Sotoba Komachi
Sotoba Komachi is a Noh play written by Kan'ami,[1] and is one of the most compelling and best-known of the type.[2]
Plot and themes
[edit]Much of the strength of the play derives from the variety provided by the three main and distinct sections: lament for lost beauty; witty religious debate; and ghostly possession.[3]
The play begins with an encounter between two priests and an old beggar-woman, lamenting how she was “lovelier than the petals of the wild-rose open-stretched / In the hour before its fall. / But now I am grown loathsome even to sluts”.[4] She later admits that she is the famed waka poet Ono no Komachi.
Because she is seated on a Buddhist stupa, a holy marker, she is challenged by the priests for creating bad karma, but in a witty debate uses Zen-like sophistries to defeat them:[5] “Nothing is real. Between Buddha and Man is no distinction”.[6]
The priests then lament in turn her loss of beauty; before in the final sequence she is possessed by the angry ghost of a former suitor, Shōshō of Fukakusa. He had been tasked with visiting Komachi for 100 nights in order to earn her love, but had died on the penultimate one; and his acting out of his cruelly thwarted struggles to win her love brings the play to a dramatic close, with Komachi then seeking for enlightenment and release.[7]
Later influence
[edit]- Bashō in his late renga ‘The Summer Moon’ wrote: “In this fleeting world no one can escape/ The destiny of that famed poetess Komachi”.[8]
- Arthur Waley moved his future wife to tears by reading from his translation of the play: “Like a root-cut reed,/ Should the tide entice,/ I would come, I think; but now/ No wave asks; no stream stirs”.[9]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ "Sotoba Komachi". jti.lib.virginia.edu.
- ^ H Shirane, Traditional Japanese Literature (2007) p. 127 and 938
- ^ H Shirane, Traditional Japanese Literature (2007) p. 938
- ^ A Waley, The Noh Plays of Japan (Tuttle 1976) p. 88
- ^ H Shirane, Traditional Japanese Literature (2007) p. 938
- ^ A Waley, The Noh Plays of Japan (Tuttle 1976) p. 92
- ^ G Kopf, The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy (2019) p. 144
- ^ Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (1982) p. 105
- ^ A Waley, The Noh Plays of Japan (Tuttle 1976) p. xiii-iv