Tom Hare's award-winning book Zeami: Performance Notes is not just a collection of translated “performance notes” by the medieval-period Japanese noh performer Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443). It is also a book about medieval Japanese culture and the art of translation.
Zeami was an important noh practitioner who played a pivotal role in the transformation of sarugaku, a medieval Japanese performance genre, to noh. Zeami's huge corpus of works, written over the forty years of his performance career and ranging from plays to various kinds of writings about sarugaku, contributed greatly to the institutionalization and canonization of noh in subsequent years. Hare's annotated translation of Zeami's writings, some never translated before, is therefore an important contribution to English-language scholarship on noh. Other than the translation, Hare has also included an introduction, three appendices, and a glossary in the book. These sections not only provide the readers with additional information about the texts, they also address issues pertaining to specific aspects of Zeami's writings.
In the introduction, Hare presents a biography of Zeami in a generally chronological manner, relating important events to some of the more critical terms and ideas in these performance notes. Readers are introduced to the political and cultural background in which Zeami functioned: his engagement with the Ashikaga shogunate and the cultural literati, rival performance genres, the religious practices of the time, etc.
But the introduction is not just a biographical account of Zeami's life. Hare has eloquently, and with utmost honesty and directness, discussed the issues he has encountered in the translation of these medieval Japanese writings. Aesthetics is often difficult, if not at times downright impossible, to translate into another language satisfactorily. With Zeami's propensity to deploy usages from Chinese and Buddhist sources, a translator needs to be not only proficient in medieval Japanese, but also equipped with the resources and knowledge to decipher some of the difficult concepts. Hare's detailed account of his methods to overcome hurdles in the translation process is both enlightening and inspiring.
There are twenty sets of annotated, translated notes following the introduction. These performance notes, discovered only in modern times, have been collected and edited by several Japanese noh scholars. The most prominent among them is Omote Akira (1927–2010). The late emeritus professor was also the former director of the Nogami Memorial Noh Theatre Research Institute of Hosei University in Tokyo. Omote's seminal works have inspired and instructed many noh scholars, such as Hare. The structure of Hare's translation, for instance, has followed a general outline of Omote's Japanese work Zeami Zenchiku. Omote's scholarship is highly regarded and appears to be an important source of reference in Hare's book. Hare sometimes disagrees with Omote, but mostly he builds on what has been discussed by Omote and expands the material when the situation calls for it. In this sense Zeami: Performance Notes is a tribute to an important noh scholar.
Hare prefaces every set of notes with a brief summary of its content and a description of the original Japanese texts, among other comments and analysis. Meticulously annotated, these translated texts come with both endnotes and footnotes, which can be confusing. While we see Hare's strength and skill as a noh scholar and translator throughout this section of the book, “Five Sorts of Singing,” a later set of notes, also serves as a good illustration of Hare's creativity. The text of the songs in this set of writing is not complete, and would have been difficult for modern readers to understand. Hare has referred to various other texts and supplemented the truncated songs with a fuller version. Printing the original Japanese text and the English translation page to page enables a quick and clear reference between the two texts. This format greatly enhances the readability of the texts.
While the translated texts provide direct access to Zeami's writings, the three appendices address specific issues pertaining to the performance notes. Appendix 1 could be read independently as an article discussing the importance of medieval sarugaku performance and its relationship with contemporary noh theater and modern readers. Hare uses his expertise in noh performance to analyze some of the more abstract performance ideas proclaimed by Zeami. It is in this appendix that we see most clearly Hare's effort in identifying the differences between sarugaku of Zeami's time and the noh theater that developed from it. Hare compares several aspects of the sarugaku notes with modern noh performance practices, drawing different conclusions on each individual aspect, depending on what kind of differences and similarities can be found between the comparison.
At the beginning of this appendix Hare cautions against assuming the unchanging presence of “tradition.” However, I cannot help but feel that oftentimes Hare seems to be too ready in affirming the hegemonic presence of Zeami's words in today's noh theater. For instance, it is not wrong to argue that “centrality of the site” (p. 438) is a salient feature in noh, but it would have been a more balanced approach to also include a discussion of the other noh plays in the contemporary noh repertoire that do not share this feature.
Appendix 2 provides more information on the textual history of the performance notes. Appendix 3 focuses on the Chinese linguistic elements in medieval Japanese and in Zeami's works. Just like in the introduction, Hare's sharing of his experience in translating these often abstract and complex terms is useful to anyone who is interested in translation. The discussion also sheds light on Sino-Japanese cultural exchange in premodern Japan. A few editorial misses can be spotted towards the end of the book, but they do not affect the usefulness of the book or the pleasure derived from reading it. Readers can feel Hare's passion about the genre and Zeami through the personalized writing style and elaborate research and translation.
This book will be a useful reference for students and researchers who are interested in learning more about one of the earliest East Asian performance genres as well as fourteenth-century Japanese cultural history. The translations and glossary serve as an excellent model for other translation projects—works, like Hare's book, that will contribute greatly to English-language scholarship on East Asia.
