Recently I was lucky enough to find a couple of volumes of the Tourist Library, a series of booklets published in English by the Japanese Board of Tourist Industry in the 1930s to educate visitors to Japan about aspects of the culture. Volume 2 is Japanese Noh Plays: How to See Them, by Toyoichirō Nogami, the distinguished Noh scholar. Professor Nogami's introduction includes an unexpected guest appearance by George Bernard Shaw, who visited Japan in the early Thirties and saw a Noh performance. I don't know if this anecdote is well known among Shaw's fans, but it should be placed against his line "Noh drama is no drama", which he obviously delivered during a quip-off with Oscar Wilde, and which would lead you to suppose that he got nothing out of the performance. The thrust stage is an important part of twentieth-century stagecraft, and you should take Nogami at his word when he says Shaw found the Noh stage very interesting.
When Mr. Bernard Shaw paid a sudden visit to Japan last spring, to the president of the Kaizō-sha (publishers), who was racking his brains how to amuse him, I gave the advice that he should entertain Mr. Shaw with the Noh. This I arranged. I was given orders to make a programme consisting of a Noh play and a Kyōgen. Trusting to the dramatist's appreciative power, and not a whit discounting it, I chose Tomoe, which is the most characteristic Noh among all Noh plays. To this I added the Kyōgen Ka-zumō (The Wrestling with a Mosquito). This is an orthodox Noh in which the First Actor (Shite) performs alone throughout almost the whole play, and the Second Actor (Waki) withdraws himself beside the pillar and watches the play just as the audience does, after he has finished his small part. The First Actor takes the rôle of a beautiful Amazon who persuades her lord to commit suicide, and in the meantime fights against swarming enemies. But on the stage there is none but the Second Actor, the representative of the audience, who plays the rôle of a Travelling Monk. And here is put in practice the principle of extreme theatrical economy, which I wanted Mr. Bernard Shaw to see. The Actors were Mr. Kintarō Sakurama, a leading actor of the Komparu School, and Mr. Shin Hōshō, my teacher of utai. Mr. Shaw watched the play with great interest, and I sat beside him with Mr. Yone Noguchi who explained it to him. When the performance was over, Mr. Shaw stood up and made a speech in response to the remarks made by the president. The day was cold, snow having fallen on the previous day and it was not yet melted. He said: "I have not been at all incommoded by the cold this afternoon. The delightful performance of this Noh drama has made me forget it. It has been a performance of great interest to me. Although I am seventy-seven years of age, I am still learning, and I have been given the opportunity of learning something new and interesting this afternoon. I wish to say that for the artist, however old he may be, there is always something to learn. Although I naturally did not understand a word of the performance this afternoon, I think I may venture to say that I understood its artistic intention, and I followed it with very great interest."
Mr. Shaw said that he was more interested in the Noh than in anything else he saw in Japan. Above all he greatly admired its unique stage construction. This is exactly what Monsieur Claudel praised. And this is indeed one of the strikingly characteristic features of the Noh play. Therefore, in this brochure I begin with the Stage.
I like the sudden switch to the topic of the weather three quarters of the way through the anecdote, a clear case of ki shō ten ketsu narrative structure.
