Sotoba Komachi is a Noh play written by Kan'ami,[1] and is one of the most compelling and best-known of the type.[2]

Plot and themes

Much of the strength of the play derives from the variety provided by the three main and distinct sections: lament for lost beauty; witty religious debate; and ghostly possession.[3]

The play begins with an encounter between two priests and an old beggar-woman, lamenting how she was “lovelier than the petals of the wild-rose open-stretched / In the hour before its fall. / But now I am grown loathsome even to sluts”.[4] She later admits that she is the famed waka poet Ono no Komachi.

Because she is seated on a Buddhist stupa, a holy marker, she is challenged by the priests for creating bad karma, but in a witty debate uses Zen-like sophistries to defeat them:[5] “Nothing is real. Between Buddha and Man is no distinction”.[6]

The priests then lament in turn her loss of beauty; before in the final sequence she is possessed by the angry ghost of a former suitor, Shōshō of Fukakusa. He had been tasked with visiting Komachi for 100 nights in order to earn her love, but had died on the penultimate one; and his acting out of his cruelly thwarted struggles to win her love brings the play to a dramatic close, with Komachi then seeking for enlightenment and release.[7]

Later influence

  • Bashō in his late renga ‘The Summer Moon’ wrote: “In this fleeting world no one can escape/ The destiny of that famed poetess Komachi”.[8]
  • Arthur Waley moved his future wife to tears by reading from his translation of the play: “Like a root-cut reed,/ Should the tide entice,/ I would come, I think; but now/ No wave asks; no stream stirs”.[9]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Sotoba Komachi". jti.lib.virginia.edu.
  2. ↑ H Shirane, Traditional Japanese Literature (2007) p. 127 and 938
  3. ↑ H Shirane, Traditional Japanese Literature (2007) p. 938
  4. ↑ A Waley, The Noh Plays of Japan (Tuttle 1976) p. 88
  5. ↑ H Shirane, Traditional Japanese Literature (2007) p. 938
  6. ↑ A Waley, The Noh Plays of Japan (Tuttle 1976) p. 92
  7. ↑ G Kopf, The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy (2019) p. 144
  8. ↑ Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (1982) p. 105
  9. ↑ A Waley, The Noh Plays of Japan (Tuttle 1976) p. xiii-iv
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