Tue No Puays or Jaray. Translated and edited by, Arthur Waley. London: George Allen & Unwin, Pp, 319. 18s. net, It is an easy and a dangerous' catch-phrase that "never the twain shall meet." To read these plays fifteenth-century Japan is to reflect that East is West and West is East and that the unity of mankind is "easily proof against the dichotomies of those who think imperially. For no sooner has one dipped into these brief tragedies of old, forgotten, far-off things than the mind flies back to memories of youth, to lecture-rooms where someone learn-telling how Greek tragedy and comedy arose, or to that earlier day when boyish wits were first. set grappling in an intoxicated awe with the grim splendour of an #schylian chorus.. True, there are differences, but these are infinitesimal compared to the similarities of structure and.of spirit. The Japanese No chorus is stationary; the actor dances while the chorus helps him out with the recitation. And the chorus seems to have bee: w later helpmeet for the actor-dancer rather than the origin of the whole dramatic procedu But, for the rest, the primitive stage, the hero-myth, the moralist ing, the masks, the rhythms, the religious atmosphere—it is all very doeely akin to the first play-acting of the West. A reader happening by chance on such a chorus as this Yet their prosperity lasted bat for a lay 5 It was like the flower of a convolvulus, here was none to tell them That glory flashes like sparks from flint-stone, And after—darkness, Oh wretched, the life of men! might reasonably wonder whether this was not some fragment from the Greek. For the No plays are ~nearly all shot through with the mse of nemesis and the same inted, reflective pity. Cur-too, they are Jargely ghost-plays (compare the tomb-theory of Greek drama), and usually a dead hero tells his battles over and a moral is drawn on the lines of later (Amidist) Buddhism. These battles of the tribal heroes that seemed so splendid are revealed, in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.