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Preston discusses her experience taking noh lessons from a professional actor in Tokyo and recounts how noh pedagogy challenged her notions of “good” teaching and learning. Western pedagogies are typically obsessed with success or performance outcomes, innovation, and creating the illusion of a non-hierarchical classroom, but tradition and mimicry are central to noh pedagogy.

This chapter examines the development and construction techniques of the nohkan and includes interviews with the nohkan makers. It explains nohkan, also known as fue (flute), as a transverse flute made from a type of bamboo known as Pleioblastus simonii. The chapter discusses how the nohkan is traditionally played in the Noh theater, Kabuki, and some shrine festivals, and is recently seen on concert stages as part of both traditional and non-traditional ensembles. It also describes the nohkan as a unique instrument in both construction and sound that uses a nodo, a thin bamboo tube that disrupts the instrument's natural acoustics. The chapter highlights the performance techniques of the nohkan, which include the creation of shakuhachi-like white noise. It looks at several theories that surround the history and construction of the nohkan in Japan.

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 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.