ABSTRACT

The yōkyoku, or texts of musical dramas known as nō, are short, serious plays, generally in two scenes. Their plots are chiefly derived from Japanese history, myth and folklore, and from certain Japanese stories such as The Story of Genji, and The Story of the Taira Family. They contain, in addition to dialogue and monologue, descriptive passages. The loveliest inspirations in the whole piece are often found in the monologue of the protagonist and in the so-called michiyuki or “songs of travel”, which indeed form the most important part of the descriptive passages and narrate in a few exquisite lines the journey, sometimes covering hundreds of miles, made by some person in the drama. The greater part of this type of drama is written in the colloquial language of the Kamakura Period (1186-1332), which just preceded the authors’ birth, and the greater portion of the descriptions and occasionally some of the dialogue and monologue is of a piece with the lyric and epic poetry of the latter half of the Heian Period (794-1186), with the lyric element predominating. The verse is largely composed of a succession of seven and five syllable lines, the standard metre of Japanese poetry. Profusely adorned with classical Japanese and Chinese poems, this order of drama also abounds in historical references and in quotations from Buddhist scriptures. For this reason the nō plays prove too difficult for ordinary comprehension without special study. These dramas disclose another pronounced characteristic in the frequent use of ingenious plays upon words, a device which is a distinguishing feature of Japanese classics and one which adds considerably to the beauty and melody of such compositions. It detracts from the originality, but not from the merit, of the nō plays, that the most beautiful passages in them are upon examination only too often found to be undigested borrowings from The Story of Genji, The Story of the Taira Family, The Rise and Fall of the Minamoto and Taira Families, The Record of Great Peace, The Collection of Odes Ancient and Modern, etc., so that the nō plays are often with justice likened to a patchwork of brocade.