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.