Paper short abstract:

Mugen nō conventions are used in the play Usuki to depict a recent event: a warrior’s death in the battle of Mimigawa (1579). Three other non-canonical nō dramatize battles of 1583 and 1590. What features do these plays share with each other or with second-category plays in the canon?

Paper long abstract:

The spirit of a warrior returns to the mortal world, describing his past death in battle and his present sufferings in asura hell. Many famous mugen nō re-enact deaths in clashes of the distant past—the Abe brothers at Koromogawa (1062), the Heike at Ichinotani (1184), Kusunoki at Minatogawa (1336), for example—but during the late Sengoku period, variations on the plot and topoi were used to re-enact violent events of the present or immediate past, always with a focus on a single individual. This paper looks at how the battle of Mimigawa (1579) is re-enacted in Usuki. The non-canonical play makes effective use of the classic tropics of warrior spirit plays to retell an individual’s experience of war, before his death and afterwards. As in earlier mugen nō, there is a tripartite temporal structure: present (encounter with the traveling monk), past (the final moments of his life), and eternal (condemned to battle forever in the shuradō). While the treatment of the topic and its language are indebted to the warrior plays of Zeami’s time, the play should also be read in the context of other plays about the same turbulent period: Shibata on the death of the Echizen warlord Shibata Katsuei (1583), Nagaharu on Hideyoshi’s siege of Miki Castle (1590), and Ujimasa on the fall of Odawara in the same year, all featuring protagonists who take their own lives when the battle is lost. In each case, the protagonist is the vanquished leader, whereas Usuki focuses on a relatively minor character, a retainer of Ōtomo Sōin, rather than the daimyō himself. Usuki is perhaps the most accomplished of the plays, but Nagaharu is also notable in its treatment of the vanquished lord’s love of his wife and concern for his people.