hell in kyogen

Comic Inversion in Kyôgen: Ghosts and the Nether WorldAuthor(s): Carolyn HaynesSource: The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Apr., 1988),pp. 29-40Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489334 .

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Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

COMIC INVERSION IN KYOGEN: GHOSTS AND THE NETHER WORLD

Carolyn Haynes

Descriptions of the nether world have been a part of Japanese literature since its beginnings. The realm of Yomi, the land of the dead in the indigenous mythology, appears in the Kojiki and Nihonshoki, which chronicle Izanagi's descent there in pursuit of his deceased part- ner Izanami and his horror at what he sees. Continental Buddhism

brought with it the cosmogony of the rokud6, the six realms of existence

through which the soul/self is bound to transmigrate, movement up or down being determined by good or bad deeds performed in each existence. In descending order, the six realms include gods, humans, warring titans

(Japanese shura, Sanskrit asura), beasts, hungry ghosts (J. gaki, S. preta), and hell.

By the medieval period this taxonomy had been thoroughly incor-

porated into Japanese culture: it was accepted that one's actions in this life determined one's fate in the next, any event was piously attributed to "karma from a former life," lovers expressed hopes to be reborn on the same lotus blossom in paradise, and so on. The four supernatural realms- of gods above men, and shura, hungry ghosts, and hell below them-were common subjects in the literary and visual artsl as well as in straight- forwardly didactic works, of which Genshin's Ojoyoshu is probably the best known. (The natural realm of animals, familiar as it was, seems to have excited little imaginative attention in this regard.)

Ky6gen was no exception in taking hell and the other realms of the nether world as subject matter. Predictably, however, nothing, not even Buddhism's terrifying portraits of retributions for sins, was sacred to this exuberant comic form. Ky6gen plays dealing with hell fall into two

groups: a sub-group of the demon (oni) ky6gen in which the demon is Emma, king of hell, and half of the plays in the category known as

maikyogen, "dance ky6gen," which are explicitly modeled after the

ghost plays of the noh drama. This paper examines how these two

groups of kyogen use-and transform-conventional images of the lower

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Volume 22, Number I

realms of the rokudo. The oni plays use what I call syntagmatic parody, reversing the roles and thus inverting the actions associated with hell (showing Emma overpowered by and forced to do the bidding of a sinner). The maikyogen use a different kind of parody, one which is essentially paradigmatic. These plays extrapolate from accepted notions of karmic retribution but carry those notions to ridiculous extremes by applying their norms to lower forms of life not usually considered in such discus- sions: if humans must suffer in the nether world, then, in kyogen, creatures and non-sentient beings do, too.

The oni kyogen are fairly well known and often cited in the literature, for nothing is quite as quintessentially kyogen as a bumbling, would- be terrifying demon wearing the lugubrious buaku mask. There are five oni plays in the current repertory which are set in hell and feature King Emma: Asaina, Bakuchi Ju6, Bakuro, Seirai, and Yao (translated below).2 In addition, there are extant texts for several others which are no longer performed.3 Emma (Yama in Sanskrit) was not originally con- ceived of as a demon. In continental myths he appears simply as the guardian king of the world of the dead and is depicted as "a just, wise, and pious magistrate."4 By the medieval period in Japan, however, he had come to be envisioned as the most fearsome of the fiends in hell, and it is in this capacity that he is targeted in the kyogen.

The King Emma kyogen plays all have similar plots: the setting is the "Crossing of the Six Roads" (rokudo no tsuji), a spatial representation of the moment immediately after death when, according to belief, the soul's rebirth into one of the six realms is decided. Emma enters and, as part of his name-announcing speech (nanori), complains about the hard times hell has fallen on now that the various sects of Buddhism have made it easy for people to get into heaven. So he is particularly happy to find a soul at the crossroads, and he begins chasing the soul off to hell. One way or another, however, the human gets the upper hand and pro- ceeds triumphantly to heaven (or back to life on earth, in the case of Seirai) .

Not only is Emma deprived of his role as judge of the dead and supervisor of hell in these plays, his physical demeanor is also consider- ably revised. The famous warrior Asaina in the play of that name does not even recognize Emma at first, so poorly does he match his reputation. When Emma boastfully announces his name and title, the unimpressed human says, "Bah, you look pretty seedy. I'd heard in the human realm that the master of Hell, Great King Emma, wore a jeweled crown, was

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girded with boulders and adorned with chiseled silver and gold. I'd heard he glittered enough to light up the whole neighborhood. But it's just not true."5 To which the sulky Emma replies that he used to look that good, but hell's fallen on hard times, and so forth.

Once Asaina and Emma have each figured out who the other is, the warrior accommodates Emma's curiosity about a famous battle by narrating his own exploits in it (with energetic demonstrations of his prowess which land Emma on the ground). On one level this scene has much in common with the battle narratives often found in warrior noh plays, but there is a significant twist in the ky6gen. In the noh, no matter how glorious the exploits reenacted from their past, the ghosts of warriors are always suffering in the dramatic present. They suffer precisely from their attachment to those moments of glory on earth, the passions of hatred and pride which delude them and hinder their progress toward enlightenment. They are also often shown suffering in the shura realm for, virtuous though they might have been, all warriors are condemned there for a time to atone for their sin of taking life. Noh's depictions of the shura realm are the models for the maikyogen, discussed below. The kyBgen warrior Asaina, on the other hand, in the presence of the judge of hell though he may be, feels neither remorse nor pain. He recalls his battle with great relish, and the scene in which he does so culminates neither in pleas for spiritual assistance nor in transformation into the shura's self-destructive battle. It ends, instead, in one more triumph: forcing Emma to act as his servant and carry his weapons on his passage up to heaven.

In Asaina, then, Emma is simply overpowered by the physical (and perhaps also the psychological) strength of the human warrior. The plots of the other hell kyogen revolve around other weaknesses Emma is shown to have, usually those of vanity or greed. In Yao, Emma is a victim of his own soft-heartedness, his fondness for an old friend, the bodhisattva Jizo. Jizo, patron saint of souls at the crossroads after death, has written a letter asking Emma to excuse the letter's bearer and send him on to heaven. (Jizo also threatens to break Emma's hell-pots if he refuses, but this coercion seems almost incidental to Emma's longstanding obligation to JizB.) In the other plays Emma's curiosity and pride are his downfall. In Bakur66 he meets a horse trainer and, with the idea that riding a horse on his rounds of hell would be more dignified than walk- ing, he lets the trainer bridle him in demonstration. The play ends, predictably, with the triumphant human riding Emma on up to heaven. In Seirai7 Emma is so captivated by the taste of bird flesh, a forbidden

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delicacy, that he lets a hawk trainer return to earth to hunt for him. And in Bakuchi Juo28 he is curious about the gambler's dice game and loses both his crown and his claim on the gambler's soul in the process of trying to learn it. (There are also two plays showing Emma with a weakness for temptations of the flesh: Yao hints that the "handsome young monk" Jizo may have once been Emma's lover, and in Kumo [no longer performed] Emma falls in love with the pilgrim's youthful companion and so lets both of them go.)

In none of these plays does Emma act much like the king of hell, nor do the humans act like trembling souls at their judgment. Instead of fear before the great judge and remorse over their past actions, the kyogen sinners argue with Emma about the morality of their deeds in life (Bakuchi Juo), or simply win him over to their way of thinking (Seirai). Instead of being subjected to a myriad horrifying torments, they physically overcome the demon (Asaina, as we have seen, and also Yao, where the sinner eventually pushes Emma off his seat and takes his place). And instead of paying retribution for their sins, the kyogen sinners merrily con or muscle their way to the top in the sacred world the way they were wont to do in the profane. This is a reversal of the conventional roles- dominator becoming dominated and vice versa-that is, syntagmatic parody.

These oni plays are based on the most elemental kind of hell depiction, that of sinners being tormented by demons. The maikyogen, in contrast, derive from a somewhaf later and more sophisticated type of hell description, that found in noh. Before turning to the maikyogen examples, brief discussion of those noh plays depicting hell is needed, for it is specifically with their conventions that the maikyogen "play."9 Performances of demon plays in dengaku and sarugaku, the precursors of noh, are presumed to have been fairly graphic, as these forms were affil- iated with temples and shrines and were responsible for the performance of demon-purging rites known as tsuina or oniyarai. Graphic, realistic

portrayals of demons tormenting humans with scourges and clubs were eliminated, however, during the course of the refinements of the art for which Zeami was largely responsible.10 In his later writings, Zeami

rejected this fierce type of demon, which he called rikidofu no oni, "the demon of violent movement."11 As a consequence, perhaps, there are no counterparts in the extant noh repertory to the King Emma kyogen.

What the noh repertory of Zeami's legacy offers in place of

scourge-wielding demons are much more sophisticated delineations of

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personalized hells: the verbal (and mimetically expressed) accounts of ghosts who return to the world of the living to relive their pasts, tell of their present suffering, and beg for spiritual aid in escaping hell. These accounts are highly individualized compared to the conventional descriptions, which state generically that all those who commit such-and- such a sin will be sent to such-and-such a hell and suffer such-and-such a torture. In the noh plays, the characters always have a specific iden- tity-they are given names and pasts-and their torment takes the form of cruel transformations of objects or activities associated with their former lives.12 In Zeami's Kinuta, for instance, in which a woman has died beating on a fulling block in anger and frustration at her husband's long absence, the block itself becomes an agent in her torture:

Tears shed by me in wrong attachment Fall upon the block and lo! They leap up in little flames; My smouldering passion turns to smoke And chokes my throat. I would cry, but I can find no voice.13

This kind of agentless, fiendish transformation of an object identi- fied with the character, in this case the fulling block turning her tears to flame, is typical of hell descriptions in noh. Another example comes from the play Akogi, about a fisherman whose sin of taking life is com- pounded by the fact that he poached on sacred Shinto fishing grounds. In the following excerpt, the fish he killed, the net he used to catch them, and the water itself become instruments of his suffering. The actor car- ries a stylized net prop for part of the scene, and it becomes a metaphor for the hell in which he is now trapped.14

Only sinful thoughts hold my net In waves which turn, now, To flames intensely burning. Oh, the heat! Unbearable! .... I, known in the world as Akogi, Am still sinfully attached to this shore. My heart is drawn to the nets, But now the fish are turned To demon fish and poisonous snakes. The deadly ice of the hells Of the crimson lotus and the great crimson lotus Mutilates my flesh-

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Bones snap, sobbing breath becomes Flame, smoke, cloud and mist Rising in the hells of searing heat And great searing heat. There is no respite, no room to breathe.15

In contrast to these terrifying portraits in noh we have the maikyogen's versions of hell. The maikyogen fall under the rubric nogakari, or noh-like, because they are structurally and thematically modeled very closely on the ghost noh plays. Like the ghost noh, these kyogen involve the appearance of a ghost who relates in song and dance how he lived and died and, in half of the ten plays in this category, how he is now suffering in hell.16

In Hamaguri, the ghost of a clam narrates how she was killed and eaten, her shell tossed cruelly into the sea. Then she describes her own personal hell, one which, like the latter part of the passage just quoted from Akogi, enumerates some of the many levels of hell.17

When a great catch is hauled in, The clams are tossed on the fire, Like a swarm of summer insects- Roasted clams, baked on the coals.18 Surely these are the hells of heat: The hell of searing heat, And the hell of great searing heat. Or again, in the hell of the crimson lotus And the hell of the great crimson lotus, My jaw muscles, frozen stiff, Break off like icicles from the eaves.19 These are the torments I suffer!20

These are hideous torments, indeed, and the roasting and freezing befit the hells they are ascribed to. Yet there is certainly humor in the blatant connection between these torments and the normal procedures involved in roasting, opening, and eating clams.

The hell description in Nushi, a maikyogen about a lacquerer, is another good contrast to the description of the fisherman's suffering just cited. In Akogi, the net, the sea, and the fish themselves turn against the fisherman. In the kyogen Nushi, this theme of transformed quo- tidian items is elaborated. In fact, the lacquer master's account of his

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sufferings in the realm of the hungry ghosts, who are condemned to con- stant, unassuageable hunger and thirst, consists entirely of a catalogue (tsukushi) of items related to his trade (lacquer, gloss, filters, brushes, a torsion press). These terms are incorporated into descriptions of hellish torments either directly or through word-play:

To my shame, among the hungry ghosts I'm appointed head lacquerer.21 I peer into water, sparkling like blue lacquer, But when I dip it with my filter And try to drink to quench my thirst, It bursts into flames,22 And my body turns to a vat of boiling lacquer, My body becomes a vat of boiling lacquer. At other times I'm bound in the cloth, And the torsion stick's jammed in, Then twisted, twisted mercilessly! Ah! my painful brush with death.23

In another maikyogen, Tokoro, this one about the ghost of a potato, this motif of a personalized torment involving objects from life is elaborated even further. Like the lacquerer's, the potato-ghost's hell description takes the form of a catalogue or, to be precise, of two catalogues: one of hellish torments, the other of the names of various delicacies or snacks (cha no ko). (The potato is ultimately saved through the "grace" of being served as a snack to a priest, hence the relevance of that list.) These two lists run in parallel, linked by intricate word-play. Here, however, instead of these everyday items becoming the agents of torment, as they have been in the previous examples, they are the victims (this is a foodstuff's viewpoint, after all): sembei (crackers) are roasted on the fire, burdock root is pounded mercilessly (there is a dish called "pounded burdock," tataki gobo), a dried persimmon is devoured by the king of hell himself, and so on.24

My last example of inverted hell conventions in ky6gen is Semi, a play about the ghost of a cicada who was eaten by a big crow. While this ghost says specifically that he is suffering in hell,25 the torments he describes have a great deal in common with those associated with the shura realm. In the shura realm warriors are condemned to endless hatred, battle, and repeated, agonizing death in a landscape which is itself fiendishly transformed and turned against them. These torments, analogous to the gruesome transformations of lifetime activities seen in

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Akogi and Kinuta, are described in several noh plays. The following scene from Kiyotsune, a warrior play by Zeami, is typical:

Where'er I turn In the Asura world The trees are foes, Arrows the falling rain, Sharp swords strew the ground, The hills are iron castles, The clouds are battle-pennants, Enemies thrust with their proud blades, Hate flashing in their eyes.26

In the ky6gen Semi, the ghost of the cicada describes a hell which is a version of his normal activities in life:

As once I did in the world of the living, I light upon treetops, but now Their branches turn to swords And tear through my body. I fly into the air, but fierce black Mountain spiders have spread their webs Wide across the entire expanse, And I'm caught in a net of a thousand ropes- Wrapped 'round and 'round, 'Round and 'round and 'round. And, when the sun goes down, I'm dinner for a horned owl-oh, the misery!27

The first torment the cicada mentions, that tree branches are turned to sharp blades, may be a reference to the hell of sword-trees

(kenju jigoku), in which all trees and plants are blades, constantly cutting the sinner. The rest of his narrative, however, plays with the conventions of the shura realm as seen in Kiyotsune-features of the natural

landscape transformed to deadly weapons or enemy fortresses, and foes from the character's former life haunting him at every turn.

These examples illustrate how the maikyogen carry to ludicrous extremes the accepted notion of karmic retribution in future lives, and

specifically its depiction in some of the ghost noh. While, in Akogi, the fisherman's vocation is clearly sinful within the Buddhist framework, in Nushi the lacquerer is asked to "confess" his profession and is said to

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suffer in the gaki realm for the nonsensical "sins of lacquering" (urushi no bachi). The same can also be said for the portraits of clam, potato, and cicada. While the noh protagonists are always in some way responsible for their fates, either because of violations of the prohibitions against taking life or because of the sin of attachment, by no stretch of the imagi- nation can the non-human characters in the maikyogen be considered so responsible. This is, presumably, deliberate, for responsibility would make them tragic figures, like the noh characters. It is precisely their total innocence which makes them suitable figures for farce. It is thus probably not accidental that the detailed hell descriptions are found in the non-human maikyogen (half the plays in this category have human protagonists), with the exception of the tongue-in-cheek account by the lacquerer in Nushi, who is in fact an imposter, a living man pretending to be a ghost.

The non-human maikyogen thus parody through exaggeration, extrapolating from accepted ideas to reach absurd conclusions: if humans must suffer in hell, then potatoes and clams do, too. But these plays operate in a different mode, as well, for they play with the entire paradigm of the rokudo. The principles of the rokudo system (movement up or down along the paradigm) are left intact but, while conventional versions of the system focus on the fates of humans within the paradigm, these plays show similar fates befalling beings who are already in a lower realm. This paradigmatic parody presents an incongruity of form and content which is the hallmark of all the nogakari plays. And this incongruity, between the grand form of the cosmic order and the humble content of what happens to its lowliest inhabitants, is funny, for, by re- placing pitiful human beings with silly creatures, the plight of those displaced humans is trivialized.

This is role transformation of a different nature from that noted earlier in the oni kyogen. The syntagmatic parody of the oni pieces takes a single level of the rokudo paradigm, hell, and simply reverses the agent and object roles in the activities there: the king of hell is weak and foolish, easily overcome by the stronger, clever sinners. While the maikyogen trivialize the conventional image of the suffering ghost with farcical substitutions, the oni kyogen trivialize the figure of King Emma by giving him human and therefore gullible characteristics. Through their respective modes of parody, these two groups of ky6gen manage to demystify, without destroying, the conventional, terrifying images of the nether world.

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NOTES

1. Such as hell screens, Buddhist sculpture, and illustrated scrolls like the Jigoku no s6shi emaki and Gaki no s6shi emaki.

2. Asaina, Seirai, and Yao are in the repertories of both of the active contemporary traditions, Izumi and Okura; Bakuchi Juo and Bakuro are only performed by the Izumi school. As with most categories of

kyogen, the oni kyogen are a somewhat inconsistently defined

group: both schools include in this category plays which feature humans disguised as demons, rather than real ones, although not all such plays are classed as oni plays. There are also three plays (Setsubun, Kaminari, and Kubihiki) which feature real demons, but ones unrelated to hell (although Kubihiki was probably originally set there; see Taguchi Kazuo (Kyogen ronko [Miyai Shoten, 1977], pp. 256-59), and one, Oni no mamako, which deals with a lesser oni from hell who encounters a woman on earth.

3. Jigoku-zo and Kumo in the earliest (1642) Okura text, Okura Toraakira-bon (Ikeda Hiroshi and Kitahara Yasuo, eds., [Hyogensha, 1972-83], 3 vols.); Esashi Juo (also in Okura Toraakira-bon; a variant of Seirai), Gaki Ju6, and Hansen in the repertory of the now-inactive Sagi school.

4. Marian Ury, Tales of Times Now Past: Sixty-Two Stories from a Medieval Japanese Collection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 53, note 1.

5. Koyama Hiroshi, ed., Ky6genshu II. Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 43 (Iwanami Shoten, 1961), p. 116. Translation by Royall Tyler, Granny Mountains: A Second Cycle of N6 Plays, Cornell University East Asia Papers, no. 18 (Ithaca, N.Y.: China-Japan Program, 1978), pp. 56-57.

6. Nonomura Kaizo and Ando Tsunejiro, eds., Kyogen shuisei (1931; rpt. Nogaku Shorin, 1974), pp. 369-71.

7. Kyogen shusei, pp. 238-41.

8. KyOgen shusei, pp. 366-67.

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9. Although approximately half of the warrior noh have some description of the shura realm, the majority of other ghost noh do not include hell descriptions, being concerned more with the character's attachment to life on earth than with his or her fate in the nether world.

10. See Taguchi, pp. 259-62. The older, "vulgar" kind of depiction re- mains in some oni ky6gen, in the stylized sequence called seme. To music similar to the kakeri dance (but with the third drum), demons brandish sticks and mime beating the sinners, chasing them into hell with shouts of "Hurry up! Hurry up!" This sequence occurs in most of the King Emma plays (see the following translation of Yao) and in a few of the oni plays in which humans impersonate demons.

11. Sando, section 9, in Omote Akira and Kat6 Shuichi, eds., Zeami, Zenchiku, Nihon shiso taikei, vol. 24 (Iwanami Shoten, 1974), p. 140.

12. The torments sometimes have psychological as well as physical dimensions. See, for example, Reiko Ochi's discussion of Higaki in "Buddhism and Poetic Theory: An Analysis of Zeami's Higaki and Takasago," Diss. Cornell University 1984, Chapter 3.

13. Yokomichi Mario and Omote Akira, eds., Yokyokushu, vol. 1, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 40 (Iwanami Shoten, 1960), pp. 338-39. Translation by Nippon Gakujutsu Shink6kai, Japanese Noh Drama: Ten Plays (Nippon Gakujutsu Shink6kai, 1960), vol. 3, p. 118.

14. He casts the net aside on "Oh, the heat!" and dances with a fan to the remainder of the text.

15. Sanari Kentaro, ed. Y6kyoku taikan (1931; rpt.: Meji Shoin, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 38-39. Translation mine, here and in the following ky6gen selections.

16. The five maikyogen describing hell are Hamaguri, Nushi, Rakuami, Semi, and Tokoro. For background and fuller discussion of the maikyogen, see my dissertation, "Parody in the MaikyBgen and the Monogurui Ky6gen," Diss. Cornell University 1988, Chap- ters 2 and 3.

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17. The hells of heat and great searing heat (shonetsu, daishonetsu no jigoku) are numbers six and seven of the eight great hells (hachi daijigoku); the crimson lotus hells (guren, daiguren no jigoku) are numbers seven and eight of the eight hells of cold (hachi kan-

jigoku). The "crimson" derives from the color of the blood said to flow when extreme cold causes flesh and bone to sunder.

18. The setting of this play is Kuwana, whose local specialty is still roasted clams.

19. A pun on noki no kori no hashira/[kai] hashira, "icicles on the eaves/adductor muscle."

20. Kyogen shusei, p. 389.

21. A pun on nushi, "lacquer/boss."

22. Such frustration in eating and drinking attempts is a common torment in the realm of hungry ghosts.

23. Ky6genshu II, p. 79. The last line is an attempt to convey the pun kokoro u[i]/urushibake, "heart's distress/ lacquer brush."

24. Kyogen shusei, pp. 302-03. For a full discussion of this complex play, see my dissertation, pp. 52-76.

25. Meido, a term referring to the three lowest realms of the rokudo, and particularly hell.

26. Yokyokushui, p. 256. Translation by Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, The Noh Drama: Ten Plays from the Japanese (1955; rpt. Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle, 1969), pp. 72-73.

27. Kyogen shusei, p. 243.

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hell in kyogen

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