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

Though considerable attention has been given in recent years to Zenchiku’s treatises on noh, Paul Atkins’s Revealed Identity is the first major study in English of his plays. Zeami, perhaps rightly, has always been treated as the central figure in the history of noh, but Zenchiku’s treatises are in many ways more engaging than Zeami’s. And though Zeami was a more prolific writer of plays (even if we dismiss as inauthentic a large number of the pieces attributed to him), many of Zenchiku’s plays (at least we think they are by Zenchiku) are as striking and memorable as any we have. A study of these is thus very welcome.

The present volume seeks, first of all, to define and argue for a group of plays that might, with varying degrees of certainty, be attributed to Zenchiku. Arguments concerning authorship are scattered throughout the book and also summarized in an appendix. Basing his conclusions on a review of Japanese scholarship on Zenchiku, Atkins ends up with fifteen plays he deems to be by Zenchiku, although the list is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. In particular, he draws heavily on, but takes a somewhat different approach from, Itô Masayoshi’s Konparu Zenchiku no kenkyû (Kyoto: Akao Shôbundô, 1970). In the course of the book Atkins discusses, at varying degrees of length, all but two (Shirahige and Nureginu) of these fifteen plays.

Atkins analyzes Bashô and Kakitsubata in a chapter entitled “Painting Landscapes in the Mind,” and Teika and Shôki in “Transgression and the Demonic.” He deals with four plays—Kamo, Tatsuta, Oshio, and Ugetsu—in “Divinity, Landscape, Abjection,” and groups another four—Yôkihi, Kogô, Senju, and Ohara gokô—under the theme “Figuring the Feminine Ideal.” A final two plays, Tamakazura and Nonomiya, are treated in a chapter entitled “As If Seen Through a Veil: Delusion and Ambiguity.” I have resorted here to a simple listing of the plays and the chapter titles because it provides an economical way of indicating the rich range of subthemes, topics, and concerns running throughout this volume. There is no hope within the limits of a short review of giving all these topics their just deserve.

As spelled out in the introduction, one of Atkins’s major strategies for understanding Zenchiku in the “context of his time” (p. 2) is to present a comparison of Zeami and Zenchiku in terms of both the historical contexts in which they found themselves and the sorts of plays they tended to write, the assumption being that different historical and political contexts can be linked to differences in outlook and style. Atkins proposes the following set of parallel cultural and political oppositions: Zeami/ Zenchiku, Kitayama/Higashiyama, Yoshimitsu/Yoshimasa, Kinkakuji/Ginkakuji, etc. As for comparisons of the plays, he characterizes Zeami’s plays as a “theater of transformation” and Zenchiku’s as a “theater of revelation” (p. 10). Atkins further correlates these two types of theater with “happy” and “unhappy” endings, describing Zeami as writing plays that “tend to end happily” (p. 9) and Zenchiku as more preoccupied with ones that tend to end unhappily. Zeami’s son Motomasa, Atkins proposes, might be viewed as having pioneered the “unhappy ending” (for example, Sumidagawa) and thus as a “bridge” to Zenchiku (pp. 10–11).

To clarify the notion of the “theater of revelation” that he associates with Zenchiku, Atkins introduces the idea of “revealed identity.” He describes this concept as “suggesting at first the true nature of a being or thing, previously concealed, now being exposed (as in the course of many noh plays); on second glance, it may be read as referring to a state in which apparent differences are illusory” (p. 21). He adds:

What I intend by the term “revealed identity” is actually a host of concepts which are fundamentally identical. These concepts share a set of common tenets. Appearances are deceiving; often what appears bad is actually good...