The aged Komachi rests upon the
''Sotoba Komachi'' is a
Noh play written by Kan'ami, and is one of the most compelling and best-known of the type.
Plot and themes
Much of the strength of the play derives from the variety provided by the three main and distinct sections: lament for lost beauty; witty religious debate; and ghostly possession.
The play begins with an encounter between two priests and an old beggar-woman, lamenting how she was “lovelier than the petals of the wild-rose open-stretched / In the hour before its fall. / But now I am grown loathsome even to sluts”. She later admits that she is the famed ''waka (poetry)">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 Māor ...
'' poet Ono no Komachi.
Because she is seated on a Buddhist stupa, a holy marker, she is challenged by the priests for creating bad karma, but in a witty debate uses Zen-like sophistries to defeat them: “Nothing is real. Between Buddha and Man is no distinction”.
The priests then lament in turn her loss of beauty; before in the final sequence she is possessed by the angry ghost of a former suitor, Shōshō of Fukakusa. He had been tasked with visiting Komachi for 100 nights in order to earn her love, but had died on the penultimate one; and his acting out of his cruelly thwarted struggles to win her love brings the play to a dramatic close, with Komachi then seeking for enlightenment and release.
‘The Summer Moon’ wrote: “In this fleeting world no one can escape/ The destiny of that famed poetess Komachi”.
*
moved his future wife to tears by reading from his translation of the play: “Like a root-cut reed,/ Should the tide entice,/ I would come, I think; but now/ No wave asks; no stream stirs”.