worlds conveyed may change, but the means by which the vision becomes possible on the stage must remain the same. Usually a particular play begins with the arrival of a priest or other traveler, who comes to a spot that has a history: a place where a famous person has lived or died, a crucial battle was fought, or a noted poet has found inspiration. Opened to the experience of the place by his own knowledge and sympathy, the traveler next meets a person, often a rather mysterious one, who, through conversation, ascertains that the traveler is indeed one who has the ability and the sympathy to grasp the real meaning of what has happened there. Often this section of a Zeami play is couched in elegant and poetic language, so the first encounter is followed by an interlude in which a rustic or some other similar character repeats the nature of the incident; in this way, everyone in the audience can grasp the significance of the encounter. Then, in the final section of the play, the mysterious person whom the traveler first met reveals his or her true nature and describes in grand poetic language the event that happened on the spot, re-creating the moment also in dance, song, and mime. The play, which has begun slowly, reaches its highest pitch, then concludes as the vision fades and the newly enlightened priest or traveler, along with the audience, once again finds himself in the real world.

Although Zeami’s plays vary in tonality and subject matter, they all have certain strong philosophical and emotional resemblances. The pain and chagrin of passion remembered, the growth of an understanding that salvation lies beyond and not in this world, and the saving power of a sincere emotion all link the dramas of Zeami to the sort of Buddhist philosophy prevalent in Japan during the difficult political period in which he lived. The confusions and disappointments of secular society at this time were such that a withdrawal in search of some transcendental understanding of reality became an important possibility for many people before, during, and after Zeami’s generation. Such attitudes thus provided a logical point of departure for the characters that the playwright created for his audiences. Yet the kind of emotional self-consciousness that Zeami posited in those characters seems to make them accessible as well (though initially in radically different ways) to modern readers and audiences who may, for quite different social, political, and personal reasons, feel themselves alienated from society. It may be links such as these that make the work of Zeami seem strikingly contemporary. Even modern readers and spectators find that Zeami’s work touches and justifies their most private feelings, showing by remote example something about the human condition that is wholly recognizable. In the end, Zeami’s powerful belief in the efficacy of poetry, as Yeats was the first Westerner to observe, comes through as clearly today as when these dramas were first composed and performed.

The Wind in the Pines

Zeami did not invent the form of the N play; indeed, he credited his father with the first high accomplishments in the genre. Nevertheless, it was in Zeami’s hands that the potential of the form was fully realized, and in all five categories of N drama, Zeami’s work constitutes an unsurpassed standard. Zeami often adapted plays by other writers; perhaps his greatest achievement is the reworking of a text presumably composed by his father; Zeami’s play is entitled The Wind in the Pines. This piece is a “woman play” about the love of two fishergirls, Matsukaze and Murasame, for a courtier from the capital, Ariwara no Yukihira (818-893), who was exiled at Suma Beach, where the play takes place. In The Wind in the Pines, every element of Zeami’s art combines to form a unified poetic whole.

Suma Beach by Zeami’s time had a number of important literary associations, notably the fact that Prince Genji, the protagonist of the eleventh century novel Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, 1925-1933), had himself been exiled there. That fictional account in turn may well have been inspired by the actual exile of Yukihira, who left behind a famous thirty-one-syllable waka poem about the time he spent at Suma. Using this poem, Zeami brings his pilgrim-priest to Suma, where, as he is walking along, he notices a peculiar pine tree. Learning that the pine was planted on the graves of the two fishergirls, Matsukaze and Murasame, he is reminded that the tree, like their names, has lingered long after their deaths. He decides to stay and pray for them. Matsukaze and Murasame now enter, and Zeami creates for these two characters a highly poetic dialogue in which images of nature, in particular the moon (a symbol of Buddhist enlightenment), blend with a sense of their own evanescence as they dip into the salt brine. The priest asks if he may stay the night in their humble shed, and as they agree, he comes to realize that he has encountered the ghosts of the two girls. In the brilliant climax of the play, Matsukaze reenacts her meeting with Yukihira, actually donning his cloak in a striking scene of remembered yearning. As the “dream of deluded passion” retreats, Matsukaze (whose name literally means “wind in the pines”) and Murasame (“autumn rain”) return to nature. Only the priest remains, with the sound of both in his ear. In this text, Zeami has captured with startling poetic power the Buddhist idea that each disparate person and thing is bound together in the all-encompassing Buddha nature. Like all of Zeami’s plays, The Wind in the Pines reveals a deep knowledge of earlier classical Japanese literature, particularly poetry. The text is filled with a variety of quotations from numerous sources, skillfully woven into the individual lines, yet the intellectual pleasures of recognition for the audience are transcended by Zeami’s own images growing out of those quotations, so that the poem of Yukihira serves as a seed from which Zeami’s own gifts can blossom. All these images are combined by Zeami to create a sense of aware, that classic Japanese literary virtue that might best be described as a sense of the beauty and sadness that lie in one’s intuitive understanding of the transience of all earthly things.

The Damask Drum

Another play by Zeami that deals with the pain of love is The Damask Drum, in which an old gardener, who has fallen in love with a lady of the court, is told that, despite the differences in their rank and age, if he can manage to make the sound of the drum that hangs by a garden pond reach her ears, she will allow him to see her again. The gardener, hoping for “an autumn of love” to close “the sequence of my years,” attempts to beat the drum, only to find that it is covered not with leather but with damask and thus makes no sound. He then drowns himself in the pond, and the lady, possessed by his angry spirit, has a vision of the ghost of the gardener, who rises from the water to accuse her of her misdeeds. As with The Wind in the Pines, the play is filled with poetic images borrowed from poem collections, Chinese philosophical texts, and Japanese folk songs, each citation reinforcing the other to create the moral vision of a woman who bears the pain of the death that she has brought about. The Damask Drum is among the N plays adapted for modern actors by the celebrated modern novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima.

Atsumori

Among the warrior plays written by Zeami, none is more famous or more often performed than Atsumori. The drama is his adaption of a famous scene presented in the Japanese medieval war chronicles Heike monogatari (wr. 1190-1221, pb. c. 1240; The Heike Monogatari, 1918), which describes in detail the terrible civil wars in Kyoto in 1185 between the Minamoto and the Taira clans, wars that weakened the power of the central court and began the rise of military government in Japan. The Heike Monogatari deals more with human tragedy than political commentary, and Zeami’s choice of the story of Atsumori illustrates well the sense of human loss inherent in the fall of the Taira. The story concerns the encounter between Kumagai, a warrior of the eventually victorious Minamoto clan, with the young courtier Atsumori, of the Taira clan. Kumagai himself is a rustic from the country, and he much admires the elegance and education of his putative enemies, the Taira. Riding down the beach, he meets an enemy soldier; pulling off the soldier’s helmet, Kumagai finds the young Atsumori, a youth no older than his own son. Atsumori is, indeed, the very cultivated young man whose flute playing Kumagai had heard and admired just the night before coming from behind the enemy lines. Kumagai decides to spare Atsumori, who might well be his own son, but as he prepares to let him go, Kumagai is seen by other soldiers from his own clan. Atsumori realizes that he must die and asks simply that, because Kumagai is so understanding, it be by Kumagai’s own hand. Kumagai is forced to behead the young man, and filled with sorrow over the meaninglessness of all earthly existence, he gives up his military career to become a Buddhist priest.

Zeami’s dramatization begins many years later when Kumagai, now the priest Rensei, is on a pilgrimage. Returning to the scene of the battle to pray for the soul of Atsumori, he hears a young reaper playing the flute and is eventually rewarded with the knowledge that the reaper is the ghost of Atsumori himself, who now seeks the priest’s prayers to gain salvation. Atsumori reenacts the scene of his death, and as the play ends, he asks that Rensei pray for him so that friend and foe alike may be born again on the same lotus in paradise. Like the woman play The Wind in the Pines, the warrior play Atsumori culminates in transcendence of earthly passion, but here the context and the language are altogether appropriate for the military subject. Zeami wrote in his treatises that a writer of N plays should choose for his subject a situation with which the audience will be at least somewhat familiar. In Atsumori, as in The Wind in the Pines, Zeami’s originality and skill as a poet and dramatist lie not with the choice of subject matter but with the astonishing appropriateness of dramatic arrangement, movement, and diction.

Aridshi

In Aridshi, a play about a Shinto god, the pilgrim himself is a poet. Ki no Tsurayuki (872-946), an excellent waka poet and writer of prose, and the first writer on Japanese aesthetics in Japanese literature, had become by Zeami’s time a veritable god of composition. In the play, Tsurayuki travels to a famous Shinto shrine. As he arrives, night has fallen and he seeks light and a place to spend the night. He encounters the Shinto deity Aridshi, who does not reveal his true nature at once but asks Tsurayuki why he is profaning the sacred space of the shrine. If he is really a great poet, Aridshi continues, then he must offer up a poem to appease the god. Tsurayuki thereupon composes a fine poem, and the god, now convinced of the poet’s sincerity, reveals his true nature and performs a ritual dance. The text ends with a paean to purity, poetry, dance, and song. The god disappears, and Tsurayuki, overwhelmed by his experience of the sacred, “continues his journey in the morning dawn.” The structure of the play is quite like the others described, but in mood, musicality, and language, the effect is altogether unique.

The Clothbeating Block and Semimaru

Among Zeami’s works, the plays dealing with mad characters (many of whom, because of their condition, are in touch with gods and spirits) are particularly effective as stage pieces. The circumstances giving rise to madness differ widely in the various plays of this category. The Clothbeating Block, for example, has as its main character a deserted wife who pines to death because she has been abandoned by her husband. In Semimaru, Zeami takes up the legend of the blind prince who was abandoned by his father the emperor and has lived as a recluse in a hut in the mountains, playing the lute. In Zeami’s adaptation of the legend, the prince, Semimaru, accepts his abandonment by his father, saying that it was undertaken “to purge in this world my burden of the past, and spare me suffering in the world to come.” He is joined in his solitude by his sister Sakagami, now half-crazed herself. Attracted by the sound of his music, she talks with him of their past and their affection for each other; yet eventually, she insists that she, too, must continue on with her own obscure pilgrimage, and Semimaru bids her a muted farewell as she disappears.