_It is not, like our theatre, a place where every fineness and subtlety must give way; where every fineness of word or of word-cadence is sacrificed to the "broad effect"; where the paint must be put on with a broom. It is a stage where every subsidiary art is bent precisely upon upholding the faintest shade of difference; where the poet may be silent while the gestures consecrated by four centuries of usage show meaning.
_Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa_, Classic Noh Theatre of Japan
THE ASHIKAGA age of Zen art is remembered today not only for gardens, painting, and architecture but also for drama and poetry. The leading political figure of the era, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, was himself an accomplished poet in the short verse forms once so popular with Heian courtier-aesthetes. But the most exalted poetry of the age was that written for the No drama, a literary art form born of Zen and at once as austere as a stone garden and as suggestive as a monochrome painting. The No is performed today virtually as it was six hundred years ago, and in its ritual symbolism it seems at times a cross between the Christian Mass and an Aeschylean tragedy. The essence of Zen aesthetic theory is evoked throughout its haunting poetry, its understated but intense style of acting, its delicately carved masks, and its mournful music and songs.
Like other Zen arts, the No was fashioned out of materials from distant times and places. The first Japanese dramatic arts were derived from various forms of Chinese farces and court dances. The farces, or _gigaku_, were popular with the Nara aristocracy, while the dances, or _bugaku_, came into favor with the more refined Heian court. Although the _bugaku _form undoubtedly influenced Japanese ideas on the blending of drama and dance, by the end of the Heian era it had become a lifeless ceremony for the emperor and his court--a role it still enjoys on occasions when performances are staged for the imperial family.
The real origins of the No are traceable to a somewhat lustier Chinese import, a circus-type entertainment called by the Japanese _sarugaku_. In addition to the display of various physical feats of daring, the _sarugaku _included farcical playlets and suggestive, sometimes indecent dances. A common theme seems to have been the lampooning of clergy, both Buddhist and Shinto. (In this respect, the development of native drama in Japan ran parallel with the resurgence of dramatic art in Europe after the Middle Ages, as citizens on both sides of the globe taunted the theological enslavement of feudal society by burlesques and dances ridiculing hypocritical authority figures.)