Noh

Noh grew out of sarugaku, a loose category of medieval Japanese entertainment that included mime, acrobatics and comic sketch, and out of dengaku, the field music associated with rice planting rites. Both were performed at shrines and temples, which had a direct interest in drawing crowds, and troupes were attached to particular religious institutions: the four sarugaku companies of Yamato were associated with the Kofukuji temple and the Kasuga shrine at Nara, and performed there under obligation.

Kan'ami Kiyotsugu and his son Zeami Motokiyo turned this material into a single art in the second half of the fourteenth century, under the patronage of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who saw Zeami perform as a boy. Zeami then wrote about what he had made. His treatises, of which the Fushikaden is the best known, were secret documents intended for transmission inside his own family and were not published for centuries; they set out training by age, the idea of hana, the flower or living freshness of a performance, and the concept of yugen, a quality of profound and slightly obscured beauty that became the art's governing standard. The religious content was not incidental to any of this. Zeami was a Buddhist, the plays were written for audiences who took rebirth and attachment as given, and the temple and shrine remained the art's ordinary setting.

Roughly half the surviving Noh repertoire is built on a single structure: a travelling monk arrives somewhere, meets a local person, and learns that the person is the ghost of someone who died there attached to a grief, a battle or a love. In the second half the ghost returns in true form and dances the memory out, and the monk's prayer releases the attachment. The plays are therefore a Buddhist argument staged as a dance: attachment holds the dead in place, and the release is the point.

Okina stands outside this and outside the category of drama altogether. It has almost no plot, its text is largely incomprehensible archaic syllables, and it is performed at New Year and at the opening of important programmes as a prayer for peace and a good harvest. The company purifies itself beforehand, the mask is carried onto the stage in a lacquered box and put on in front of the audience rather than in the mirror room, and the performer is understood to become a god while wearing it. Noh actors treat it as a rite that happens to be performed on a stage, and the distinction is theirs, not an outside classification.

The atlas records Noh honestly: it is theatre, it has been theatre for six hundred years, it is performed for paying audiences and taught in universities, and it retains inside it a piece that its own practitioners do not treat as theatre at all.