by Arthur Waley
Seami, in his plays, frequently quotes Po Chū-i's poems; and in his lament for the death of his son, Zemparu Motomasa, who died in 1432, he refers to the death of Po Chū-i's son, A-ts'ui.
PERSONS
RAKUTEN (a Chinese poet)
AN OLD FISHERMAN, SUMIYOSHI NO KAMI, who in Act II be-comes the God of Japanese Poetry
ANOTHER FISHERMAN
CHORUS OF FISHERMEN
SCENE: The coast of Bizen in Japan.
HAKU
I am Haku Rakuten, a courtier of the Prince of China. There is a land in the East called Nippon.* Now, at my master's bidding, I am sent to that land to make proof of the wisdom of its people. I must travel over the paths of the sea.
I will row my boat towards the rising sun,
The rising sun;
And seek the country that lies to the far side
Over the wave-paths of the Eastern Sea.
Far my boat shall go,
My boat shall go—
With the light of the setting sun in the waves of its wake
And a cloud like a banner shaking the void of the sky.
Now the moon rises, and on the margin of the sea
A mountain I discern.
I am come to the land of Nippon,
The land of Nippon.
So swiftly have I passed over the ways of the ocean that I am come already to the shores of Nippon. I will cast anchor here a little while. I would know what manner of land this may be.
THE TWO FISHERMEN (together)
Dawn over the Sea of Tsukushi,
Place of the Unknown Fire.
Only the moonlight—nothing else left!
THE OLD FISHERMAN
The great waters toss and toss;
The grey waves soak the sky.
THE TWO FISHERMEN
So was it when Han Rei* left the land of Etsu
And rowed in a little boat
Over the misty waves of the Five Lakes.
How pleasant the sea looks!
From the beach of Matsura
Westward we watch the hill-less dawn.
A cloud, where the moon is setting,
Floats like a boat at sea,
A boat at sea
That would anchor near us in the dawn.
Over the sea from the far side,
From China the journey of a ship's travel
Is a single night's sailing, they say.
And lo! the moon has vanished!
HAKU
I have borne with the billows of a thousand miles of sea and come at last to the land of Nippon. Here is a little ship anchored near me. An old fisherman is in it. Can this be indeed an inhabitant of Nippon?
OLD FISHERMAN
Aye, so it is. I am an old fisher of Nihon. And your honor, I think, is Haku Rakuten, of China.
HAKU
How strange! No sooner am I come to this land than they call me by my name! How can this be?
SECOND FISHERMAN
Although your honor is a man of China, your name and fame have come before you.
HAKU
Even though my name be known, yet that you should know my face is strange surely!
THE TWO FISHERMEN
It was said everywhere in the Land of Sunrise that your honor, Rakuten, would come to make trial of the wisdom of Nihon. And when, as we gazed westwards, we saw a boat coming in from the open sea, the hearts of us all thought in a twinkling, "This is he."
CHORUS
"He has come, he has come."
So we cried when the boat came in
To the shore of Matsura,
The shore of Matsura.
Sailing in from the sea
Openly before us—
A Chinese ship
And a man from China—
How could we fail to know you,
Haku Rakuten?
But your halting words tire us.
Listen as we will, we cannot understand
Your foreign talk.
Come, our fishing-time is precious.
Let us cast our hooks,
Let us cast our hooks!
HAKU
Stay! Answer me one question.* Bring your boat closer and tell me, Fisherman, what is your pastime now in Nippon?
FISHERMAN
And in the land of China, pray how do your honors disport yourselves?
HAKU
In China we play at making poetry.
FISHERMAN
And in Nihon, may it please you, we venture on the sport of making "uta."*
HAKU
And what are "uta"?
FISHERMAN
You in China make your poems and odes out of the Scriptures of India; and we have made our "uta" out of the poems and odes of China. Since then our poetry is a blend of three lands, we have named it Yamato, the great Blend, and all our songs "Yamato Uta." But I think you question me only to mock an old man's simplicity.
HAKU
No, truly; that was not my purpose. But come, I will sing a Chinese poem about the scene before us.
"Green moss donned like a cloak
Lies on the shoulders of the rocks;
White clouds drawn like a belt
Surround the flanks of the mountains."
How does that song please you?
FISHERMAN
It is indeed a pleasant verse. In our tongue we should say the poem thus:
Koke-goromo
Kitaru iwao wa
Samonakute,
Kinu kinu yama no
Obi wo suru kana!
HAKU
How strange that a poor fisherman should put my verse into a sweet native measure! Who can he be?
FISHERMAN
A poor man and unknown. But as for the making of "uta," it is not only men that make them. "For among things that live there is none that has not the gift of song.*
HAKU (taking up the other's words as if hypnotized)
"Among things that have life—yes, and birds and insects—"
FISHERMAN
They have sung Yamato songs.
HAKU
In the land of Yamato...
FISHERMAN
...many such have been sung.
CHORUS
"The nightingale singing on the bush,
Even the frog that dwells in the pond—"
I know not if it be in your honor's land,
But in Nihon they sing the stanzas of the "uta."
And so it comes that an old man
Can sing the song you have heard,
A song of great Yamato.
CHORUS (changing the chant)
And as for the nightingale and the poem it made—
They say that in the royal reign
Of the Emperor Kōren
In the land of Yamato, in the temple of High Heaven
A priest was dwelling.*
Each year at the season of Spring
There came a nightingale
To the plum-tree at his window.
And when he listened to its song
He heard it singing a verse:
"Sho-yō mei-chō rai
Fu-sō gem-bon sei."
And when he wrote down the characters,
Behold, it was an "uta"-song
Of thirty letters and one.
And the words of the song—
FISHERMAN
Hatsu-haru no Of Spring's beginning
Ashita goto ni wa At each dawn
Kitaredomo Though I come,
CHORUS
Awade zo kaeru Unmet I return
Moto no sumika ni. To my old nest.
Thus first the nightingale,
And many birds and beasts thereto,
Sing "uta," like the songs of men.
And instances are many;
Many as the myriad pebbles that lie
On the shore of the sea of Ariso.
"For among things that live
There is none that has not the gift of song."
Truly the fisherman has the ways of Ya
mato in his heart. Truly, this custom is excellent.
FISHERMAN
If we speak of the sports of Yamato and sing its songs, we should show too what dances we use; for there are many kinds.
CHORUS
Yes, there are the dances; but there is no one to dance.
FISHERMAN
Though there be no dancer, yet even I—
CHORUS
For drums—the beating of the waves.
For flutes—the song of the sea-dragon.
For dancer—this ancient man
Despite his furrowed brow
Standing on the furrowed sea
Floating on the green waves
Shall dance the Sea Green Dance.
FISHERMAN
And the land of Reeds and Rushes...
CHORUS
Ten thousand years our land inviolate!
[The rest of the play is a kind of "ballet"; the words are merely a commentary on the dances.]
ACT II.
FISHERMAN (transformed into SUMIYOSHI NO KAMI, the God of Poetry).
Sea that is green with the shadow of the hills in the water!
Sea Green Dance, danced to the beating of the waves.
(He dances the Sea Green Dance.)
Out of the wave-lands,
Out of the fields of the Western Sea
CHORUS
He rises before us,
The God of Sumiyoshi,
The God of Sumiyoshi!
THE GOD
I rise before you
The god—
CHORUS
The God of Sumiyoshi whose strength is such
That he will not let you subdue us, O Rakuten!
So we bid you return to your home,
Swiftly over the waves of the shore!
First the God of Sumiyoshi came.
Now other gods* have come—
Of Isé and Iwa-shimizu,
Of Kamo and Kasuga,
Of Ka-shima and Mi-shima,
Of Suwa and Atsuta.
And the goddess of the Beautiful Island,
The daughter of Shakära
King of the Dragons of the Sea—
Skimming the face of the waves
They have danced the Sea Green Dance.
And the King of the Eight Dragons—
With his Symphony of Eight Musics.
As they hovered over the void of the sea,
Moved in the dance, the sleeves of their dancing-dress
Stirred up a wind, a magic wind
That blew on the Chinese boat
And filled its sails
And sent it back again to the land of Han.
Truly, the God is wondrous;
The God is wondrous,and thou, our Prince,
Mayest thou rule for many, many years
Our Land Inviolate!
occurrence of place-names and plays of word on such names makes it impossible to translate.
Footnotes
* Here follows a long lyric passage describing their journey and ascent. The frequent
* I have only summarized the last chorus. When the pilgrims reach the summit, they pray to their founder, En no Gyōja, and to the God Fudō that the boy may be restored to life. In answer to their prayers a Spirit appears carrying the boy in her arms. She lays him at the Priest's feet and vanishes again, treading the Invisible Pathway that En no Gyōja trod when he crossed from Mount Katauragi to the Great Peak without descending into the valley.
* The play is given in a list of Seami's works composed on the authority of his great-grandson, Kwanze Nagatoshi, in 1524. Owada gives it as anonymous.
* "Wakare no tori," the bird which warns lovers of the approach of day.
* Turn it into a Buddha.
* The fact that Haku is a foreigner is conventionally emphasized by his pronunciation of this word. The fishermen, when using the same word later on, called it "Nihon."
* The Chinese call him Fan Li. He lived in China in the fifth century B.C. Having rendered important services to the country of Yiieh (Etsu), he went off with his mistress in a skiff, knowing that if he remained in public life his popularity was bound to decline. The Fishermen are vaguely groping towards the idea of "a Chinaman" and a "boat." They are not yet consciously aware of the arrival of Rakuten.
* Haku throughout omits the honorific turns of speech which civility demands. The Fishermen speak in elaborately deferential and honorific language. The writer wishes to portray Haku as an ill-bred foreigner.
* "Uta," i.e. the thirty-one syllable Japanese stanza.
* Quotation from the Preface to the Kokinshū ("Collection of Songs Ancient and Modern"). The fact that Haku continues the quotation shows that he is under a sort of spell and makes it clear for the first time that his interlocutor is not an ordinary mortal. From this point onwards, in fact, the Fisherman gradually becomes a God.
* The priest's acolyte had died. The nightingale was the boy's soul.
* They do not appear on the stage.
SUMMARIES
OF the plays which are founded in the Ise Monogatari* the best known are Izutsu and Kakitsubata, both by Seami. Izutsu is founded on the episode which runs as follows:
Once upon a time a boy and a girl, children of country people, used to meet at a well and play there together. When they grew up they became a little shame-faced towards one another, but he could think of no other woman, nor she of any other man. He would not take the wife his parents had found for him, nor she the husband that her parents had found for her.
Then he sent her a poem which said:
"Oh, the well, the well!
I who scarce topped the well-frame Am grown to manhood since we met."
And she to him:
"The two strands of my hair That once with yours I measured,
Have passed my shoulder;
Who but you should put them up?"†
So they wrote, and at last their desire was fulfilled. Now after a year or more had passed the girl's parents died, and they were left without sustenance. They could not go on living together; the man went to and fro between her house and the town of Takayasu in Kawachi, while she stayed at home.
Now when he saw that she let him go gladly and showed no grief in her face, he thought it was because her heart had changed. And one day, instead of going to Kawachi, he hid behind the hedge and watched. Then he heard the girl singing:
"The mountain of Tatsuta that rises
Steep as a wave of the sea when the wind blows
Tonight my lord will be crossing all alone!"
And he was moved by her song, and went no more to Takayasu in Kawachi.
In the play a wandering priest meets with a village girl, who turns out to be the ghost of the girl in this story. The text is woven out of the words of the Ise Monogatari.
Kakitsubata is based on the eighth episode. Narihira and his compamons come to a place called Yatsuhashi, where, across an iris-covered swamp, zigzags a low footpath of planks
Narihira bids them compose an anagram on the work Kakit-subata, "iris," and someone sings:
"Kara-goromo
Ki-tsutsu nare-ni-shi
Tsuma shi areba Bar u-baru ki-nuru
Tabi wo shi zo omou."
The first syllables of each line make, when read consecutively, the word Kakitsubata, and the poem, which is a riddle with many meanings, may be translated:
"My lady's love
Sat close upon me like a coat well worn;
And surely now
Her thoughts go after me down this long road!"
"When he had done singing, they all wept over their dried-rice till it grew soppy."
In the play, a priest comes to this place and learns its story from a village-girl who turns out to be the "soul of the iris-flower." At the end she disappears into the Western Paradise. "Even the souls of flowers can attain to Buddhahood."
HANAKATAMI
(THE FLOWER BASKET)
By Kwanami; Revised By Seami
BEFORE h
e came to the throne, the Emperor Keitai† loved the Lady Terubi. On his accession he sent her a letter of farewell and a basket of flowers. In the play the messenger meets her on the road to her home; she reads the letter, which in elaborately ceremonial language announces the Emperor's accession and departure to the Capital.
TERUHI
The Spring of our love is passed! Like a moon left lonely
In the sky of dawn, back to the hills I go,
To the home where once we dwelt.
(She slips quietly from the stage, carrying the basket and letter. In the next scene the EMPEROR* is carried on to the stage in a litter borne by two attendants. It is the coronation procession. Suddenly TERUHI, who has left her home distraught, wanders on to the stage followed by her maid, who carries the flower-basket and letter.)
TERUHI (speaking wildly)
Ho, you travelers! Show me the road to the Capital! I am mad, you say?
Mad I may be; but love bids me ask O heartless ones! Why will they not answer me?