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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?