[In the following essay, Rimer provides a historical overview of Japanese theater, focusing on three representative works of classical and modern Japanese drama.]

When I first began to attend performances by Japanese contemporary theatre companies in the 1950s, I was puzzled by what I took to be a disparity between the power of the texts chosen for performance and the quality of the acting available to make those texts come alive on the stage. To see Pirandello, Molière, and Kinoshita on the stage in Japan was a rare opportunity, and yet the performances, for all their polish, seemed to lack any real natural elegance. The thoughts that follow here, in fact, have grown from that initial sense of surprise and, perhaps, of disappointment.

The first help I received came in the form of a few paragraphs in Peter Arnott's The Theatres of Japan. Arnott, an expert on the Greek classic theatre who visited Japan in 1966, revealed his conception of an important distinction he found between Japanese and Western performing technique.

The gulf between the Japanese theatre and its Western counterpart embraces more than different social standards and unfamiliar subjectmatter. They are two forms built on different aesthetic foundations, and divided by the actor's concept of his relation to his role. The extrovert and presentational style cultivated for centuries in Japan cannot be easily reconciled with plays written for actors trained in a different mode and expected to identify themselves psychologically with their roles. This is the most serious difficulty that the Japanese actor has to face. He is forced, in effect, to relearn the fundamentals of his trade. Japanese actors, on the whole, are more secure in Western plays to which the traditional methods can be applied. They are conspicuously successful in the "epic" style cultivated by Brecht and others, which comes close to, and indeed borrowed from, their own traditions. The "alienation effect" demanded by Brecht from his characters is founded on the premises of presentational acting. But the wholly naturalistic style continues to elude them, with results sometimes disastrous to the play. In Brecht, the [Japanese] actor is moving in a world he knows.

Arnott's suggestion of a profound difference in craft and style seemed to go a long way in answering my question; as it turned out, however, his explanations opened up further questions still. When I translated for an American production a drama by the contemporary playwright Yamazaki Masakazu, one of the most thoughtful and intellectually imaginative writers of his generation, the director, musing over the English script, told me that he was struck by the form in which the drama was cast. "Why," he asked me, "should a contemporary playwright choose to write a metaphysical melodrama? The play is extremely effective, but it is cast in a form difficult for American actors and based on assumptions difficult for us to seek out."

The director's remarks seemed most perceptive; and even though I could not answer his question properly, I realized that perhaps he was struck not so much by a need to search out different acting styles but by the fact that an altogether different view of reality was suggested by this and the other Japanese plays he had read, a genuine reality certainly, but one not based on the concept of mimesis so familiar in Western drama since its very beginnings. Reality in the Japanese theatre was to be found not in imitation but in stylization, the kind of intense simplification and suggestiveness that had so attracted certain important Western poets, composers, and writers to the Japanese traditional theatre. How, then, was the stylization that had so appealed to artists such as Claudel, Britten, Brecht, and Yeats to be understood?

Various angles of analysis seemed possible. One obvious point, and one well understood by Yeats, for example, was that this stylization seemed allied to ritual and could thus provide a means to allow an audience an experience quite outside their everyday comprehension of themselves. The medieval no drama shows this ability consistently. An examination of ritual, in turn, can help show the purposes of stylization. In seeking out the psychological basis of ritual, I was led to the work of Victor Turner, mentioned earlier in this book; his discussion of pilgrims leaving their orthodox social environments in order to undergo a special experience, their assumption of voluntary status as pilgrims, and their movements through symbolic time, all in order to seek the state of communitas, a universal sense of nonduality, which releases the pilgrim from his everyday "role playing and all its guilts," struck me as highly suggestive of the process through which an audience, albeit an ideal audience, might go.

But to what extent can the theatre be considered a place of pilgrimage? After all, the audience does not participate but rather watches and observes. Still, I thought, a case might be made out that the audience is always on a pilgrimage of sorts. I was reminded of a scene in Paul Claudel's play L'Échange, in which some of the qualities Turner points out as typical of a pilgrimage—a strange sense of time, of place, and the possibility of transcendental understanding—are placed in the province of the theatre. Lechy Elbernon is an actress, and at one point in the drama she is attempting to explain the craft of the theatre to a friend.

LECHY. The theatre. Don't you know what it is?

MARTHE. No.

LECHY. There is a stage, there is an audience. In the evening, everything's closed. They all come, and they sit in rows, one behind the other, and they look.

MARTHE. What do they look at, if everything is shut?

LECHY. They look at the curtain. And what is behind it when it rises. And something happens on the stage just as though it were real.

MARTHE. But it isn't real! It's like a dream you have when you're asleep.

LECHY. Yes, that is why they come to the theatre at night … I look at them, the audience; and they are living, clothed flesh. And they cluster on the walls like flies, right up to the ceiling; I see those hundreds of white faces. Man lives his life in boredom, and ignorance that has clung to him from his birth. And because he does not know how anything begins or ends he goes to the theatre. And he looks at himself, his hands on his knees. And he laughs and he cries and cannot bear to leave … They look and listen as though they were asleep.

MARTHE. The eye is made to see, and the ear to hear the truth.

LECHY. What is truth? Is it not like an onion, wrapped in seventeen skins? Who can see things as they are? The eye sees, the ear hears, But only the mind can know. And that is why man Longs to take out what he carries in his mind and spirit To see it with his eyes and know it with his ears. And so it is that I show myself on the stage.

Audiences, Claudel suggests, exist in a special state of heightened, detached awareness that is altogether reminiscent of Turner's psychological pilgrim state: dream as reality, time at a stop, the world of the spirit dominating the rule of the senses. In Claudel's vision, an audience comes to the theatre in the hope that its members can make manifest, to actually see before them, what may otherwise exist only inside their own souls, as potential. The spectators, desiring an understanding of themselves, seek that vision in the images they find in their own minds and souls, which are thrown up on the stage for them to examine, to look at and observe. In Turner's terms the spectators participate vicariously in the movement of the images on the stage that parade before them; they see the pilgrimage spread out before them.

If such a vicarious pilgrimage can be posited in terms of the theatre, then an examination of the nature of the relationship of an audience to the drama of its time can suggest as well what images a given audience may most desire to see, what kind of mirror it most wishes to have thrown up before it: in short, what kind of reflected pilgrimage it may find itself most wanting to seek out. Individuals, audiences, and societies change, and so will the nature of the pilgrimages on which they embark. By way of example I would like to indicate Japanese dramas from three historical periods that can suggest the dynamics of this process. All reveal a congruence with Turner's scheme: the pilgrimages seem to involve a voluntary act on the part of the pilgrim, the trip to a special place, and a segment of symbolic time. Finally, Turner's idea of a crucial liminal experience, a sense of communitas, seems present as well. To anticipate my conclusions, I would like in particular to suggest that a play written as a surrogate pilgrimage surely requires a style of composition and performance at variance with the kind of realism so basic to the modern Western theatre.

My first example is taken from the medieval no; closest to European medieval ritual as these dramas are, they provide almost a paradigm for a dramatic version of Turner's conception of pilgrimage. The play I have chosen is one I have translated and the text of which I have studied closely, Taema, a play attributed to the greatest figure in the history of no, Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443). The audiences for no in Zeami's time were largely popular, with a sprinkling of aristocrats, not unlike the medieval popular audiences in Europe. Whatever the differences in class outlook, the audiences were held together by their common cultural consciousness, which centered on Buddhist belief and psychology. The texts of this and most other plays contain "high" sections of metaphysical poetry, presumably for the highly literate aristocrats, and "low" sections of easier prose for the commoners.

The play is a perfect model of a spiritual journey. The waki, or subsidiary character, consists of a priest, plus his two companions; the shite, or main character, appears first as a nun, then in the second part of the play as the Princess Chujo. At the beginning of the play, the priests visit Taema temple to see the famous woven mandala there (which, incidentally, modern tourists can do as well, since the original temple, with its beautiful grounds, is about one hour from Osaka by train). They meet an old woman, a Buddhist nun, who is accompanied by a young girl. The pair tell the priest and his companions how Princess Chujo prayed at the temple for the coming of Amida Buddha, and how eventually an aged nun had come to the princess, revealed herself as a manifestation of Amida, and heralded the princess' ascent to paradise. The nun and the girl next reveal themselves to the priest as dream-visions of the princess and Amida, then disappear. During the interlude, a farmer in the vicinity retells the story in simple language, adding the fact that Amida Buddha had presented a mandala woven of lotus threads to the princess. In the final and highly poetic section of the play, the priest and his companions pray for enlightenment; the princess now reappears in dazzling attire and reveals a poetic image of paradise. She praises Amida, presents the priest with a sutra, and bids him pray. As he kneels to do so, the vision fades.

The play follows Turner's schemata closely. The very opening lines of the play show the priests anxious to make a trip toward enlightenment.

PRIESTS. [Together.] Wonderful the Gate Of the Wonderful Law: Let us follow the road it discloses.

The priest and his companions have consciously sought out a holy place, a sacred spot, far out of the way; their piety in turn makes it possible for them to identify the two others, the nun and the young girl, who also worship Amida Buddha. Their encounter together suggests the possibility of a shared communitas, a oneness that surpasses the individual.

GIRL. Amida with a single mind
      Shows the way …
BOTH. Let us never neglect
      To say with all our hearts,
      "I put my faith in Amida."
NUN.  And as we praise him,
      All distinction between the Buddha
      and
      ourselves
      Will disappear …

They identify their own pilgrimage as a transcendental one.

NUN. In that road which leads towards
              Cool purity
              We place our trust.

As the priest and his companions observe these two women, the visitors come to realize that they are beginning to become involved in an experience that may lead them to still greater faith. The nun and the girl describe the various holy relics to be seen at Taema temple, then remind the priests of the proper attitude needed to participate in a real pilgrimage.

TOGETHER. Many are the well-known places,
          Many the occasions to contemplate
               the Buddha
          And to hear the Wonderful Law,
          But too profound for our
                comprehension.

          As a single strand of pure lotus,
          Our cry rises from our united
              hearts
          Amida save us!

Mere observation, cognition, must be abandoned for the deep cry of faith. The nun now explains to the rapt priest how Princess Chujo herself made a pilgrimage to the deep mountains, giving herself up to contemplation and prayers to Amida. As they finish the story, the two reveal themselves.

TOGETHER. We are transformed beings from
                 the past,
        A nun and a girl,
        Who appeared in your dream,
        And even as we speak these words
CHORUS. Light thrusts,
        Flowers fall,
        Miraculous odors everywhere,
        Voices of music.

Now the priest and his companions fulfill the third of Turner's conditions leading to communitas: they will come to move in symbolic time. In the final section of the play, as they begin their prayers to Amida, they are rewarded by a vision that might be classed as a form of extended reality, which will move them toward a transcendent experience.

PRIESTS. Even before we can speak of it,
         How surprising!
         Wondrous music sounds,
         Light floods down,
         Boddhisattvas,
         Singing, dancing,
         Before our eyes,
         Sacred manifestations—
         Wonderful, oh wonderful.

The princess now appears and tells the priests of the joys of paradise.

CHORUS.   Wondrous Paradise!
          Magnificence, a vast unending world
                  of sky
          Dazzles the sight, lost in paths of
                  clouds.
PRINCESS. The sound of the voice
          Of the turning wheel of the
                   Wonderful Law
          Fills the air to the vast edges
                    if Paradise.
CHORUS.   The heart, calm and quiet as the
                   dawn
PRINCESS. Is guided on its cool path to Paradise
                  By the light of Amida.

She then presents the priest with a sutra, which he worships. All join together in the unity and oneness of prayer.

CHORUS.   Keep your heart without
                   confusion
PRINCESS. Do not go astray
CHORUS.   Do not go astray
PRINCESS. The strength of ten voices
CHORUS.   Will rise from your one voice in
                   prayer.
           Gracious Amida!

The vision reaches its climax, then fades as the priests awaken from their dream of bliss just as, with another image of travel, the play ends.

PRIESTS. In the waning night the bell
                 sounds
         And the bell sounds echo
         With the voices crying,
         "Praise to Amida!"
         As we venerate the Buddha
         And hear his miraculous word,
         His holy truthful teaching
         Shines down to light the world:
         In all ten directions
         Mankind finds welcome from him
         As they travel
         In the boat of the True Law.
         The oars are used in moving
                 water,
        And yet
        In the time it takes to push away
        an oar
        The dream of this short night fades
        And dawn comes,
        Faintly.

Now the priests are becoming reabsorbed into the real world; their spiritual pilgrimage is ending, and their physical one will now begin again; they will return to their familiar existence enlightened. Taema seems a perfect artistic representation of Turner's scheme, in which each layer reinforces the others. All participants, the princess, the nun and the girl, the priests, and, presumably, the audience as well, are seeking an authentic pilgrimage experience; all search out paradise, and the play seems a poetic representation of a vast prayer into which the audience seeks to be drawn. The style of the play is perfectly suited to the theme, rising as it does to the first poetic climax, dropping back for the interlude, then moving up to the final poetic heights. All aspects of the presentational no performance—dancing, poetry, masks, and music—help involve the audience in this symbolic act.

My second example is from the world of joruri, specifically a play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724) that has been widely performed both by puppets and by kabuki actors. By this time in Japanese history, the theatre, as in Europe, was responding to the rapid development of a bourgeois society; the playwright thus provides a secular view of the pilgrimage progress. The audience now moves toward the role of observer rather than that of participant.

By the time of Chikamatsu, the medieval unities had broken down. The audience for the puppet theatre now constituted a class audience, made up largely of urban merchants who wished for their entertainment a chance to see their own values reflected on the stage, particularly in the so-called sewamono, or "domestic dramas," based on contemporary events, where the moral tensions of their own society could be portrayed.

Some insights recorded in Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art, although dealing with the European situation during the eighteenth century, suggest both a parallel development with the Japanese cultural situation and an occasional striking similarity. His remarks thus provide some useful insight into the interactions between Chikamatsu and his audiences. Hauser remarks that a self-consciousness of social class helps define and limit the work of the playwright at the time. "The assumption is that the spectator is able to escape from the influence of the play much less easily when he sees his own class portrayed on the stage, which he must acknowledge to be his own class if he is logical, than when he merely sees his own personal character portrayed, which he is free to disown if he wants to."

Hauser goes on to say that the characters in European plays of this period often become functions of their environment. Men are posited as social beings, and, "deprived of all autonomy, lose to some extent the responsibility for their actions." His observations on the effect of a growing consciousness of a class structure would seem a useful means to examine a Japanese example, Chikamatsu's Shinj ten no Amijima (The Love Suicides at Amijima), written in 1721 and often regarded as Chikamatsu's masterpiece. The play was originally composed for the puppet theatre but its evocative settings and realistic dialogue, and a plot presumably based on a real love suicide, have made it a favorite with kabuki actors as well.

The plot of the play is simple and like many of the other familiar "domestic dramas" of Chikamatsu. Jihei, a paper merchant, is in love with a courtesan, Koharu, despite the real affection felt for him by his long-suffering wife, Osan. Osan's love for Jihei is such that, suspecting that the pair may attempt to commit suicide together, she attempts to avoid the worst by helping her husband ransom Koharu from the teahouse where she has been forced to serve as an entertainer. The story as it evolves is crafted with a number of effective confrontations between the characters concerning the nature of love, duty, honor, and so forth. In this, Magoemon, Jihei's brother, plays a particularly effective part, serving to some extent the role of the honnête homme of Molière as he seeks to bring his brother to the path of reason and the consolations of social duty. Eventually these tensions push Koharu and Jihei to suicide. The last two scenes of the play form a lyrical pilgrimage not to an immediate transcendence, as in Taema, but to a communitas through death. The change in tonality is immediately obvious; the realistic and often spirited exchanges of the early scenes that make up the bulk of the play vanish and the language of the text becomes lyrical, indeed highly poetic. This change of tonality is so striking in the last sequence, and the values the playwright propounds there are so different from those expressed in the rest of the play, that the interpretation of the drama as a pilgrimage seems virtually the only means to link the two sections of the text together, at least in terms of the language involved.

In this regard, Turner's conditions again seem to be fulfilled in this final scene. The lovers, Koharu and Jihei, choose to die together. Their decision is voluntary. In fact, they have made the decision to die together early in the play; their real problem, then, concerns how to carry out their vow. During their pilgrimage to death, they also choose a special place, out of the way of normal human traffic. They leave their familiar surroundings and take a fanciful journey, the stage michiyuki so familiar in all forms of the traditional Japanese theatre. Their destination is Amijima (which might be rendered into English as "Island of Nets"), and on the way they pass by various islands and bridges that are assigned poetic, often transcendental meanings as they approach the final spot chosen for their death.

JIHEI. Look, there is Oe Bridge. We follow the river from Little Naniwa Bridge to Funairi Bridge. The farther we journey, the closer we approach the road to death.

When they approach the site where they will kill themselves, the imagery of the play becomes more and more religious.

JIHEI. Listen—the voices of the temple bells begin to boom. How much farther can we go on this way? We are not fated to live any longer—let us make an end quickly.

NARRATOR. Tears are strung with the 108 beads of the rosaries in their hands. They have come now to Amijima, to the Daicho temple; the overflowing sluice gate of a little stream beside a bamboo thicket will be their place of death.

Finally, time expands as the couple travels their "long last night," as they call it. As in Taema, the drama ends as the dawn breaks, but the circumstances are very different. The communitas achieved is one of death. Koharu herself sees her voyage, her pilgrimage, as a means to salvation.

KOHARU. What have we to grieve about? Though in this world we could not stay together, in the next and through each successive world to come until the end of time we shall be husband and wife. Every summer for my devotions I have copied the All Compassionate and All Merciful chapter of the Lotus Sutra, in the hope that we may be born on one lotus.

Here at the moment of their deaths, Koharu and Jihei abandon their normal secular social roles and consciously take on the persona of pilgrims.

NARRATOR. Jihei whips out his dirk and slashes off his black locks at the base of the top knot.

JIHEI. Look, Koharu. As long as I had this hair, I was Kamiya Jihei, Osan's husband, but cutting it has made me a monk. I have fled the burning house of the three worlds of delusion; I am a priest unencumbered by wife, children, or worldly possessions. Now that I no longer have a wife named Osan, you owe her no obligations either.

NARRATOR. In tears he flings away the hair.

KOHARU. I am happy.

NARRATOR. Koharu takes up the dirk and ruthlessly, unhesitatingly, slices through her flowing Shimada coiffure. She casts aside the tresses she has so often washed and combed and stroked. How heartbreaking to see their locks tangled with the weeds and midnight frost of this desolate field!

JIHEI. We have escaped the inconstant world, a nun and a priest. Our duties as husband and wife belong to our profane past.

As in Taema the pilgrims pray to Amida.

JIHEI. You musn't let worries over trifles disturb the prayers of your last moments. Keep your eyes on the westward-moving moon, and worship it as Amida himself. Concentrate your thoughts on the Western Paradise.

In her ecstasy Koharu now leads Jihei to the final act.

NARRATOR. She smiles. His hands, numbed by the frost, tremble before the pale vision of her face, and his eyes are first to cloud. He is weeping so profusely that he cannot control the blade.

KOHARU. Compose yourself, but quick!

NARRATOR. Her encouragement lends him strength; the invocations to Amida carried by the wind urge a final prayer. Namu Amida Butsu. He thrusts in the saving sword.

The combination of images employed by Chikamatsu provides a striking example of how one set of images, those borrowed from the kind of religious terminology so highly developed in the medieval no, can now be employed in a self-consciously artistic way in order to create a secular, exteriorized version of a similar religious vision. Artistically, at least, Chikamatsu does believe in his lovers and wants the audience to do so as well. As Jihei kills himself, he calls out, "May we be born on one lotus: Hail Amida Buddha!" And indeed, the last lines in the play suggest that the lovers did earn in death the transcendence they sought.

NARRATOR. The tale was spread from mouth to mouth. People say that they who were caught in the net of Buddha's vow immediately gained salvation and deliverance, and all who hear the tale of the Love Suicides at Amijima are moved to tears.

There is here an effective pun on the word ami, which serves both as the name of the place where the lovers died (Amijima, "Island of ami, or Nets"), and as a reference to a traditional saying that the nets of the Buddha are woven meshes able to catch and take up to heaven the most recalcitrant sinner. Chikamatsu's title thus carries the suggestion of a transcendental message.

In the case of Chikamatsu's drama, then, a play that is realistic in most of its details ends with a poetic and religious conclusion which, if not altogether out of keeping with the opening scenes, is certainly scarcely anticipated in them. The audience is taken by the playwright on a journey, but, unlike the voyage of the priests in Taema, this trip is really an interior one, moving from exterior action to interior motivation, which is expressed poetically. Chikamatsu's technique in creating this movement is accomplished through his skillful use of the narrator. The characters themselves are never required to speak in a fashion out of keeping with their social milieu, or in a fashion so poetic that the verisimilitude that Chikamatsu sought, that famous "slender margin between the real and the unreal" for which he was famous, is never destroyed; rather, the narrator takes over the task of providing a philosophic and poetic gloss on the actions witnessed on the stage. As his role grows larger, the language of the play expands. In this regard Chikamatsu's use of the narrator provides an ingenious solution to the difficulty of how to put poetic dignity in the mouth of everyman, a stylistic problem that has troubled many modern playwrights. Arthur Miller, for example, in A View from the Bridge, was driven to adopt, rather awkwardly, the same sort of device in order to lift his text up to the level of eloquence he sought.

Chikamatsu's lovers may commit suicide together in a kind of triumphant search for communitas, but they are themselves no larger than life, no Tristan and Isolde. A case might be made that Wagner's orchestra is his narrator, glossing the words of his characters with a high pitch of emotion, but a reading of the text alone of Isolde's love-death shows that the words themselves are conflated far beyond anything that Chikamatsu would have considered appropriate to a human scale. After all, he was writing in his sewamono about contemporary figures, not medieval knights, and for many modern readers of the plays, the figures he creates are more passive than active, more acted upon than acted. They are, perhaps, barely heroic enough.

The same phenomenon has been observed in Western drama of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when plays began to be written for middle-class audiences, whose beliefs and assumptions began to show marked differences with those of other levels of society. Here is Georg Lukàcs' description of the hero of such Western bourgeois drama.

The heroes of the new drama—in comparison to the old—are more passive than active; they are acted upon more than they act for themselves; they defend rather than attack; their heroism is mostly a heroism of anguish, of despair, not bold aggressiveness. Since so much of the inner man has fallen prey to destiny, the last battle is to be enacted within. The greater the determining force of external factors, the more the center of the tragic conflict is drawn inwards; it becomes internalized, more exclusively a conflict of the spirit.

In the case of Chikamatsu, that anguish is transcended through death, which gives Jihei and Koharu their final dignity. In the composition of this play, as in most of his domestic dramas, Chikamatsu was working with a series of givens, the actual accounts of the lives and deaths of the characters he wished to show on the stage. The remarks of LukAcs suggest that one means to observe the dramatic movement of the characters in Chikamatsu is to follow the progress of their pilgrimage, their voyage out of their class, out of their problems, and, of course, out of the world altogether, where no final solutions are possible. Again, LukAcs provides striking insights. "The heroes of the new drama always partake of the ecstatic; they seem to have become conscious of a sense that death can vouchsafe them the transcendence, greatness, and illumination which life withheld, and together with this, a sense that death will fulfill and perfect their personalities."

The townspeople for whom Chikamatsu chose to write could certainly appreciate the poetry of this pilgrimage, framed as it was in terms of the conceptions that made up their own consciousness; they might not carry out such an adventure themselves, but there was a satisfaction for them in watching those whose lives served as witness to the fact that heroism was possible. The Love Suicides at Amijima was a large, distorting mirror held up to amplify and dignify the lives of those who came to the theatre. The very movement in the language of the play from prose to poetry confirmed the possibility of that beauty.

If Chikamatsu's play can be seen as a secularizing vision of pilgrimage in a changing Japanese society, then in the contemporary secular world, the modern Japanese theatre can offer up as few sacramental occasions as can its Western counterparts. The audience for contemporary theatre in Japan is young, urban, highly educated, and wholly secular, an audience of intelligentsia that constitutes another kind of "class" altogether. Their interest in religion ranges from indifference to skepticism. In that climate, what forms will drama take, particularly when there has been so much influence from Western theatrical forms and ideals admired and absorbed into the assumptions of the postwar dramatists? Is pilgrimage still possible? Some examples, in fact, would suggest that it is, and that, further, the continuation of such themes argues for some fundamental qualities in the art of the Japanese theatre.

The theme of pilgrimage, in its modern guise, is particularly apparent in a work by the contemporary dramatist Yamazaki Masakazu (born 1934). Sanetomo shuppan, written in 1974, was successfully performed in Tokyo, and the author chose it for translation and production in the United States. When preparing the translation, I became aware of just how the mental constructs of the pilgrimage mentality were present, almost as unspoken assumptions, in the text. The conception of the drama itself is quite sophisticated and in a sense repeats the structures of Chikamatsu and of Taema, where actual locations, events, and characters are placed on the stage. In this case, Yamazaki chose the figure of Minamoto Sanetomo (1182-1219), the young shogun of Japan who was installed after the Heike wars that ended in 1185; a gifted poet and a remarkable statesman, his assassination marked a tragic turning point in the fortunes of the Kamakura shogunate. Sanetomo's character has long fascinated writers, scholars, and thinkers, and Yamazaki has made this fascination part of the construct of his play by superimposing the figure of Hamlet onto that of Sanetomo, in which the same search for truth and the same questions of the significance of existence come to the fore as the protagonist questions all the assumptions of the life he finds around him. Yamazaki has constructed the text as a kind of psychodrama assembled by those who knew him—his mother, uncle, relatives, allies, enemies; they are presented as ghosts who reconstruct and examine various incidents in Sanetomo's life. Much of the central section of the play concerns the young shogun's desire to build a ship to sail to China. As the incidents concerning this event are reconstructed, discussed, relived on the stage, Yamazaki makes use of an expanded poetic time that puts his drama into the expanded psychological atmosphere redolent of the atmosphere of pilgrimage that Turner described. In this regard, Yamazaki's use of the dichotomies of the stage versus reality, acting versus living, memory versus action, effectively combine to reveal his central concerns. As with Chikamatsu, the central events presented by Yamazaki are well known to his audience; both dramatists play on what the audience already understands so as to move them to a higher and different level of understanding and empathy.

The full title of the play, translated into English, is Sanetomo Sets Sail, and the events of the play suggest on one level a wholly secular end to the theme of pilgrimage, for the ship never leaves Japan. Sanetomo's sole desire is to go to China, his own idea of a cultural paradise, but his vessel is built without sufficient knowledge of seagoing sail craft and never leaves the beach. Each character in the play has formed a different idea of why Sanetomo wants to go to China, and each of these convictions in turn is based on the differing motives, obsessions, and blindnesses of the particular character who devises them. Does Sanetomo know himself? Early in the play he attempts to articulate to the ghost of his dead father some of his feelings in a scene that comes closest to Yamazaki's chosen model of Hamlet.

SANETOMO. Show me your face … I want to tell you something. I want you to do something for me. Speak. I have the force. And the strength of will. And too much curiosity. I'll do anything, try anything. Risk some adventure? Where should I go? Speak. Tell me. Am I to live? To die?

Despite the mistrust of all those who surround him, Sanetomo makes a decision to build the ship, to prepare his men. His powerful uncle Yoshitoki, who admires and loves his nephew, now becomes convinced that Sanetomo has some sort of transcendental purpose in mind, some purpose which he, Yoshitoki, because of his own view of the world and its scheming politics, cannot understand. Convinced of this, Yoshitoki now sets out to try to grasp in his own terms the seemingly ambiguous purposes of Sanetomo's effort. The huge ship is finally completed, but Sanetomo's Chinese shipwright adviser remains concerned about the impracticality of the voyage.

CHEN. I do not know. I do not. Do you really intend to go on board? Do you plan to board her and sail across the sea?

SANETOMO. What a nuisance you are. Of course.

CHEN. But you must not. It is not a ship. It is an apparition. A ship of two thousand stone. What is more, you had three cabins built. The prow of the ship is too heavy. Too dangerous. And the weights in the bottom have increased three times over. That is bad. So unreasonable. Sailing a ship like that you will sink, even on a fair day. Please. Sanetomo. Listen to what I tell you.

SANETOMO. To sink … or not to sink … sink … not to sink …

Is Sanetomo's scheme dream or reality? Yoshitoki thinks in the end that he has come to understand his nephew's motivations. He recites to his sister Masako, the young shogun's mother, a poem by Sanetomo.

YOSHITOKI. "The world itself
            Is but a reflection in a mirror:
              If it seems to be there, it is;
                If not, then there is nothing."

I'm not quite sure I understand the part about being there and not being there. But if the whole world is just a reflection, then where does that leave us, my dear sister? If Kamakura, the Emperor himself, everything is an illusion, then all my strength evaporates. And more awesome is the man who can go on existing, serene, knowing that everything is an illusion. A man who conducts his life with good sense, and without despair, even though nothing, nothing at all makes any difference. With such a strong man nearby, I am overwhelmed. I lose the strength to go on living.

MASAKO. Calm yourself, Yoshitoki. You are over anxious. You are tired.

YOSHITOKI. Now I have only one hope. It is Sanetomo's ship. Because this is the only time he has positively opposed me. The one time he has stepped off the path I have prepared for him. And with such passion. Masako. We will allow him to do it. I want to see it. I want to see him once, firm in the belief that this world is not merely an illusion.

Sanetomo prepares his ship, but the vessel is too large and is destroyed at the launching on the beach. Sanetomo now gives up his transcendental voyage and makes plans instead for a this-worldly political voyage, to become a courtier and a poet. Even those who are shortly to murder him cannot understand his change in motivation.

The play concludes with a scene in which his wife asks all those who knew him to enact an incident that never occurred in life, the moment when Sanetomo would actually set sail. It is his murderer, his nephew Kugyo, who, now watching the sails unfurl at last, comes closest to grasping the meaning of Sanetomo's gesture.

KUGYO. I'm overwhelmed. He's really putting all he's got into it. In the middle of a senseless dream, when he knows nothing will come of it, why does he never become discouraged? Why?

Sanetomo, it seems, has made his interior and transcendental voyage after all.

Yamazaki's play was written in the kind of climate that exists in the postwar theatre movement around the world. His dialogue is realistic and psychologically attuned to the changing inner self-perceptions of the characters. Yet the play's purposes do not stop there; indeed they are intended to lead contemporary spectators from a sterile emphasis on individual motive and obsession to a larger vision of the universe, a world where personal predilections dissolve in a movement toward a larger gathering together. The whole structure of the play is calculated to permit the spectators to transcend the world of those who surround Sanetomo, with their plots and schemes, and rise up with him onto the platform of the ship. In the pattern of the medieval no, the person seeking enlightenment went on a pilgrimage himself; now Yamazaki combines the idea of physical pilgrimage, appropriate to the historical Sanetomo, with the image of an internal search for transcendence, so much a part of the way in which contemporary human beings conceptualize the possibilities of understanding life today. If this represents a bonding between Freud and the Buddha, then it must be said that, in theatrical terms at least, they have more in common than might have been supposed.

All three of these plays, then, and the traditions they represent show a poetic style, a thrust away from mimesis, an invitation for the audiences to lose themselves in an experience that can draw them out of their normal mental structures of reality. Metaphysical melodrama turns out to have a logic all of its own. In that regard, the three examples provided here were not chosen with an eye to validating Turner's pilgrimage model; rather, Turner's insights can help illustrate this powerful pattern of a poetic desire for oneness which began with the no and continues to exist in the secular theatre of today. The movement beyond the abstract logic of words and social data toward a vision of a shared communal world that lies beyond is as strong an impetus behind, say, the avant-garde theatre of Suzuki Tadashi and his Trojan Women as it remains behind Taema. It is perhaps for such reasons that the so-called post-modern theatre of Suzuki and his contemporaries has gone back to the roots of the Japanese dramatic experience to come forth and reassert the genius of the Japanese theatre, not in the realm of a Chekhov, an Ibsen, or a Molière, however much has been learned from them, but from a transcendental thrust that, in our culture, has perhaps only been fully visible in the best of modern dance. What Zeami and Chikamatsu knew, and what Claudel, Yeats, and Britten recognized, is finally coming to be appreciated again in contemporary Japan. It is to such new theatre, rather than to the Brecht and Molière that I saw in the 1950s, that spectators around the world are beginning to look with excitement and enormous admiration. The pilgrimage, happily, would seem to continue.