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Reviewed by:
  • Another Stage: Kanze Nobumitsu and the Late Muromachi Noh Theater by Lim Beng Choo
  • Shelley Fenno Quinn
Another Stage: Kanze Nobumitsu and the Late Muromachi Noh Theater. By Lim Beng Choo. Cornell East Asia Program, 2012. 276 pages. Hardcover $55.00; softcover $39.00.

Kanze Nobumitsu (1435 [or 1450]–1516) was without doubt one of the most gifted playwrights that the noh theater has ever produced. Thirty plays are attributed to him, making him the second-most prolific playwright after Zeami Motokiyo (1363?–1443?). Twelve of these plays remain in the active repertoire, including such perennial favorites as Funa Benkei (Benkei on Board), Momijigari (Autumn Excursion), and Ataka, from which the even more famous kabuki play, Kanjinchō (Subscription List), took its inspiration.

Lim Beng Choo’s Another Stage: Kanze Nobumitsu and the Late Muromachi Noh Theater is the first book-length critical study in English on Nobumitsu, his oeuvre, and his contributions to noh. Moreover, to the best of my knowledge, no such comprehensive monograph existed even in Japanese until the publication last year of a collection of critical essays on Nobumitsu and his age.1 Another Stage is thus a substantial addition to the scholarship on noh. Lim is very persuasive on the significance of Nobumitsu’s contributions as a playwright, and one emerges from reading this book with a vivid sense of his versatility and his brilliance at expanding the expressive potential of the art—and with a sense of wonder at how such an important figure could have escaped the critical spotlight for so long.

Lim’s critical analysis adheres to a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, she defines her goal as an examination of late Muromachi noh, “the specific cultural and societal framework in which Nobumitsu functioned as a noh practitioner—ranging from troupe management to composition and performance.” At the same time, she states that her ultimate intention is to propose an “alternative way to discuss and debate noh theater in present-day noh discourse” (p. xxvi). Here, she is referring to a trend in some modern noh scholarship to set apart late Muromachi plays that draw heavily on pageantry and colorful display—including many by Nobumitsu—into a stylistic subgroup called furyū nō (flamboyant or spectacular noh). Once these plays are assigned to such a classification, it is simple for scholars to consign them to an inferior status vis-à-vis a preexisting style of play that features lyrical depictions of a character’s inner life through song and dance. This latter style is traceable to the playwriting and drama theory of Zeami, who was a seminal figure in early noh and Nobumitsu’s great-uncle. Just where to situate Nobumitsu in the modern discourse on noh adds a provocative new dimension to this study, a point I will return to below. [End Page 117]

Another Stage comprises six chapters in three parts, preceded by an introduction and followed by five appendices. Especially helpful among the appendices are the synopses of Nobumitsu’s plays, including ten bangaikyoku (plays that have fallen out of the repertoire).

Part 1 opens with Lim’s translations and her close reading and interpretation of two historical documents—the inscriptions on two portrait paintings, one of Nobumitsu’s father, the actor Kanze Motoshige (On’ami), and one of Nobumitsu. Both inscriptions are by Zen monks, and both are composed in kanbun. In the course of her remarks characterizing this genre of portraiture, Lim points out that the inscription on On’ami’s portrait is formulaic in its praise of his artistic prowess and lineage, whereas the detailed inscription for Nobumitsu done by the Zen prelate and affiliate of the Muromachi shogunate, Keijo Shūrin, attests to a personal acquaintance between him and Nobumitsu and demonstrates that Nobumitsu enjoyed the status of an “honored guest at important occasions” (p. 26). She finds the personalized inscription significant as evidence that the status of sarugaku had changed in the course of a generation from that of a newly arrived art on the social margins to one firmly established in the salons of the late-Muromachi elite. Not only had noh performers become welcome companions to the intelligentsia of the day...

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