Yasuda has provided a witty and fresh approach to this art.
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Review by Cody Poulton
This slim volume, at just over 100 pages, is a primer to noh, Japan’s classic performance art. First appearing in Japanese, the text was translated by Kawamoto Nozomu, who was raised in the United States and currently trains with the author in noh utai singing. The work was published by Japan Library, as part of a series of non-fiction English translations by prominent Japanese authors that is backed by the Japanese government. As might be expected, this series reflects a somewhat conservative picture of Japan’s achievements in politics, economics, international relations, art, and culture.
With all the books out there on noh, would this be worthwhile for a first-time student of this venerable tradition? My answer would be a qualified yes. The translator has, along with the author, made certain changes to target a foreign readership, but more than that, Yasuda has provided a witty and fresh approach to this art.
Yasuda Noboru is a professional specializing in waki roles, which he calls the “foil.” (The protagonists of noh plays are called shite, pronounced not as Roddy Doyle would say it, but more like shté.) It escapes me why anyone would want to specialize in waki roles when everyone knows that the shite get all the best parts, not only for singing, but also for the dance (mai). Waki don’t say much, and after entering and introducing themselves, sit down and pretty much do nothing else for the duration of the performance. A thankless task for any actor, one might think. Like many outsiders attracted to noh, however, Yasuda was already a musician in another genre— jazz—and waki performer Kaburaki Mineo’s voice literally “swept [him] away.” Kaburaki thus became Yasuda’s mentor. One of Yasuda’s own students is the novelist and rap artist Itō Seikō. (More on him later.) Chance encounters like this are life-changing.
Since Yasuda is not directing this book to scholars or other professional actors, but to the general public, his angle on noh is as a guide to living well, a sort of tongue-in-cheek self-help book along the lines of Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Save Your Life. For centuries noh has served as a window into the Japanese classics and as a means of spiritual and physical cultivation, not only for the samurai class in past centuries, but also for commoners. Indeed, today it is largely via teaching amateurs and professionals that noh has been able to survive as long as it has. Even so, the number of people studying this ancient performance art is dwindling, hence the need for a proper guide. Besides conducting a regular coterie of students in utai as do most other professional actors, Yasuda also teaches outreach classes, even as therapy to hikikomori (shut-ins who have shut themselves out of society for a variety of reasons). The psychological benefits from practising noh, Yasuda suggests (following from Rollo May), has to do with enabling a person to become, not an object of others, but a subject in one’s own right.
Toward the end of his book Yasuda offers fifteen witty reasons for studying noh and one of the best is: “Belting out an utai piece is an excellent way of relieving stress,” and “…it is also a good way of beating the blues. Unlike pharmaceuticals, moreover, utai has no side effects” (p.90). (Yasuda’s appendix provides information on excellent online resources like the-noh.com and where to find places to study the form.)
Practising noh is good for the body too and many actors are phenomenal athletes. In his fifties, Yasuda was examined by a physician who pronounced that he had the core muscles of a twenty-year-old. Kamae, the distinct stance taken in noh, and the sliding footwork of suriashi, ensure that even the waki, who seems to do little on stage, is in superb shape. The energy expended but often sublimated by the actors in performance ensures that noh is thrillingly alive and not a museum piece.
The master to disciple iemoto system has ensured a continuous performance tradition for over 650 years, which is unprecedented in any European performance art. Still, it has had to change with the times. Noh as Living Art provides a quick, standard history of this form and the singular contributions that Zeami and his father Kan’ami made to lifting it out of a popular, but low-class, entertainment into a high art patronized by Japan’s elites. Along the way, Yasuda suggests that noh served as a civilizing influence particularly for Japan’s warrior class, noting how it was a successful “attempt to redirect the energies of the samurai from warfare to dance” (p.42). Japan, after all, enjoyed 250 years of peace under the Tokugawa rule.
The texts of noh also served as a kind of lingua franca for Japanese people, who were divided by their distinct local dialects. Zeami’s noh was a good deal faster (Yasuda surmises it might have been more like hip hop) than it became during the Tokugawa Shogunate when it was transformed into a kind of court ceremonial.
Noh wasn’t only for samurai, however. The poet Matsuo Bashō was evidently a great fan of the form and utai especially had many amateur practitioners among the lower classes. Noh might have died out during the Meiji era were it not for politicians like Iwakura Tomomi initiating a transition of patronage from the disbanded samurai class to the prewar aristocracy, but many key figures in the arts, like novelist Natsume Sōseki and haiku poets Masaoka Shiki and Takahama Kyoshi were avid amateur singers of utai. However, since 1945, in order to survive, noh has needed to open up to people from all walks of life.
Which brings me back to Yasuda’s student, the rapper Itō Seikō. Since April of last year, Yasuda, Itō, and Jay Rubin have been running a monthly series in the literary magazine Shinchō, with Itō providing modern Japanese translations and Rubin the English translations of ten plays, one per month. Rubin may be better known to readers here as a translator of Haruki Murakami, but he’s been tinkering with noh texts for over a quarter century now. Royall Tyler’s Penguin translations of noh may be the gold standard for some of us, but I for one am eager to hear what noh sounds like as a kind of rap Haruki. Let’s hope that Japan Library or someone else will make Rubin’s translations available soon to English readers.
Note: This title is currently only available in hardback form from Amazon Japan (see “Where to Buy” link to the left) or directly from The Japan Library.