The Komparu Society's "Sumidagawa"

One early-spring evening I went to see a Komparu Society Noh performance on Marquis Hosokawa’s stage in Fujimi-chō—or rather, I went to see Kintarō Sakurama in Sumidagawa.

I was shown to my box after Hanagatami, or something of the sort, had ended and before Sumidagawa began. In all the theatre I have seen, I have never encountered a spectacle more entertaining than the audience that fills the floor and boxes. New plays written by friends of mine are the exception. At those I generally forget the audience, because the author, seated in the same box and watching his own play, is a more entertaining sight than any spectator. But never mind that. As a rule, a theatre audience is more interesting than the play, and Noh is no exception. Nowadays a Noh audience includes a great many young ladies. Every one of them suppresses tiny yawns while maintaining a posture of solemn dignity. And tonight there were not only young ladies. On either side of me, beginning with the round and amply nourished French ambassador, Monsieur Claudel, five or six Western men and women were training their opera glasses on the stage. Before seeing Sumidagawa, I was already satisfied by this audience, like a drawing by Daumier. Naturally, I was prepared to count myself among the figures in the caricature.

Sumidagawa began quietly. That word ‘quietly’ is not the conventional adjective one uses whether it applies or not. With Arata Hōshō’s words, ‘I am the ferryman at the Sumida River in the province of Musashi,’ the broad, misty river of a far-flung countryside truly rose before my eyes in stillness. Like a hound catching the scent of prey in a gust of wind, I felt a faint shiver pass through me. That may sound pretentious. In fact, I have never studied chanting and possess no knowledge whatever of Noh, so my judgment is of course unreliable. Yet Hōshō’s brief speech unquestionably made me shiver. More than that: in my experience, such a shiver is the beacon that warns of an approaching surge of artistic excitement. Whatever anyone may say, for me this much is an indisputable fact.

Next a young traveller slowly came onto the bridgeway. Regrettably, I do not remember the actor’s name. He was a gaunt young man who indeed seemed to have come ‘past clouds and mists, crossing distant mountains, through barrier after barrier and country after country.’ Hōshō’s ferryman, by contrast, was imposing. No such handsome, stout ferryman can ever have rowed a boat on the Sumida from antiquity to the present. Yet we feel nothing incongruous in that imposing figure, just as we feel none in the red moon of Kabuki. Noh is even less bound than Kabuki to the world of realism. A thousand deficiencies of reality vanish at once into poetry. An excess of reality, however, has the opposite power: it can destroy the illusion of the stage. In the traveller’s thin figure I felt a slight excess of it. He reminded me a little too strongly that in the waters of the Sumida crossing, celebrated since Narihira, even a drowned dog might float. This was no fault of the actor. It was merely the unhappy fate of having been cast in the part. Being thin myself, I sympathized deeply with him even as I felt dissatisfied.

Thin though he was, this was no ordinary traveller. His was the honorary office of representing in one body all the lonely travellers who have ever sought the Sumida ferry. He was also an artistic herald, come to announce to us spectators that ‘a madwoman is journeying down from the capital.’ At the ferryman’s words—‘What is that alarming commotion behind you?’—I felt a single road appear among the bending grasses of Musashino. Ancient sunlight illuminated a vague stir of people beyond it. The madwoman from the capital might be among them. No: before I knew it, she was already moving with measured steps along the brightly lit bridgeway toward the stage.

The madwoman was Kintarō Sakurama. As his figure reached the second pine, I marvelled: what a beautiful madwoman. The black lacquered travelling hat flashed; a faint shadow fell across the mask; the pale-blue costume made the figure slender. I felt as though I had met a court lady from an illustrated scroll of Taima-dera. Slowly the madwoman began to voice her grief: ‘Truly, the heart of a parent…’ Her voice—her voice is not easily described. If I must, I would call it bright yet austerely desolate. The Englishman beside me exchanged a glance with his wife and murmured something like ‘Wonderful voice.’ A voice, at least, must be intelligible even to a foreigner. And the delicacy of every expressive gesture beneath the Ko-omote mask was almost infuriating. Once again I felt a faint shiver beneath my shirt.

At last, amid the chorus, the madwoman reached the Sumida ferry. But the handsome ferryman would not take her aboard for nothing. ‘You call yourself a woman of the capital and a madwoman; show us an entertaining fit of madness,’ he demanded with shameless self-interest. In their exchange I discovered the tragedy of genius. Genius too travels in search of something, as this madwoman does. Unfortunately, we do not understand such passion. Even a traveller committed to the same road coldly overlooks its pain. How much more so the happy ferrymen of the world, who can conceive no meaning in life beyond supporting wife and children: for three thousand years they have serenely repeated ‘show us your madness,’ mistaking the passion of genius for a performing dog’s trick. To earn its bread, genius has no choice but to make a spectacle of suffering. And now the madwoman was displaying her private accomplishment—a dance—before the ferryman.

The madwoman’s dancing too was beautiful. Her feet in white tabi moved with particular subtlety. Even now, when I recall those feet, they seem decidedly uncanny. I truly wanted to touch them—or at least to remove the white tabi and examine them at leisure. They did not seem ordinary parts of a human body. Surely narrow eyes of some kind lay between the creases of their soles. Yet—like every critic, I did not forget my ‘yet’—if one must find fault, Sakurama’s art may be a shade too beautiful. One false step and it might succumb to the malady of over-refinement. The masters of old would surely not have rested content at this boundary; to attain a still more archaic grandeur, they would not have shrunk from staking their lives. At that very thought, as the chorus subsided on ‘Take me aboard, ferryman; have pity and take me aboard,’ the madwoman sank to one knee and, before the ferryman barring her way, joined her hands as though she might fade away. Since the elder Shūchō I have seen my share of celebrated onnagata, but I do not remember ever finding one as beautiful as Sakurama at that moment. Archaic grandeur is admirable, of course. But attained or not, beauty at this pitch leaves no reasonable ground for complaint.

To discuss the rest of Sumidagawa would merely waste words. The decision not to use a child actor may indeed have been a noteworthy experiment, but an amateur like me has neither the qualifications nor the inclination to debate it. I felt no dissatisfaction at the absence of Umewakamaru’s ghost. Indeed, I have sometimes suspected that employing a child actor even in such a scene is simply a legacy of the Ashikaga age, when every opportunity demanded the appearance of a beautiful boy. In any event, I left Sumidagawa satisfied that I had seen something beautiful. It is enough to say that.

If I may add one thing in passing, it concerns the Noh audience that first caught my interest. Bernard Shaw said that the proper way to appreciate Wagner’s operas at Bayreuth was to lie flat on one’s back and keep only one’s ears open. Such advice is needed only in the uncivilized countries of the distant West. The Japanese, it seems, know the art of appreciation without instruction. That evening, too, most of the Noh audience kept their chant books open before them and scarcely looked at the stage at all!