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Sotoba Komachi (Mishima)
Sotoba Komachi (卒塔婆小町) is one of the stories in Five Modern Noh Plays by Yukio Mishima. The original work was written by Kanami and was later reworked by Mishima Yukio for modern theatre. The kanji 卒塔婆 means stupa and小町 is the synonym of belle or beautiful woman. The story was written in 1952 and published in 1956. It was translated by Japanese literature expert Donald Keene into English in 1957. Sotoba Komachi is the third story of The Five Modern Noh Plays. In relation to Sotoba Komachi by Kanami The original work, Sotoba Komachi written by Kan'ami, was originally a conversation between two priests and a 99-year-old lady at a Buddhist shrine. She later admits that she is Ono no Komachi (one of the six great ''waka Waka may refer to: Culture and language * Waka (canoe), a Polynesian word for canoe; especially, canoes of the Māori of New Zealand ** Waka ama, a Polynesian outrigger canoe ** Waka hourua, a Polynesian ocean-going canoe ** Waka taua, a Māori w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Five Modern Noh Plays
''Five Modern Nō Plays'' is a collection of plays written by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Mishima wrote these plays between 1950 and 1955 and presented them as modern plays in Tokyo. Of these five, only ''The Damask Drum'' was expressed in the traditional Nō fashion. ''The Lady Aoi'' was expressed as a Western-style opera. The plays take older Nō plots or traditional and foreign fairy tales and bring them to a modern setting. Famed Japan scholar Donald Keene translated "Five Modern Nō Plays." Plays *Sotoba Komachi: A poet meets Komachi, a repulsive-looking old woman, at a Tokyo park at night. She expresses the memory of when she had been lovely 80 years ago. She reminisces on a night in the 1880s, and together with the help of the poet (who acts the part of the Military Officer with whom she fell in love), they relive that night. The poet realizes that she is still beautiful, and sees past her ragged clothes and wretched body. But expressing her beauty can only result ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yukio Mishima
, born , was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the , an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, but the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata. His works include the novels and , and the autobiographical essay . Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. Mishima's political activities made him a controversial figure, which he remains in modern Japan. From his mid-30s, Mishima's right-wing ideology was increasingly revealed. He was proud of the traditional culture and spirit of Japan, and opposed what he saw as western-style materialism, along with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Keene
Donald Lawrence Keene (June 18, 1922 – February 24, 2019) was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene was University Professor emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name . This was also his poetic and occasional nickname, spelled in the '' ateji'' form . Early life and education Keene was born in 1922 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York City and attended James Madison High School. He received a Bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1942 and studied under Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. He then studied the Japanese language at the United States Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado and in Berkeley, California, and ser ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kan'ami
was a Japanese Noh actor, author, and musician during the Muromachi period. Born in Iga Province, Kan'ami also went by and . He is the father of the well-known playwright . Theater Kan'ami's career began in Obata, Nabari-shi, Mie when he founded a sarugaku theater group in the Kansai region on the main Honshu island. The troupe moved to Yamato and formed the Yuzaki theater company, which would become the school of Noh theater. He grew in popularity and began making trips to Kyoto to give performances. In 1374, the shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was in the audience of a performance and was so impressed by it that he became Kan'ami's patron. Kan'ami was the first playwright to incorporate the Kusemai song and dance style and Dengaku dances from rustic harvest celebrations. He trained his son Zeami Motokiyo in his style, and his son eventually succeeded him as director of the Kanze school of Noh. Kan'ami died in Suruga Province was an old province in the area that is tod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ono No Komachi
was a Japanese waka poet, one of the ''Rokkasen'' — the six best waka poets of the early Heian period. She was renowned for her unusual beauty, and ''Komachi'' is today a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan. She also counts among the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals. Life Almost nothing of Komachi's life is known for certain, save for the names of various men with whom she engaged in romantic affairs and whose poetry exchanges with her are preserved in the ''Kokin Wakashū''. She was probably born between 820 and 830, and she was most active in composing poetry around the middle of the ninth century. Extensive study has gone into trying to ascertain her place of birth, her family and so on, but without conclusive results. The Edo-period scholar Arai Hakuseki advanced the theory that there was more than one woman named Komachi and that the legends about her referred to different people. This theory was later expanded to conjecture that there were four "Komachis"., citin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Waka (poetry)
is a type of poetry in classical Japanese literature. Although ''waka'' in modern Japanese is written as , in the past it was also written as (see Wa, an old name for Japan), and a variant name is . Etymology The word ''waka'' has two different but related meanings: the original meaning was "poetry in Japanese" and encompassed several genres such as ''chōka'' and ''sedōka'' (discussed below); the later, more common definition refers to poetry in a 5-7-5-7-7 metre. Up to and during the compilation of the '' Man'yōshū'' in the eighth century, the word ''waka'' was a general term for poetry composed in Japanese, and included several genres such as , , and . However, by the time of the '' Kokinshūs compilation at the beginning of the tenth century, all of these forms except for the ''tanka'' and ''chōka'' had effectively gone extinct, and ''chōka'' had significantly diminished in prominence. As a result, the word ''waka'' became effectively synonymous with ''tanka'', and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
