Noh theatre and the spirits: ghosts, masks and Japanese dreams

Kan'ami, Zeami and mugen noh: how classical Japanese theatre staged ghosts, possessing spirits and demons with wooden masks, chant and music.

In 1374, at a temple in Kyoto called Imagumano, the young shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu attended a performance by an actor named Kan'ami and his son, a boy of about twelve. Struck by their art, he took both under his protection. The boy was Zeami Motokiyo, who would become the greatest theorist and playwright of Noh, the classical Japanese theatre in which ghosts and spirits occupy a central place.

Zeami and the beauty of yūgen

Zeami, who lived from about 1363 to 1443, wrote many plays and a series of treatises on the actor's art, the best known of which is the Fūshikaden, composed in the early fifteenth century. At the heart of his aesthetics is yūgen, a concept hard to translate that denotes a deep, mysterious and melancholy beauty, sensed rather than shown. Noh, with its extremely slow movements and its silences, seeks to suggest what lies beyond words.

The performance combines chant, dance, acting and the music of flute and drums. The protagonist, called the shite, often wears a carved and painted wooden mask, while the secondary character, the waki, performs unmasked. The masks, kept by families of actors for generations, are regarded almost as living objects, and the actor bows to them respectfully before putting them on.

Mugen noh, the theatre of dreams

Many of Zeami's plays belong to the genre called mugen noh, the Noh of dreams or apparitions. The structure recurs: a traveller, often a Buddhist monk, arrives at a famous place and meets a local person who tells him its story. In the second part the same person reappears in their true form, as the ghost of a warrior or a lady of the past, and relives before the monk the crucial moment of their life.

In Atsumori the ghost is a young warrior who died in the war between the Taira and Minamoto clans; in Izutsu it is a woman who dances wearing the robes of her lost beloved, gazing at her reflection in a well. The monk listens and prays, and the prayer offers the spirit a chance of peace. The stage thus becomes a meeting place between the living and the dead, in which memory takes ritual form.

Possessing spirits and demons

Alongside its melancholy ghosts, Noh also knows more disturbing spirits. In Aoi no Ue, inspired by an episode of the Tale of Genji, Lady Rokujō, tormented by jealousy, persecutes Prince Genji's wife as a living spirit that has left her body. In the finale the spirit appears in the hannya mask, the face of a woman turned into a demon by passion, with horns and a gaping mouth.

The stage space also preserves sacred traces. The stage is connected to the dressing rooms by a long bridge, the hashigakari, which performers often read as a passage between the world of the living and that of the spirits. On the back wall a great pine is painted, which according to tradition recalls a sacred tree at the Kasuga shrine in Nara. In 2008 Nōgaku was inscribed by UNESCO on the list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Noh offers a model of theatre very different from the European one: it does not aim to astonish with effects but to make a presence felt. Its ghosts do not frighten; rather, they ask to be heard. This is why Western poets and playwrights of the twentieth century, from W. B. Yeats onwards, saw in it an example of a theatre able to give form to the invisible.