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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Japanese Theatre

Japanese Theatre

Professor Ernst has brought together in this volume three Japanese plays never before published in an English translation, each one being representative of its particular form of Japanese theatre: the No, the Doll Theatre, and the Kabuki. Each play has an introductory essay in which the history of the form and its stage conventions are discussed in some detail. Though The House of Sugawara and Benten the Thief have each considerable force and humour, The Maple Viewing (a No play) seems likely to appeal most to a European reader, on account of its remarkable lyrical passages. Among No plays there are five principal groups: god plays, man plays, woman plays, plays of mental derangement, and demon plays. Yeats experimented in the form of the No, and Maeterlinck in his plays and essays suggested a similar theatre. The Maple Viewing, despite its idyllic title, is a demon play. Koremochi, a great general, is sent to Mount Togakushi to exterminate a nest of demons. He falls in love with one of them, in the guise of a beautiful gentlewoman. One cannotpage 393 avoid conjecturing whether the fifteenth-century author drew on personal experience in his choice of plot and symbolism –

She spreads a sleeve
Upon the moss-grown rock,
As though for a loverless sleep.
Her cheeks flushing a darker crimson,
Surely a reflection of the scarlet leaves
That flutter down to clothe her . . .

Even without the temptings of such earthly beauty,
Still there is the thing called wine
To corrupt man’s heart
Even as a bamboo
May force its way between the rocks . . .

This translation, by Meredith Weatherby, is superior in quality to those in which Professor Ernst has collaborated with Japanese translators. It may be that Professor Ernst is a better editor and essayist than translator or poet.

1959 (197)