In Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater, Susan Blakely Klein's thorough grounding in the textual traditions of Noh drama and in the esoteric poetic commentaries of medieval Japan coalesce in fresh and stimulating ways. Klein describes Dancing the Dharma as the companion volume to her 2003 monograph Allegories of Desire: Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan. That earlier monograph is a study of the esoteric commentaries and related initiation rituals produced by the waka poet and Shingon priest Fujiwara Tameaki (1230s–1290s), the grandson of Fujwara no Teika. In it, Klein writes about the rhetorical strategies that the authors of commentaries employed. Typically, they offered interpretive readings of secular literary classics as religious allegories to be passed down in the form of secret teachings. They tended to build their exegeses around surface inconsistencies or ambiguities in the literary texts, aporias to which they then would ascribe deeper hidden meanings by means of allegoresis (allegorical interpretation). Arguments often would invoke etymological and numerological allegoresis, involving associations at the level of metaphor, such as those created by puns (kakekotoba), by the analysis of Sino-Japanese characters into their component parts (paronomasia), or by numerological homologies.
In Dancing the Dharma, Klein builds on her first book by exploring the influence of the esoteric commentaries and their rhetoric on selected treatises and plays in the Noh (sarugaku) tradition. In Noh texts, too, Klein discerns the presence of allegorical treatments from the commentaries. Two literary works that received the most attention in both the commentaries and Noh-related materials were the anonymous collection of short tales with waka poems titled Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise, ninth century; hereafter Ise), popularly believed to depict the exploits of the poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–80), and the first imperial collection of waka poems, the Kokin wakashū (Collection of waka poems old and new, early tenth century; hereafter Kokinshū).
After mapping out a blueprint for discussion of the commentary tradition in poetry and Noh in part one, Klein devotes part two to selected Noh materials that show the influence of Ise commentaries, and part three to two plays that draw on Kokinshū commentaries. Klein is unequivocal about her approach to the Noh texts in this monograph. They will receive a historicized treatment that “takes into account the extent to which these plays signal their relation to a complex configuration of rhetorical, political, and religious discourse” (p. 48).
Chapter 1 opens with an introduction to strategies of allegorical interpretation that typify poetic commentaries, a brief overview of the commentaries mentioned in her book, and some helpful textual examples of allegorical readings in a selection of poetry, commentaries, and Noh texts. In chapters 2 and 3, her focus shifts to two critical treatises by the seminal sarugaku playwrights and actors Zeami Motokiyo (ca. 1363–ca. 1443) and Konparu Zenchiku (1405–ca. 1470), respectively, to discover “the circumstances under which the two explored the relationship among poetry, allegory, and noh” (p. 48).
Chapter 2 discusses Zeami's treatise Rikugi (Six poetic modes, 1428). The original rikugi theory consisted of a typology of six ways in which poetry expressed meaning. First developed in Chinese poetics, it achieved canonical status in waka discourse thanks to analyses of it in the Chinese and Japanese prefaces to the Kokinshū. Klein points out that numerous problems with the descriptions there “triggered commentary throughout the medieval period” (p. 49). She deftly walks us through multiple layers of interpretation of the rikugi theory over time, starting with the Japanese Preface (Kana jo) and two poetic treatises from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She next examines Tameaki's interpretation in his commentaries Chikuenshō (Selected comments from a bamboo grove, ca. 1265–70) and Kokin wakashūjo kikigaki Sanryūshō (Lecture notes on the preface to the Kokin wakashū: Selected comments from the three schools, ca. 1270s; hereafter Kikigaki). She identifies the styles among the six most valued by Tameaki as adhering to the “rhetorical structures of metaphor most closely connected with allegory and allegoresis” (p. 10) and establishes that Zeami seems to follow that example in his treatise.
Chapter 3 examines Zenchiku's critical treatise Meishukushū (Collection illuminating the indwelling deity, ca. 1465) and leaves little doubt that Zenchiku's influence from esoteric commentaries runs deep. She notes that, in Meishukushū, Zenchiku makes the word okina (old man) the basis for etymological allegoresis. She calls the method associational identification, which derives from the rule of correspondence: “when two people, places, or things share a name, they must ultimately be the same (nondual)” (p. 91). Zenchiku considers the Okina deity in sarugaku thus to be nondual with other figures who manifest as okina, including an astral deity of destiny named Shukujin; an ancestral deity, Sumiyoshi Myōjin; the guardian deity of waka, Kasuga Myōjin; the guardian deity of his primary patron, the Kasuga-Kōfukuji complex; and even Ariwara no Narihira, since Ise refers to him in late episodes as “the humble old man” (katai okina). Klein observes that Zenchiku employs similar arguments in his plays analyzed in later chapters, such as Oshio and Kakitsubata. Her exegesis of Zenchiku's esoteric logic in Meishukushū, a text that is understudied and only sparsely annotated, is truly impressive.
Chapter 4 introduces the extant fragments of two bangai plays (plays outside the canonized repertoire), Maiguruma (The dancing carriage) and Kuzu no Hakama (Arrowroot trousers), which offer the earliest examples of how Noh plays incorporated medieval commentaries. Both texts insert long passages with few alterations to fit them into a dramatic framework. Chapter 5 examines the woman play Unrin'in. Of unknown authorship, its records go back to Zeami's father's generation. The text draws on poems from Ise along with commentary material, mainly from the Reizei school Ise monogatari shō. Klein points out influences from the play on Zenchiku's dramaturgy, such as the unstable identity of the protagonal role, the “layers of persona” (p. 151) that are created through punning and poetic allusion.
Chapter 6 is an interpretive study of Zenchiku's play entitled Oshio. This play builds on the story of the breakup between Narihira and perhaps his greatest love in Ise, Fujiwara no Takaiko. Klein points out that, through associational identification, in Oshio, Narihira's persona accrues a new layer as the Kami of Yin and Yang (In'yō no Kami) and that the Noh text intimates his identity, “as the deity of carnal/conjugal love, [who] mingled with the flowers/women of this world in order to bring them to enlightenment” (p. 155).
Her analysis of Oshio also fleshes out matters of political allegory. Unlike many Noh libretti, there are detailed records about the occasion of the first performance of Oshio. It was a command performance for the shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436–90), at the Kasuga Wakamiya Festival in Nara, with Zenchiku playing the lead as Narihira. It occurred in the autumn of 1465, the same year that Yoshimasa and his wife conducted an elaborate cherry-viewing excursion in Kyoto. Klein probes the political implications of the performance program on that day and examines the significance of the flower excursion in the play as an allegorical trope that would have resonated as a tribute to Yoshimasa's reign.
The play Kakitsubata, the topic of chapter 7, is also attributed to Zenchiku. It treats episodes 7, 8, and 9 of Ise about Narihira's journey away from the capital after his breakup with Fujiwara no Takaiko. He stops at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa Province to admire the irises in bloom. The protagonist of this play is the spirit of an iris blossom from that scene. Klein provides an especially intricate and insightful exegesis of the play. She reminds us that it expresses “the fundamental ontological ambiguity of Buddhist deities and kami” already seen in Zenchiku's treatise Meishukushū. She discusses the apotheosis of Narihira's image in the libretto, inspired by multiple esoteric commentaries. Along with his suijaku manifestation as the Kami of Yin and Yang, Narihira's identity is further complicated in Kakitsubata as a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Song and Dance (Kabu no Bosatsu), and in his honji manifestation as Dainichi Nyorai, Narihira is to be seen as bringing “salvation and blessings to all living beings through his poetry, which has the efficacious power of sutras” (p. 213).
In part three, the focus shifts to “Kokinshū Commentaries and Noh,” opening with an analysis of the play Ominameshi (The damsel flower), in which another nonsentient plant, “as surrogate for a human being” (p. 244), achieves enlightenment. The authorship is uncertain, although Zenchiku is one possibility. It draws its material from the commentary Kikigaki regarding the correct interpretation of a cryptic line in the Kana jo (Japanese preface) to the Kokinshū. Klein explains that although the play has a confusing plot structure and poses other obstacles to the reader, when read in conjunction with commentaries and contemporaneous ritual practices, “a number of its perplexing aporias and fractures can be explicated” (p. 13), which she then demonstrates. The final play explored is Haku Rakuten, which is possibly by Zeami. Klein concentrates on its possibilities as a political allegory. The protagonist, the celebrated Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846), appears on the shores of Japan to assert the superiority of Chinese poetry, but he is sent packing by the deity Sumiyoshi Myōjin. Klein suggests that the play was as an allegorical response to two events that occurred in 1419: the Korean invasion of Tsushima Island, and an envoy from the Chinese emperor attempting to pressure the shogun into reestablishing diplomatic relations.
Dancing the Dharma takes a fresh and illuminating approach to the interpretation of Noh texts. Studying their rhetoric through the lens of esoteric commentaries is an effective way to discover political and cultural subtexts that may been erased or are perhaps too counterintuitive for modern readers to even notice. This book is deeply interdisciplinary, and Klein is painstaking in her efforts to address the religious and historical contexts needed to capture a glimpse of how Muromachi readers and audiences may have thought about these texts. Dancing the Dharma should appeal to a broad range of readers, including specialists in literary studies, history, drama, poetics, and religious studies, and it makes a significant contribution to scholarship in all those fields. Its detailed textual analyses may not be easy reading, but they are one of the book's strengths, making it more than worth the effort.
