Zenchiku’s Mekari: Staging Ambiguous and Hollow Worlds

Abstract

Konparu Zenchiku (1405–c. 1470) was the son-in-law of Zeami Motokiyo. Zeami is the most famous nō actor–writer–composer–showman–impressario, but Zenchiku brought nō back from the shōgun’s court to the temples, effectively resacralising the art form for a troubled, violent age. This paper asks whether Zenchiku’s approach to theatre has anything to teach us as contemporary creators and audiences in our own unstable era and, simultaneously, whether contemporary modes of interpretation, such as queer musicology, can highlight new aspects of Zenchiku’s work. Focusing on the under-studied and under-performed play Mekari—which dramatises a ritual cutting of seaweed at the Kanmon Strait between the islands of Kyūshū and Honshū as the new lunar year dawns—this paper explores how Zenchiku’s work plays with—crosses back and forth over—multiple physical, temporal, and spiritual boundaries in both its text and performance, leaving the audience with a sense of ambiguity and questioning the received wisdom of conventional capitalist reality. This paper concludes with a look at Kyōto School philosopher Ueda Shizuteru’s concept of the hollow expanse, or a place of limitless possibility. This paper argues that the audience viewing these ambiguities cultivated by Zenchiku’s sacred dramas—via the music, words, and staging together—might themselves be given a glimpse into the radically open place of the ‘hollow expanse’. The first full English translation of Mekari is included in Appendix A.

1. Introduction

Zeami Motokiyo (世阿弥元清 c. 1363–c. 1443) was the first nō (能) actor to receive a formal courtly education, having, as a beautiful and talented 12-year old, captured the attention of the 17-year-old 3rd Ashikaga shōgun Yoshimitsu (足利義満) (Hare 1986, p. 16)1. Yoshimitsu’s attraction led to a lengthy period of patronage, which included a classical education generally unavailable to young men of the class to which actors belonged. Zeami became not only literate but deeply knowledgeable in Chinese and Japanese classics, poetry, and religions. The nō—known as sarugaku (猿楽) in his time—which he inherited combined the arts of appealing to an audience of city-dwellers through a combination of singing, dancing, and, above all, the ability for a man to convincingly imitate (Jp. monomane 物真似) anyone through body and voice, from a young warrior to an aged crone, from a famous beauty to a demonic spirit, from a cherry tree to a deity: these arts were extended, enhanced, and became more sophisticated in response to both Zeami’s education and the expectations of his new audience of high-ranking warriors and the nobility.

As Noel Pinnington and others have pointed out, there are a plethora of material reasons behind the direction of development Zeami took for sarugaku nō (Pinnington 2006, p. 69ff.). Among these is the reality of competition; multiple nō troupes in Kyōto competed among each other at competitive theatrical festivals for fame and patronage throughout this period. Tips and tricks for capturing an audience’s attention, dealing with differing levels of sophistication among diverse audiences, and how to conduct oneself on stage in the presence of the highest-ranked warriors and nobility are the subject of a significant proportion of Zeami’s secret treatises on nō—trade secrets intended to give his Kanze troupe heirs a continuing advantage in competitions even after Zeami’s own retirement and death (Zeami 2008).

Among the other troupes active at that time (and today) was the Konparu (金春), headed by Konparu Zenchiku (金春禅竹, 1405–c. 1468), Zeami’s son-in-law. The Konparu had a distinctly different position to the Kanze and other troupes in that they were located in Nara and had a permanent patronage relationship with the Kōfukuji/Kasuga Taisha (興福寺・春日大社) temple–shrine complex which de facto ran Yamato Province (modern Nara prefecture). This relationship provided both a religious education for Zenchiku as a young man and a relatively secure source of income for his troupe. These factors (among others) meant that Zenchiku’s troupe did not face the same competitive commercial pressures that the Kyōto-based troupes did. This allowed Zenchiku to take the nō skills he learned from his father-in-law, Zeami, and develop them in a completely different direction, creating a nō in which the prime motivation was not monetary rewards or competitive advantages over another troupe’s performance but rather the spiritual awakening of the actor and audience together through the ritualistic power of the performance. Where for Zeami the shite (シテ) in kami (神, En. deity or spirit) plays imitated (monomane) kami on stage, for Zenchiku, the shite manifested as—transubstantiated into—a kami.

In developing his vision through a series of treatises written from c. 1444 to 1466, collectively called Rokurin Ichiro (六輪一露), and the later Meishukushū (明宿集, 1460s), Zenchiku drew on not only various schools of Buddhist and early Shintō (神道) philosophy but also Confucianism and secular thought from Japan and China. In this paper, I will outline this confluence of ideas from different philosophical and religious traditions, how this manifests in Zenchiku’s works in comparison to Zeami’s, and finally, taking the example of an under-performed and under-studied work, Mekari (和布刈), consider how Zenchiku’s religious, ritualistic nō can be interpreted in the present day, utilising approaches from both Japan (i.e., the third-generation Kyōto School philosopher Ueda Shizuteru’s (上田閑照) aesthetics) and the west (i.e., New Musicological approaches such as queer musicology).

2. Okina and Allegoresis

Zenchiku’s immersion in a variety of religious traditions is clear in both his treatises and plays. As he explains in Meishukushū, his Rokurin Ichiro set of texts was based on a vision, a visitation from the Sumiyoshi deity he experienced while praying on a poetically auspicious date at the Sumiyoshi Shrine (住吉大社), which bequeathed the six circles and one dewdrop image to him. Sumiyoshi Daimyojin (住吉大明神), a god of poetry and war, appeared to him as an okina (翁) figure—a revered old man of nō. As Susan Blakeley Klein has argued, it seems that at least Zenchiku himself honestly believed that this vision occurred (i.e., he does not seem to have cynically concocted it) (Klein 2021, pp. 87–88).

Zenchiku was at pains to have prominent scholars from a variety of backgrounds read and comment on the significance of his visions. Nittō Shamon Shigyoku (入唐沙門志玉) of the Kegon (華厳; Ch. Huáyán) sect of Buddhism, the Confucian scholar Ichijō Kaneyoshi (一条兼良), and Nankō Sōgen (南江宗沅), a Zen (禅) monk and poet, were all asked by Zenchiku to read his text and provide commentary on it. The interpretations given in these commentaries on an already syncretic but Shintō-focussed text were incorporated into subsequent versions of Rokurin Ichiro, allowing Zenchiku to refine his interpretation of his vision in accordance with up-to-date ideas from across multiple intellectual traditions.

One important intellectual tool used by Zenchiku which is less familiar (considered less rigorous) now is allegoresis. This is an intellectual tool which was widely used in esoteric Buddhist schools (and in esoteric religions elsewhere). To quote Susan Blakeley Klein, ‘[i]t is evident from Meishukushū that Zenchiku believed in the signifying power of signs, that is, that the linguistic/symbolic relation of signifier and signified is not arbitrary, but motivated, and that homonyms and graphs can therefore be analyzed to reveal hidden identities’ (Klein 2021, p. 90) and that he ‘assumed that such associative identifications, when properly understood, conveyed something important about the true nature of reality: specifically, that associative identifications were a legitimate basis for the efficacy of rituals performed in connection with sarugaku noh’ (Klein 2021, p. 82).

Okina, mentioned above as an important figure in Zenchiku’s late treatise Meishukushū, is a good example of how Zenchiku uses allegoresis. Okina is the name of the prototypical nō play, a play which is more ritual than play, with a provenance so old that some of its lines were incomprehensible even in Zenchiku’s time. The play is to this day performed as the first play of the new year or on other auspicious occasions by nō troupes as a kind of purifying ritual for the stage. In Meishukushū, Zenchiku uses allegoresis to integrate Buddhist, Shintō (kami-worship), and Confucian ways of seeing the world—different points of view and different ways of experiencing or interpreting the same underlying reality—and, in this way, connects the Okina of the nō play to the Buddhist deity Dainichi Nyorai (大日如来), kami such as Sumiyoshi Daimyōjin and Kasuga Daimyōjin (春日大明神), as well as the great courtier and waka (和歌) poet Ariwara Narihira (在原業平 825–880). Narihira is also considered by Zenchiku to be both a bodhisattva as well as a kami of yin–yang—i.e., Confucian onmyōdō (陰陽道). This allegoristically reflects the then-prevalent paradigmatic concept of honji suijaku (本地垂迹)2. Through the prevalent concept of bonnō soku bodai (煩悩即菩提 carnal passion as the nondual equivalent of enlightenment), Zenchiku identifies the prolific seducer and poet Narihira-cum-Okina—‘the benevolent deity of song and dance’—with kōjin (荒神) and the raging spirit of creative energy (and Konparu ancestor) Hada no Kawakatsu (秦河勝), in other words, to himself and his own artistic inheritance (Klein 2021, p. 93). There are numerous other examples of Zenchiku’s deployment of allegoresis in relation to Okina—a use so frequent that Nakazawa Shinichi has referred to it as a kind of ‘Okina monism’ (2002, 196)—but one more which deserves a mention in relation to Mekari is Zenchiku’s identification of an Okina of salt and purification (Iwotsutsu-no-Okina 塩土ノ翁) with the Buddhist sea dragon god Ryūjin (龍神) in the Meishukushū (Konparu [1974] 2016, p. 400; cf. Nakazawa [2003] 2022, pp. 172–76). Zenchiku thus manages to show a command of contemporary techniques of allegoristic hermeneutic discourse, positing an original interpretation of both the Okina play and the spiritual importance and heritage of sarugaku nō.

3. A Queer Musicological Approach

Now, just as Zenchiku used intellectual tools—such as allegoresis—and concepts—such as the unity of local deities (kami) and universal buddhas (honji suijaku), or the buddhahood of non-sentient beings (sōmoku kokudo shikkai jōbutsu (草木国土悉皆成仏), more commonly shortened to sōmoku jōbutsu (草木成仏))—of his time to interpret the world and compose his nō, in this paper, I am going to make use of interpretive tools of my time to make sense of his writings. Though I doubt that many readers will object to this approach to the analysis of non-Western and pre-modern music theatre, in light of Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood’s observation that ‘ethnomusicology has been even more nervous of categories of sexual behaviour manifest in music than has historical musicology’ (Brett and Wood 2006, p. 373), I want to take a quick moment to explain why I use an interpretive approach derived from queer musicology to talk about Zenchiku and Mekari, a play with no overt romantic or sexual content in it at all.

I emphasise musicology rather than the broader literary category of queer theory for a simple reason: the strategies developed within queer musicology since the early 1990s have been developed to deal with texts (=scores) with little to no explicit verbal content: absolute music and music without words. Though there is of course a rich seam of queer literary theory which analyses texts with no explicit queer content for undertones and gestures enacted from deep within metaphorical closets, queer musicology often deals with texts that have no linguistically meaningful content at all. And if I approach a nō play such as Mekari, which is largely plotless, and which is more ritual than drama, as I would a musical score with words—with the non-verbal equal to or more important than the verbal content—than queer musicology has more tools to assist in this interpretation than queer (literary) theory does. I would also like to point to avant-garde theatre director Suzuki Tadashi’s (鈴木忠志, b. 1939) comments about the physicality of nō: ‘the audience is drawn to the physiological feeling of high tension an actor expresses, rather than the meaning of the language or psychological expressions. […] The physiological energy that emanates from [the unnatural style of the actor’s body] resonates with the audience’s own physiological rhythms—rhythms that accompany breathing’ (Suzuki 1976, p. 26; trans. Hori Tanaka 2022, modified). Note that rhythm (a musical element) and breath (a physical element which is also essential to New Musicology’s and queer musicology’s focus on the embodiedness of music in the physical body of the performer) are elevated above language in this contemporary account of the nō actor.

I also contend that this queer approach is valid not just because it is a contemporary mode of interpretation, but because it is a kind of post-modern allegorises—like Zenchiku in his day, I will be offering an interpretation which is not orthodox, and which focusses on teasing out hidden connections through allegory and association. As a researcher who is a composer first and scholar second, I approach Zenchiku’s works with empathy, for he too was a working composer–writer–performer trying to make sense of the world through song, poetry, and dance first and only as a scholar secondarily, later in his life.

Furthermore, Zenchiku is known as the most yūgen (幽玄) of all the nō composers, and, as Hare points out, for Zenchiku’s father-in-law and mentor Zeami, ‘boyish “prettiness”’, which Hare identifies with yūgen, is considered to be ‘the basis for all yūgen in the noh’ (Hare 1986, p. 19). In pre-modern (pre-1868) Japan, homosexual behaviour could in general be openly practiced and was not condemned in either society or religion3. It was celebrated in art, including nō—including in at least one play attributed to Zenchiku, Matsumushi (松虫). But there are other kinds of closets: Japan then and now does have a pervasive cultural of secrecy and esoterism (Scheid and Teeuwen 2011) which might—via allegoresis—be usefully examined using analytical tools developed within queer musicology. And, like in many non-Abrahamic religions the world over, queer people—people who in their bodies and souls transcend the binaries of gender and of sexual desire—have in pre-modern Japan been elevated to positions of spiritual power4, positions which allow them—via allegoresis—to transcend the binaries of the conventional world and the absolute nothingness/emptiness/hollowness which is the ultimate reality where kami, buddhas, humans, and all other beings engage in generative play together. This connection between spiritual experience and sexuality will be important in discussing Zenchiku’s patently spiritual aesthetic.

To reiterate, my central claim here, then, is that queer musicology, because it does not have any linguistic content to analyse, is already always doing allegoresis, is a contemporary Western form of allegoresis, and, as such, is in fact an apposite theoretical approach to Zenchiku’s nō. This is not to claim that Zenchiku himself was queer or to divine a queer subtext within the spiritual motivations of his art (even for someone like Zeami, for whom a same-sex relationship is attested, such a claim would be anachronistic, given that the term ‘queer’ only began to be widely used in the present sense in the 1980s (Taavetti 2024, p. 139)). Rather, it is to claim that for contemporary interpreters, reading through queer musicology and theory opens up new and worthwhile perspectives on Zenchiku’s oeuvre.

4. Zenchiku’s Nō

In the previous section, I noted that—in common with many queer-identified people today—seeking alignment with mainstream society was not the motivation behind Zenchiku’s nō. This is in contrast to Zeami, whose aim was to popularise nō among the elites (i.e., potential patrons), merchants, and other city dwellers, while distancing it from the rural peasantry (i.e., people of lower classes and lower incomes) with which it had previously been associated. These different perspectives have often been remarked upon: Klein notes that ‘unlike Zeami, Zenchiku puts very little emphasis on audience response.… Instead, he devotes a great deal of attention to the Konparu troupe’s connection to Kasuga and sarugaku noh’s spiritual efficacy’ (Klein 2021, p. 318, n. 6). And Paul Atkins states that ‘Zeami … builds his aesthetics around the human subject. Zenchiku, on the other hand, … seems to regard the actor as a mere part of the vast universe, a conduit through which cosmic energies flow’ (Atkins 2006, p. 47).

Zenchiku’s under-theorisation of the actor’s role might actually reflect his lack of confidence in his own abilities as a performer of nō (Zeami, in one of his two extant letters to Zenchiku (‘The 5:14 Letter’), spends a whole paragraph reassuring a seemingly self-doubting Zenchiku that, though he has never seen his son-in-law perform, he has heard good reports) (Zeami 2008, p. 432). However, regardless of his acting ability, Zenchiku was undeniably in demand as a playwright, writing plays not only for his own Konparu troupe but also writing on commission for other performers and troupes to perform (the late 15th-century text—considered the most reliable mediaeval source of nō composer attributions—Jika denshō (自家伝抄) credits Zenchiku with 32 plays, 17 of which were written for seven other performers, including three for Kanze Matasaburō (観世又三郎 1429–1470) and seven, including Mekari, for the Hōshō school (宝生流)) (Atkins 2006, p. 252).

So how did the religious and philosophical ideas swirling around Zenchiku’s mind and through his milieu find expression in his plays? Obscurity is one technique he used to prime an audience for a deeper engagement with the mysteries of artwork and thence the universe (recall that Okina—the ur-play of nō and a touchstone for Zenchiku—includes some passages which were even in Zenchiku’s time incomprehensible). It can be artistically dangerous, because obscurity and ambiguity can be experienced as alienation that discomfits the viewer, but this denial of the audience’s conventional expectations also affords opening them up to new, spiritual, and revelatory experiences instead. And, aside from its value in opening audiences up to the wonder of the unexpected, obscurity—i.e., coded meanings—is also a crucial tool of communication utilised by queer interpreters, especially in cultures in which queer identities are repressed. As Wayne Koestenbaum points out, ‘In Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton’s “musical words said with musical utterance” awaken homoeroticism in the inexperienced Dorian because they evade explicit meaning’ (Koestenbaum 2001, p. 190; italics mine). Zenchiku fills his plays with references to Confucian, Buddhist, and Shintō concepts (often syncretically combining these traditions), not to mention far more classical Chinese poems and obscure waka than other nō writers, that would go over the heads of all but the most well-educated of his contemporaries. One example of Zenchiku’s use of relatively obscure poetry, in contrast to Zeami’s injunction to use poetry which everyone would know, is Zenchiku’s use of Fujiwara no Teika’s (藤原定家) waka (and indeed, an entire play called Teika about Teika in which Teika himself does not appear). Teika is known for complexity, ambiguity, and yūgen, and Zenchiku is the only nō playwright to use Teika’s poems in, at least, the classical period of nō. Thornhill also notes Zenchiku’s commitment to an overall aesthetic of yūgen, which he glosses as ‘tonal darkness’ and ‘gloomy obsession’ (Thornhill 1997, p. 38). Secrecy—obscurity—is also an essential element of yūgen.

To borrow Atkins’ words, ‘[r]efusal to provide the audience with catharsis’ (Atkins 2006, p. 65) is another technique Zenchiku frequently uses in his plays, one which can add to their difficulty from the audience’s point of view. This lack of catharsis stems not only from the circular narrative structure of his plays, in which the characters do not develop, but also the musical and rhythmic structure, which is cyclical rather than teleological: Rather than the breathless climaxes brought about by the circular but ever-increasing intensity of Zeami’s jo-ha-kyū (序破急), Zenchiku’s structures tend to make a return to the slower opening (jo) rhythms at the end of the play (after the kyū). Together, the circularity of both the dramatic and musical structures constitutes a practical and relatively unique utilisation of kōko kyakurai (向去却来), a Zen phrase that means ‘having experienced enlightenment, to return to the [conventional] world’ (Thornhill 1993, p. 30, n. 25). Zenchiku’s uniquely circular, non-cathartic, yūgen structures can also be read in a similar way to the structural ambiguities of the music of queer composers, such as Schubert, the pervasive sense of tragedy in whose music has been identified by multiple musicologists as relating to the queer trope of unrequited love (Fisk 2022, pp. 342–43; McClary 2006, p. 226ff.)—i.e., a passionate emotional arc which ends in the same unfulfilled state as it begins.

It is also worth noting, in this context, Zenchiku’s sustained interest in the potential for enlightenment of women and non-sentient beings (sōmoku jōbutsu). Two of his plays have main characters which are plants (Bashō (芭蕉) and Kakitsubata (杜若)) and other plays where characters are kami of non-sentients (Tatsuta (竜田) and Mekari). Teika has both, in a way—the shite Princess Shikishi’s (式子内親王) attachment to Teika has taken the physical form of teika-kazura (テイカカズラ) vines curled around Shikishi’s grave. And while it would be self-evidently foolish to suggest that an interest in women is inherently queer, it is undeniable that for gay men at least, identification with powerful female characters has been a longstanding trope, and the ability for many cis-gendered gay men to identify with women is one manifestation of the transcending of binaries that queer interpretation excels at. It is also worth reminding ourselves that the characters in nō—regardless of gender, species, or metaphysical status—were all (at least, prior to the early 20th century) played by men or boys.

The techniques Zenchiku deploys in order to create a dramatic atmosphere which affords opening both the performers and audience out to the hollow world—obscurity, cyclical structures, and finding ways to express being between or outwith seemingly solid binary states of existence—are techniques which are also crucial expressive tools for queer artists.

5. Mekari

I am going to go a bit deeper into these ideas by looking at a very under-discussed5 play—Mekari—from two perspectives: a perspective rooted in Japanese religion and ontology, as well as one rooted in queer musicology6. Mekari’s focus on the sea as a site of religious meaning and fertility does allow us to delve into some unique areas of Zenchiku’s art7. Mekari exhibits many of the esoteric religious qualities mentioned above, while also providing a wealth of examples of binaries being transcended which have religious significance for him—and, by allegoresis, can be interpreted in the present as queer.

The main action of Mekari is a re-enactment of what is claimed to be the oldest annual kami-worshipping ritual in Japan, the putatively 1900+-year-old seaweed cutting ceremony which takes place in the pre-dawn hours of the lunar new year on the shores of the Kanmon Strait (関門海峡), between the islands of Kyūshū (九州) and Honshū (本州)—in other words, a location on neither sea nor land and neither island nor mainland. The shite and tsure (ツレ) are, respectively, an old fisherman (identified as an okina in the script) and his daughter, an ama (海人, En. diver), coming to seek a connection with the deity of the sea at this ceremony of absolution for the past years’ sins (such as the taking of life in the course of their jobs) and blessings for the new year. The waki (ワキ) is the priest of Hayatomo who conducts the seaweed-cutting ceremony.

Fabio Rambelli points out that there is a dearth of scholarship on the ocean’s place in studies of Japanese religions (Rambelli 2018, p. xii ff.). This is despite the ocean’s fundamental place in the creation stories in the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀) and the Kojiki (古事記). Especially in the latter, the sea is presented as both the original state of things before the islands of Japan were created and is also presented as an equal plain (unabara 海原) along with the takama no hara (高天原) and ashihara (葦原), respectively, or the plains of sea (water), high heaven (light), and reeds (land). The process by which the centralised spiritual institutions of Japan became disconnected from the sea is allegorised into a myth in the Kojiki, in the story of Hoderi-no-mikoto (火照命, a deity of fishing sacred to the Kyūshū-based Hayato (隼人) people) and his hunter brother Hohodemi-no-mikoto (火火出見尊)8 (Teeuwen 2018, pp. 5–6). This story is likely to have been the principle source material for Zenchiku’s Mekari; it is referred to throughout the play. To quickly summarise the myth, the brothers exchange their tools and, through a series of accidents, the land-focussed hunting brother, Hohodemi-no-mikoto, ends up in the deep-sea palace of the Dragon God (identified in by Zenchiku’s script as both the Buddhist Ryūjin and sea kami Watazumi (海神, En. sea god)), marries his daughter, Toyotama-hime (豊玉姫), and brings her back to Kyūshū. Hohodemi-no-mikoto uses the wealth and magic powers he acquired at Watazumi’s palace to impoverish and almost drown his fisherman brother, Hoderi-no-mikoto, eventually forcing him to submit and become his servant. This story can be read as an allegory of the inland Honshū-based Yamato people conquering the Kyūshū-based divers and sea-worshippers and thenceforth treating the sea as spiritually inferior to the land (especially mountains).

In Mekari, however, Zenchiku does not tell the second half of this mythological story and indeed makes the fisherman and ama—identified with the sea kami Hoderi-no-mikoto—his main characters rather than the victims.9 In Zenchiku’s theoretical writings, too, the sea appears multiple times as a prominent metaphor for the absolute, the emptiness from which creativity springs—what Thornhill names as Zenchiku’s ‘Theory of Primal Water’, associated with Shintō creation myth, the Buddhist concepts of impermanence and creation, and as one of the Confucian elements—an association crystallised into the non-dual culmination of his rokurin-ichiro system, the one dewdrop (Thornhill 1993, pp. 156–63).

And while this play does not offer a sōmoku jōbutsu literal personification of a non-sentient being (i.e., the sea), at the end of the first act—as is typical in deity nō—the shite and tsure reveal themselves to be the kami of, respectively, the sea (i.e., Ryūjin—a honji suijaku equation/replacement of the native Watazumi with a Buddhist sea dragon—who initially manifests as Okina—and is thus also related to Dainichi Nyorai, Sumiyoshi Daimyōjin, Narihira, etc.) and sky (a pun on ama, which means both diver and sky/heavens), while the ai-kyōgen (アイ狂言, a comic actor who appears between the two acts of the main play) is a kami of seaweed.

At the temporally ambiguous, in-between point in the year where the last day of the old year has gone and the first day of the new year is yet to dawn, through the ceremony of cutting the seaweed, the old separation of (animosity between) land and sea is dissolved:

SHITE and TSURE together

In this Hayatomo kami festival

There is no separation between land and Watazumi

Thanks to this offering of seaweed,

Both the plants on the ocean floor and those floating on the waves

Recall that the first island of Japan created in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki myths was just a reed bed floating on the ocean: what Zenchiku has the actors enact on stage is a subversion of what the source Hohodemi-no-mikoto myth accomplishes: it is a purification via a return to the primal oceanic state, when sea, sky, and land—the three places of unabara, takama no hara, ashihara—are once again unified and non-dual. It can thus be read as a radical reimagining of the Yamato Shintō myth which celebrates, rather than subjugates, the sea, aided by the honji suijaku Buddhist sea dragon/Okina as the principal character, spirits of both women and seaweed as secondary characters, and an ambiguous setting at the point between Kyūshū and Honshū, or land and sea.

I do not wish to claim any radical, heretical motive behind Zenchiku’s reinterpretation of the Hohodemi-no-mikoto myth. Rather, what I want to emphasise here is that the syncretic religious/philosophical milieu of 15th-century Japan was a fertile, open ground in which different traditions influenced each other, and the surface stories (myths, rituals, and plays) could be reshaped to reflect what was assumed to be a unified core shared by these diverse traditions. It was a moment of openness that for a creative thinker like Zenchiku, one who himself had a mind-opening/expanding revelatory experience, was itself a kind of ‘hollow’ field in which he could explore and play. This also gives weight to Thornhill’s interpretation of Zenchiku’s treatises, in which he reads as Zenchiku, positing that water—the sea—is the primal element from which all else is generated: it is the source of sacredness.

6. Mekari’s Hollow Expanse

This is also, of course, a play of in-betweennesses and ambiguities, or commonplace binaries transcended as illustrations of the Buddhist truth of the unity of opposites. Mekari temporally takes place between the old and new year, and the physical setting is doubly in-between—neither Kyūshū or Honshū and neither the ocean nor the land (‘In this Hayatomo kami festival/There is no separation between land and Watazumi’). There is the ambiguous divinity mentioned above, the shite’s manifestation as a god playing a fisherman (the fisherman identified as Okina and thus all the Buddhas and poets and kami associated with Okina allegoristically manifest as well), and the fact that divinities representing three non-sentient beings (one also manifesting as a woman) are on stage, the sea, the sky, and seaweed itself, and the unusual choice to have the comic interlude ai-kyōgen actor play the seaweed kami in-between the first and second acts. The music sung by the ai-kyōgen part also repeatedly approaches climaxes without reaching them, which is an unusual gesture in nō but one which reflects Zenchiku’s characteristic refusal of catharsis both dramatically and musically.

It is undoubted that Zenchiku, in all his work, hoped to effect a purifying realisation of spiritual oneness in his audience, mirroring the unity of elements on stage. Obliterating these binaries (there are more in the play than space permits me to explore here), bringing the audience to the brink of climax (neither listless nor fulfilled), and setting up a situation that affords an intense spiritual experience but making the audience take the final step themselves surely had a soteriological function for Zenchiku. But does this play retain its soteriological potential in the 21st century?

I have previously written about reading nō texts and rhythms through the lens of Ueda Shizuteru’s aesthetics (Jamieson 2022), which I will expand on here: through alienation techniques, such as obscurity of location, ambiguity of textual meaning (i.e., openness to multiple avenues of interpretation), irregularity of rhythm10, and circularity of form (ending his jo-ha-kyū with a return to the slow opening rhythms of the jo), Zenchiku’s nō (similar to Zeami’s, but more so), in general afford being interpreted as ‘hollow’ (虚 kyo) in the soteriological sense of Ueda’s ‘hollow words’. I also want to underline that while the language barrier (even for modern Japanese speakers) may prevent the subtleties of the text’s word-play from contributing as much to this effect as in Zenchiku’s time (though in general increasing the experience of alienating obscurity), the musical (rhythmic and structural) alienation effect is, given the sheer amount of steady teleological rhythms and short, self-contained tonal or modal musics that we are unavoidably exposed to in daily life, if anything, even more pronounced in our late-capitalist era than in when these nō were first performed.

All of these elements offer the potential to trigger an awareness of conventional reality not being the entirety of reality and that conventional reality is ensconced in the hollow expanse (kyo no sekai 「虚」の世界; akin to the ‘emptiness’ (kokū 虚空) of Mahāyāna thought or absolute nothingness (zettai mu 絶対無) of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎). They do not reveal the hollow expanse per se; they suggest the possibility of there being more than the conventional narrative of capitalist realism typically allows. That crack in the certainty of convention is what mugen nō (especially Zenchiku’s) still offers us in late-capitalist modernity—a glimpse into different potential ways of being in the world. And, to pivot to the queer reading, what is the point of ‘queer’ (instead of ‘straight’ or even ‘gay’) readings if not to emphasise the multiplicity of ways of being in the world? To quote Koestenbaum on opera again: ‘Opera is not very real. But gayness has never been admitted into the precincts of reality. And so gays may seek out art that does not respect the genuine.’ (Koestenbaum 2001, p. 145). Mugen nō (夢幻能, En. nō of dreams and illusions) is also, by definition, a subversion of conventional reality; a queer musicological reading is, perhaps, simply a post-modern set of interpretive tools through which we can glimpse the hollow expanse, the emptiness of ultimate reality that Zenchiku identified with the limitless primal ocean.

7. Conclusions

The theme of this special issue is Spaces Between. In landscape, islands are areas of land between vast stretches of sea, and archipelagos are ocean straits flowing between groups of islands—in either case, a counterpoint of land and sea. In Mekari, the binaries of land and sea are transcended, and conventional interpretations of myth are upended. For a contemporary interpreter, this can have queer implications; at least, it affords being queered. Takahashi Mutsuo 高橋睦郎, one of Japan’s foremost living waka poets, has already done this in his inimitable and humorous way:

和布刈のうみ潮の八百合に立つ脛の脛毛なびくはわれへならなく

Mekari no umi shio no yaha ai ni tatsu sune no sunege nabiku wa ware he naranaku

The briny tide of Mekari meeting his leg hairs standing up and waving, but not at me.

(Takahashi 2005, p. 132; translation mine)

Here, the maleness of the speaker can be assumed; the maleness of the bearer of those leg hairs—the seaweed-cutting priest—is undoubted.

Zenchiku’s work retains its soteriological potential today, not only because of its focus on the environment—the agency and importance of non-humans—the equality of women, and the importance of reconnecting with the universe (and, often, the tragedy of failing to do so). Its ambiguity is its strength and resilience, our permission to interpret spiritually, anti-capitalistically, queerly, or through whatever theoretical lens we choose to view the world: not just because Roland Barthes gave us post-moderns permission to interpret without undue deference to the intention of the author, but, by his own example, so does Zenchiku himself.