The 10th Udaka Seigan Noh Performance

September 13, 2009

Noh play: Omu Komachi (Komachi’s Parrot-answer Poem)

Author: Zeami Motokiyo

Shite: Ono-no-Komachi, performed by Udaka Michishige

Omu Komachi was attributed to Zeami Motokiyo, whose treatises on Noh are regarded as the finest of all writings in theatre. Then, it’s one of those roles that Noh actors don’t usually perform until in their sixties. That is, unitl they have to reach certain calibre in a certain stage of their careers. So it’s such a special occasion.

So everyone on stage wore extra long hakama pants (they walked on their pants, basically) and matching vests with sort of winged shoulders. I discovered a beautiful thing about Noh music that the drummers who play otsuzumi (hip drum) and kotsuzumi (shoulder drum) with their amazing chanting represent the character of the shite (main actor). In this play, the leading role of Komachi is an old woman past her 100th birthday, so the otsuzumi and kotsuzumi were played by two senior drummers. I think they understand the timing of Komachi better perhaps.

Before I go on, just a brief story of Omu Komachi: Poetry-loving Emperor Yozei (876-884) wasn’t’ happy with the quality of poetry he found around him. He remembered the name Ono-no-Komachi, once famous for her poetic genius, now an old woman of a hundred years old, living in poverty, begging on the streets on the outskirts of the capital. The Emperor sends Great Counsellor Yuki-ie with a poem to pay respect to Komachi. Unable to see well now, Komachi asked Yuki-ie to read the poem for her. After listening to the poem, Komachi changed one syllable of the poem to make a new poem, suprising Yuki-ie and in a way showing her mastery in poetry. That was pretty much the story!

My view to Omu-Komachi was an oh-so-minimal of a Noh, almost making something out of nothing! But the mastery of Zeami again lies in the time it takes to describe the most ordinary of a situation: a very old woman with a glorious past, now in a very old age and death is approaching. This is what Noh is all about. It’s the Buddhist philosophy imbued in this form of theatre. Nobody can escape death. The pace of the play was so slow I saw a few in the audience nodded their heads in agreement. For Udaka-sensei, an upright dazzling man in his sixties, to transform his gender and age to perform Komachi is utterly amazing to watch.

To me, Omu-Komachi is the simplest of a tale of mortality. The program notes described, quite literally, about the glory days of the young Komachi, her splendid poetry, her past lovers (she’s been around…for a long time…). Now it’s all gone. What is left is an old frail woman, just back from begging on the street when Counsellor Yuki-ie visited her. The silence of the situation of being old, the emptiness of time that she had in an old age, one can imagine, could never been better display here in this play of Zeami’s. 

The program notes also described the ending just before Counsellor Yuki-ie left Komachi, “how the shadows lengthen, bringing the day to a close.” The farewell of Counsellor Yuki-ie was described by the chorus instead of a dialogue between the two, as if any conversation would not fit into such depth of silence. He quietly left Komachi. It’s her that had to deal with her mortality herself.

The most beautiful, touching moment was when Komachi performed a painfully slow dance in the end. The music stopped, the chorus stopped. Komachi slowly and quietly left the stage. Theatrically and philosophically, there’s nothing true to the situation than silence. I suppose that’s the mastery of Zeami who wrote it and Udaka-sensei to perform it.

That’s the hana moment alright. The most poignant of the play is also the simplest moment.

PS: Hana 花 means “flower”. It’s the analogy of the blooming a flower as the blooming of an actor in his youth with exuberance. It seems he can do anything with great energy. Soon the actor would lose his youthful energy but he has to develop his artistry to find the hana of a different kind. Zeami often refered to hana as the presence and intensity of the actor, the moment when the audience felt the true presence of the actor.

Acknowledgment: I traveled to Japan with the financial support from the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts and its arts funding and advisory body, and Arts Network Asia www.artsnetworkasia.org, an enabling grant body, working across borders in multiple disciplines, that encourage collaboration initiated and implemented in Asia by Asian artists and Asian arts communities.