Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction

Which is the identity of a traveler who is constantly on the move between cultures and languages? What happens with stories when they are transmitted from one place to another, when they are retold, remade, translated and re-translated? What happens with the scholars themselves, when they try to grapple with the kaleidoscopic diversity of human expression in a constantly changing world? These and related questions are, if not given a definite answer, explored in the chapters of this anthology. Its overall topic, narratives that pass over national, language and ethnical borders include studies about transcultural novels, poetry, drama and the narratives of journalism. There is a broad geographic diversity, not only in the anthology as a whole, but also in each of the single contributions. This in turn demand a multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches, which cover a spectrum of concepts from such different sources as post-colonial studies, linguistics, religion, aesthetics, art and media studies, often going beyond the well-known Western frameworks. The works of authors like Miriam Toews, Yoko Tawada, Javier Moreno, Leila Abouela, Marguerite Duras, Kyoko Mori, Francesca Duranti, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Rībi Hideo, and François Cheng are studied from a variety of perspectives. Other chapters deal with code-switching in West-african novels, border-crossing in the Japanese noh drama, translational anthologies of Italian literature, urban legends on the US-Mexico border, migration in German children's books, and war trauma in poetry. Most of the chapters are case studies, and may thus be of interest, not only for specialists, but also for the general reader.

Introduction

This chapter investigates flute performance as a space for exploring the relationship between tradition and innovation and traces the characteristics of the nohkan and its music. It examines the musical structure and nohkan melodic patterns of five traditional Noh plays. It also assesses the degree to which Issō School nohkan players maintain the continuity of their musical tradition in three contemporary Noh plays inspired by the twentieth-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The chapter reviews three contemporary works draw upon Yeats's At the Hawk's Well, which was influenced by Noh drama. The chapter argues that traditions of musical style and usage remain vastly influential in shaping contemporary Noh composition and performance practice, and that the freedom within fixed patterns can be understood through a firm foundation in Noh tradition.

Piercing the Structure of Tradition

What does freedom sound like in the context of traditional Japanese theater? Where is the space for innovation, and where can this kind of innovation be located in the rigid instrumentation of the Noh drama? This book investigates flute performance as a space to explore the relationship between tradition and innovation. This first English-language monograph traces the characteristics of the Noh flute (nohkan), its music, and transmission methods and considers the instrument's potential for development in the modern world. The book examines the musical structure and nohkan melodic patterns of five traditional Noh plays and assesses the degree to which Issō School nohkan players maintain to this day the continuity of their musical traditions in three contemporary Noh plays influenced by William Butler Yeats. The book's ethnographic approach draws on interviews with performers and case studies, as well as the author's personal reflection as a nohkan performer and disciple under the tutelage of Noh masters. The book argues that traditions of musical style and usage remain influential in shaping contemporary Noh composition and performance practice, and the existing freedom within fixed patterns can be understood through a firm foundation in Noh tradition.

Layers and Elasticity in the Rhythm of Noh Songs

Song in Japanese Noh drama is generally described in terms of an eight-beat meter. In the hira-nori song rhythm, the meter is organized according to the standard Japanese poetic unit of 7+5 syllables. The meter of Noh is isochronous in theory and a song’s syllables can be laid out regularly in accordance with it. However in performance, singers and drummers never seem to obey the meter; rather they create layers of deviation from the meter. Spaces between beats articulated by drummers seem more elastic than one might imagine based on the notation. To examine such layers and elasticity, this chapter describes the singers’ training style. This teaches them how to deviate from the meter and specifies drummers’ modification types of the cycle of eight beats. “Taking komi” is the drummer’s technique for synchronizing with and detaching from the singers’ part. The history of patron-amateurs’ participation in performance is described as a background for the creation of the interaction style.

Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama

How should we understand the role robes play within noh dance-drama's enactments of femininity? In the above poem Genji's jilted lover, Rokujō, bemoans her inability to keep her vengeful spirit from besieging the Lady Aoi, for whom Genji has spurned her. Within the worldview of Murasaki Shikibu's early eleventh-century narrative, to bind the hem was to tether the restless spirit to its host's body, like a tourniquet stanching spectral energies from seeping to infect victims. The famous noh play Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), in which Aoi is played not by an actor but by a short-sleeved robe (kosode), activates the poem's metaphor onstage. Moreover, the Japanese poem's final term, tsuma, signifies both as “robe hem” and “wife,” foregrounding a gendered dimension sutured to problematic notions of feminine deportment and mobility whose dramatic manifestations merit exploration.