historical present.

There is much talk of poetry in Takasago, but in a very wide sense. The principal Japanese word for 'poem' is uta, which more generally means song. Thus we are told that "each sound of beings

feeling and non-feeling, every last one, is a song." This is why "all living things to the Blessed Isles, they say, draw nigh." For Blessed Isles (a tentative translation of the name Shikishima) is an ancient name for the islands of Japan, and here stands for Shikishima no michi, the way of the Blessed Isles: this is simply a term for poetry.

The true function of poetry in the Japanese tradition is communication. When all sound is heard as song, that is, as communication of essence, there are no barriers anywhere to understanding. (It is often specifically mentioned in god plays that all barriers, gates, and checkpoints stand open: the roads are free, communications are unimpeded.) When speech is coherent, as light can be coherent, truth is conveyed. The unfailing leaves of speech spoken of in Takasago are an everlasting flow of song that conveys the essence of man, and, in a wider sense, the endless hymn sung by all beings to that other singer, the one source of all being. In this antiphon, both beings and source are at one.

Leaves of speech: one can hardly fail to think of leaves of grass. "Words" is all the term means, and "leaves of speech" (ha is a pine needle as well as a leaf) is an overtranslation. But the metaphor is so often followed up in nō that one must translate it, or mutilate whole passages.

The fool tells the Sideman in Takasago that the Paired Pines hold divine converse through these pine boughs: each needle is, or sings, a word of their song. And since the pine is always green, the song is indeed endless. This endless vigor and life (the pine was said to flower ten times, once every thousand years) are actually seen

in the pine's unchanging hue, and heard in the sound the wind makes as it blows through a pine tree. Pining Wind is a play about this sound.

The climax of Takasago is the appearance and dance of the god pine himself, in the guise of the God of Sumiyoshi. The Sumiyoshi Shrine, near what is now the city of Osaka, is one of the greatest shrines in Japan, and the god there is the god of the sea. Perhaps sea and pine are one because the sea, too, is endlessly and murmurously alive. At any rate, the young and handsome god might well be nicknamed, like Henri IV of France, Le Vert Galant.