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Chapter Seven examines how Zeami and his artistic heir Konparu Zenchiku sought to harness the otherworldly charisma of the aged body in Noh. This chapter traces Zeami’s uses of the aged form in his attempts to transform Noh from a low-status performance tradition into an aristocratized art. Zeami (and later Zenchiku) argued that Noh had its origins in okina sarugaku or the Shikisanban—a set of three ceremonial dances featuring actors performing as old men, including the smiling Okina. They described the Shikisanban as an ancient ritual with the power to ensure peace and prosperity in the realm. In developing the genre of Waki Noh—plays in which gods appear (usually as elders) to bless the realm—Zeami once again promoted the aged body as a locus of sacred power. And, in many of his dramatic works, Zeami used the aged body to generate pathos. Relying on Buddhist logic, Zeami suggested in his theoretical works and libretti that audiences moved by the pathos of the aged body would also reap worldly and spiritual benefits.

Menu collections, one of the major categories of published culinary books in the Edo period, included complex meals that most of their readers could not create because of the menus' expense and complexity, and the existence of sumptuary laws which prohibited the use of key ingredients and elaborate methods of serving. This chapter explores menu collections that vary in their treatment of their subject, but share the fact that they are less like shopping lists and guides for actual meals and more like poems written to evoke other things: the dining habits of the elite, the change of seasons, or Noh drama. The menus demonstrate ways that those who wrote about food borrowed from and participated in larger cultural trends ranging from the elite tea ceremony to popular pastimes such as shrine pilgrimage and the puppet theater. Medieval rules for cooking and dining became the guidelines for a literary genre in the Edo period, allowing readers to conceive of entire banquets as abstract meditations on food.

The list of those figures who, to varying degrees, donned the Japanese Noh mask in modernist theater is long. Having borrowed several of the most obvious elements of Noh, particularly the use of masks, symbolic movement, and ritual dramatic structure, modernist figures tended to re-dress these elements in the fashion of their own cultural costume. Euro-American works and productions based on or inspired by Noh were created throughout the twentieth century to serve a variety of political, religious, and didactic functions. Two archetypal cases of this kind, in which Noh was tailored to fit Western purposes in works of modernist music theater, were the “Plays for Dancers” of W. B. Yeats and the Lehrstücke of Bertolt Brecht.

This chapter is a transnational study that draws into focus the globalized modernist dialogue between artistic traditions. This dialogue is invited through both Wong’s investigation of the little known paintings, drawings and collages, rather than poetry, of Rabindranath Tagore. Rather than connecting Tagore with the Western traditions in which he was sometimes immersed, Wong explores the influence of the Japanese mask on the construction of a regional Indian Modernism, with particular emphasis on the Bengal School. She also investigates the Tagore family’s collection of Japanese noh theatre masks on display in the Rabindranath family home and the incorporation of mask themes in Abanindranath Tagore’s paintings and plays, which would have been known to Rabindranath Tagore. As Wong explains, this dynamic led to comparisons between Tagore’s work and more westernized strains of modernism, including Surrealism and Symbolism, as the artist travelled through Europe gaining popularity. But Wong traces Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali modernism as an artistic persona, one that, in light of imperialism and the orientalizing of the West, becomes a mask that strategically subverted, and at other times espoused Western and Eastern modernities.

This essay analyzes W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer, and specifically its negotiation of elements of Noh theater as well as its reliance on dramatic characteristics of tragedy for its fundamental structure. It first considers the various theatrical strategies employed by Yeats to represent the hero's absence before discussing how the Chinese-box structure of The Only Jealousy of Emer is employed in the service of the play's tragic dynamic, which turns theater into an ambiguous metaphor of absence. It then explains how the tragic logic that governs The Only Jealousy of Emer turns the dramatic project of Noh on its head, since it is based on the impossibility of the border between the visible and the invisible, between audience and stage. It suggests that the play enables Yeats to offer a kind of reinvention of tragedy distinct from naturalism and infused with “the dramatic syntax of the Noh tradition.”

This chapter, “Noh Kah: An Archaeological Site in Extreme Southeastern Quintana Roo,” describes the newly surveyed site Noh Cah as an example of the clustered dispersed settlement pattern known from throughout southeastern Quintana Roo. These mostly Early Classic sites do not have a single monumental core as is common in Petén. Rather they have multiple monumental cores arranged in clusters across a more dispersed landscape, possibly an advantageous arrangement for large scale cacao production. They are linked by line-of-site from pyramidal summits oriented on a predominately east–west axis that does not deviate beyond the angle of the summer and winter solstices. Epigraphic evidence from several of these sites links them to Early Classic Dzibanché and the powerful Kaanal dynasty that was located there.

This chapter illustrates how black programming produced elsewhere navigates the circuits of contemporary commercial television and global, digital distribution platforms. It looks at three examples of non-American black television and video programming: the animated Samoan/ Māori television series bro'Town (2004–2009); the booming Nigerian videofilm industry known as Nollywood; and the transnational pirating of the first Belizean television drama Noh Matta Wat (2005–2008). Together, these examples display several important trends in black television during an era of digitization, globalization, and marketization. First, there is an obvious increase in the variety of video and television programming featuring non-U.S. blacks circulating internationally. Secondly, these programs retain significant cultural specificity. Lastly, black television programming travels through disorganized, parallel markets, which make production funding highly precarious.

Song in Japanese Noh drama is generally described in terms of an eight-beat meter. In the hira-nori song rhythm, the meter is organized according to the standard Japanese poetic unit of 7+5 syllables. The meter of Noh is isochronous in theory and a song’s syllables can be laid out regularly in accordance with it. However in performance, singers and drummers never seem to obey the meter; rather they create layers of deviation from the meter. Spaces between beats articulated by drummers seem more elastic than one might imagine based on the notation. To examine such layers and elasticity, this chapter describes the singers’ training style. This teaches them how to deviate from the meter and specifies drummers’ modification types of the cycle of eight beats. “Taking komi” is the drummer’s technique for synchronizing with and detaching from the singers’ part. The history of patron-amateurs’ participation in performance is described as a background for the creation of the interaction style.

This chapter examines translation theory and practice in the context of the specific linguistic and cultural challenges that arise when translating Milton’s poetry into accessible Japanese. Milton has been known in Japan as being as important as Shakespeare, but his works have a limited readership while Shakespeare has had a strong presence. Elements that account for Milton’s reception are Milton scholarship in Japan, characteristics of the Japanese language, the archaic sound of Milton’s grand English style especially given Japanese translational choices, and a Christianity articulated too immediately and profoundly for a culture in which Christian training and history are almost absent. This chapter then provides a personal account and the theoretical underpinnings of Sano’s recent Japanese translation of Samson Agonistes and her participation in a well-received production in 2012 of poet Takahashi’s adaptation of Milton’s tragedy in the Noh style.