Pathos and Farce. Zato Plays of the Kyogen Repertoire

Abstract

Too HE difficulty of trying to write about kyjgen' is that there is so little to go by. By this I mean that we have only the texts, and the text of a kyJgen play is deceptively simple. To read it can be remarkably unrewarding. If read in Japanese it may be faintly amusing, and the play on words and the peculiar use of language in general may be of some interest. Traditionally, Western plays, and to a certain extent noh plays as well, can be read and analyzed in the classroom and enjoyed purely as literature. But by its very nature kyJgen belongs exclusively to the stage. Its lines are hardly more than guidelines and they possess little meaning outside of interpretation. Of course, the function of acting is always to clarify and to refine meaning-one has to see Bajazet to realize the full psychological impact of Roxane's famous 'Sortez!'. But a student with intelligence and imagination can understand Racine's plays without ever seeing them performed on the stage. Not so with kyJgen. Kyogen plays were born on the stage and still bear the imprint of their origin. Words are indissolubly linked to the peculiar form of diction which only a trained person can emulate, and to the stage action and facial expressions which belong to kyJgen and to kyJgen alone. KyJgen is pure theater and can only be enjoyed as such. Historically, kyJgen developed in a haphazard sort of way until Zeami2 established its position in relation to noh. Comical elements seem to have existed within sarugaku and dengaku3 since very early times. In 1270 some monks of Kafukuji in Nara gave a performance of dengaku and the program included an item called kyJgen, which was 'amusing' or 'entertaining' (okashii). But it was in the fourteenth century that kyJgen began to be differentiated from noh, and some monks called okashi-hoshi4 appear to have specialized in this form of entertainment. In 1416 some monogatari-zJ,5 who may have been blind storytellers, were invited to perform kyogen at a private party. After this, with the writings of Zeami,