能のあらすじ・見どころ Summary and Highlights of Noh Jinenkoji English
Summary
A Buddhist lay monk called Jinenkoji is preaching for a vowed period of seven days to collect contributions for the construction of Ungoji Temple in the eastern hills of Kyoto near the place where Kodaiji Temple stands today. On the seventh and final day of his preaching, a girl appears with a petition to have a sutra recited for her dead parents, and a kosode kimono as an offering. The lay monk reads the petition aloud, and moved by the girl’s filial piety the people in the audience shed tears.
Human traffickers who were searching for the girl find her at the preaching and forcibly take her away. Hearing about this, Jinenkoji realizes that the girl had sold herself into slavery to purchase the garment she brought. She had sacrificed herself in order to give a memorial service to her parents. The lay monk interrupts his preaching and goes after the slave merchants.
On the shore of Lake Biwa in Matsumoto, Otsu, he finds the slave merchants putting out a boat to head to the eastern provinces. He eloquently talks the slave merchants down, tosses the garment to them and holds onto the boat to stop it from moving. The slave merchants are irritated by this, but they are unable to strike a person wearing a priest’s robe, so they strike the girl instead. Unable to hear her cries, the concerned lay monk gets on the boat and finds the girl tied up and gagged. When he demands for the girl’s release, the slave merchants say they cannot return what was once purchased, and threaten to take the lay monk’s life. Yet the lay monk refuses to get off the boat. The slave merchants therefore decide to release the girl once they humiliate the lay monk by having him perform various dances. The lay monk chants and dances a kuse (a dance with storytelling), a sasara performance (a dance using a bamboo instrument), and kakko (a dance using a hand drum). The girl is released, and he returns to Kyoto with her.
Highlights
In the first half of the play, Jinenkoji bravely interrupts his vowed seven-day period of preaching on the final day—thus rendering his preaching up to that point futile—in order to take action to save the girl.
This noh play was written by Kan’ami (1333-1384). Its canonical source is uncertain, but various historical materials indicate that a person called Jinenkoji lived during the Kamakura period. An extremely popular player of the sasara (a bamboo dance prop and instrument that was either whisked or hit to make sound), he was sometimes called “Sasara-tarō.” Tengu-zōshi, an illustrated scroll from the Kamakura period, shows him bearded with long black hair falling to his shoulders and wearing an eboshi hat as he dances with a sasara in his hands.
The plot of this noh, in which this well-known religious performer uses his skills in the performing arts to save a girl from human traffickers, is likely Kan’ami’s own work. The performances; including dances using a kakko hand drum, a sasara, and a fan; are the highlights of the second half of the play. In the script, there is a line that refers to these dances, calling them “embellished words.” “Embellished words” were considered an infringement on the Buddhist precept about lying but in some cases were also considered to be capable of leading people to the Way of the Buddha. Jinenkoji’s performances are thus portrayed as having an aspect as an act of building affiliation with Buddhism.
Jinenkoji stops the human traffickers’ boat in Matsumoto, Otsu, which is on the southern coast of Lake Biwa and is known to have been a major waterway hub in medieval Japan. It is likely that human traffickers entering Kyoto to purchase people and take them to eastern Japan often used this route. Many noh plays, such as Sakuragawa and Sumidagawa, in addition to this one, feature human traffickers, reflecting the social situation of the time.