tiny haiku, portraying only the moments of greatest intensity so as to suggest the rest of the drama. Like the haiku also, the Nō has two elements, the interval between the first and second appearance of the principal dancer serving the function of the break in the haiku, and the audience having to supply the link between the two. Sometimes there is also the intersection of the momentary and the timeless which may be noted in many haiku. Thus, for example, in the first part of the play Kumasaka, a travelling priest meets the ghost of the robber Kumasaka, who asks him to pray for the spirit of a person whom he will not name. Later that night the priest sees the robber as he was in former days, and the robber rehearses the circumstances of his death in impassioned verse, ending:
“Oh, help me to be born to happiness.”
(Kumasaka entreats the Priest with folded hands.)
The cocks are crowing. A whiteness glimmers over the night.
He has hidden under the shadow of the pine-trees of Akasaka,
(Kumasaka hides his face with his left sleeve.)
Under the shadow of the pine-trees he has hidden himself away.”[1]
In this play the meeting of the priest and robber is fortuitous, the happening of a moment, but the desperate struggle of the robber to escape from his past into the path of salvation goes on and on.
Behind these plays, as behind the haiku, were the teachings of Zen Buddhism, whose greatest influence is probably found in the form of the Nō itself—the bareness of the lines of the drama, and the simplicity of the stage and sets. These teachings, which inspired so much of Japanese literature and art in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, probably came to the Nō largely with Kanami and Seami, who were closely associated
- ↑ Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan, p. 101.
