Revealed Identity: The Noh Plays of Komparu Zenchiku (review)

The book jacket tells us that this is the first (English-language, presumably) comprehensive study of the nō plays of the fifteenth-century author Komparu Zenchiku. This in itself might be considered a significant enough purpose and basis for evaluation. The book has larger ambitions, however, and raises the prospect of relevance to fields of interest beyond either theater studies or Japan studies alone.

Although Atkins's interests are diverse, the general argument builds around an analysis of nondualism in Zenchiku's work. Dramatic revelation of identity is tied to this attitude of nondualism as a definitive characteristic of Zenchiku's nō plays. The claim, then, is that an understanding of revelation in these terms will help not only to illuminate an underappreciated author, it will also help to explain a larger historical era which itself was of seminal historical importance to Japanese culture. Further, the hope is that approaching Zenchiku and his time in this way will engage a readership not limited to specialists in Japanese theater studies.

Atkins makes it clear at the outset that he does not find it productive to view nō, or Zenchiku, as comprehensible within the conditions of literary modernism. Rather, Zenchiku's work "resists modern hermeneutics" (p. 2). This, in my view, is already an interesting claim and one that might be a good basis for engaging a broad readership. Atkins does not, however, want to think about Zenchiku in direct relation to modernism, and he argues instead for the uniqueness of Zenchiku's historical era (what in English is still called Japan's middle ages); this is not, therefore, a juxtapositional history. Zenchiku, again, is taken to be an iconic figure within that unique historical moment.

It might be noted that this approach, of reconstructing a historical moment by reconstructing a single playwright, returns a lot of explanatory weight to the figure of an individual author. Atkins is aware of at least some of the risks of doing so. In my view, this is not necessarily a problem, assuming that what he is really describing is more the name of a historically specific style than an individual author. The book can, I think, be read this way. The central elements of this style as described by Atkins are nondualism and revelation, and so that is what I focus on here.

In simple terms, the nondualism of Zenchiku's style is presented as following Zen or Zen-like principles, in which apparent binarisms work dialectically toward "a state in which apparent differences are illusory" (p. 21).¹ This nondualism also defines the form of revelation that, according to Atkins, characterizes Zenchiku's nō plays—revelation, or "revelation of identity," in other words, implies a movement toward understanding (or revealing) difference in the world as illusory.

That would be clear enough, and one could then extrapolate out a view of the middle ages as being largely determined by this attitude, as Atkins seems also to imply. Over the course of the book's analysis, however, it is not really quite that simple. Much of the argument hinges on the constitution of nondual identity that Atkins sees being revealed in Zenchiku's nō.

There is of course no such thing as a single, true, or official Zen. But in general terms it would not really make sense to speak of a nondual identity in Zen. Basically, Zen's nondualism consists of a negation both of dualism (the idea that any whole consists at root of two parts) and of any single, unitary identity. It is based at once on the not-two view that negates dualism and on the not-one view that negates any simple whole: in a sense, it moves back and forth between the two possibilities and is therefore a third position (it is not a dialectic that produces a synthesis and resolution or an identity that would be based on that synthesis...