Killing the Self: How the Narrator Acts

Author(s): Frank Hoff

Source: Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 1-27
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
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 Killingthe Self:
How the NarratorActs
Frank Hoff

Joruria, theJapanese puppet theatre, is a type of animated storytel-

ling illustrated with puppets. One or more tayub (reciter, narrator, chanter,
or storyteller) and a musician sit apart from the main stage, where pup-
peteers silently manipulate large dolls without the use of strings (Plate 1).
One Western observer, Roland Barthes, finds in this type of theatre, where
words and movement are produced separately, an opportunity to re-
examine certain Western concepts: animate/ihanimate; outside/inside;
soul/God. (1982, 48-62) Because Barthes examines the relationship be-
tween puppet and manipulator, he does not explore the way in which the
storyteller renders texts: the tayu sometimes distinguishes between and at
other times intermixes the words of the characters and those of the
narration.
One detects a depreciation of this theatre's vocal aspect in Barthes'
catalogue of its "limited notion of the voice." (1982, 49) He does describe a
"whole cuisine of emotion," enumerating vocal effects and identifying
them with human emotion: "tears, paroxysms of rage, of supplication, of
astonishment, indecent pathos." (1982, 49) He also includes another di-
mension of the reciter's art, since it is a repertoire of pure sound as well:
"exaggerated declamation, tremolos, a falsetto tonality." (1982, 49) But
something has been overlooked; sound qualities need to be differentiated
according to the storyteller's dual role as characters and as narrator. This
differentiation is the subject of my article.
Chushingura:The Treasuryof LoyalRetainers(Keene 1971), an English
translation of the great 1748 puppet play Kanadehonchushingurac,contains

Frank Hoff is Associate Professorof East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. His most recent
publication is "Looking into the Distance: Stage Presence in Noh Theatre," JapanandAmerica1, no. 1
(spring 1984): 101-108.
Asian TheatreJournal2, no. 1 (Spring 1985). ?by the University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

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2 Hoff

lines attributed to characters and lines attributed to a narrator. In act 7, for

example, a young warrior, Heiemond, asks his sister, Okarue, to choose
suicide in order to resolve a complicated nexus of human relationships. In
the English translation, Heiemon concludes a long speech thus: "The sad
thing about being part of the lower rank is that unless you prove to other
samurai that your spirit is better than theirs, they won't let you join them.
Show you understand by giving me your life. Die for my sake." The words
of the narrator follow: "Okaru sobs again and again as she listens to her
brother's carefully reasoned words." (Keene 1971, 121) Then a speech by
Okaru is given.
Live performance is different from a printed text, however. The
mixing of speech and narration can be examined in recordings. A collec-
tion of the performances of the great reciter Takemoto Tsunatayuf
(1904-1969) contains a version of act 7 recited by three chanters-
Tsunatayu as Yuranosukeg, Takemoto Tosatayuih as Okaru, and the well-
known Takemoto Koshijidayui as Heiemon. (Takemoto 1981) The differ-
ent tayu give both dialogue and narration related to each of those three
main characters. (Brandon 1982, 119-120, 144 n. 28, 144n. 30) Reciting a
text by breaking it up into speeches for separate characters is unusual;
generally one chanter takes the lines of all characters and voices all
narration in a scene. The high ratio of speech to narration in act 7 may
explain the unusual mode of recitation.
The tayu moves from a tone of narration to one appropriate to
speech, and the versatility of the human voice-speaking, singing, and
reciting-is used to suggest meanings beyond the printed page.' For
example, the phrase, rendered in the neutral voice of narration by Kosh-
ijidayu, "the sad thing about being of the lower rank is that... they won't
let you join them," becomes in this way an epitome, perhaps a laconic
critique, of the play's theme. That same tayurenders the next two sentences
in Heiemon's voice. Such fragmentary use of a narrative tone within a
speech is common. In a speech that follows, the vocal coloring of Okaru the
woman returns only fleetingly and intermittently to punctuate the other-
wise narrative tone that predominates. The neutral tone is surprising
because her earlier speeches were in a distinctly female voice. Why then, at
a climax, should the tayu only occasionally convey the female pitch of
Okaru's voice?
The effect of crossovers within a single speech between narration
and the voice of a character should be interpreted individually. One phrase
of the aforementioned speech of Okaru's in which a critic has detected
irony, in fact criticism, at the expense of the samurai code is rendered in a
narrative mode: "I'll kill myself. After I'm dead, if my head or my body
can bring you credit, please use it for that purpose." 2 An arresting switch-
over to the character's voice comes earlier, in the passage where Okaru

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KILLING THE SELF 3

laments her husband's suicide. It is a short phrase, but expressed in a

feeling voice: "Kampeij to die when he was hardly thirty."
To summarize, then, a neutral narrative tone can be inserted into
spoken dialogue, where Koshijidayu departs from Heiemon's voice, for
example. Or the predominantly narrative tone of a speech can be colored
by a speaking voice, such as, "Kampei to die when he was hardly thirty."
Another type of crossover is the intrusion of an individual, personal tone-
the voice of a particular character-into an otherwise third-person
narration.
The subtle interplay just illustrated with brief examples fromjoJruri
is typical of traditionalJapanese theatre, not only in vocal procedures but
also in grammatical and syntactic usages. In costuming, masking, and
acting technique performers retain dual identities, fluctuating between
themselves and their characters, moving from one identity to another. As I
will illustrate, Japanese critics and scholars sometimes group such tra-
ditional theatre characteristics under what they call katarik (storytelling
tradition). They believe that this durable tradition is one way to charac-
terizeJapanese classical theatre. (Honda 1970, Introduction) A proper un-
derstanding of the current definition of the kataritradition first requires the
realization that in the early 1960s critics, scholars, and performers alike
sought to distinguish theatre in Japan from Western naturalism.

Stage Presence in No
Comment from the period conveys the sense of an intellectual
climate within which katari began to be considered a theatrical principle.
The year 1963, not quite a quarter century after the end of the Second
World War, was the 600th anniversary of the birth of Zeamil, major
dramatist and theoretician of nom. In that year an East-West symposium
on theatre was held in Tokyo, and a number of special events related to
Zeami took place. One of these, a discussion of no as contemporary
theatre-later published (Kanze 1981c)-includes the no actor Kanze
Hisaon.
At the moderator's request, Kanze explains the survival of no
through six centuries. Kanze notes that by 1945 public performance of the
genre became a rarity. (During the Occupation, he himself saw the under-
pinnings of Japanese society threatened by an onslaught of foreign prod-
ucts and ideas; the survival of no thus became a personal matter to him.)
For the sake of his answer, Kanze breaks the history of no into three periods.
The first lasted until the late nineteenth century, before which the liveli-
hood of no troupes had been guaranteed by the support of the samurai class.
When that class was abolished after the Meiji restoration, the genre almost
became extinct, and the history of no entered upon a second period. A

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4 Hoff

certain group of actors began to find support among advocates of Western-

ization. To help the new elite understand no, these actors incorporated
European ideas about theatre into their explanations. Thus, Western
theatrical concepts like naturalism and realism began, almost imper-
ceptibly, to influence the way in which no was performed. The immediate
postwar period can be seen as marking the beginning of a third period. This
was the time when Kanze himself sought to revive the spirit of the much
earlier, and in his opinion truly creative, epoch of Zeami; Zeami's career
and aesthetic seemed an ideal guide. Throughout the symposium, Kanze
makes no reference to katari; however, he does describe the essence of no as
nonnaturalistic. In this way, he opposes the earlier Westernizing ten-
dencies and argues for the uniqueness and strength ofJapan's traditional
theatre.
Some ten years later, Kanze clarifies his ideas in response to a
question about how the no actor prepares for performance. (Kanze 1981b)
He acknowledges his sympathy for the emphasis of Peter Brook and Jerzy
Grotowski on the sacred nature of the actor's art because their view has
something in common with the essence of no. Kanze cites dance in no as
one example. In some plays the main dance is realistically motivated by
previous events in the plot. For example, the principal character may be
asked by another character to dance. On the other hand, notes Kanze, in
the plays Teika0 (Yokomichi and Omote 1960-63, 41:46-53) and The
Shrinein theFields (JNonomiyaP; Varley 1970) there is no outward motivation
for dance. By this he means that they both containjo-no-maiq, movement
without words which is accompanied only by the austere no ensemble.
For approximately fifteen minutes, the performer moves on stage without
being in a role. In the Western sense, this kind of dance is meaningless
because it does not arise from plot. Dance of this sort makes the ultimate
demand upon the performer's "spiritual quality" (Kanze's expression;
1981b, 73-74). An interior transformation must take place, emphasizes
Kanze, if pure dance is to be effective. Kanze pursues the point by stating
that no is not like naturalistic theatre, for an actor does not cease to be
himself in order to become a character. In an experience akin to magic
or ritual, performers are transformed into a world beyond their own
consciousness.
Kanze wishes to describe what actors experience when they are not
playing roles in the naturalistic or realistic sense. In an essay written in
1978 (Kanze 1981a), shortly before his death, Kanze describes the expe-
rience of the performer in katari. In particular, he details how a performer
experiences the flow of time on stage during the long recitation of the main
story section of a play. The narrative section he refers to is the kuser.The
convention is that a group of reciters, also sitting on stage and called thejis
(generally, though misleadingly, translated as "chorus"), takes some or all

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KILLING THE SELF 5

FIGURE1. The no actor Kanze Hisao during the iguse (sitting-kuse) of the play
Teika,at the Tessenkai's performancein Kanze Hall, Tokyo, in October 1961.
(Photo: Yoshi Tatsuo, Tessen Bekkai.)

of the words of this section in place of the main performer. In some kusethe
performer moves while theji recites, but in others-the so-called sitting-
kuse (iguset)-he remains motionless at center stage. The technique that
accompanies an iguse is a challenge to a contemporary no actor-not
because the passage is unmotivated, as in pure dance, but because the
performer seems to be doing nothing for so long a time.
Kanze was often asked about the emotions he had when silently
facing the audience while theji sings the words of the passage. His answer:

I want to exist on the stage as a flowermight, one which by chance hasjust

happened to blossom there. Each member of the audience too sits brood-
ing over variousimages of his own. Like a single flower.The floweris alive.
The flower must breathe. The stage tells the story of the flower. (Kanze
1981a, 105-106)

Kanze uses imagistic language to describe the ineffable: the emotions the
actor has in pure dance or during the iguse, experiences foreign to natural-
ism. The choice of the flower (hanau) as a prime image was his inheritance
from Zeami. Zeami, not Europe, provided Kanze an ideal for no.

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6 Hoff

Role-taking in Kabuki'
The acting styles of kabuki and naturalism are contrasted in an
article by Hirosue TamotsuW (1963) who examines a performance ofJean-
Paul Sartre's Kean3 starring Takizawa Osamux and staged by the group
MingeiY (Folk-art) in Tokyo, September 1963. The author questions the
positive critical response of the day to Takizawa's acting in the role of
Edmund Kean, and then turns to investigate how a performer denies the
self in order to play a role. Hirosue compares the approach to characteri-
zation by kabuki actors in their most creative period (late-seventeenth to
early-eighteenth centuries) and that by Takizawa, a respected representa-
tive of European naturalism, which transplanted and adapted toJapan has
been called "new theatre" (shingekiZ).Hirosue also explores differing "ide-
ologies" (the term he prefers) of acting, particularly assumptions about
role-taking.
Similar to Kanze's breakdown of no eras, Hirosue categorizes
periods of kabuki acting technique. In the early, creative period an actor
made roles and plays simultaneously. Although the reference is to the
present century, the mode of creativity itself remains the same when the
folklorist Origuchi Shinobuaa observes of the great kabuki actor Onoe
Kikugoro VIab: "He writes for the stage the drama of his own body."
(Origuchi 1955, 194) As their creative power waned, performers ceased
being creators and became imitators. The latter merely used whatever
techniques were at hand: "They took things ready-made out of a drawer."
(Hirosue 1963, 6)
To breathe new life into old forms, says Hirosue, actors experi-
mented during the time of Westernization in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries with kanjoinyuac, the foreign concept of empathy with a
character. For Hirosue, this approach not only borrowed naturalism's
trivialization of detail, but also rejected premises central to earlier kabuki.
One such premise was the attitude of male actors of female roles (onna-
gataad) who had to deny or reject their maleness as part of the process of
imitating female comportment. Great courtesans, the primary role-type
early in kabuki's development, were the most conspicuous models among
many observable types of women's behavior. The denial/rejection of
normal behavior required of lower-class girls as part of their indoctrination
into the world of the courtesan was a model for the male actor's rejection of
the traditional male role.
To deny oneself is part of any actor's efforts in creative imitation.
Hirosue notes how important for Takizawa was the skill of identifying with
other people's ways of thinking. However, performers such as he reject or
deny themselves in an intellectual rather than a physical manner, as had
been the practice of early kabukionnagata.
Performers of traditionalJapanese theatre forms must be conscious

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KILLING THE SELF 7

of both a difference between themselves and the objects of their imitation,

and of an opposition to these objects. This dynamic provides an under-
standing of katari. The narrator qua actor is both separate from and
identical with the characters. Injoruri the narrator sits apart from the stage
on which the puppets are manipulated. However, in kabukithis separation
is not spatial, rather it is psychological, in the sense of the doubled nature of
the actor's experience. Hirosue comments upon a passage by Yoshizawa
Ayameae, one of the progenitors of the onnagataart, contained in The Actors'
Analects (Dunn and Torigoe 1969, 46-66), a record of discussion by actors
and dancers in the late-seventeenth century:
One ofYoshizawa's utterances was that in onnagataplaying, her outward
appearance should be coquettish, but her heart chaste. And to make a
samurai'swife unfemininejust because she is a samurai'swife is bad acting.
When one is playing the role a strong-minded woman, one must see that
her heart has some softness. (1969, 51)
Hirosue notes that a double rejection is implied in this statement. Yet
neither is a rejection of self on an intellectual level, as in Takizawa's case.
Primarily, the onnagata rejects his physical male self. On another level,
Yoshizawa points out, when an actor performs the role of a strong-minded
samurai's wife he may be mistakenly tempted to fall back upon his own
masculinity as the most expeditious way to convey this characteristic. By
mixing opposites ("her heart has some softness"), by striking a balance in a
second, or double, rejection of self-of himself as a female impersonator-
the actor succeeds in creating a samurai's wife. (Hirosue 1963, 6)
Hirosue adds that the kabukiactor of female roles is unnatural in the
extreme. However, his training gives him a special awareness that the
difference separating him from the object of imitation is lessened by an act,
or in this case acts, of rejection/denial. This awareness affects his under-
standing of role-taking. Further, the kabuki actor's consciousness of an
apartness, quite unlike the naturalistic actor's empathy, is helpful in under-
standing the katari tradition. Or rather-it is the katari tradition that
conditioned this apartness.

Katari: Archetype and Ideology

The doubled, contradictory identity, as discussed by Domoto
Masakiaf (1963), is at the core of the shamanic prototype of katari in
Japan's classical dramatic types. If a historical perspective is part of
Kanze's and Hirosue's arguments, a prehistory of theatre is essential for
Domoto because he locates his archetype in a god possessing and speaking
through a priestess. Domoto interrelates engiag (acting and stage tech-
nique) and maneruah(imitation) before moving into his central concept,
kamigakariai(possession) as prototype.

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8 Hoff

Basically one is interested in engi because it imitates the shape of something

that never was. By imitating it, the priestess's rite of possession leads to her
becoming that thing and then manifesting its power. Though we know
that the famous story of Ame no Uzume at the cave door is a mythical
scenario, we still feel obliged to place it at the beginning of all histories
of theatre.4 Forever afterward, this drama has been entangled with
Japanese theatre, and in fact has dominated it. It is the tradition of posses-
sion, the tradition of katari. Katari starts in third-person language, then
suddenly changes into first. As one Chinese character with which the word
can be written implies, katari is a process that deceives reality. It inverts
reality. Inversion is a bewitchment by which the individual human per-
sonality of the narrator, or of the priestess who calls up the spirit, is animated
and changes. Whether the priestess in this process is the living reality and
the spirit has appeared temporarily, or whether the spirit itself is real and
the priestess but a temporary manifestation, is an unanswerable question.
One cannot know in fact. There is only ambiguity. Is one imitating a shape
of something outside oneself or is the person who imitates really returning
once again to become the object he thinks he is imitating? One thing is
certain: there are two contradictory aspects within the single human.
Below what at first appears on the surface, its opposite is unexpectedly
forced upward. There is change, transformation from one aspect to
another. (Domoto 1963, 11)

Mystification of katari in this quotation is purposeful. Like Kanze,

Domoto talks about acting, the essence of theatre, in language unlike that
of naturalism. More importantly, the quotation brings together key con-
cepts of katari: engi, a term which places acting technique in a wider
philosophical or ideological context; priestess and possession; the change
from third- to first-person discourse; a secondary meaning of katari, "decep-
tion," such that theatricality, which is itself a kind of deception, is a
productive fiction of life as well; the simultaneous existence within a single
human being of opposite and sometimes contradictory tendencies or iden-
tities; the transformation or change from one identity to another; and, one
might add, the inconsistency of human, personality. The underlying
human experience of contradiction and change-life/death, male/female,
a pulling and tension between many other and equally diverse identities-
makes a dramaturgy of transformation both effective on stage and true to
life's experience.

Katari and the History of the Performing Arts

Gunji Masakatsuaj (1979c) specifically mentions kamigakari as the
archetype of traditionalJapanese theatrical genres. He defines it as a rite of
possession during which a priestess invokes a spirit, calls upon it with her

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KILLING THE SELF 9

own voice, and speaks in the spirit's voice-first to name herself as that
spirit and then to deliver its oracle (katari). To support the hypothesis that
traditional types of theatre actually do contain katari-like elements, the
author analyzes no and kabuki texts and draws upon their performance
features. He also refers to folk performances in the Japanese countryside
today. Though outside the mainstream of classical theatrical arts, these
performances have preserved the form of their antecedents. If those such as
Gunji refers to were not alive today, the prehistory of Japan's traditional
performing arts would be known through visual and written documen-
tation alone, and very likely Gunji's conceptualization of theatricality in
Japan would not have taken the form it has.
Gunji begins his argument with a distinction between European
and Japanese theatrical arts. (1979c, 563-564) The concept of conflict
may be essential to a definition of drama in Europe, but not for Japan's
classical theatre. For example, in no the relation of the principal performer
(shiteak) to the secondary performer (wakial) is not adversarial (Plate 2).
The waki defers to, or sets off, the shite;in a sense he seconds the acting of the
shite. This is clear in spatial terms: the shite alone occupies center stage,
facing the audience directly. His scenic prominence-a reminder of the
origin in katari of his engi in the right to face an audience-is paralleled in
the dramaturgy of no plays. Vi can be called a drama of a single person, the
shite, and Gunji speaks of it as a first-person drama. It takes place as the
first-person story-the Japanese word being monogatariam,a compound
noun created by monoand katari-of the shite. This means that the entire
story focuses on the shite: the waki is on stage only as an agent to witness or
validate this tale.
To illustrate the survival of the older katari mode, Gunji stresses
flexibility of point of view within the language of no. He analyzes the
transition from first to third person in the name-announcing section
(nanorian)of the well-known play Sumidagawaa?(The Sumida river; Nippon
Gakujutsu Shinkokai 1955-60, 1: 143-160). He believes that a form of self-
introduction itself is evidence of the survival of the older archetype of
possession. In true rites of possession, or rituals derived from these, tran-
sition from the third-person formulae of a priest(ess) who invokes a spirit,
enumerating its names or attributes, to the first-person naming of himself
or herself by the spirit is taken as proof that the rite of possession has been
effective, that the spirit is truly present.
The example from Sumidagawais intended to show that no is first-
person drama. Yet we find third-person expressions within a first-person
speech. Gunji adroitly, though paradoxically, resolves the seeming contra-
dition: first person in the nanori is in one sense similar to third person
because it is used to introduce and explain oneself. However, the need to
distinguish between first- and third-person language itself arises from a

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10 Hoff

modern conciousness. Many instances of discourse which is dual, flexible,

and ambiguous regarding person are found in earlyJapanese literature. As
I illustrated in the earlier discussion ofjoruri, ambiguity in personal ident-
ity, a part of the kataritradition in general, can be effectively used as a stage
art.
Another characteristic of no which is a feature of its katari nature is
that it never developed into a theatre of dialogue. Even where dialogue is
used its language, Gunji notes, seems from a Western perspective to be
handled irrationally. AtakaaP (Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai 1955-60,
3: 149-171), the no play that served as the basis for the well-known kabuki
play The SubscriptionList (Kanjinchoaq; Brandon and Niwa 1972), is one
of the most "dramatic" plays in the no repertoire. Yet here, the child actor
who takes the role of the hero Yoshitsunear uses the third person to describe
his own actions in a series of short exchanges with his followers. Again,
even at the very climax of the play Funa-Benkeias (Benkei in the boat;
Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai 1955-60, 1:161-182), when Yoshitsune is
locked in combat with the spirit of his mortal enemy, the performer who
takes the role explains his actions in the third person. Despite the fact that
he is disguised, masked, and costumed in a particular role, the performer in
no also retains the older function of performer as narrator, telling a story in
a language that ranges between first- and third-person discourse, some-
times even taking the words of another character. The no actor does so
because he developed from the katari tradition of a kamigakarinarrator.
Gunji uses a similar rationale to explain why kabuki performance
handles the conclusion of The Village School (Terakoyaat;Leiter 1979) in a
way that is out of keeping with the Western concept of character consis-
tency. Though the final short speeches, the well-known irohaokuriau(Leiter
1979, 139-140), are sometimes delivered by several actors, the passage
should be interpreted as a first-person lamentation of the narrator, or the
"dramatist," says Gunji. (Gunji 1979c, 567-568) It is not the expression of
individual grief on the part of several characters. The special type of kabuki
vocal technique used is borrowed from joruri and takes the form of stage
speech recited in succession by several actors. The sentiments expressed
have no indication of personal or individual characteristics. It does not
matter which actor-character takes which line. In fact, the effect is all the
more intense because roles are not differentiated. A unity of sentiment
emerges at the conclusion of the play. Such an effect, according to Gunji,
comes naturally to the katari tradition in kabuki.
Another example of kabuki'skatari nature can be seen in Kumagai's
Camp (Kumagai jinyaaV; Brandon 1975, 186-211). Fuji no Kataaw, the
mother, begs the warrior Kumagai to tell her about the death of her son
Atsumoriax. The subsequent battle story, in which Kumagai tells how he
killed the boy, is a high point (Plate 3). Kumagai is asked by Fuji no Kata

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KILLING THE SELF 11

to narrate the death of her son; but as he begins, he turns away from her
and faces directly forward, toward the audience, just as the tayu (a survival
from the original puppet version) at the side of the stage, intones: "He
settles himself and begins to narrate the tale!" (Brandon 1975, 194)
Fuji no Kata seems to pay no attention to the tale. Gunji explains
why: as the story is told, her identity as a character in the play vanishes. She
yields the stage to the narrator of the katari,just as the waki of no does to its
shite. Were this scene to be staged by a modern theatrical group, surmises
Gunji, the implicit conflict between a mother who wants to hear of the last
moments of her son and the warrior who killed him would be fully
exploited. But to stage it psychologically, with Fuji no Kata and Kumagai
confronting each other, would be a clumsy translation into a "modern"
idiom of an original where the katari spirit is still alive.
In his article, "Towards a History of the Japanese Theatre: An
Introduction," (1964) Gunji admonishes scholars and critics to be alert to
concepts that can serve as a basis for a trulyJapanese history of its theatre.
Gunji has discovered these in part through reflection upon specific perfor-
mances he has seen. Their very range and variety, unique to Japan, has
contributed in a large measure to the vitality of his thought.
One of these performances took place in November 1964, when the
Actors' Theatre (Haiyuzaay) produced a "modern theatre" (shingeki)
adaptation of the kabuki play Tokaido Yotsuyakaidanaz (The ghost story of
Yotsuya; Sigee 1979). First staged in 1825, this work by the kabukidrama-
tist Tsuruya Namboku IVba has been highly regarded for the truthfulness
of its picture of lower-class life in Edo (Tokyo). Neither performance style
nor staging used in the first production has survived. The Actors' Theatre
followed the dictates of contemporary Western-derived realism in its pro-
duction, a liberty that, in Gunji's judgment, reflects a fundamental mis-
understanding of the nature of kabukirealism which is always constrained
within the limits of its larger katari framework.
Another performance that contributed to Gunji's understanding of
the pervasiveness of the katarielement in theJapanese performing arts took
place in 1962. A play in the repertoire of the daimokudatebbperformance
form was presented as part of the annual October production of folk
performance in Tokyo. Daimokudateis an uncostumed, unmasked narrative
form from the Nara region. Seeing it filled out Gunji's understanding of
how the katari tradition developed toward no and kabuki.
Even earlier, in February 1961, Gunji had been among a group of
seven scholars who accompanied Honda Yasujibc, doyen of folk perfor-
mance studies in Japan, on the first leg of a research trip that eventually
took Honda to the village near Nara where daimokudatehad been preserved.
(Honda 1971, 372-375) The close tie between the two men helps to explain
the development of Gunji's theory of theatre. Honda identifies folk perfor-

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12 Hoff

FIGURE2. In daimokudateperformance (Yamabe-gun, Nara Prefecture, Japan),

Benzaiten, the divinity of the Itsukushima Shrine, bestows the halberd upon
General Kiyomori. This marks the highpoint of the katari. (Photo: Hagiwara
Hidesabur6.)

mance types such as daimokudateand kowakamaibdas an "intermediary step

by which katari advanced toward classical no in the process of becoming a
staged performance."5 (Honda 1973, 1131) For in types such as these,
performers are not disguised as characters in the stories they tell; they both
narrate and speak dialogue. Even though more than one performer recites,
the narration is not broken up "rationally"; no effort is made to apportion
exclusively to any one performer speeches attributed in the text to a
particular character. An apportionment of narration and of speech is made
for reasons, including musical ones, other than verisimilitude and consis-
tencv in character delineation and expression.

Katari and Acting Technique6

The starting point for the creation ofengi (acting technique) and for
decisions on matters of staging in the Actors' Theatre 1964 production of
Totsuyakaidanwas an understanding of the text as literature. Actors anal-
yzed speeches and built up characters logically, or psychologically, based
upon this understanding. They believed-incorrectly, according to Gunji
(1964, 6)-that such an approach, derived from Western realism, was
applicable.

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KILLING THE SELF 13

FIGURE3. Three narrators deliver a story of military exploits in kowakamai,

(Yamato-gun, Fukuoka Prefecture,Japan). They use neither costumes, masks,
nor gestures which might identify them with the characters presented. (Photo:
Hagiwara Hidesaburo.)

However the equivalent of the dramatic text in kabukihas never had

the exalted role as literature attributed to its Western counterpart. The
daihonbe(script) of kabukiwas merely a memorandum; it was kept for the
sake of recording speeches to be used as part of the paramount aspects of
performance-production and acting. Acting in kabuki has never been
based upon the scenario as literature, but upon katari.
The deficiency of the Yotsuyakaidanproduction was due to a confu-
sion: the actors mistook naturalism as they practiced it for the "realistic"
strain within kabuki. In the latter, faithful reproduction of lifelike detail
(shaseibf), though present, has always been subservient to the katari-nature
of kabuki. Whatever directly mimetic elements may be included are re-
stricted by the larger aesthetic. Portrayal of real life (shasei) always takes
place within the space and the time of katari.
This unique world also determines the human image of characters
in kabuki. In a sense, becoming a role is a phenomenon shared by actors
East and West, yet the various means to this end differ. If the acting
technique ofJapan's classical theatre forms might be described as that of
katarubg (telling a story),yobubh (calling-out to one) epitomizes Western-
derived realism.
Gunii (1964, 7) applies this view to the relationship between nar-

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14 Hoff

rator and role. In katari, the narrator frequently speaks of events on a level
distinct, almost in a separate dimension, from that occupied by the char-
acter whose speeches he delivers. In the same way, though he may be
costumed as a particular character, his acting technique does not make
him the equivalent of that character. The kabuki actor uses a mode of
expression that might be typified as speaking a katari in costume. His
technique derives from the basic situation of addressing a katari to an
audience. This technique cannot express an interior state or conflict.
Consquently, the more actors try, as did the shingekiperformers of Fotsuya
kaidan, to become characters in the drama, the further they stray from the
goal.
Kabukiengi describes from the outside. At the same time, it induces
an illusion within the spectator. Thus the audience is caught up by the
magic of kabukiexpression. The narrator as actor creates his character by
conveying the illusion that this is the way he would like the character to be.
The performer in kabukiis always the self who performs; he never becomes
the hero of the drama. But by giving up the attempt at empathy, he breaks
through into an even more encompassing reality, from which it is easy for
the actor to "possess," as one would say of the priestess, the character.

Katari and the Function of the Actor

The concept of katariprovided the theme for a series of lectures on no
held between October 1965 and February 1966. By this time, katari was
becoming accepted as the way by which to identify the uniqueness of
Japanese classical theatre. The series was held under the auspices of the
Tessenkaibi, a subgroup of the larger Kanzebj school of no, of which Kanze
Hisao was a leading member. The scholar Yokomichi Mariobk delivered
six talks: (1) the engi of katari, (2) the origin of katari and no, (3) song in
katari, (4) various katari, (5) katari and kyogenbu, (6) katari and no. (Kanze
1981d, 380)
Katari and no, as a subject of inquiry, continued to stimulate Kanze
and Yokomichi. A lively glimpse of the two, together formulating hypoth-
eses about the history of no in relation to katari, is caught in a discussion,
published a year after the katari series. (Kanze 1981e, 197-198) The
general drift of one passage and an important conclusion deserve to be
mentioned.
Kanze says that the performer in the plays Bashobm(Nippon Gaku-
jutsu Shink6kai 1955-60, 1: 125-142) and Teika has a double identity. He
does not become the role, as naturalistic theatre would have him do, but is
simultaneously himself and the role. This is a feature of plays of the third
category of no--kauramonobn (female-wig plays) that might be explained
as an inheritance from an earlier katari form, speculates Kanze. He won-

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KILLING THE SELF 15

ders what Yokomichi thinks of plays in other categories such as Jinen kojib?
(Yokomichi and Omote 1960-63, 40:96-105) and Sotoba Komachibp
(Komachi on the stupa; Nippon Gakujutsu Shink6kai 1955-60,
3: 79-93). Is there any historical relation here to a tradition of katari?
Yokomichi's opinion is that third-category plays, with which
Kanze associates katari-like elements and the double identity, were in fact a
later development. In that sense, they should more accurately be termed
"secondary" katari plays. However, in the second pair mentioned by
Kanze, a primary katari influence can be detected-for they result from a
process of development that can be partially reconstructed with the
evidence provided by a performance type like daimokudate.The exchange
concludes with a remark by Kanze:

The implication, then, for myself as a performer,is that the relationship

between the performer'sself and his role in the type of no and kyogenI
mentioned earlier came about only afterthe establishment of what you
call the "secondary type" of katariin no. (Kanze 1981e, 198)

The discussion between Kanze and Yokomichi looks at katari as-

pects in no; Gunji (1979a) examines katari in kabukiandjo5ruri.In another
article, written the same year (1979b), Gunji discusses the performance of
Okinabq (literally, "benign old man").7 Translated below is a passage from
that article in which the author explores the significance of one Japanese
word for "actor,"yakushabr (literally, "person who has a role or function").
In the context of the Okina role, the actor is a man who puts on the mask,
takes the role of the old man, and in the persona of this divine figure
delivers a katari. (Plate 5) Transformation of the actor, hence the title of
Gunji's essay (translated as "Engi, transformation into kami"; 1979b), is
effected either by masking procedures or by the various austerities of a
training system.
Here Gunji no longer emphasizes, as he once did, a contrast in the
practice of role-taking between Western and Japanese theatre, which has
become implicit in his outlook. The concepts of shamanistic origin and of
transformation recall Domoto's and Gunji's identification of katari with
shamanism. And the cluster of ideas around the concept of rejecting self
"killing" oneself, self-mortification as a mode of transformation-reminds
us of Hirosue's discussions of the principle of role-taking for the kabuki
onnagata.
If the language of this passage in English translation seems formi-
dably esoteric, one has only to imagine how aJapanese reader might react
when readingJapanese translations of current theoretical Western works.
The religious, folkloric, and ethnic biases here faithfully represent an
important strain of conceptual and theoretical writing on theatre in the
Japanese language.

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16 Hoff

When he puts on a mask the performer's humanity is obliterated; man is

transformed into the face of god (kamibS). Eyes through which he looks
become those of the kami who is looking. The mask is looking. The spec-
tator, somewhere beyond the mask, sees kami turned into a mask; he does
not see a man wearing a mask. The rite called Okina is performed openly
on the stage before spectators. The performer of the role of Okina puts on
the mask in front of spectators who are looking at him. Because the rela-
tionship between the human actor and mask is displayed so clearly, the
spectator accepts the extremities of the performance-truth and falsity
-believing them both to be equally real.
Transformation is validated. It is not mere illusion. It cannot be
mistaken; it is there to be seen. Since masking is palpable, we relax, letting
ourselves be swept forward until we plunge into the true world within the
mask. Masking makes it possible to accept what we see as a procedure, or
formality, leading to transformation into kami. This is the tradition of per-
formance in Japan. For the role [function,yakuwaribt] of the actor (yaku-
sha) here has lost none of its shamanic nature. The wordyakusha means the
person who has the kami-role. Consequently, by the very action of putting
on the mask [where the verb "put on" is etymologically related to that for
"being possessed"] the double nature of the mask is certified; it is the
genuine expression of transformation into kami.
Going further still we might say that even when unmasked the face
of the actor on stage is not the face of a man. It is a mask. The unmasked
face of the performer in no is called hitamenbu.Hitamenimplies a strict inter-
diction against showing emotion. This is so because if the actor shows emo-
tion, the feelings of his secular nature appear .... For this reasonJapanese
performance does not tolerate empathy with a character. The performer
remains aware that his profession is ultimately the tradition of the guild of
storytellers (kataribebV).In other words, he is a functionary (yakuninbw) in
the rite of kamigakari.
Members of an audience, however, do engage in empathy. In fact,
the actor has the role (yakubx) of making spectators experience empathy.
But he does not himself empathize with a character. In this pointJapanese
traditional theatre differs both from European and from modern theatre
in Japan, shingeki. What is true of the nature of classical performance in
Japan is the masking experience.
We see, then, that transformation (henshinby) is not empathy.
Ultimately transformation is an acting technique (engi) by which the per-
former eliminates, does away with [literally, "kills"], the self.
Doing away with self, escaping one's humanity, is a rite of passage
assigned to the actor in order that he might be transformed into kami. In no
the actor of Okina at an earlier time had to undergo various austerities as
part of his preparation. In a similar way, the equivalent of an ascetic
practice, abstinence, and self-denial are still important and serious off-
stage engi. At one time ritual ablution was performed in order to come near
to kami's body. Self-mortification aimed at putting off one's humanity....
Purification was expected to follow upon the rejection of one's body.

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KILLING THE SELF 17

This process, the darker interior aspect of drama, cannot be seen

by the eyes of the spectator. One might even say that theatre is false where
the deeper darknessis absent. What happens on stage is the purified por-
tion. It appears afterwards;it is the "edge," the "flower" (hana).In order
for the miracle of the flower'sblossoming to take place on stage, there must
be time spent in training, self-mortification through training. Another
requirement is a space, an area, for the practice of abstinence, a private
room where the performer can reject his body. Only theatre that has
passed through this deeper space and this deeper time manifeststhe mar-
velous and visible spiritual power. And so we might say that in theatre the
time and space of training are the most spectacular drama of all.
Seeing the training sessions of Suzuki Tadashibz of the Waseda
Shogekijocaone imagines that one day its training procedures will pro-
duce many actors like Shiraishi Kayokocb. And one understands fully
that theatre is more than a mere reproduction of a dramatic work of
literature. (Gunji 1979b, 521-523)

Katari and the Performance Space

Here, Gunji has closely intergrated the concepts of engi (acting
technique) and transformation with each other, and with the question of
the identity of the actor and role-taking. The reference at the end to Suzuki
Tadashi, the contemporary director and trainer of actors, and to his
leading actress Shiraishi Kayoko, prepares the way for the following
translated quotation of a passage by Suzuki (1980), where he examines the
relationship between the katari tradition and the audience's experience.
With the various complex interlinkings by Gunji and those by Suzuki to
follow, most of the key words and concepts in my own exposition of ideas
are finally in place.
The passage from Suzuki's essay includes a dictionary definition of
katari. But I have treated katari not as a word to define but rather as a
convenient key concept around which to gather others, a cluster of loosely
interrelated ideas that began to assume this particular configuration in the
early 1960s. With this cluster of ideas, one can associate a certain indige-
nous view ofJapanese theatre, one shared by others besides those whose
articles have been quoted. That article, meant for a reader with a wide
interest in cultural issues but with little specialized knowledge of perfor-
mance, raises the question of the proper indigenous environment for
performance inJapan. Suzuki explains why he and his troupe turned away
from a small ferroconcrete building in Tokyo to a farmhouse theatre in
Toga Village, Toyama Prefecture, some eight hours by train from Tokyo.
The context for the discussion is in part architectural. Of course,
physical conditions determining the rapport between audience and actor
are a concern to every theatrical tradition. What is special about katari,

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18 Hof

however, in Suzuki's view, is the physiological nature of this relationship.

He sought a place in which an audience would be most sensitive to the
"feeling" with which performers ofkatari transmit their presence. He found
this in an indigenous style of domestic architecture that was dark inside and
had great potential for flexibility in the director's and actors' control of
spatial arrangements.
In the passage I have translated, however, these issues are in the
background. The immediate argument is that "seeing" is placed at the
pinnacle of the human senses by classical theorists of performance in Japan
as well as in the West. But for himself, says Suzuki, "feeling" takes prece-
dence. Audience members gathered into a place of performance actually
experience together, feel together, the rhythms of the place. They breathe,
gasp, and applaud together in a community of feeling that is Suzuki's
definition of the relationship of theatre to place.

The expression "to appreciate," with its meaning of understanding and

enjoying, is the right one to apply to the act of looking at a film. The same
is true of listening to a record; here too the actual real-life,presence of an
expressive agent is unnecessary. But I believe that the word is inappro-
priate for theatre and for live performance of music. To describe what a
persondoes who attends a theatrical performanceor a live musical concert
-the one who looks, the one who hears-the word "to participate"
(tachiaucc) is better than "to appreciate" (kanshocd). For the former accu-
rately describes the way to confront the object of the spectator's and the
audience's seeing and hearing. Spectators are participants, witnesses.
They may not be the actual agent of expressionbut their existence, as par-
ticipants, is indispensable, if the artistic expression is to be successful at
the place of its occurrence.
Engi in traditional Japanese theatre has a history of special con-
cern with ways to make the spectator feel that he directly participates in
performance. Japanese theatre, whether no or kabuki, is said to be katari.
Other genres of performance,as well, all near-neighborsof theatre... are
also said to be katarimonoce.The definition of katarimonoin the dictionary
Kojiencfis this:

A generic term used of vocal music for reciting (kataru)a narrative

text withfushi g [voice coloring and modulation]. Compared to
song forms, katari is longer and in prose. Thefushi and tempi of
monogatariare meant to express, through melisma, the feelings of
characters; but most katarimonoinclude sections of words without
melody. The technique of expression used in katarimonois the engi
of katari.

Accordingto the folkloristOriguchi Shinobu, the verb katarumeans to infect

someone's soul with one's own presence. It is the same word as that which,
written with a different Chinese character, means to cozen, cheat, or
swindle. The world of the katarimonohas preserved in its aim the inten-

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KILLING THE SELF 19

tion to imbue or infect the listener with the performer's deepest thoughts,
to involve the listener in a mood that becomes shared. In this sense the
actor might be said to be a cheat, a "con artist," and the recorded remem-
brances of many actors could be looked upon as books about how to be-
come an accomplished confidence man....
But in order to deceive someone, first of all one must be deceived
oneself. How to deceive oneself is what reminiscences by actors on the art
of acting are about. The history of the actor in Japan is one of devising
means to further this end, artificial and painful ways to use the body. For
actors know full well: to deceive the spirit, first one must deceive the flesh.
One must enter into an aggressive relationship with the physiology of one's
own body. Forcibly restricting the breath, then opening up and letting it
go free, for example; going into convulsions, groaning, relentlessly piling
up phrase upon phrase in speech are ways for the actor to apply artificial
pressure to his physical being. The aim is to use the rhythmic tension
which results in order to set the spectator's or the auditor's own body
into shared resonance, to harmonize the spectator with the actor. The
spectator, caught up together in this physiological rhythm, becomes a
participant.
In the end, of course, the spectator is released, refreshed from the
experience; catharsis sets in. In terms of contemporary music, there may
be something shared between this approach and that of rock music.
Through the ceaseless, simple, and repetitive rhythms that set to work
upon the body in hearing it, the listener of rock music is forcibly socialized,
as it were, and becomes the participant in an event. Of course what the
actor aims at, in East and West alike, is ultimately the same. The actor
must always be an eloquent deceiver of others; he must always be the
agitator. If it is through logic and rhetoric that the actor in the West
agitates, his Japanese counterpart's specialty is doing so by this feeling of
physiological pressure and by the words of passion he speaks. Whereas
rock music uses amplifier and microphone to increase the volume of its
agitation, the actor depends upon energy that erupts from his unaided
bodily equipment. Consequently, however much his body and voice may
have been trained, the actor can project only a limited distance. (Suzuki
1980, 226-228)

A Contemporary Katari Self

In 1981 a book by Watanabe Tamotsu'h, Haiyu no unmeici (The
actor's fate; Watanabe 1981), appeared. The title reveals nothing of its
content. In a sense, it is the culmination of the scholarly and critical
concern with katari that I have traced from the early 1960s. The subject is
the doubled nature of the actor in the mainstream of the classical katari
theatres ofJapan: a simultaneous identity as both self and role(s).
Watanabe, in a review of a 1971 performance by the Waseda
Shogekijo, notes that the acting technique of the modern actress Shiraishi

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20 Hoff

FIGURE 4. Shiraishi Kayoko, transformingherself from the role of Hecuba into

that of Cassandra in the Waseda Shogekijo production of TrojanWomen,shows
the simultaneous presence of the performer'sself and the role. (Photo: Waseda
Shogekijo.)

Kayoko resembles the tradition of actors who do not sacrifice their own
identity in order to play a role. For him, the novelty of her acting consisted
in embodying a performer's self concurrently with the self of another (or
others), that of the role(s). But her acting was not a rediscovery of the
traditional technique of a doubled presence. Shiraishi and Suzuki in the
late 1960s and early 1970s internalized in a unique way the doubled

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KILLINGTHE SELF 21

structure-the "I" of the actor superimposed upon the "I" of the role. This
internalized nature of the doubled self constituted the modernity, the
contemporaneity, of Suzuki's and Shiraishi's restatement of a traditional
Japanese mode of comprehending selfhood.
The Waseda Shogekijo performed Somekaetegonichino omemieCj(Re-
dyed and later appearance) from November 2 to December 18, 1971.
Watanabe's account of it emphasizes the concluding scene, in which
Shiraishi appeared as a ghost. Stepping forth from the general carnage and
chaos of a world collapsing about her, she recited the lines ofOkuni Gozen
from a kabuki play, Okuni Gozen kesho no sugatamick (Makeup mirror of
Okuni Gozen; Gunji 1971) by the dramatist Tsuruya Namboku IV, who
also wrote Yotsuyakaidan.The actress also took the words of the man Okuni
loves and of others in the scene. Normally these parts would each be taken
by a separate actor. By speaking without distinction the words of all the
characters, though no one else appeared onstage, the performer seemed to
have rejected contact with the outer world; Shiraishi seemed to have
internalized the outer world.
It is worth giving a paraphrase (intermixed with direct translation)
of Watanabe's account of this scene. Watanabe effectively renders the
step-by-step process by which a spectator comes to recognize the super-
imposition, or the simultaneous presence, of the "I" of the actor upon that
of the role. We glimpse here one man's discovery of a new selfhood in the
dramatic art of contemporary Japan:

Shiraishi emerged into the semidarkness of the stage wearing a white

garment; she was like a spider, a spider who spins out words, not thread.
This deformed, ugly presenceon stage was not human, but rather the total
embodiment of human passion. Quite unexpectedly, a passage of the
speech from OkuniGozenkeshonosugatamiturned into the current popular
hit song by Mori Shinichic1, "Onna no tameiki" m (A woman's sigh).
[In Namboku's original, Okuni Gozen sings to lute accompaniment.]
The lyrics of the song became the speech of Shiraishi's Okuni Gozen; a
popular song, which one could have heard almost anywhere in Tokyo at
the time, became the song of Okuni Gozen from another and distant age;
Okuni's song became that of Shiraishi the actress.
The actress had internalized a temporal axis that reached from
the song of Mori (today's everyday reality) to the song of Okuni Gozen
in Namboku's play (a fiction, a fantasy). The song became the actress's
own because she existed along the now-shattered temporal axis. In imita-
ting Mori Shinichi, "first chewing in and then spitting out words," Shirai-
shi augmented and filled out emotions that lay just beyond the reach of
language. The force of the passion that words had summoned up, concen-
trated within the on-stage presence of the actress, grew. Yet the temporal
dislocation was still well-matched to the corresponding dislocation be-

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22 Hoff

tween the actress'sphysical being, body, and words. Gradually, however,

words augmented emotions to the point where the words themselves
became a corporeal presence and the two historical periods overlapped
and coalesced.
The song, at first belonging to Mori Shinichi, then to Okuni, then
to both at once, seemed finally to belong to Shiraishi. Words superceded
the performer's presence until the power of passion, summoned up by
words, became the sole stage presence. The final impression was not of
Shiraishi herself but of words-concrete presences as things on the stage.
(Watanabe 1981, 228-231)

Through an act of dislocation, such as that of the calculated use of a

popular song, Suzuki has created the modern equivalent of what was
bridged when the shaman spoke with the voice of the god. Watanabe's
recollection of the scene just discussed is a graphic portrayal of the actress
astride the shattered axis, merging dimensions of time by incorporating
them within her self. Her identity, as an actress trained in a particular
discipline, is a totally contemporary means of transforming the shaman
into the god, Gunji's prototype of the function of the actor. It is the
embodiment of the contradiction in theatre: actor's reality, role's fiction.
The Waseda Shogekijo's approach to role-taking is a principle shared with
performers in the traditional theatrical arts ofJapan. InJapan, the relation
of self to role in theatre has the flexible potential befitting a culture in which
the experience of selfhood and society, as well as the pattern of develop-
ment of theatrical types, has not paralleled that of the West.
In conclusion, it would be useful to summarize views about katari.
The dictionary definition given earlier is widely accepted. For example, it
explains the aspect of katari that Kanze Hisao has in mind when he writes
concretely about the vocal techniques of no.8 It explains how a tayu-injoruri
marks differences between tones of narration and imitative speech. Tra-
ditional theatres, then, are katariin that the vocal aspect of the performer's
skill is paramount in his art.
A scholar of Japanese literature, however, will emphasize some-
thing different. As defined by Tsuchihashi Yutaka, for example, there is still
concern for the performative aspect of katari: the narrator "explains in
order to convincehis listener as he recites." (Tsuchihashi 1968, 321)9 But its
subject matter must also be defined: the narrator explains the origin or
nature of some object or event within the life of the community. Thus, katari
is etiology; it means "giving a reason for," or "explaining," an affair of
concern to a community, thereby validating a custom and confirming its
place within the world view of the community.
The folkorist Origuchi's description of katari as a way of infecting
someone's soul with one's own presence-along with the description of it

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KILLING THE SELF 23

by Domoto and Suzuki as a means of deception-has implications beyond

the question of the performer's vocal art in any single genre. The dual
relationship in katari-priestess/kami, performer/mask, narrator/character,
self/role-is basic to the process of role-taking. It implies a fluidity of
language (first person, third person), an ambiguity of identity, unique
acting and staging techniques (related especially to the space of perfor-
mance), and special training methods.
The starting point of my own essay was not a definition. I began by
noting the need, which arose in Japan in the early 1960s, to claim katarias a
tradition that contributed to the formation of the Japanese classical
theatres. The claim was made in order to set these off from Western
naturalism. A contrast between katari and naturalistic realism (whether
in the European tradition or in its Japanese adaptation, shingeki) has
certainly been part of the assumptions of the generation of theorists
sampled here. What I wish to make clear is that this view arose from a
unique Japanese experience of a particular historical and sociopolitical
reality. The understanding of the katari element of traditional theatre
was part of a larger redefinition, or reevaluation, of their own culture by
the Japanese in the critical postwar years.

NOTES

1. William P. Malm's "A Musical Approach to the Study of Japanese

Joruri" (1982) contains a discussion of the language of this theatre form from a
musical point of view, and includes transcriptionsof passagesinto Western musical
notion.
2. See page 51 in the pamphlet included with the sound recording (Take-
moto 1981).
3. Sartre adapted his play about the early nineteenth-century English
actor from a play of the same title by Alexandre Dumas. Kyokitotensaic (Madness
and genius) is the title of the Japanese version.
4. The myth is translated by Donald L. Philippi (1968, 81-86).
5. See Araki (1964) for detailed information on daimokudateand
kowakamai.
6. A summary of certain ideas in the third section of Gunji's article (1964,
5-8) follows.
7. Versions of Okinaare still performed at countryside festivals, and one
unique form is part of the classical no repertoire.
8. In another article (Hoff 1981), I discusshow noincorporatedrecitation
from contemporary vocal performance during its formative period in the four-
teenth century.
9. For a more detailed description of that scholar's view, see pages
316-323 (Tsuchihashi 1968).

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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
24 Hoff

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