- Convenors:
-
Elizabeth Oyler
(University of Pittsburgh)
Akiko Takeuchi (Hosei University)
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- Discussant:
-
Susan Klein
(UC Irvine)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Performing Arts
Short Abstract
This panel brings together presentations theorizing time in Nō. Through chronotopic and phenomenological analysis, the panelists consider how a set of Nō plays make time “material and active,” highlighting that time is not merely a narratological tool but a central theme of the theatre.
Long Abstract
How do we theorize time in Nō plays? Current scholarship tends to focus on ghostly story-tellers in mugen nō (dream vision nō), who rearrange time in flashbacks, melding the present of the stage with the ghost’s narration of the past. However, flashbacks are only one of various ways in which temporal complexity is represented in noh; both mugen noh and present-time noh offer much broader and more intriguing approaches to temporality. The papers on this panel use chronotopic and phenomenological analysis to consider, as Matthew Wagner has said, how plays make time “material and active,” highlighting that time is not merely a narratological tool but a central theme of theater. Each of the papers shows how time is made palpable, with temporal negotiations that mourn the passage of time, reflect on mutability, and highlight the deadness of waiting. As the first paper shows, flashback constitutes only a small portion of the mugen noh Tōru. Its first act features a figure who laments decline and mourns change. The second act, the ghost is released from his temporal burden into an order of time free from both linear progression and emotional weight. The second presenter examines Shunkan, featuring a character exiled from the capital, both temporally estranged and out of time. Yet, the play remakes the spatial and temporal logic of the stage by doubling the place of exile with the place of pilgrimage. In doing so, the play evokes chronotopes of exile and pilgrimage, temporal powerlessness and temporal agency, damned time and transcendent time, letting them play out on stage. Finally, the third presenter examines how two plays, Kinuta and Torioibune, use the motif of a slow lawsuit that waylays litigant husbands before pivoting to time-marking practices of waiting by the wives. These frictional time schemes show how gendered waits function in the play, contrasting frustration and patient endurance, stability and precarity, inert time and immersive interlude. Taken together, the three papers show what Wagner calls “temporal thickness,” of untimely characters and polychronic time schemes in Nō theater.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the noh play Shunkan's evocationv of sacred and political spaces through a complex layering of the chronotopes of exile and pilgrimage. Both are defined by their relation to kinds of space and the timescapes they define: the Kumano Shrines and their site of exile, Kikaigashima.
Paper long abstract
Depicting the abandonment of an exile on a remote island at the edge of the realm, Shunkan is one of the most relentlessly stark plays of the active noh repertoire and one of its most enduring. Set on the volcanic island of Kikaigashima, Shunkan’s portrayal of desertion is deeply connected to the setting, a location that is disorienting in both its cultural and physical distance from the capital city from which the exiles have been banished. One of Shunkan’s notable features is the juxtaposition of exile and pilgrimage on the island’s bleak hellscape. Whereas two of the exiles actively recreate the Kumano pilgrimage route on the island, Shunkan, the main character, can only see it as a hell realm, the dead-end destination of the condemned. This presentation explores the interplay between the productive, restorative mode of movement embraced by the other men and Shunkan’s inability to see their situation as anything other than a journey to hell, and specifically how the chronotopes of exile and pilgrimage intersect and refigure the landscape of the setting of the play, the peripheral and alien Kikaigashima.
Through a close reading of the play as performance, I examine the play’s evocation on a mostly bare stage of sacred and political spaces through a complex layering of these modes of movement. In Shunkan, exile and pilgrimage, both defined by their relation to specific kinds of space, simultaneously bring into relief (and call into question) the integrity of the timescapes they define: the sacred space of the Kumano Shrines and the hellish Kikaigashima, both evocative of transcendent space and time that is complicated by the political juxtaposition between Kikaigashima and the distant capital city to which Shunkan’s compatriots are returned while he is abandoned alone as “guardian of Devils’ Island.” How does the play effect the complex intersection of the everyday time of the men’s experience and the transcendent time of heavens and hells? What does the reimagining of actual landscape as eternal in Shunkan reveal about the shifting relationships between the realm’s center and its increasingly meaningful peripheries at the time it was first performed?
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Kinuta and Torioibune contrast the slow lawsuit that waylays husbands with the time-marking practices by their wives. In doing so, the plays use legal “clocks” to highlight phenomenological understandings of waiting, as a stalled state of inaction or an immersive interlude.
Paper long abstract
Recent scholarship on theater and time by Matthew Wagner, David Wiles, and Rebecca Bushnell has shed light on drama as a temporal medium that creates frictional time schemes, contrasting clock time and the individual experience of time by characters. Such scholarship, however, has not followed developments in the legal humanities, where scholars study law and time. Bringing these two bodies of scholarship together, I consider how Noh plays use legal “timepieces.”
This presentation will focus on Kinuta and Torioibune, two plays that use the timepiece of a slow lawsuit. In both plays, the husbands wait fruitlessly in the capital, subject to the temporal practices of bureaucrats, stymied by the bureaucratization of time. Meanwhile, the wives tether their experience of time to autumnal rites, by pounding silks and shooing away birds from the harvest. I will show how such time-marking practices function in the plays, the ways in which they create frictional time schemes contrasting inert legal time with the richness of “inner time,” existential precarity and stable orders, and ultimately highlighting the temporal density of theater.
Paper short abstract
The paper argues that Zeami’s Tōru exemplifies noh’s capacity to construct nonlinear, transcendent time-spaces. By shifting from autumnal lament to an aseasonal, illusory realm, the play shows that emotion is grounded in temporality, while eternity effaces both.
Paper long abstract
This paper analyzes how Tōru, a noh play by Zeami, constructs a dramatic realm that transcends ordinary temporality, seasonality, and emotionality. Central to the argument is the claim that noh—through its linguistic features, ambiguous speakers, and reliance on verbal scenic construction—can create nonlinear, otherworldly time‐spaces, of which Tōru offers a paradigmatic example.
The first act of Tōru is intensely rooted in the season of autumn, a season symbolically linked in Japanese poetics to nostalgia, loss, and reflective emotion. The play dwells on the desolate landscape, repeated invocations of aki (autumn), poetic references to the moon, and the old man’s lament for the irreversible passage of time. The moon—anchored in autumnal sentiment—functions as a catalyst for his sorrow and longing for his once-magnificent villa. This act strongly emphasizes human emotion intertwined with a singular season.
The second act radically shifts the play’s temporal and emotional logic. Tōru reappears not as a grieving old man but as a youthful, radiant figure nearly indistinguishable from a celestial being of the Moon Palace. Here, the text introduces imagery of multiple seasons, while carefully avoiding anchoring the scene to any one of them. This deliberate blending produces an aseasonal, transcendent realm.
Furthermore, the dried-up pond of the first act becomes an illusory pond filled with water, reflecting not the full moon of the dramatic present but a crescent moon—thus collapsing even the linear sequence of lunar phases. Time, space, and natural order become fluid, and Tōru dances joyfully, free of earthly attachment.
The play ultimately highlights a paradox: in Japanese tradition, seasonal imagery and human emotion are deeply intertwined, but when time itself is transcended, both seasonality and emotion vanish. Thus, Tōru reveals how emotions are bound to the irreversible passage of time—and how, in transcending temporality, theatre can stage a vision of eternity.