Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the process by which Kurumaya utaibon was published. It thus reveals how the libretti of noh were transformed through publishing processes, in the period when the primary materials of instructing noh chanting shifted from handwritten copies to printed texts.

Paper long abstract:

Noh has no playscript in a strict sense. A group of texts called "utaibon" resemble a playscript the most but they are a type of musical score for chanting practices without acting or dancing. Therefore, the texts of utaibon could be affected by the way "chanting" practice was enjoyed by amateurs, sometimes even breaking away from what was intended in the original manuscript.

In former noh studies, several efforts were made to clarify the historical transition of noh texts, by analyzing and comparing old manuscripts of utaibon. Few other studies associate these texts with their targeted users and how they were transmitted. This paper discusses the publishing process of utaibon, revealing how their texts were transformed through this new medium of print.

The main target of my analysis is Kurumaya utaibon set, a group of utaibon that Torikai Dōsetsu compiled, transcribed, added musical notations to, and then published in the early 17th century, when the primary materials of instructing and transmitting noh chanting shifted from hand-copied utaibon to published utaibon. Several meticulous studies of Kurumaya utaibon have demonstrated how Torikai collected the original texts for his copies. However, his publishing processes have not yet been fully studied. In my paper, while citing some noh texts as examples, I will demonstrate how Torikai edited his manuscripts for publication—the first-ever published utaibon.

Although it tends to be thought that utaibon was handled and controlled only by professional noh actors, in reality, amateurs—including Torikai—were deeply involved in collecting and transcribing them, even to the extent of affecting text transformation. Wood-block printing—the latest medium at that time—also played a significant role in determining noh texts. From this historical perspective, this study presents a new viewpoint to grasp the characteristics and text generation of utaibon.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines narration and its fusion with characters' speeches in Zeami's deity plays and warrior plays, using theater semiotics and narratology. It reveals Zeami's careful manipulation of narrative style to match the play's socio-religious purposes.

Paper long abstract:

In contrast to Western theatrical tradition, in noh, not only characters' speeches but also "narration" is spoken (or rather chanted) on stage. Many noh plays also contain sections in which narration and characters' speeches merge and become indistinguishable. This paper examines how narration and its fusion with characters' speeches affect the stage-audience relationship, first by applying Western theoretical frameworks, and then by analyzing specific cases in Zeami's warrior plays and deity plays.

Borrowing theater semiotics and narratology, we can say that "narration on stage" transforms the audience's spatial cognition with "absolute authority" (authority that forces the audience to accept whatever narration says), through maximum stage-audience communication (with excellent "appeal" to the audience). The same effects can also be attributed to the sections in which narration and characters' speeches merge.

Analyzing narration and its fusion with characters' speeches in Zeami's plays reveals that he adjusted the play's narrative style depending on the type of play. Warrior plays use less narration at the end of an act than other dream plays. Similarly, the chorus part with a grammatically ambiguous addresser often ends with signal words that indicate that it is indeed one character's speech to another. Thus, the whole dramatic incident occurs mostly within the framework of the onstage communication between characters, with minimum intervention from the narrator in warrior plays.

In contrast, in deity plays, the ends of acts and the chorus sections with an ambiguous addresser are characterized by avoidance of a character's speech. Thus, the ambiguity of the addresser (narrator or a character) is sustained; the praise of the deity's benevolence toward the current regime is thus directly delivered to the audience through the stage-audience communication, from a voice that is not restricted to a single character but rather bears the "authority" of narration.

Such differences between warrior plays and deity plays reveal Zeami's careful handling of the narrative style to match the play's socioreligious purposes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper picks up verses typically seen in noh, in which each sentence is grammatically incomplete and merged with the following one. Rhetorical devices such as kakekotoba and engo play a crucial role in it. The analysis of these verses reveals the mechanism of generation of poetic images in noh.

Paper long abstract:

In a scene where a character or a narrator describes emotional landscapes or the protagonist's psychological state, noh texts tend to use verse. There are three major styles in noh verses: reciting Chinese poems in Japanese (roei style), enumerating historically famous places and things (soga style), and describing a scene with the rhetoric of Japanese poetry (waka style). Among these styles, the waka style has an interesting feature. The texts written in this style are difficult for readers/audiences to understand linearly and logically. This is mainly because they comprise "chained sentences," in which each sentence is grammatically incomplete and merged with the following one. This paper analyzes how the chained sentences in noh texts produce their peculiar poetic effects, aiming to gain new understanding of the function of poetic languages in our experience of the art of noh.

We focus on rhetorical devices such as kakekotoba (pivot words) and engo (correlative words) in noh texts. They play a key role in chaining sentences and producing layered images. Although earlier studies on Japanese poetry and poetics have examined these rhetorical devices, there remains much to be revealed about their function in noh texts. With respect to their mechanism, we propose the following hypothesis: In the performance of noh, the vocal description of a scene keeps progressing with incomplete chained sentences; hence, the audience are unable to understand the scene at the same pace as it unfolds. However, the audience is listening to the ambiguous words themselves; they unconsciously experience the association of ideas expressed by the words, where fragmented images are layered and diffused and reflect each other, similar to video works where fragmented cuts are quickly and disruptively montaged. In this image experience, scenery and feelings are combined, swallowing the audience's mental vision all the better because sentences are not integrated into logical syntax or linear meaning.

Through the analysis of some noh texts, we clarify the aforementioned mechanism of generation of poetic images. Furthermore, we mention how this mechanism in verse relates to narrative theory and the problem of writing and distribution of texts.