Zeami and the Birth of Noh Theatre in Muromachi Japan (1374)

Zeami Motokiyo and his father Kan’ami created Noh, Japan’s classical masked music-drama, in the late 14th century. The decisive moment came in 1374 or 1375, when their troupe performed at the Imakumano Shrine in Kyoto before the young shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who became their patron. With that support, Zeami turned a popular entertainment into a refined art whose plays, masks and ideas are still alive more than six centuries later.

Background: sarugaku in Muromachi Japan

In the 14th century Japan was ruled, at least in name, by the Ashikaga shoguns from Kyoto, in the period known as Muromachi after the district where their palace stood (see the founding of the Ashikaga shogunate). Popular performance included dengaku, which grew out of rice-planting music and dance, and sarugaku, a mix of comic sketches, mime, song and ritual dance.

Sarugaku troupes were often attached to temples and shrines, which hired them for festivals. The best-known guilds came from Yamato province, around Nara, and were linked to the Kōfukuji temple and Kasuga Shrine. One of these was the Yūzaki troupe led by Kan’ami Kiyotsugu (1333–1384), a gifted actor known for playing both delicate and powerful roles.

Kan’ami changed sarugaku’s music by borrowing the rhythmic kusemai, a popular dance-song, which gave his performances a stronger narrative drive. His troupe was successful in the provinces, but it lacked the prestige of the dengaku companies favoured by the Kyoto elite.

The Imakumano performance

In 1374 or 1375 (the sources do not allow a firmer date) Kan’ami’s troupe performed at Imakumano, a shrine in eastern Kyoto. Among the audience was Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the third shogun, then about 16 years old. It is said that Yoshimitsu insisted Kan’ami himself dance the sacred opening piece Okina, a role usually taken by a troupe’s senior member.

Yoshimitsu was captivated by Kan’ami’s art and, above all, by his son, a boy of about 11 or 12 then known as Fujiwaka. He took the troupe under his patronage and kept the boy close to him. The favour shocked some aristocrats. In 1378 the court noble Sanjō Kintada wrote disapprovingly in his diary that the shogun had shared his seat at the Gion festival with a sarugaku boy, since actors were considered a low social class.

The young Zeami also gained the attention of Nijō Yoshimoto, a former regent and the leading master of linked verse (renga). Yoshimoto praised the boy’s beauty and talent and taught him poetry, giving Zeami a literary education that later shaped his plays.

Zeami’s art and ideas

After Kan’ami’s death in 1384, Zeami became head of the troupe, which later took the name Kanze. Over the next decades he wrote or reworked many plays and developed the form now called mugen nō, or “dream Noh”. In a typical dream play, a traveller, often a monk, meets a local person at a famous place; in the second half the figure reappears as the ghost of a hero or lover and relives a moment of passion or regret.

Zeami’s plays drew on classical literature, especially The Tale of the Heike and The Tale of Genji. Works attributed to him include Takasago, Izutsu, Atsumori and Tadanori, and he reshaped earlier pieces such as Matsukaze. Their language is dense with poetic allusion, suited to an audience of warriors and courtiers who prized learning.

He also wrote about 20 treatises on acting, kept secret within his family. The first, Fūshikaden (also called Kadensho), was begun around 1400. It introduces hana, the “flower” of performance: the quality of freshness and surprise that captivates an audience. Later works develop yūgen, a subtle and elegant beauty, and jo-ha-kyū, the principle of slow introduction, development and rapid climax that governs a play and a whole programme.

The elements of a Noh play

A Noh play is short on action and rich in music, poetry and movement. The principal actor, the shite, often wears a carved wooden mask representing a woman, an old man, a god or a demon. A secondary actor, the waki, usually unmasked, plays the traveller or priest who questions the shite and draws out the story.

The words are chanted rather than spoken, accompanied by a chorus of about eight singers seated at the side of the stage and by an ensemble of a flute and three drums. Movements are slow and stylised. A single step, a turn of the masked face or a gesture with a folding fan can stand for weeping, travelling or the passing of seasons.

Costumes, by contrast, are lavish silk brocades, and many surviving robes and masks from the 15th to 17th centuries are treasured as works of art. Much of this visual vocabulary was settled after Zeami’s time, but the dramatic structure and the emphasis on suggestion rather than realism come directly from him and his father.

Patronage, decline and exile

Yoshimitsu, who built the Golden Pavilion at Kitayama (see Kinkaku-ji), remained Zeami’s most important patron until his death in 1408. The next shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimochi, preferred the dengaku actor Zōami, though Zeami kept performing and writing.

Fortunes worsened under Ashikaga Yoshinori, shogun from 1429. Yoshinori favoured Zeami’s nephew On’ami and barred Zeami and his son Motomasa from certain venues. Motomasa, Zeami’s chosen heir, died in 1432. In 1434 Yoshinori exiled the roughly 70-year-old Zeami to Sado, an island in the Sea of Japan. A short work written there, Kintōsho, is dated 1436. Nothing certain is known of his final years; he is thought to have died around 1443.

Key people

• Kan’ami Kiyotsugu (1333–1384): actor and playwright, founder of the troupe that became the Kanze school.
• Zeami Motokiyo (c. 1363–c. 1443): Kan’ami’s son, actor, playwright and theorist.
• Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408): third Ashikaga shogun and the troupe’s great patron.
• Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–1388): regent and renga master who tutored the young Zeami.
• Konparu Zenchiku (1405–c. 1470): Zeami’s son-in-law, who continued his ideas in another troupe.

Legacy

Noh survived the wars of the 15th and 16th centuries and was later adopted as the official ceremonial art of the Tokugawa shoguns. Today five schools of principal actors perform it: Kanze, Hōshō, Konparu, Kongō and Kita. Noh is staged on a square roofed platform of cypress wood with a painted pine tree on the back wall and a bridgeway (hashigakari) along which actors enter. Comic kyōgen plays are performed between Noh pieces.

Zeami’s treatises remained almost unknown outside his lineage until 1909, when the scholar Yoshida Tōgo published a collection of them. They are now read as some of the most important writings on performance in any culture. In 2001 UNESCO proclaimed Nōgaku, the combined art of Noh and kyōgen, a masterpiece of intangible heritage, and it was inscribed on the Representative List in 2008.

Timeline

• 1333: birth of Kan’ami Kiyotsugu.
• c. 1363: birth of Zeami.
• 1374 or 1375: Kan’ami’s troupe performs at Imakumano before Ashikaga Yoshimitsu.
• 1378: Zeami sits with Yoshimitsu at the Gion festival, criticised in Sanjō Kintada’s diary.
• 1384: death of Kan’ami; Zeami becomes troupe leader.
• c. 1400: Zeami begins writing Fūshikaden.
• 1408: death of Yoshimitsu.
• 1432: death of Zeami’s son Motomasa.
• 1434: Zeami is exiled to Sado Island.
• c. 1443: probable death of Zeami.

Why it matters

The meeting at Imakumano tied a provincial troupe to the most powerful patron in Japan and gave Zeami the means to refine his art. The result was Noh, one of the world’s oldest continuously performed theatre forms, and a body of thought on acting and beauty that still influences theatre makers in Japan and abroad.