Kagura

Kagura carries its own myth of origin. When Amaterasu, the sun goddess, shut herself into the rock cave after the outrages of her brother and the world fell dark, the gods assembled before the cave, and Ame no Uzume overturned a tub, danced upon it and was carried far enough out of herself that the assembled gods roared with laughter. Amaterasu, wondering how there could be joy in a darkened world, opened the cave door, and light returned. The tradition reads its sacred dance as the continuation of that first one: dance not as entertainment for the gods but as the thing that draws them near.

The word kagura is usually derived from kamukura, the seat of the kami, and the oldest layer of the practice is exactly that, a place prepared into which the deity is called. At the imperial court this became mikagura, a night rite of song and measured movement performed by hereditary musicians before the palace sanctuary, documented from the eleventh century and still performed. The court form is spare: no masks, no drama, a sakaki branch or a fan in the dancer's hand, and a repertoire of songs whose office is to summon, entertain and send back the kami. Everything the village forms elaborate, the masks, the serpents, the myth plays, stands on that plain foundation, the prepared seat and the invited god.

Sato-kagura, the kagura of the villages, is less one form than a family of them, and Japanese scholarship since Honda Yasuji has sorted it into broad lines. Miko kagura is the dance of the shrine maidens, bells and fan in hand, the quietest and perhaps the oldest layer. The Ise line centres on yudate, the cauldron rite, in which water is boiled before the kami and scattered with bamboo fronds for purification.

The Izumo line, the largest, is torimono kagura, dances organised around the held object, and it is here that the masked myth plays flourished: episodes of the age of the gods staged in carved masks and brocade, above all the rock cave story itself and the slaying of the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi, which in the Iwami district of Shimane has grown into a spectacular many-dancer set piece with smoke and winding serpent bodies. The shishi kagura line travels the opposite way: the lion mask itself is the temporary body of the kami, carried from house to house to bless and to purify.

In the mountain villages of Kyushu and Tohoku, whole cycles of thirty and more pieces are still danced through the night at winter festivals, the audience drinking and dozing and waking as the gods come and go. Kagura remains shrine practice rather than heritage display: the masks are treated with respect, the opening pieces summon, and the closing pieces send the kami home.