Watching Noh: First Impressions
Today I watched my first complete Noh play on YouTube, which can be watched with English subtitles here. The play is called “Tomoe” by Mikata Shizuka. The plot of the play is simple. A monk is traveling to the capital. He spots a woman weeping close by a lake. They start a conversation, and she mentions a shrine dedicated to a warrior. If the monk passes by the shrine, she requests he give offerings and a prayer. As she leaves she reveals she is actually a ghost, still occupying the living realm due to her obsession over her lost husband. It turns out she was a warrior as well, and her husband was the warrior the shrine is dedicated to. We see her reenact a battle scene in warrior garb, react to her husband’s death, and leave the stage, continuing to wander obsessing over her loss. The play ends.
The topics of Noh plays are stories from traditional literature, including heroes and spirits. Throughout music plays to establish an atmosphere. People move slowly and chant their lines.
First impressions when interacting with traditional or cultures outside of your own are usually wrong. With nothing familiar for your imagination to grasp onto, and the additional barrier of a foreign language, it all seems strange, almost trivial, and makes one think it is antiquated. But living people enjoyed these art forms, and still do, so we must place the blame or responsibility for not appreciating it on ourselves.
From my first watch through, the translated lines had simple but effective poetry. The most memorable is when Tomoe requests the monk to view the shadow of a pine as “a connection to the other world”, and therefore the proper place to chant sutras for her warrior husband. I realized this perception was part of the key to appreciating, or at least understanding, this particular play.
We must suspend disbelief and accept the existence of ghosts. Not a particularly hard thing to do, as when it gets dark in a place we are unfamiliar with, we make out all sorts of figures, and swear we saw something move out of the corner of the eye. In the universe of the play, the realm of the unliving is close by, so close that our living actions directly impact that unseen world. Recalling what Junichiro Tanizaki stated in “In Praise of Shadows”, about the darkness that surrounds the Noh stage, I think this performance of the play would have benefited from less lighting. It is one of the strongest aids to the imagination. The ominous, sad atmosphere would have been strengthened, and the performers playing the music would have been better hidden.
The movements at first seem slow and unrealistic. But the power of contrast is utilized, and so when Tomoe swings her broadsword, not familiar with this speed and force, the swing seems more powerful, and you can imagine someone on the other end. There is also the way Tomoe clears her tears. She slowly lifts a flat hand to her face a few times. Every time this happened it was more and more affecting. The simple, repeated movements gave it that aspect of the sacred, that extra level of thought, in the consideration of the spirit, that marks rituals. It was as though she fully respected the behavior of her heart and, not wanting to impede the necessary suffering it must endure, she did as little as possible to obstruct its natural effusions.
At the end of the play the music stops, and Tomeo makes her exit, wandering the living realm once more, with the loss. The silence is heavy.
