Send message to Author

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.