The allusion to this gay poem in a moment of extreme distress is a psychologically effective device; a similar use of incongruous poetry is found in Ophelia’s mad scene, and, in our own day, in The Waste Land, where Eliot quotes Ophelia’s “good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”, after a sordid lower-class scene.
The “pivot-word” in the passage I have cited is one of the best, a splendid example of the use of this device. The words semukata nami mean “helpless”; by addition of the syllable “da”, we got the word namida, “tears”. Thus the bridge is made between the helplessness of the girl and her tears, the meaning shifting imperceptibly from one image to the other.
It may be wondered to what degree such passages were intelligible to the audience. Arthur Waley has contended that general familiarity with the old poems, especially in the form of songs, must have made comprehension far more general than we might suppose. Nevertheless, it is true that the Nō increasingly became the pastime of the court aristocracy, the group best trained in recognizing poetic allusions and feats of verbal dexterity. The middle and lower classes had to wait until the end of the sixteenth century for forms of theatrical entertainment which were designed primarily for their tastes. These new forms included the kabuki, a brilliant dramatic, but essentially not a literary, art, and the jōruri, or puppet theatre, in my opinion a far more important literary medium. Japan is far from being the only country in which the puppet theatre has a long history, but elsewhere it is seldom considered a very exalted form of art. The puppet-plays produced in Europe are usually either adaptations of plays originally written for actors, or else are trifles calculated to delight or amuse by their ingenuity. In Japan the puppet theatre has been a serious medium for creative artists; in fact, the greatest Japanese dramatist,
