The Joy of Noh: Embodied Learning and Discipline in Urban Japan by Katrina L. Moore (review)

In recent years, significant popular attention has been focused on the crisis of aging in Japan. As the overall Japanese population declines, the proportion of the elderly continues to grow. Media representations depict the failure of families and community institutions to come to grips with the problem and a neoliberal ruling regime unwilling or unable to manage the crisis. Japanese scholars have been attentive to these issues, as have growing numbers of academics writing in English: Anne Allison, Jason Danely, and Jieung Kim have all published compelling interventions, complex and nuanced ethnographies that belie the language of catastrophe that colors popular discourse. As Anne Allison recently wrote of the response of the elderly and the dying, taken in the face of this crisis: "This sociality to come is already emergent today and can be seen in innovations given to dealing with—and learning from—the dead."¹

Katrina L. Moore's The Joy of Noh: Embodied Learning and Discipline in Urban Japan explores similar terrain. As the author writes in her introduction, her focus is "women's cultivation of self in later life within communities of learning in urban Japan" (p. 2). However, her book is less an intervention in this particular crisis than a text grounded in a long tradition of Japanese ethnographies that explore the ways Japanese men and women construct meaningful lives. In that sense, it has more in common with the work of John Traphagan, Gordon Matthews, and David Plath. This is not to say that the text is inattentive to crisis: it is simply that the ethnographies in this tradition have long been attentive to the problem of self-fashioning in the face of pressures to the contrary.

In her introduction, Moore outlines this problem in very personal terms. When describing her interest in studying nō herself as part of a project to understand the lives of women who practice it, her grandmother—a cultured and accomplished woman—offers a discouraging reply. "How can you understand nō when even a Japanese person cannot?" However, her grandmother follows up this dispiriting assessment by sending the author a shoulder drum that she herself had used as a student in the 1920s, encouraging her to be patient and commit herself to three years of study. Despite the personal and particular nature of the exchange between Moore and her grandmother, the tone is set for a broader ethnographic project. To learn a traditional performing art is demanding. It requires a commitment of time, effort, capital, and self-discipline that will push the aspiring student to her limits. Perhaps it will be impossible. Still, for those who persevere, the self that emerges in practice and in performance might make all of these sacrifices worthwhile.

The introduction also lays out the theoretical stakes of Moore's project. The author briefly reviews other ethnographies that consider ways in which the category of leisure affords subjects an opportunity to transform themselves through keiko—the demanding, structured tutelage that characterizes much of traditional Japanese art—in ways that might otherwise be unavailable to them in their daily lives. A short historical chapter follows, tracing the changing relationship between professional and amateur performers, and exploring the place of women in both. However, all of this serves to prepare the reader for the second chapter, the intellectual and affective heart of Moore's project.

In "The Biography of a Noh Teacher," Moore collaborates in the narration of the life story of Tsurumi Reiko, founder and primary teacher of the Sumire Kai nō group. Tsurumi first appears in a dramatic encounter with the author, transforming a performance at a birthday party into an impromptu lesson in nō chanting and commanding her audience to become her students. It is a memorable introduction to the figure who will animate the rest of the ethnography. Speaking of the work of the film essayist Chris Marker...