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Japanese no theatre or the drama of 'perfected art' flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries largely through the genius of the dramatist Zeami. An intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume and language, the dramas address many subjects, but the idea of 'form' is more central than 'meaning' and their structure is always ritualized. Selected for their literary merit, the twenty-four plays in this volume dramatize such ideas as the relationship between men and the gods, brother an...

In an important and unique contribution to the study of noh, this volume includes, for the first time, essays on the subject of one noh play written by scholars from both sides of the Pacific Ocean in their own language, Japanese or English (with a summary of each contribution translated into the other language also included). The essays show some of the breadth and depth that is available for the study of Japanese literature and drama both in Japan and abroad. Japanese scholars Amano Fumio, Nis...

Noh plays live on as a magnificent artistic heritage handed down from the high culture of medieval Japan. Among the major types of Japanese drama, the No, which is often called the classical theatre of Japan, has had perhaps the greatest attraction for the West. Introduced to Europe and America through the translations of Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound, it found an ardent admirer in William Butler Yeats, who described it as a form of drama 'distinguished, indirect, and symbolic' and created plays i...

Although he has been touted as Japan's finest prewar playwright, few of Kishida Kunio's works have been translated into English. This volume brings together for the first time representative plays that span the entire course of Kishida's career, including in this expanded edition, a new translation of his maiden work, Autumn in the Tyrols. The plays collected in this anthology are the ones critics have regarded as Kishida's best and that the dramatist himself preferred. An introductory essay by...

Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, is the third volume in a monumental new series - the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in nearly a quarter of a century. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. The fourteen plays translated in Volume 3, Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, mark an extreme point in the development of kabuki dramaturgy. The plays are remarkable, even within kabuki, for...

Translations of 19 noh and nine kyogen plays seeking to produce English poetry which reproduces the 'texture of the Japanese'... an experiment in translating the 'untranslatable' word play which provides so much of the effect of noh in the original.

Entangled Performance Histories is the first book-length study that applies the concept of "entangled histories" as a new paradigm in the field of theater and performance historiography. "Entangled histories" denotes the interconnectedness of multiple histories that cannot be addressed within national frameworks. The concept refers to interconnected pasts, in which historical processes of contact and exchange between performance cultures affected all involved. Presenting case studies from acros...