Seiobo There Below

1597. ZE’AMI IS LEAVING

Everyone says that he wasn’t at all sad, that the cruel exile hadn’t weakened him, on the contrary, that he understood the Sadogashima judgment to be a kind of completion, a sort of merciful judgment, the higher divine contradiction of “willing evil but creating good,” and this is the opinion of Miss Matisoff and Erika de Poorter, Kunio Komparu and Akira Oomote, Dr. Benl and Professor Amano — no point in enumerating them — for it is Stanford and Leiden, Tokyo and Tokyo, Hamburg and Osaka, that most decisively claim, and in unison, that he was born Yuusaki Saburo Motokiyo, bearing the name of Fujiwaka in his youth, then Shio Zempoo as a monk, widely known as Ze’ami Motokiyo — that is to say, the condemned, who departed in 1434 for his exile in an almost happy state, and there, on Sado Island, the traditional destination of exile for the most highly ranked offenders, he felt that Fate had directly elevated him to Paradise: this is what they all write, this is what they imply, they spread this lie as if they — the Japanese and non-Japanese alike — had all previously agreed upon it: that the ignominy, monstrous and unparalleled, of even dispatching one of the greatest artistic figures in the history of the world, this tiny, frail, and otherwise already broken old man, seventy-two years of age, onto a perilous journey and then, to crown it all, to our even greater ignominy, if not to the direct cretinization of our ignorant present age, by having us believe that he felt just fine, he made the trip and on the distant island spent a period of time left unspecified, in accordance with custom, which therefore might as well have been for all eternity, in a harmonious, balanced state of mind; we have no sources to indicate the contrary, they all spread their hands wide in unison, we may rely, they proclaim, only and exclusively upon the enchantingly beautiful Kintoosho, referring to his short masterpiece written in 1436, and thus beyond doubt entrusted to paper during the period of the Sado exile; surely this farewell-pearl of his aesthetic oeuvre, this exquisite ornamental gemstone, this ravishing cadenza, cannot be read otherwise, cannot be interpreted as anything else but the ceremonial swan-song of a soul sunk into silence, of a being who has overcome inconstant fate, capable of contemplating worldly existence only alongside heavenly existence; but this is all a deliberate intrigue and a lie, a mystification and a conspiracy, because he certainly was sad, infinitely, inconsolably sad; they injured him, more precisely they injured that artist in whom there was already hardly any strength to endure a verdict that was thoroughly unjust, both to him and to the instigators of this command; he was already very tired, he was weak, and life had worn him out; and in the impotent court and the residence of the crazed Shogun, everyone knew that even just the mere tone of a superficial, an insensitive, an unfeeling remark was enough for Ze’ami to feel eternally wounded; well then, after such a verdict as this, after all that had come before — his career, with its luminous beginnings, decisively shaken in 1408 by the death of Shogun Yoshimitsu, well, and still after that, his career approaching consummation, interrupted by the death in 1428 of Shogun Yoshimochi, and yet still after that, the final blow, crushing the genius so defenseless — indeed, he was already susceptible to even the slightest blows of fate — the loss of his utterly adored son, his heir, and the embodiment of the future of the Yuuzaki Association, and therefore of the Noh itself, Juro Motomasa, whom he, Ze’ami, held to be a greater talent than both himself and his own father; still, how could anyone, Japanese or non-Japanese alike, believe that after all this, that this thoroughly megalomaniacal, ignoble, idiotic, and arrogant decision, to send such an elderly person to certain death, would make that person, the subject of that decision, happy, and that in his eyes Sado would be truly identical with that described in the Kintoosho, identical with the center of the Wasp and the Diamond Mandalas, with the Cosmic Unity, the Endless Course of Regeneration of Gods and Humans — no, that is not Sado, just as no location in the Kintoosho is identical with even one location of the story of his exile; what a shameless deception, what a depraved falsification; for in reality — and not in the Kintoosho — it was a sad, wounded, broken old man that had to depart from Kyōto in 1434, subsequently reaching Wakasa prefecture by boat and from there the place of his exile; it is altogether as if we were expected to believe that when Ze’ami received the order to go into exile from Muromachi Dendoo, the residence of the shogun, he was filled with the greatest happiness, oh, at last I can get to Sado, oh, his heart was flooded with warmth, at long last here is the possibility for me to attain in this world, as a reward for my entire life, that which is not worldly, the Realm of the Wasp and the Diamond Mandalas — should we imagine it like this?! really?! — no! a thousand times no! in reality the entire thing happened completely differently, for there was every reason for him to sense that ill fortune, personified by Shogun Yoshinori, did not merely wish to drive him away, but wanted, like a sledgehammer, to crush him to bits, to destroy him, annihilate him, to clear this disobeyer of his wishes from his path; Ze’ami knew very well that if he left Kyōto, fulfilling the order of exile, a command that nonetheless he had to fulfill, that he would never see Kyōto again in his lifetime, so then in what other atmosphere could this have taken place than one of farewell for all eternity; everyone in the house wept, the servants of the retinue from the very youngest to the most hardened elders all wept; he gently reassured them that everything would be fine, but he knew full well that from this point, nothing would be fine, he bowed before all the members of his family, he bowed to his beloved wife, but all the while he was bidding farewell to the house as well: the objects, the rays of light, the delicate scent of incense; and the hour came and they set off through the streets of Kyōto, and then he bid farewell to the streets of Kyōto, farewell to the Gosha, to the Arashiyama bridge, then farewell to the Kamo River as well, it was the fourth day of the fifth month, the sixth year of Eikyo when they left the city in silence, at the time, with the retinue, specified in the command, and they arrived only the next day at the port of Obama in Wakasa prefecture, there stood the boat; Ze’ami tried to evoke his memories of the place because he was certain he had been here before, but he could not recall what had brought him to this place or when it might have been and in whose company his visit might have occurred, he hardly remembered anything anymore, maybe he wasn’t sure that he had even been here before, perhaps it only seemed that way to him, the burden of more than seventy years weighing down upon his memories, and these memories functioned in a particular way, namely that everything swirled around, completely helter-skelter, in his shattered heart and mind, the memory-pictures came, flowed, surged, continually floating one after the other, and drawn from everything that he had encountered in reality, some old image drifted into his mind; there were no important, no essential memories, because now each and every memory was important, essential; although one single face returned again and again, one face kept continually floating into these transient memories: the dear face of his beloved son, whom he had lost, and whom he knew — until the day he departed from this earth and with the most merciless suddenness left him behind — to be his worthy successor; he saw Motomasa-san now as well, until the picture grew pale, and the mountains surrounding the shore, and the gentle clouds above the waves, evoked in his mind the renowned Chinese work “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang”, then he thought about this picture and a poem was beginning to formulate itself inside him, there was more than enough time for that, as having embarked onto the boat they were obliged to wait, and for a long time, in the dead calm and utter stillness; no wind blew the entire night, only in the morning and then in the wrong direction, not from the direction for which they had to wait, but then that wind came too, the wind blowing in the right direction; they raised the anchor, they sailed off, above the waves; and he looked back and he saw that they were moving farther and farther away, away from the land that he had loved so much, already he was very far from the city that he must now leave once and for all, he really must bid it farewell now, and although he had been hoping until the very last minute that perhaps it would not, after all, come to pass, now that the certitude was irrefutable, he could not master his emotions and there was not even anyone in his vicinity who would have understood why his tears were flowing down, when the sailing craft — although following the coastline all the way — put off so far from shore that one could only know, and not see, that it remained back there, somewhere in the fog: they left him alone on deck and he stood there leaning against the rails, and for a good long while could not even bear to sit back down in the chair that they had fastened there for the old man; for his soul was bidding farewell to everything that had been his life, which was now ending, because what could come now, he asked himself, but he only saw waves as the boat cleaved through them, the waves, that was the answer to his question as to what could come, because — well, what could come; waves, waves, one after the other, thousands and thousands, millions and millions of waves, already he had known that it was going to happen — this thing and in this way; once when he was very young, sometime between childhood and youth, he had fallen passionately in love with Shogun Yoshimitsu, from whom afterward — completely independent of their feelings for each other, and purely thanks to the Shogun’s exceptional aesthetic sensitivity — he and his troupe — and with that the entire Sarugaki no Noh as they called it back then — were awarded the most elevated patronage; even then he already knew, already in the midst of this infinitely pure love known as wakashudo; and often he stood by the window in the Shogun’s bedroom, which had a view onto the exquisite garden; he stood there; at that moment, dawn had not yet begun to break, it was still dark but something had already begun to relent in this darkness, promising that later on the darkness would slowly, utterly slowly, be sifted through, like a delicate breath, with light; even then it occurred to him many times that one day this would come to an end, and that fate would not be kind to him, and truly fate was not kind to him, executing its judgments upon him without mercy, one after the other, so that now the final one was brought forth and was dispatching him on the decrepit vessel; neither in front of him, nor behind him, nor anywhere at all was there anything in sight, just water and endless water, how far is it to Sadogashima, he asked the captain, who replied after what seemed to him like a remarkably prolonged silence that oh, venerable sir, it is yet a very long, long journey; this is what he replied into the wind that had risen to a storm, or rather he yelled it out from the helm, yelled it out through two smaller gusts of wind, it is still a long, long journey; and so it was, too, they proceeded along, following the coastline, just water and water everywhere: sometimes rain poured down onto them, and there was no sign of summer, and it was possible to sense the mountain Shirayama faintly in the distance, and Hakusan with the mountain-shrine and its snowy peak, then out alongside, the pilgrimage harbors of Noto and Suzu and the Seven Islands, and maybe the sun set once, and the sun set two times, and perhaps still at times the gentle sparks of fireflies could be seen above the water near the shore, or perhaps it was just the last embers of the sinking sun, who knows, thought Ze’ami, and he could hardly even decide anymore whether he was seeing reality or just the mechanisms of his imagination, in any event, later on he distinctly recalled the fishermen’s boats: those were not the work of his not overly keen imagination, they definitely encountered fishermen’s boats, and the days came, and the nights came, and at times it seemed to him as if the boat wasn’t moving at all, but just swaying, and there next to him swayed the renowned pilgrimage temple on Tateyama, and then, one day, the peak of Mount Tonami, and they were just swaying there in the wind, while the prefectures of Echizen, Etchū, and Echigo slipped away; there was moonlight and there were smaller storms too, the days and the nights alternated with each other; he watched this, but the flashing pictures, between Shirayama and Echigo, were not pictures to stimulate his thoughts, because those, his thoughts, kept returning again and again to Kyōto, taking up the streets one after the other, the Suzaku Ōji running straight between Rashomon and Suzakumon, then Gosho above, and farther to the north, the Shogun’s palace; he went in one direction, as if he had entered into a dream, he turned at one corner then strolled on some more, and he saw in sequence the most important figures of his life, and finally he stood unexpectedly in front of his own house: and he would have opened the door already, pulled the door at the entrance gate, when a wave rocked the ship and he had to clutch onto its side, as the wave otherwise would have swept him overboard, the sailors cried out, they reefed the sail, the boat returned to its former position, and from the captain’s face one could see that nothing had happened, they cleaved on through the waves, and just water and water everywhere, and memories and memories, no matter where he looked, and the sadness, the pain in his heart now almost without object, and water and water, and waves and waves, he was tired, lonely, and very old, and then suddenly he was startled by something; he cried out to the captain where are we, to which the captain replied there it is already, it’s over there, and he pointed in some direction, grimacing but with a respectful expression, there is Sado island, my lord, that is certainly Sadogashima, venerable sir.

Oota was the name of the gulf where such vessels, carrying the exiled, traditionally moored; namely that here they had to lower the anchor, at the gulf of Oota, where, in accordance with the command, they had to disembark onto Sado Island, and disembark here they did; day was already turning to night, and after the exhaustion of the trip, lasting at least a full week, though this full week seemed much longer to him, more like a week of eternity extending into some kind of timelessness; they did not remain on deck, of course, but embarked onto the shore, following the stipulation only to travel by day, and spent the first evening, in view of the narrow range of possibilities, in a small fisherman’s hut; no sleep came to him that night, the journey had worn him down, his every limb was aching, in addition underneath his head was a piece of stone but even this did not capture his attention as they lay down in the kitchen to rest, but rather he thought of his children, his wife, and his beloved son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku, to whom he had entrusted those he loved; later on there drifted in among his thoughts a few lines from a poem by Ariwara Motokata, from the Kokinshu, about how autumn was approaching, and whether the mountain, with its shape like a rain-hat, would protect the maple trees from the ravages of the weather, or something to that effect; it was strange that exactly this mountain, Kasatori, shaped like a rain-hat, Kasatori of Yamashiro came into his mind from that poem, this Kasatori emerging from utter nothingness; he could not connect it to anything; as to why, he could not explain it in any terms, as to what caused precisely this verse to emerge in his memories in the depths of night — Kasatori, he tasted the word in his mouth, and he called forth in his mind the form of the mountain, recalled the wondrous colors of the maples of the land plunged into autumn, Kasatori, Kasatori, then suddenly the entire thing fell away from his brain; he looked at the unknown, cold, simple objects in the hut’s gloomy dark; he adjusted the position of his head on the stone, turning now to the left and now to the right, but it wasn’t good anywhere on the stone, which was his head-rest for this night, and although dawn broke with difficulty, with great difficulty, in the end he couldn’t even have said that he was too exhausted as he awaited this dawn, at his age one usually spent one’s time just like that, in a great waiting, even in Kyōto it was almost always like this, long hours in the silence after a brief sleep, a Kyōto dawn — Kyōto, a sacred, immortal, eternally radiant Buddha, it was all so far away already, as if it had been obliterated from reality once and for all, to exist from now on only within himself, oh Kyōto, he sighed, stepping outside through the door of the hut, sniffing the biting sea air, Kyōto, how horrendously far away you are already — but then he was helped onto one of the horses stationed here, as instructed by the Shinpo, and the procession began to head upward along a mountain path, his imagination was already taking him back to an autumnal dawn of long, long ago, not only did he see the unparalleled strength of its crimson, but he even sensed in the depth of the maple trees that unmistakable scent that made him so giddy at such times, for example, an autumn in Ariwara, on the mountain-side celebrated in song; they struggled upward along the path, he searched for the maple trees, but here they were not to be seen anywhere, the journey was wearing the horses down, the tiny path was serpentine and it was steep; the guide who had been entrusted to lead him on horseback slipped at times in his hemp-woven sandals — the worn-down waraji — on the stony ground, and at such times the reins grabbed him, rather than him grabbing the reins, it went on for a long time like this, and why deny it, he could hardly bear it, he couldn’t even name the year when he had last been seated atop a horse, and now on this dangerous ground; their one bit of luck was that it wasn’t raining, he determined, and in vain did he try to discover a beautiful glade in the forest along the path, or catch the song of a nightingale or a bulbul, continually he was forced to concentrate on not falling off the horse, on not sliding down from the saddle during a perilous washed-out stretch, he had no strength left for anything else, so that when they finally reached the Kasakari Pass and he addressed the peasant leading his horse saying, is this not Kasatori? — No, the peasant shook his head, but then there is something here in common with that word; the convicted man pressed him further, with the Kasatori in Yamashiro, no there isn’t, the peasant replied in confusion, this is Kasakari, so nothing, the rider pondered, and was he completely certain of this? he asked, but did not even wait for a reply, almost simultaneously with his question he conveyed that the journey had worn him out a bit, and he requested a stop to rest, just a brief rest, which did him well, too, and they spent just one half-hour underneath the thick foliage of a wild mulberry tree, yet his strength returned, he spoke saying they could now go on, he was helped again onto the horse, the procession started again, and they quickly reached the Hasedera Temple, which as he knew from the peasant, belonged to the Shingon sect, but to whom else would it belong; he would have smiled to himself if this name hadn’t evoked in him the memory from home of the Hasadera in Nara, which, however, was so painful that he said nothing to the peasant, only nodded, it’s well that it belongs to the Shingon sect, and although magnificent flowers suddenly came into view by the side of the temple — from where he was it seemed for a moment that they could have been well-tended azaleas — he didn’t call out to stop the horse, because he didn’t want to, he didn’t want a memory from Nara to torment him anymore, because right then he would have been tormented further by his daughter’s dear face and his son-in-law’s dear face and the picture of Fugan-ji, their family temple, the memory of an important prayer uttered there would have tormented him; well, better to be tormented by the journey, then, let us go on, he motioned, but the peasant, misunderstanding him or believing an account would bring joy to the venerable gentleman from Kyōto, spoke to him as they went along, and so the peasant was continually pointing backward toward Hasadera, where there, before the main altar, was a statue of the Eleven-Headed Kannon, but the gentleman from Kyōto didn’t say anything, so the peasant did not even begin to enumerate in detail what this famous Kannon in the Hasadera even was; he just trudged upward along the pass, grasping the horse’s reins, and he didn’t even dare to speak until they reached Shinpo, when night was already falling, and thus the district regent, insisting fully on the strictest of formalities, had already designated for the exiled man a place in a nearby temple, the Manpuku-ji, which could not convey to Ze’ami anything of itself on that day, as Ze’ami was so exhausted that they had him lie down on the spot prepared for him, he had already closed his eyes, lying on his back as always, he adjusted the blanket and immediately fell into a deep sleep, and slept for nearly four hours straight, so that the temple displayed itself to him, not then, but only the next day, only then did the convicted man from Kyōto see what kind of a place he had ended up in, he pushed back his blanket, pulled on his robe, and went out into the temple garden, which later on, until he changed his residence, was to give him so much joy, particularly one pine tree which he discovered at the edge of a high cliff, and which grew out and clung to this cliff as if it were holding tight to it, and this sight was often heart-wrenching for him, and at such times, so not to be overcome again by profound emotion, in the face of which he proved, during this period, to be so weak, he listened to the mountain winds as they caressed the foliage in the trees, or in the shadow of a tree he watched water trickling down the tiny veins of a moss-patch, he watched and he listened, he asked nothing of anyone, and no one asked anything of him, the silence within him became immutable and this silence around him became irrevocable too; he looked at the water in the little rivulets in the moss, he listened to the murmuring of the mountain winds up above, and from every quarter he was inundated with memories, no matter where he looked, an ancient recollection, dim and distant, fell upon the image or the sound, and he began to pass the days in such a way that he no longer could sense that one morning had come and then the next, because the first morning was exactly the same as the one that followed it, so that he began to feel that not only were they coming one after the other, but that all told, there was just one single day — one single morning and one single evening — he stepped out of time and returned to it only occasionally, and even then just temporarily, and on these occasions it was as if he were seeing the Manpuku-ji from a great height, or the Golden Hall in the middle of the garden, with the Yakushi Buddha inside it on the main altar, all from a great height, from the height of a slowly circling hawk; well at such times it occasionally happened that he came back for a little while and, sitting underneath a beautiful cypress tree in the moss garden, he said aloud to himself: so, this is my grave, that of the blameless, this is my grave, here, this temporary residence in the Manpuku-ji, then he sank back into that particular inner silence, and this was not looked upon favorably in the office of the Regent of Shinpo, he should be doing something, he was advised one time when he, the District Regent, came himself to pay a visit, whereupon Ze’ami, in order to stave off any further exhortations of this kind, asked for a piece of hinoki cypress wood and tools, and he set about to carve a so-called o-beshimi rain-making mask, which was not in use in the Noh, as might have been expected, but in the bugaku, the renowned worship-dance: he worked out the forehead and the eyebrows in a completely detailed fashion, and the eyes and the ridge of the nose delicately and movingly, but then he didn’t have enough attention for the rest: the ridge of the nose, the ear, the mouth, and the chin, remained in a crude state, as if in the course of things he had lost interest, or as if his thoughts had continuously wandered off somewhere between the ridge and the lower edge of the nose, and moreover he worked slowly, in contradiction to his nature, which was quick; he created this mask with many slow movements, and now he chose the appropriate, the precisely necessary chisel with great meticulousness, even with too much care, then he dug into the soft material with the chisel, so cautiously, so dilatorily, that anyone who knew him could well believe that he was working upon a truly extraordinary task, but here, of course, no one knew him, there was no question of any sort of extraordinary task, as among the higher-ranking officials no one was even that interested in what he was doing, just as long as he was doing something, the important thing was his person, and that he not be idle, and hence not die before his time, which for the higher-ranking officials and even the Regent himself would have meant only unpleasant questions and answers difficult to formulate, risks and obligations, so that, well, not even a flea was curious about this mask, they simply became aware of the news with acquiescence in the Shinpo Regent’s office and in its environs, that the tiny exiled old man was not just sitting around in the garden and idling away the entire day, as they expressed it, but was working on something, he is carving a mask, they repeated to each other, which then quickly spread among the general population of Sado, because the news was spread, not so much among the higher-ranking officials, but rather the lower-ranking ones, so that altogether 208 years after the death of the great emperor, and 154 years after the death of the founder of the faith, if we do not take the poet-minister into account, the residents of the island noted among themselves that the next famous exile from Kyōto is already here — but he wanted to move his residence to Shoho-ji, he nonetheless informed the Regent, in the future, he felt, the Shoho-ji temple would be a better place for him, assuming this would not represent any kind of bother for His Excellency the Regent, the old man said one day in his faint voice; the Shoho-ji, the Regent started back in astonishment, and he really could not conceal how shaken he was by the request from the condemned man from Kyōto, it wasn’t as if it would have made any kind of difference whether he was living in the Manpuku-ji or the Shoho-ji, that itself caused no problem whatsoever, but rather that — the Regent stammered in nervousness among his retinue — well, why is the Shoho-ji better, and why isn’t the Manpuku-ji good, and the people in the retinue looked at each other and they were perplexed, because they said, it didn’t mean anything if it were now the first or the second, but why the first and why the second, that was the question, and this question had to have an answer, they nodded enthusiastically, but then Ze’ami received permission and he changed residence, and no one ever asked him again why the first and why not the second, it was so inconsequential, it’s just that the question was not inconsequential and somehow — no one remembers how it happened — the problem sorted itself out, the Regent issued a command that the man exiled by Shogun Yoshinori should be transferred from Manpuku-ji to Shoho-ji, inasmuch as, the Regent wrote in the necessary documentation, inasmuch as this would not cause a burden to the venerable gentleman, and so in this way the Shoho-ji forthwith became the residence of Ze’ami, he took with himself the mask he was working on, and at times he still worked on it, but he never got beyond the ridge of the nose, he found an enormous boulder and attributed some kind of enormous significance to it, because from that point on, every day if it wasn’t raining, he went out to his cliff — there was no way of telling what he was doing there, the people covered all the possibilities: he was reciting poetry, singing, mumbling prayers, but in reality no one ever really knew, because no one ever dared to approach him, he could never make himself understood if some infrequent conversation might come about from time to time, he couldn’t even get them to stop calling him Your Honor, Venerable Sir, in vain did he tell them he was just an ordinary monk named Shio Zempoo, the Your Honors and Venerable Sirs remained, but it was also true that they really didn’t dare approach him, not because he was frightening, he wasn’t frightening in the least, rather he was just a small, emaciated, frail, gentle creation, his hands trembling, ready to be blown away by the first large gust of wind; the only problem was that he was so different, they simply didn’t know how to approach him, his world and theirs were so far away from each other, like the stars in the heavens from a clump of earth in the ground, his movements seemed so peculiar here, he raised his trembling hand in such a different way, and the way he held his fingers was different too, his eyes as he slowly looked at someone were as if he were looking through this someone, as if he were seeing their great-great-grandfather through them, and they found it odd that his face, despite his advanced age, was like a young boy’s, and moreover that of a very beautiful boy; the smooth, white skin, the high smooth forehead, the narrow tapering nose, the finely chiseled chin, they were confused if they had to look at him, because he was beautiful, very beautiful, and no one had any explanation for this, here in Sado, where everyone, including the Regent himself, was cut as if from the same cloth, everyone’s face with the same dark-brown skin, and this skin pockmarked from the eternally blowing winds, and the women from higher-ranking families hardly dressed any better than the women from lower-ranking families, boats rarely arrived, and it was even rarer for something to arrive on these boats that these women could have used to smarten themselves up: the exile was truly, in a word, the envoy of a distant realm, and sometimes he alarmed the local gentry and their subordinates by speaking fluently in verse, if he felt so inclined, and he mixed up his words, it was impossible to tell if he was speaking of a dream from yesterday or a memory from twenty years ago; one thing was certain, he never spoke of what was here on Sado, or he always changed the topic, talking about things that had happened twenty or thirty years ago, or he gave an evasive reply, saying when they asked if everything was to his liking that, yes, it was to his liking, they were in fact heaping too much on him, he didn’t need so much food, during the day he ate just once, in the morning, and very little, a little cooked vegetables, fish, beans, that kind of thing, he was satisfied with everything, he never once complained about his circumstances, he nodded at everything in approval, he praised the people who brought him things and who served him, he seemed tranquil and peaceful, or impassive, it was only when he was near his boulder that he cried, sometimes they saw it, the group of children among the servants gave an account of it, they dared to come near him and they spied on him, and the most simple and most high-ranking residents of the island did not even say anything upon hearing this news, this at least they could understand, he’s thinking of home, they said to each other and they nodded, as those who are fully able to comprehend, they understood the matter very well, and no explanation at all was necessary as to who this man was and what he was feeling; nevertheless it was precisely the case that they understood nothing, absolutely nothing of the matter, in this entire god-given world, because of course how would they have been able to understand, how could they have even suspected that precisely on this occasion, not only did they not understand — this was in the end to be expected here on Sado, in this godforsaken place — no — but not a single person in the entire world existed who could have truly understood him, neither in Kyōto nor in Kamakura, neither in the Emperor’s Palace nor in the Muromachi Dendoo, nobody, nothing, never and not even in the slightest possible degree, not even the infinitely cultivated advisor to the Shogun, Nijo Yoshimoto, and not even Ashikaga Yoshimitsu himself, that Ze’ami was not one of many, not just a sarugaku performer whose star had risen and then set, no, altogether no, he had created the Noh, he had called into being and determined a new form of existence: he had not created a theater because the Noh is not theater, but a higher if not the very highest form of existence, when an individual, by dint of a cultivated sensibility, unique intuition, and genial introspection, the competence of a profound engagement with a tradition of the highest order, creates revolutionary forms, never before experienced, and in doing so elevates all human existence, elevates the whole, to a very high level; and now this situation, this death sentence: because human existence holds its own needs at a very low level, they have always been held at a very low level and will be held at a very low level for all eternity, for the human being simply has no need for anything save a full stomach and a full coin-box, he wants to be an animal, and there is no strength that could convince him otherwise or recommend anything else, and so cunning is the human being that he instinctively senses when something or someone wants to dislodge him from that place where the stomach and the coin-box are the only things that matter; don’t need it, he replies to the higher challenges, you can take your advice and shove it up your filthy ass, if he has to put it crudely, and at such times he does put it crudely, whether he is a nobleman or a commoner, it’s all one and the same, let them strut and mince about, give themselves airs at any time and for any reason, but he still won’t get up from the dinner-table and no one will be able to pry him away from the wonders of the coin-box, if the stomach and the coin-box are full then he has no need for anything else, leave him alone already, moreover he wouldn’t understand, even if he had good intentions, he still would never be able to understand that which is great, that which surpasses him to such a degree that he hasn’t the slightest hope of comprehension, and so, not even reverence, so that Ze’ami had to go, thought Ze’ami sitting on the boulder, and anyone could have executed him, he reflected, rolling a little pebble here and there with his foot; then one day he asked a servant for permission to go for walks on the island, special permission is not required, came the answer, in conformity with the Regent’s order that he could go wherever he wished on the island, so he set off immediately, because the weather was good, and he sought out Kuroki Gosho Ato, the location of the exiled great Emperor; he bowed his head before the memory of his predecessor, he placed flowers by the first column, on the right-hand side of the entrance to the remains of the building; then another day the sun was shining nicely again, not too warmly, but the light was filtering down just so, the birds were particularly lively, he went on horseback with his escort to the Hachiman shrine, where Kyogoku Tamekane, the great poet and minister, had lived during his exile, and although he venerated him and held Tamekane’s work to be truly great, at the same time he had grown very curious upon hearing the legend that circulated among the residents of the island, according to which the hototogisu, the cuckoo that could be heard everywhere, was here, and only here, silent, he did not wish to hear the legend again, although in his retinue there were many who, upon reaching this location, immediately wanted to relate it again, so that he allowed some of them to do so, but it was not the story that he wanted to hear, but how did the hototogisu not sing in this place; and actually it was so, he stood before the shrine, he prayed, then he stepped aside to listen to how the hototogisu did not sing, and it was so, the hototogisus remained silent all around the shrine, not one sound could be heard from any cuckoo, and as for seeing a cuckoo, he saw just one, which, however, he watched for a very long while, and the people accompanying him could not understand what he was up to with that bird for such a long time, the bird on its branch didn’t move, nor did Ze’ami, as the procession to the horses came to a dead halt, he looked, he looked indeed for a long time, then finally the bird flew into the thick of the trees, the venerable sir somehow — with assistance — agonizingly got himself into the saddle, and they returned home quickly, and that night he slept for not one single moment, he tried to force himself but it didn’t work at all, no sleep came to him, he stared into the darkness, he listened to the night sounds, the rustling trees, and the gliding sound as a flock of bats returned or set off into the night, you cry out, Tamekane’s poem came to his mind, and I hear you, I hear you yearning for the capital city, oh hototogisu of the mountains, fly away from here, and he spoke these lines aloud perhaps two times, then he himself didn’t even know if he was quoting anything, or if these were his own words, he added something yet about the falling flowers, the first song of the cuckoo, the moonlight with its promise of autumn, then the word came into his mind again, hototogisu, and he played with the primary meanings concealed within this word, for examining it from another viewpoint, hototogisu literally means the bird of time, he tasted the word in this sense, nearly twisting it around — the cuckoo is signified by a compound, which is the bird of time — to see from which side it would be suitable to give form to his soul’s deepest sorrows; at last he found the way, and the melody began to formulate itself within him — he was just thinking about it, not calling it by name — and the verse somehow formulated itself like this: just sing, sing to me, so not only you will mourn; I too shall mourn, old old man, abandoned and alone, far from the world, I mourn my home, my life, lost, lost forever.

No one even knew, neither the Regent nor the servants closest at hand, that Ze’ami was writing; it would not however have been too difficult to ascertain, as he asked for paper, just for taking some notes, he enunciated several times and with strong emphasis, when he called the Regent’s attention — simultaneously sending him the half-finished mask as a gift — to the fact that what he was receiving only occasionally was merely an inferior imitation of real paper; please try, the exile beseeched him, to find something of better quality somewhere on the island, and if this is not possible, then — and this was his only request — have some brought from the mainland, but the Regent considered that Ze’ami was just a pampered court darling and was whining about a trifle, he can be happy, his voice thundered out in his office, that he gets anything at all, but frankly speaking he didn’t even know what kind of paper Ze’ami was insisting upon, as in his entire life he had never seen such a thing, in a word he could not have the faintest idea of what kind of paper the temporary inhabitant of Shoho-ji had in mind, and what quality it was to which he kept referring, he could not even begin to comprehend that it very nearly caused Ze’ami physical pain to see, in the package sent to him when the messenger arrived from Shinpo, these coarse materials, pressed from the fibers of who knows what plant, horrible, crude, malodorous, on the other hand there was nothing he could do about it, his request had clearly not met with comprehension in Shinpo, so that, well, he began his work with the quality of materials at his disposal, although he himself would never have referred to what he was doing as work, because it had not been mere self-depreciation, when at the time of the submission of his request, he had designated the activity for which paper was required as note-taking: the thought formed within him very slowly that he could possibly in time put the fragments of quotations and fragments of his own versifications into some kind of order, which then at times ended up on this sort of, as he was to call it later, rustic paper — so, well, he started one morning by attempting to put into sequence everything he had composed so far, but the whole thing ended up being too contrived, he did not wish to write a drama, never again to write another Noh piece, nevertheless the thought of framing these broken fragments into some kind of coherency eventually would have led him to something that he didn’t want, this wasn’t his intention — why? — he shook his head, and he pursed his lips in disapproval as he sat in the cell of Shoho-ji arranged for him, in the light coming through the tiny window; puzzled, impassive he looked at the paper, at the lines written there, and he really had no idea of what the hell he should do with them, and he even pushed them to one side for a while, and just sat in the garden when the weather permitted, murmuring prayers, trying to find his bearings among his memories, or his attention was drawn for long minutes to a lizard warming itself in the sun at the base of a tree, then another morning he decided to put everything he had written so far into chronological order, but it was just then that the problem came up that he could not recall when one part or another had arisen, yet the idea seemed like a good one, to put these things here into chronological order, among the circumstances of his captivity, wedged in between the mute bird of time and the shriveled continuity of one single day; Obama came to mind, the name of the port in Wakasa, the journey made by sea came to his mind, the gulf at Oota, the fisherman’s hut, then the journey to Shinpo — and then, somehow just like that, the brush in his hand began to move as if by its own accord, and he began truly to narrate the story of his exile, in chronological order as it had occurred; he did not wish to think of it and could not ever have even thought of it as something for a future drama, as something for the ceremonies at Kasuga or Kofuku-ji; no, not at all, what for, he shook his head again, it would make no sense at all to embark upon such an undertaking, I no longer wish to embark upon any kind of undertaking, it’s just enough that I’m still alive, he said aloud to himself, it is just enough of a burden, so that he did nothing else but begin to describe how it had all happened — from Wakasa to Shinpo — but of course he also used everything that he had already committed to paper, the ink was suitable, he had brought the brushes with him from home, there was enough time, in that one single long day it seemed endless, and it didn’t even concern him that the whole thing was turning out to be a little discontinuous, fragments of verse followed upon one another as they came to mind, with prose descriptions, verse fragments of which he frequently had no idea at all if he or someone else was the author, sometimes he hadn’t the slightest idea about the one who wrote these lines, it seemed so, so unimportant; at a certain point, he felt the lines to be just right, and he played, as he had done so many times before, with the different layers of the meanings of the words, so that they would harmonize, and diverse places or persons or events would come into a sudden unexpected connection with each other, that is to say, he did what he had done throughout his entire life when he wrote a play, moreover when in his most enigmatic works, even his summaries of everything necessary for the Kanze School to be aware of, he could not free himself from this, from the play of this Chinese compositional mode, the growth of meanings, the concordance of meanings, the exchange of meanings, in a word the search for the joy of the meaning-rhythms, so that it didn’t concern him when, on a later morning in that one long, so long, motionless day, he saw already that his work, the likes of which he had never before committed to paper, was changing, was transforming from the loosely woven story of his exile to the chant of his religious feelings; above the next chapter he wrote the words Ten Shrines and then Northern Mountains above the next, and he looked out of his tiny window, he saw from his cell a little sun-warmed patch of garden, and he thought of the infinite distance extending from Sadogashima to Kyōto, and that would always exist between them for all time, and as his heart was filled with bitter sorrow, he painted these words onto the paper: beloved gods, beloved island, beloved ruler, beloved country.

At the end of the Kintoosho he wrote that it had been created in the second month, in the eighth year of Eikyo, and he signed it as Novice Zempoo. His death was just as silent as the years of his exile. They found him one morning on the ground, he’d been on his way from the window to his sleeping-pallet, and by that point he was so tiny that even the smallest pyre, as if for a child, sufficed for his cremation in the funeral ceremony. And he was so light that one person alone carried the corpse and placed it on the wooden logs.

The cell was empty; they found the Kintoosho manuscript on the ground, and they were heading out the door when they noticed that there seemed to be something on the table. But it was just a little slip of paper, and on it was written: Ze’ami is leaving. They crumpled it up and threw it away.