Matsukaze by Zeami is often considered as the greatest Noh play and also as one of the greatest Japanese plays ever written. The title of Matsukaze is taken from the name of its protagonist, the
ghost of a female salt maker - a rural girl lingering on the desolate
seashore of Suma waiting for the return of her lover, who long ago set
off for the capital and never returned. Her name is therefore a pun:
both "wind in the pines" and "the wind that awaits."
[Scene from Matsukaze by Tsukioka Kogyo (c. 1900)]
The play is based on several stories. In the first place we have the historical Ariwara no Yukihira (818-893), the grandson of emperor Heizei, a courtier and high official who fulfilled various positions, from the governor of several provinces to Councillor and Minister. He was also a poet, just like his even more famous brother Narihira (Narihira is known for his many love affairs and became the stuff of legend - he is the "hero" of the poem-tale The Tales of Ise).
We know almost no details about the life of the historical Yukihira, but apparently at one time he was banished for three years to the lonely shore of Suma (now lying within the
city limits of Kobe and not at all lonely anymore).
The rest is fiction, based on the motif of "the courtier who goes down to the provinces, becomes briefly involved with a woman there, and then leaves her yearning for him forever more." The story that while Yukihira lived at Suma he amused himself by helping two fisher-girls, Matsukaze (Pinning Wind)
and Murasame (Autumn Rain), to
carry salt water in pails from the sea to the salt-kilns on the shore, was probably devised by Zeami. Salt-making was an intricate process, as described by Royall Tyler in his translation of the play: seaweed was either harvested offshore or workers raked it up from the beach, and then repeatedly poured brine over it. Next they would burn this salt-saturated seaweed, mix the ashes with water, let them settle, and then skim off the salt solution. Only after that would they boil down this elaborately prepared brine (paraphrased from Tyler, p. 192).
At this time Yukihira wrote two famous poems; the first, while he was crossing the mountains on his way to Suma:
through the traveler's dress
the autumn wind blows
with sudden chill
it is the shore-wind of Suma
blowing through the pass
When he had lived a little while at Suma, he sent to the capital a poem which said:
if any should ask news
tell him that upon the shore of Suma
I drag the water-pails
These poems and their imagery play an important role in the Noh play.
Zeami was also inspired by the Suma
chapter of The Tale of Genji. Like Yukihira, Genji spends a
period of exile in Suma, and then moves on to neighboring Akashi, where
he becomes involved with the Akashi Lady, who likened her own status to
that of the rural girls working by the seashore. Matsukaze borrows from the Genji Monogatari
the relationship between a noble exile and a local woman at the
seacoast and recreates it as the story of Yukihira who while in exile at
Suma for three years, had an affair with two local girls and left
behind his robe and court cap as keepsakes when he journeyed back to the
capital.
The chapter of the Genji Monogatari called “Suma” says:
Although the sea was some way off, yet when the melancholy autumn wind came “blowing through the pass” (the very wind of Yukihira’s poem), the beating of the waves on the shore seemed near indeed.
It is round this prose passage and the two poems quoted above that the play is written.
[Yukihira and the two salt-making sisters]
The plot is as follows:
One autumn evening, a traveling priest has come to the seashore at Suma
where he notices a strange pine tree standing alone which seems to serve
as a memorial (in the play, a small pine tree set in a stand, is placed at front of stage; a poem-slip hangs in its branches). When the
priest asks a local about it, the villager explains that it is a grave marker
for two young diver sisters, Matsukaze and Murasame, and asks him to
pray for them. The monk recites a
sutra and prays for the comfort of their souls. Meanwhile, it is
growing late and the priest announces that he intends to ask for
shelter “in that salt-kiln.” He goes to the “waki’s pillar” and waits
there as if waiting for the master of the kiln to return.
Meanwhile
Matsukaze and Murasame come on to the stage (they are pulling a brine wagon, a small, light evocation of a wagon with a pail on it and a long brocade rope to pull it). They then perform the
“water-carrying” dance which culminates in the famous passage known as
“the moon in the water-pails.” The sisters, ladling seawater into
their brine cart at night, become fascinated by the sight of the moon in
the water, and try to capture it in their pails.
Here is this passage in the translation by Arthur Waley (The No Plays of Japan):
CHORUS (speaking for MURASAME).
There is a moon in my pail!
MATSUKAZE.
Why, into my pail too a moon has crept!
(Looking up at the sky.)
One moon above ...
CHORUS.
Two imaged moons below,
So through the night each carries
A moon on her water-truck,
Drowned at the bucket’s brim.
Forgotten, in toil on this salt sea-road,
The sadness of this world where souls cling!
Their work is over and they approach their hut, i. e., the “waki’s pillar,” where the priest is waiting. After refusing for a long while to admit him “because their hovel is too mean to receive him,” they give him shelter, and after the usual questioning, reveal their identities. They now are overcome with their love and longing for Yukihira - and the monk realizes that they are ghostly beings, the two sisters buried in the grave under the pine tree.
Matsukaze next mistakes the pine tree for her lover Yukihira. In the final dance she dresses in the “court-hat and hunting cloak given her by Lord Yukihira” and dances, among other dances, the “Broken Dance,” which also figures in the Noh play Hagoromo.
The “motif” of this part of the play is a famous poem by Yukihira in the Hyakunin Isshu which was also interpreted to fit in this story (my translation below therefore differs from the one in my post on Yukihira in the One Hundred Poems, One Poem Each series):
when I am gone away
and hear that like the pines
growing on the peak of Mount Inaba
you are pining for me
I will immediately come back to you
There is a familiar play of words between matsu, “wait,” and matsu, “pine-tree”; Inaba, the name of a mountain, and inaba, “if I go away.”
The play ends with the release of the girls’ souls from the shushin, “heart-attachment,” which holds them to the earth. Their attachment has been broken and now they can obtain enlightenment.
Finally, a few remarks on the Noh and Zeami, the creator of the genre and author of Matsukaze.
By the mid-14th c. Noh had gained wide popularity, especially among the warrior class. The Kanze troupe from Nara, led first by Kan'ami (1333-1384) and later by his son Zeami (1363-1443), shaped the genre into what is seen on today's stage. Kan'ami began making trips to Kyoto to give performances, and in 1374 the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was in the audience and was so impressed that he became Kan'ami's patron. Kan'ami wrote many plays, but as these were in later times adapted into new plays by his son Zeami and others, only few have been transmitted in their original form.
Zeami wrote nearly 40 plays (more than 50 when we include his revisions of existing plays), which are marked by exquisite diction and frequent allusion to classical texts. He created plays with elegant dances and refined versification. Zeami also wrote about 20 theoretical treatises on the Noh theater.
Another innovation by Zeami was the "mugen-Noh," the "dream play," in which a monk meets a ghost, plant spirit or deity, who in the guise of a commoner recalls a famous episode that took place at that location; then, in the second act, the ghost appears in its original form in the monk's dream, recalling a crucial incident in his or her former life that has blocked the path to buddhahood. By reenacting the incident, the ghost finally seeks to gain enlightenment through the monk's prayers. This is also the type of play to which Matsukaze belongs.
I have read the translation by Royall Tyler Japanese No Dramas in Penguin Classics (also anthologized in Traditional Japanese Literature by Haruo Shirane). Another translation is by Donald Keene in 20 Plays of the No Theatre (Columbia U.P., 1970)
In the above I have quoted from The No Plays of Japan by Arthur Waley (New York, 1922, public domain), pp. 226-228. Waley doesn't translate the play, but gives a brief summary.
Performance by Tessenkai at Youtube (with English explanations)
Greatest Plays of All Time