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Introduction A relative latecomer to the world of traditional kyogen, the play Sakon Zaburo (Sakon Zaburo, the Hunter) remains comparatively little known and infrequently staged. Its plot is easily summarized. One drizzly day, the hunter Sakon Zaburo meets a pompous Buddhist monk on the road. Like many other Buddhist monks on the kyogen stage, this one is something of a sham. The hunter bullies the monk into admitting that he has broken the Buddhist precepts against liquor, meat, and sex, and they then argue over the propriety of killing animals in the hunt. The hunter wins the debate, handily besting the monk's shallow understanding with his superior knowledge of Buddhism and verbal facility. Even so, the two leave the stage together, reconciled. Despite its relatively marginal status and the simplicity of its plot, this play merits thoughtful consideration. To pose and answer the question about hunting, the play's author(s) drew heavily on ritual and intellectual resources from medieval and early modern Japan. As this play demonstrates, kyogen is capable of "staging" serious intellectual engagement with religious thought and practice, while retaining its characteristic light touch. As the kyogen scholar Hashimoto Asao has shown, the earliest known version of Sakon Zaburo was published in a comparatively late collection of kyogen scripts, the Record of Kyogen (Kyogen ki, hereafter Record), of 1660. (1) There it appears under the title Shishigari (The Deer Hunter). The play's earliest known staging took place still later, in 1706, in what is now the province of Tottori (Hashimoto 1996: 348). Only from the mid-nineteenth century do extant records con.rm performances in the political center of Edo (later Tokyo) (Ibid.: 351). Of course, as late as the eighteenth century, kyogen performances are believed to have been relatively fluid and spontaneous; the art thus assumed its relatively fixed, "classical" form only in that century. Having said that, the dates associated with Sakon Zaburo are themselves relatively late in the context of a dramatic form whose roots are commonly sought in medieval Japan--a period usually regarded as closing with the civil wars whose end brought political stability to much of the archipelago in the early seventeenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the play had been accepted into the textual canons of the Okura, Izumi, and Sagi schools. Despite variations that developed among individual schools' scripts, all known manuscript versions largely derive from The Deer Hunter, whether in its Record version or as a very closely related text that is no longer extant. (2) In performance, Sakon Zaburo lacks the mime, song, and dance that are so prominent elsewhere in kyogen. However, in its strong focus on words and wordplay, it does exemplify the characteristic kyogen stress on spoken dialogue. After the two characters complete their travel sequence, they spend the rest of the play speaking from opposite corners of the stage, alternately facing one another and the audience. The visual humor of the play is largely in seeing the self-important Zen monk reduced to cowering before the hunter when threatened with the bow and arrow. Aside from this, however, there is little stage action in the play. Sakon Zaburo may thus seem to be a kyogen unusually preoccupied with verbal exposition of a Buddhist nature. However, other kyogen share this interest. One very well known play, Shuron (A Religious Dispute), features even more overtly doctrinal content, depicting the rivalry between two medieval monks from different sects of Buddhism. Their doctrinal dispute stalemates, and the play reaches its climax when each monk, vying to out-chant his rival, loses himself and unintentionally begins to recite the trademark prayer of his rival's sect. Even when Buddhist ideas are not as prominent as those in A Religious Dispute, they can still supply the root inspiration for a kyogen. … |
