KOMACHI (turning toward Monk):
Of all the many men who staked their hearts on Komachi, (Faces decisively forward.)
the deepest love was that of Shii no Shōshō,
of Fukakusa’s deep grasses;
CHORUS:
(uta) for Shii no Shōshō
the tally of love’s grievances
rolls round again; (Advances slightly, then stops, caught in the throes of attachment.)
to her carriage-shaft bench
I must go courting!51 (She looks off to the west, toward the bridgeway.)
(age-uta) What time of day is it?—twilight.
With the moon as my companion,
I shall set out on the road to her.
Though there be barrier guards to block the way,52
I will not let that stop me; off I go. (Goes to the stage-assistant position and turns her back to the audience.)
(Costume change)
While monogi-ashirai music is played, the actor playing Komachi lengthens his sleeves by lowering the shoulders of his outer robe; or he may exchange it for a chōken (man’s overrobe). He then dons an eboshi (black-lacquered court hat), takes up a fan, and proceeds to the shite spot.
KOMACHI (looking down at her trouser hems and stamping once):
(uta) Hitching up the legs of my white trousers,53
(Quasi dance: iroe)
To musical accompaniment, she moves very slowly to the corner pillar, then circles left to back center and stops, facing forward. Although her movements have no meaning in themselves, the romantic ardor of the Shōshō as he makes his way to Komachi is perceptible. She continues dancing and miming as the text resumes.
KOMACHI:
Hitching up the legs of my white trousers,
folding down my tall court hat, (Raises fan and points with it to her head.)
and draping my robe’s sleeve over my head,54 (Flips left sleeve over her head and half-hides her face with fan.)
I make my way to her in stealth, avoiding the world’s gaze,
going in bright moonlight or in darkness, (Lowers her hands and faces forward, gazing up into the sky.)
on rainy nights and windy nights,
when chilly autumn leaves come drizzling down,
and when the snow lies deep.
(unnamed) As from the eaves the jewel drops melt and patter
quick-quick-quick-quick (Looks upward and around.)
CHORUS:
(uta) go and then return, (Komachi moves away two or three steps.)
return, then go again: (Bends the fingers of her left hand, counting.)
one night, two nights, three nights, four,
seven nights, eight nights, nine nights—
to attend the harvest feast, the Light of Plenty,
I did not appear at court,
and yet neither did she appear to me—
at cockcrow, timely as the rooster with each dawn,
I inscribed the nightly count
upon the edge of her shaft bench.
I’d sworn to go to her a hundred nights; (Stamps several times.)
so came the ninety-ninth night. (Extends her left hand and looks at her still unbent little finger.)
Oh, agony! The world grows dark before my eyes…. (Falls back to center stage, pressing her fan to her breast as though in pain.)
A pain within my breast, he cried in sorrow, and,
not tarrying that one last night, so died (Drops to one knee, then sits.)
the Shōshō, of Fukakusa’s deep grasses, he
whose bitter indignation (Sits bolt upright, then rises.)
takes possession of Komachi, (Earnestly facing Monk, stamps her foot.)
visiting on her this state of frenzy.
Komachi’s attitude now shifts, and she becomes completely tranquil.
(kiri) And thus we see that aspiration for the life to come
is the true way. (Slowly extends fan, as though beckoning from afar.)
Piling up sand to make a stupa tower,55
burnishing the Buddha’s golden skin
with loving care,
offering up a flower, (Slowly closes fan, joins her hands as if in prayer.)
let us enter the path of awakening,
let us enter the path of awakening.
[Translated by Herschel Miller]
PINING WIND (MATSUKAZE)
Attributed to Zeami
The play’s title, Matsukaze, is taken from the name of its protagonist, the ghost of a female saltmaker. Matsukaze means “wind (kaze) in the pines (matsu)” as well as “the wind (kaze) that awaits (matsu).” Poetic puns on this homonym recur throughout the play. The protagonist is the ghost of a rural girl, lingering on the desolate seashore of Suma—like a lonely wind blowing through the coastal pines—awaiting the return of her lover, who long ago set off for the capital and never returned.
The play’s authorship has long been the subject of scholarly debate, but it is now generally accepted that it was probably written by Zeami, although he seems to have borrowed several chanting sections from earlier compositions.56 The precise relationship between the play and its original source also remains obscure. The image of two saltmakers drawing seawater under the moon was probably taken from Drawing of Seawater (Shiokumi), a play now lost. Pining Wind’s central plot—an affair between Ariwara Yukihira (818–893), a noble exiled from the capital, and two sisters from Suma Bay, his place of exile—cannot be found anywhere else and was probably Zeami’s own invention. Yukihira, a grandson of Emperor Heizei, was exiled to Suma for some unknown reason. One account of his life in exile, in an anthology of Buddhist anecdotes (setsuwa) entitled Senjūshō, recounts an episode in which Yukihira exchanged words with a local fisherperson (ama).57 Although this account offers no hint of any love affair, certain romantic connotations are associated with fisherwomen in literature and legends, some of which depict a girl by the sea marrying a noble aristocrat and bearing his child.
The “Suma” chapter of The Tale of Genji links the image of Yukihira in Suma—a nobleman lamenting his exile to a desolate seashore—to the romantic portrayal of fisherwomen. Like Yukihira, Genji, in self-imposed exile, spends a period of time in Suma, after which he moves on to Akashi, a nearby coastal province. While there, he becomes involved with the Akashi lady, who likens her own status to that of rural girls working by the seashore. This lady, however, bears Genji his only daughter, a child who later becomes the mother of a crown prince, cementing Genji’s political power and worldly glory. Pining Wind borrows from Genji this relationship between a noble exile and a local girl at the seacoast and re-creates it as a story about Yukihira, who stays in Suma for three years, has an affair with two local girls, and leaves behind his robe and court cap as keepsakes before making the journey back to the capital, just as Genji left his robe with Lady Akashi before his own return to the capital. The play is replete with citations from Genji, especially in its description of the Suma seashore.
According to one medieval linked-verse (renga) manual, the “Suma” chapter, which recounts Genji’s sojourn at Suma, bears a close literary association (yoriai) with “The Wind in the Pines” chapter, in which the Akashi lady and her daughter finally move to the capital. According to another contemporaneous renga manual, wind in the pines is associated also with autumn rain, since both are representative autumn poetic topoi. At the same time, wind and rain allude to the goddess of Mount Wu in China, famously portrayed in a Chinese poem entitled “Ode to Gaotang.” The goddess, who appears to Emperor Huai in a dream and sleeps with him, promises to manifest herself as “clouds in the morning and rain in the evening” on Mount Wu, which subsequently remains obscured by a mysterious haze. This tale, which suggests erotic beauty in hazy clouds and misty rain engulfing distant mountains, became a popular example of the concept of yūgen (mystery and depth). Through the association with the goddess of Mount Wu, the two sisters’ names, Pining Wind and Autumn Rain, suggest that they, too, might be amorous incarnations of natu
ral phenomena along the Suma coast.58
Another pair of natural images is implicitly erotic as well; the moon and the pails. The moon was sometimes a metaphor for a beautiful young man, and some popular medieval songs compare a young girl to a flower basket; one even uses the combination of the moon and a basket as a metaphor for coitus.59 Here there may be erotic implications in the scene in which the two sisters rejoice on seeing the moon reflected in their water-filled pails.
Pining Wind is the oldest example of extant nō plays that depict love not merely negatively, as a sinful attachment, but also positively, as an illogical yet irresistible human passion.60 In earlier plays, those obsessed with the fervent passion of love in their former lives end up tormented in hell. In Pining Wind, the sisters’ longing for Yukihira is repeatedly referred to as a sinful attachment. At the end of the play, however, both surrender to their passion and to the illusion that a pine tree standing on the seashore is Yukihira, who has come back to them at last. Instead of representing torturous retribution in hell, the play displays the deranged dance of a girl (Pining Wind) enraptured by an illusory reunion with her lover. Pining Wind thus marks Zeami’s significant departure from the purely negative treatment of earthly desires, a remnant of nō’s original religious function, toward a more poetic representation of human emotions.61
Characters in Order of Appearance
A MONK waki
A VILLAGER ai
PINING WIND (waka-onna mask) shite
AUTUMN RAIN (ko-omote mask) tsure
Stage attendant places a small pine tree, set in a stand, at front of stage; a poem-slip hangs from its branches. To shidai music, the Monk enters and stands in the shite spot.
MONK:
(shidai) Suma! and on down the shore to Akashi
Suma! and on down the shore to Akashi
I will go roaming with the moon.
(nanori) You have before you a monk who is looking at every province. Since I have not yet seen the lands of the west,62 I have decided this autumn to make my way there and watch the moon over Suma and Akashi.
(tsuki-zerifu) Having come so swiftly, I have already reached Suma shore, as I believe it is called, in the province of Settsu. On the beach, I see a single pine with a sign placed before it and a poem-slip hanging in its branches. There must be a story about this tree. I will ask someone what it is.
(mondō) Is any resident of Suma shore nearby?
Villager, who has slipped in to sit at the kyōgen seat, now rises and comes to the first pine.
VILLAGER: What do you need, reverend sir, from a resident of Suma shore?
MONK: I see this pine has a tablet planted before it, and a poem-slip hanging in its branches. There must be a story about it. Would you kindly tell it to me?
VILLAGER: Why, certainly. Long ago there were two young women—two saltmakers63—named Pining Wind and Autumn Rain. This pine stands in their memory. People who wished to honor them put this tablet here and hung in the pine’s branches the poem-slip you see. Such people also give them comfort and guidance as they pass. Of course, reverend sir, you yourself have no connection with them,64 but it would be good of you to do so, too, as you pass by.
MONK: Thank you for your account. Then I will go to the pine and comfort the spirits of those two young women.
VILLAGER: If there is anything else you need, reverend sir, please let me know.
MONK: I promise to do so.
VILLAGER: Very well.
Exit Villager. Monk comes to center and stands facing the pine.
MONK: (unnamed) So, this pine is the relic of two saltmakers who lived long ago: Pining Wind, one was called, and the other Autumn Rain.
A sad, sad story!
There they lie buried deep in the earth,
yet their names still linger, and in sign,
ever constant in hue, a single pine
leaves a green autumn.65
Ah, very moving!
And now that I have comforted them by chanting the sutra and by calling for them upon our Lord Amida, the sun—as it will on these short autumn days—has all too quickly set. That village below the hills is still a good way off. I will go instead to this salt-house and see the night through here.
Stage attendant places the brine wagon near the corner pillar: a small, light evocation of a wagon, with a pail on it and a long brocade “rope” to pull it by.
To shin-no-issei music,66 Autumn Rain enters and stops at the first pine. She is followed by Pining Wind, who stops at the third pine. Autumn Rain carries a second pail. Both are dressed in white robes over red trouser-skirts. They stand facing each other.
PINING WIND AND AUTUMN RAIN:
(issei) A brine wagon wheels meagerly
our dreary world round and round:67
O sorry life!
They face the audience.
RAIN:
Waves here at our feet: on Suma shore
They face each other.
BOTH:
the very moon moistens a trailing sleeve.68
To ashirai music, both come on stage. Autumn Rain stands at the center, Pining Wind in the shite spot.
(shidai) We of Suma, long familiar with fall,
we of Suma, long familiar with fall—
come, under the moon, let us draw brine!
Face audience.
WIND:
(sashi) Fall winds were blowing, to call forth sighs,69
and although the sea lay some way off,
Yukihira, the Middle Counselor,
Face each other.
BOTH:
sang of the breeze from Suma shore
blowing through the pass; and every night,
waves sound so near the saltmakers’ home,
apart and lonely. On the way to the village,
besides the moon, there is no company.
WIND:
The sorry world’s labors claim us,
and wholly wretched the seafolk’s craft
BOTH:
that makes no way through life, a dream
where, bubbles of froth, we barely live,
our wagon affording us no safe haven:
we of the sea, whose grieving hearts
never leave these sleeves dry!
Face audience.
CHORUS:
(sage-uta) So thoroughly
this world of ours
appears unlivable,
one only envies
the brilliant moon70
rising now, come, draw the rising tide, (Pining Wind steps forward, as though toward the sea.)
rising now, come, draw the rising tide! (Notices her reflection in a tide pool.)
(age-uta) Image of shame, my reflection,
image of shame, my reflection
shrinks away, withdrawing
tides leave behind stranded pools, (Gazes at the water again.)
and I, how long will I linger on?
Dew agleam on meadow grasses
soon must vanish in the sun,
yet on this stony shore
where saltmakers rake seaweed in,
trailing fronds they leave behind,
these sleeves can only wilt away,
these sleeves can only wilt away. (Retreats to the shite spot.)
WIND:
(sashi) How lovely, though so familiar,
Suma as twilight falls!
Fishermen’s calls echo faintly;
They face each other.
BOTH:
out at sea, their frail craft loom
dim, the face of the moon:
wild geese in silhouette,
flocks of plovers, cutting gales,
salt sea winds—yes, each one
at Suma speaks of autumn alone.71
Ah, the nights’ long, heart-chilling hours!
Face the audience.
WIND:
(kakeai) But come, let us draw brine!
At the sea’s edge flood and ebb
clothe one in salt robes:
RAIN
:
tie the sleeves across your shoulders
WIND:
to draw brine72—or so we wish,
RAIN:
yet no, try as we may,
WIND:
a woman’s wagon
CHORUS:
(age-uta) rolled in, falls back, weak and weary, (Autumn Rain goes to the back center. Pining Wind advances slightly, gazes after the cranes.)
rolled in, falls back, weak and weary.73
Cranes start from the reeds with cries
while all four storm winds add their roar.74
The dark, the cold: how can they be endured? (Pining Wind looks at the moon, then glances into the buckets on the brine wagon.)
As night wears on, the moon shines so bright!
Now we draw the moon’s reflections!
Salt-fire smoke—O do take care!75
This is the way we of the sea
live through the gloom of fall. (Kneels by the brine wagon.)
(sage-uta) Pine Islands! where Ojima’s seafolk,76
beneath the moon, (With her fan, mimes drawing brine, then gazes at the moon’s reflection in her pail.)
draw reflections, ah, with keen delight
draw reflections, ah, with keen delight! (To the shite spot.)
(rongi) Far away they haul their brine77
in Michinoku: though the name
is “near,” Chika, where workers tend
the Shiogama salt-kilns.78
WIND:
And where the poor folk carried salt-wood:
Akogi beach, that was, and the tide withdrawing
CHORUS:
on down the same Ise coast lies Futami shore,
and its Paired Rocks: O I would pair
a past life in the world with one renewed!79
WIND:
When pines stand misty in spring sun,
the sea-lanes seem to stretch away
past the tide-flats of Narumi,
Bay of the Sounding Sea.80
CHORUS:
Ah, Narumi, that was,
but here at Naruo,81
beneath the shadowing pines,
no moon ever shines to touch
the village huts roofed with rushes
at Ashinoya,82
WIND:
drawing brine from Nada seas
sorely burdens me with care
though none will tell, and I am come,
Traditional Japanese Literature Page 66