Matsumushi (Pinus Erectus) 松虫

from

Pretty Boys in the Noh (2004)

Kenneth L. Richard

The Siebold University of Nagasaki

Abstract: ‘Pretty Boys in the Noh’ includes new translations of four plays from the traditional Noh repertoire: 1.) Matsumushi (Pinus Erectus) that is without a category, 2.) Kagetsu (Florimund) also from category four and that appears here, with Pinus Erectus, for the first time in English translation, 3.) Kanehira (Imai’s End) from category two of warrior plays, and 4.) Yoroboshi (The Beggar and His Saviour) from category four of people in various states of mental confusion or those who change gender role or societal function. All four plays are about men in love (Kanehira), men who have been sold into sexual slavery and recover (Yoroboshi), a beautiful dancer and his patrons (Kagetsu), and men who have died for love of the same sex (Matsumushi). The plays I have chosen for analysis here re-privilege the appeal of beautiful boys and strong warriors, as well as the homosocial society of the Buddhist priesthood in Japan.

‘Living Noh’ is the title given to a series of workshops held at the Nichibunken in Kyoto in 2001-02. I was privileged to attend these sessions. As we read through often performed plays as well as some that are not as well known or performed, I began to draft my own answer to the question of what constitutes an idea of ‘Living Noh.’ After all, the main characters in a Noh play are mostly returned from the dead. ‘Living Noh,’ as I discovered, is a dramaturgy that has been re-evaluated, restored to a more originally lucent spirit, and that is where I became convinced that the widest variety of male responses to life and death was central to the whole idea of Noh, and that this male response had been undervalued, or truncated in the choice of plays performed for modern audiences.

Then, as now, Noh is filled with beautiful moments when memory is exalted, and the soul saved. The texts are central to the aesthetic beauty of the play, and actors and acting traditions throughout the four eras since the first Noh was performed seek to reinterpret, even reform plays to their ideals. In the Muromachi era when Zeami and those who followed him were both actors and writers, a privileged class of consumers of the art, the military class--both employed and unemployed, patronized actors, encouraged them to write plays that would be well received, and often took Noh players to bed. Actors in this era were an unprivileged class. Many of their plays give witness to men like themselves who were at home in the marketplace where they drank sake and then went to make love in the surrounding fields. Matsumushi is an anonymous play but a good one, because it deals with men who may have been friends of actors, not patrons. For their patrons, witnessing Matsumushi and enjoying the eternal love of two commoners, might have exalted the actors in the eyes of their audience. Because Matsumushi so obviously restores the appeal of same sex relationships, actors easily became samurai, shogunal lovers. These actors were rewarded both for their drama, and for their good looks and character. The stories of Zeami Motokiyo as shogunal lover to the Ashikaga are well known. Kagetsu, though ostensibly a play about the reunion of a long, lost son with his father, is really a story about how a young and beautiful boy found his way as a boy lover to priests who then taught him the arts of music, dance, and repartee, and who has, by the current time of the play, become a free agent for his skills. Kagetsu is the epitome of the male prostitute, as entertainer and actor, of the Muromachi era. He is a very talented dancer. His name Florimund in my English translation is the name of the Prince in The Sleeping Beauty ballet. As many of the principal male dancers in the Russian ballet had same sex lovers, so does Kagetsu outside of the play text. All consumers of the Noh in the Muromachi enjoyed stories of beautiful boys.

In the Edo Period, the second of the greatest eras of purveyors and consumers of Noh, great acting families grew into distinct acting traditions with specific plays privatized to their house style. Noh took on a more specific canonical role as an entertainment for the shogunal and samurai class. It legitimized the neoclassical stance of the kokugakusha, the nativists, and others who touted Japanese classical literature over a newfound interest in continental Chinese writers. At the same time, however, newer theatrical performances by manipulated puppets, and then by professional actors took over the intimate exchange of art and sex that had once been the sole purvey of Zeami and his successors. Noh became ‘high art.’

Whereas the actors and playwrights of an earlier era had the precedent of clawing their way up the social ladder from waifs, to chigo or boys who were engaged in Buddhist temples for the sexual satisfaction of priests, to private troupes for the Shogunal authorities, the social agenda of the Edo schools of Noh was quite different. A play such as Kanehira, based on characters and incidents drawn from The Tale of the Heike from the 13^th century, helped to maintain a myth of the nobility of the warrior class and might have been a staple of regular performances for the pleasure of the Edo shoguns, for example. Because of the time lag between the active roles of the Minamoto warriors in the 12^th century historical narrative and the mostly unemployed and idle samurai class in Edo and Osaka of the time, Yoshinaka and his friend Imai Kanehira, in the play male lovers who promised to die together, might have been an entertaining ideal state of Bushido, a state of mind enacted on the battlefield, but kept as an emotional modus operandi when the sword was laid down. Kanehira in performance restores the ideal of the strong warrior, and reinforces the prevalence of sympathy for the fallen hero among Japanese audiences. Both Kiso and Kanehira are from the winning side in the war, but choose a form of liebestod, a love death, rather than commit suicide in the face of the enemy. Kanehira continues to appeal in performace to this day, despite the same sex vows the two men take before their deaths.

Meiji and modern Noh performance, being so strongly tied to the responsibilities of the acting families to teach the repertoire to amateurs, to publish texts and annotations, to perform and introduce their art to audiences throughout the world, and to live up to their canonization as so-called Japanese ‘living treasures,’ has taken the idea of purveyor and consumer a huge distance away from the patronage of individuals and the sexual intimacies of the Muromachi era. Now Noh is traditional, and classical. Very few plays are being added to the regular repertoire, and very few actors adopted from completely outside the acting families ever make it to the stage. Gone are the connections between the Buddhist clergy, the temples, the chigo, and becoming an actor. Many old plays considered inappropriate for foreign audiences were dropped from the repertoire of all the acting families. There is a history of government interference since the Meiji in the activities and repertoire of Japanese drama and its venues. Iwata Jun’ichi’s Honcho nanshoku ko – nanshoku bunken shoshi (Thoughts on Same-Sex Male Relations in Japan – Bibliography of Homosexual Literature in Japan) published privately from his writings in the 1930’s lists many Noh plays dealing with same sex relations that have been abandoned, become haikyoku or lost repertoire. Matsumushi and Kagetsu are both on Iwata’s list, and I have included them here in English translation because at least the text is still available.

But I have also included here my translation of Yoroboshi because, though quite acceptable to modern audiences because its text is loaded with Buddhist terminology and because the setting at Tennoji is highly nostalgic for audiences from Kyoto and Osaka, I believe the beggar yoroboshi as he calls himself, is not a priest by any means, nor does he achieve salvation in the context of the play, but a male prostitute now wizened and wasted by venereal disease, who has come to Tennoji to receive alms on that special day in Spring reserved to honor the memory of the temple’s founder Prince Shotoku (7^th century) whose reason for founding the temple was to provide aid to the infirm, the ill, and to lost children. Yoroboshi fits all these categories: he was thrown out of his home by his father for having sold himself into sexual slavery, I believe, though the text is not specific enough about this. He is ill with then incurable sexually transmitted disease, and he is infirm, though young, because he says that his legs are wobbly, and he makes constant use of a cane throughout the performance. The entire play is a tribute to the Tennoji, not a deeply felt revelation of the why and how of Yoroboshi’s unfortunate life. We want to know so much more about why the so-called father wants to make contrition for throwing his only son out of his house. We want to know so much more about how Yoroboshi made a living meeting strangers along the road on the plains of Naniwa. We want to know whether Yoroboshi really wants to go home to Takayasu with a man who only says he is his father. In the last seconds of the play, Yoroboshi expresses legitimate doubt about the revelation, and he has nothing by way of revelation to comfort his father, and to acknowledge him before going off at the dawn bell from Tennoji back to a place for which he must certainly not have a fond memory.

What to make of this? Because Yoroboshi is a form of fallen hero, the Japanese audience may find him appealing enough. But does he achieve the Buddhist salvation promised to those who accept alms on this day at the Tennoji? We are left wondering. Of the four plays presented in translation here, Yoroboshi is the most altered, cut, rewritten and variant in performance. One cannot help but think that this editing process happened in modern times.

The four plays follow in the order that I have outlined. Matsumushi is timeless and seems to best represent the older animistic beliefs of legend. It seems the oldest play to me. Kagetsu plays upon the themes of Buddhist festival, the Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, and on the boy kept as a male lover by priests. This play seems closest in spirit to the joy and affirmation of same sex relations in the Muromachi era. Kanehira, though clearly written in the time of Zeami, is perhaps most representative of the type of play appreciated by Edo audiences, even though the ending is shocking. Two men committing love suicide on the battlefield seems remote indeed from the more pressing concern of urban suicide, seppuku, ordered and honored by the shogunal government. There is a choice in the romance of Kanehira and Yoshinaka, while none in most sanctioned seppuku during the Edo era. That is why the drama of Chushingura is so appealing now, as it was then. The 47 masterless samurai chose their death. It was not ordered, at least in the dramatic version of events. We now know that only after a long court case did the Tokugawa government permit the band to avenge their lord’s untimely death, and that they all died the same day as the edict was issued. In such an era, the purity of Kanehira surely appealed to a samurai class under the constant watch of the shogunal authorities, and for whom no battlefield was present, or in the offing.

Matsumushi (Pinus Erectus)

Tr. Kenneth L. Richard

Type of Play: unclassified

Author unknown

Shite (1st half): male villager (apparition)

Shite (2nd half): the ghost of a man who died for love

Tsure (1st half): male villager (real)

Waki: Sake seller

Ai: male villager

Setting: Abeno market and its environs, now within the City of Osaka

NANORI

Waki

I make my home in Abeno, in the Province of Tsu.1 One day, in my normal routine of selling sake at the Abeno market, a crowd of young men appeared out of nowhere and commenced to drink. As I left for home they seemed to be in the midst of a party. It all seemed strange, and so since they have appeared here again today, I mean to ask them who they are.

(The waki takes his seat. As the Shidai begins, the Shite and the Tsure enter)

SHIDAI

Shite and Tsure

Pine cricket calling back the autumn I knew Pine cricket calling back the autumn I knew I yearn for you in their cries

SASHI

Shite

Autumn winds through the darkening night the long month of autumn on cold dawns in the morning breeze sleeves fluttering together intimates on their way to market marked by affection’s dew upon the roadside grasses deep and devoted straight and tall they go cloaked in rapture emblem to a rising sun going on the road to Abeno market

SAGEUTA

Shite and Waki

From distant Tozato through nearby Koya and Suminoe along the bay2

AGEUTA

Shite and Waki

Salt air breathing through autumn grasses on the shore meadow breathing on autumn grasses on the shore meadow waves from the open sea sounding up through the pines hear them together inviting intimates to the throng in the marketplace I will go he will go drawn to the plain of Abeno drawn to the plain of Abeno

(The waki remains seated while the shite stands. The Kakeai section begins. As the chorus sings an ageuta, the shite does one turn around the stage, then stands in his usual spot.)

KAKEAI

Waki

As it is in poetry Po Chu-I3 made sonnets in praise of wine the three friends—wine, music, poetry so I too bring memories here to my market stand barrels in a row cups aligned I wait here for those who chance by

KAKEAI

Waki

Come in come in everyone have a cup of sake

Shite

This stall sells not men nor potions of long life but at any corner where men congregate the songs of friends now gone are the same I exhort each man in his own way to partake of the sweet elixir brew and be of good cheer

Waki

Will he come again today? Today I overflow with sake come amuse yourself with music and dance sing the verses comfort your souls stay late

Shite

Why do you ask me not to leave early?

Waki

Best things happen when it grows late, very late never fail to keep a watch on the moon

Shite

You shall have it your way, but why need you ask? Why would I leave a band of drinking friends as the ancient verses say here beneath the blossoms?4

Waki

Forgetting to return

Shite

Is to poetize on a beautiful spot

Shite and Waki

Beside the kegs to indulge in drunkenness ‘spring breezes’ make us do it

UTA

Chorus

In the autumn breeze we know the warmth sake brings to the body elixir beneath the chrysanthemums forgetting to go home Ah, how I love to love sake.

AGEUTA

Chorus

Though darkness falls though darkness falls we are companions of the night intimates whose familiar sleeves catch reflected moonlight in our cups fleeting fading flowers our faces redden with the prowess of the prime flower chrysanthemum through a thousand autumns the crying of the pine cricket shall never end and forever as vines twining up a wall our friendship will never end the best prize of all in the marketplace the best prize of all in the marketplace

(The waki begins to question while the shite moves to stage center and sits. The tsure is seated in front of the chorus)

Waki

Let me ask you, in the words you have spoken, can I interpret that you yearn for a lost friend in the cries of the pine cricket? Please explain.

Shite

As you say, there is a story here. I shall tell you.

Waki

Please do.

KATARI

Shite

Once, many years ago, there were two intimates who were passing through the pine forest of Abeno when one of the friends, enticed by the lovely crying of the pine crickets, went off in the direction of the insect sounds. The other friend waited for a very long time, but his friend did not return, and so lonely and worried, he went in search of him. He found him laying dead upon the frost bitten ground among the grasses. Why, he searched his mind, had this happened when they two had promised that if death came that they would die together? He cried in anguish, but nothing was to bring him back.

UTA

Chorus

Bury him here in this ground among the trees and no one shall remember him, only the sad mourning cries of the pine cricket will tell the world forever how he yearned for his friend.

AGEUTA

Chorus

Even now pine crickets sing of lost friends pine crickets sing of lost friends drawn by the sounds, a townsman changes his form to a ghost who now comes forth as if reluctant to go farther. He mingles with the throngs in the marketplace at the end of the day, and makes his way toward Abeno makes his way toward Abeno.

(At this point, the tsure rises and exits the stage while the shite goes to the ichi no matsu (first pine) pillar nearest to the stage, on the hashikakari. From there he begins the rongi . At the words ‘ the soulless crying of insects’, he makes a circle around the stage, then exits.)

RONGI

Chorus

How wonderful it is that in this world still there is some reminder of the dead and that friends gather to commemorate Let me stay for awhile among the friends here.

Shite

The time is the end of autumn when the pine crickets sing are they waiting for me?

Chorus

The soulless crying of insects that wait for you? Hardly possible, these words

Shite

Insect cries insect cries as a symbol of yearning for a lost friend? Yes, there are words to that effect.

Chorus

Yes, yes, it is in an old poem ‘on the autumn moor’5

Shite

He speaks with the voice of the pine cricket, a man yearning.

Chorus

Thinking that perhaps I have come have you resolved to pray for me? Thank you, thank you, you are a true friend Indeed the pine crickets yearn Let the cries be your guide on your return let the cries lead you home.

MONDO-KATARI (The Ai appears on stage and begins a conversation with the waki. His words almost exactly repeat the shite’s early speeches. The next text is while waiting for the shite of the second part to appear.)

AGEUTA

Waki

Pine winds blow coldly over the field pine winds blow coldly over the field I shall have a brief sleep here among the grasses then shall I intone the Buddhist law and throughout the night pray over this site reverently pray over this site reverently

(At the beginning of the musical ISSEI that follows, the shite reappears and then sings the SASHI.)

SASHI

Shite

I am so thankful for this invocation for when I hear the sadder cries of insects touched by autumn frost my soul seems to return to a more painful mortal autumn I stand before you a wizened ghost bereft and left to wither on this dry field What joy to have you pray for me!

(The waki remains seated while the shite stands for the next KAKEAI section. When the chorus begins the AGEUTA, the shite moves slightly.)

KAKEAI

Waki

Already the waning light sets deep shadows the dew settles heavily over the red blossomed grasses Is that a human form in the distance? Is that a man I am looking for who I see so dimly in the light?

Shite

Exactly as you see, yes I am here revealed as the voice of the crickets yearning still for a friend who is no more vested in the grasses who receive your prayer

Waki

By the Bay of Naniwa

Shite

Intimately, I indulge a merchant from the Abeno market

Waki

He who prays

Shite

And I who receive the prayer

Waki

Past has turned to present

Shite

And all is changed

AGEUTA

Chorus

The old home is the same we are one in the same citizens of Naniwa one in the same citizens of Naniwa where we know the same captains who burn the reeds share the same sort of merchant house where we pledged our undying love as hidden grasses yearning, bending toward one another one never forgets ones friend so precious to recall such thoughts now

(The shite now begins the Kuri, Sashi, and Kuse, moving into the set motions of his dance.)

KURI

Chorus

Oblivious, time passes and yet as waves plash on the shore I return to the past whatever became of Naniwa its good sedge and its bad reeds because there is nothing to keep friends apart

SASHI

Shite

In the morning we tread upon the fallen flowers walking together into the day;

Chorus

In the evening we follow the nesting birds going home together

Shite

It is as if we play among the flowers and sing among the birds at a sumptuous banquet

Chorus

Beckoned by my friend of the wind and the moon to the Spring mountainside and to the Autumn moor even unto the songs we hear of insects in the grasses—

to listen is to hear the friends of ones heart

KUSE

Chorus

We dwell in the shade of a single tree and know our destiny will live beyond this life we know when we cup the waters from a single stream that the depth of our affection is not shallow fresh clear water from the deep valleys of the deepest mountain though we cup our fill and cup again these waters shall never cease I would be the first to stop the wine cup with my hand were it to come floating to me in a winding water banquet6 In ancient times on Mt. Lu in China a poor monk sat in a cave with a promise never to come out and cross over a gorge but just because he broke the admonition did not mean that his determination had been weak at moments the dew of our jeweled water finds a way to spill out across the chasm, so the saying goes.7

Shite

Yes, in a past where wisdom prevailed

Chorus

where the world lived in a purer spirit those intimates who knew the way of men brought wealth and enrichment to many houses spreading the way, shall we say, far and wide but now in our own muddied world helplessly we let our minds go astray lost in fine wine or poorer grog until our world is fuddled so I too shall not be sober just as all the trees of the world have their red faced sodden autumn so I will dance to the single cry of a pine cricket singing a chant to his friend

(The shite continues to quicken his dance.)

Shite

Wine cups

Chorus

Flower sleeves that make the snow swirl

WAKA

Shite

Wondrous! Thousands of insect voices in the grasses

Chorus

The sound of a weaving loom

(As if intoxicated by the insects’ song, the shite moves extemporaneously with the music, then comes to rest.)

NORIJI

Shite

IN and OUT and IN

Chorus

IN and OUT and IN, and sew my seams again chiming crickets, grasshoppers all those sensuous sounds I leave them all for the voice of my yearning pine cricket Rin Rin Rin Ring into the quiet night darkness of no return

NORIJI

Chorus

Awake! to Naniwa the sound of the morning bells and it is morning so it must be with you my friend, a goodbye our sleeves still entwined plumes of pampas grass beckoning to us dimly there the figure vanishes thick with grasses on the morning meadow thick with grasses on the morning meadow only the insect voices remain only the insect voices remain.8