Ono no Komachi is an enigma. She was a woman who lived in Japan during the 9th c. Eighteen of her poems have been included in the early 10th c. anthology Kokinshu, which means she must have been active in court circles. Perhaps she was a lady-in-waiting who served the emperor or another member of the imperial family at some time probably around the middle of the 9th c. For the rest, we don't know anything about her, and all we have are legends - many legends - which can not be considered factual. Komachi must have appealed to the imagination - or rather, her poetry, because that is the genesis of much of the Komachi legend!
In legend she is renowned for her peerless beauty - she is described as one of the most beautiful women Japan ever knew (in one legend, the number of men who longed for her is given as 18,099, and letters proposing marriage came to her like falling rain). "Komachi" is today a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan and her name
has been given to the Akita Shinkansen as well as to a variety of rice
from Akita (one legend makes her a native of that northern prefecture, which is rather hard to believe). But as so often happens with beautiful people, she was also haughty and sometimes ill-treated her lovers. Perhaps because her poetry is all love poetry, legends abound of Komachi in love. There are also legends about her cruel treatment of her lovers, notably Commander Fukakusa (Fukakusa no Shosho), a high-ranking courtier. Komachi promised that if he visited her continuously for a hundred nights, then she would become his lover. He visited her every night, regardless of rain or snow, but died of exhaustion on the ninety-ninth night.
A third type of legend tells of an aged Komachi, forced to wander in ragged clothes, her beauty faded and her appearance so wretched that she is mocked by all around her, as "punishment" for her earlier mistreatment of her lovers. Yet another group of legends concern her death, her skull lying in a field; when the wind blows through the skull’s eye socket the sound evokes Komachi's anguish. These last two types, misogynistic as they are, belong clearly to the category of male vengeance.
And finally, we also have five beautiful Noh plays in the current repertory about Ono no Komachi (and several others which are no longer current). In three of these Komachi is an old woman, and these plays belong to the highest and most difficult to perform plays in all of the Noh theater, the category of "rojo-mono" or "Old Women plays." Here we will discuss one of them, Sotoba Komachi, "Komachi on the Stupa," a play which keeps a strong dramatic tension throughout.
[Sotoba Komachi]
In Sotoba Komachi, Komachi is a hundred years old, ugly, and mad, yet wise and witty. The play (by Kan'ami, the father of Zeami, but revised by the latter as
happened with most early Noh plays) begins with an encounter between two
priests of the esoteric Buddhist temples on Mt Koya and an old
beggar-woman, lamenting how she was “lovelier than the petals of the
wild-rose open-stretched / In the hour before its fall. / But now I am
grown loathsome even to sluts”. She later admits that she is the famed
waka poet Ono no Komachi.
The first half of the play focuses on a religious debate between Komachi and the Shingon priests. The priests find she is sitting on a fallen stupa and criticize her for creating bad karma - the stupa here is not a full-size tower but either a small, sculpted wooden stupa or a tall, slim wooden board meant to stand upright as a grave marker which has slid down into a leaning or fallen position. The stupa with its Sanskrit inscription is especially sacred to Shingon Buddhism as Kongosatta, who compiled the teachings of Dainichi, the Cosmic Buddha in Shingon, temporarily hid them in an iron stupa in southern India. What follows is a religious debate, in which the replies of Komachi (who takes the position of Zen Buddhism against the Shingon doctrine) are so quick and direct that the priests are forced to acknowledge her superior understanding of Buddhism. Komachi uses Zen-like sophistries to defeat the priests: “Nothing is real. Between Buddha and sentient beings is no distinction”.
The priests then lament in turn her loss of beauty. In the final
sequence Komachi is possessed by the angry ghost of a former suitor, the
above mentioned Commander Fukakusa. He had been tasked with visiting
Komachi for 100 nights in order to earn her love, but had died on the
penultimate one; and his frenziedly acting out of his cruelly thwarted
struggles to win her love brings the play to a dramatic close, with
Komachi finally seeking Enlightenment and release.
Komachi is a very difficult role, requiring great skill and stamina, which is only taken by an actor for the first time when he is at least in his
fifties or sixties, and even then authorization from the head of the Noh
school with which the actor is affiliated is necessary. It is an intense role in which the elderly actor playing an old woman, must also let the young and beautiful woman Komachi was in the past shimmer through. He also has to switch from the quick repartee in the religious debate, to the frenzy of Komachi's possession by the ghost of her lover, and finally show the serenity of her transcendence.
[Sotoba Komachi]
Because of its depth of content, this Noh drama was translated early on by the French missionary Noël Péri (1865-1922), and later by Waley, Fenollosa, and others.
Mishima Yukio published a modern version of Sotoba Komachi in Five Modern Nō Plays in 1956. Mishima sets the scene in a modern city park, and has Komachi, an ugly old woman, picking up cigarette butts. A poet criticizes her for interfering with lovers who meet in the park. But Komachi insists they know nothing about love, and gradually draws the poet into an imaginative experience in which he sees her as the very archetype of young female beauty. At the climax of the experience, he dies - so Komachi is still the sorceress, with the poet as the victim, like once the Fukakusa Commander.
Translation by Arthur Waley.
Also translated in Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600 by Haruo Shirane (Columbia) - this translation, by Herschel Miller, has extensive notes.
A third translation can be found in Ono no Komachi, Poems, Stories, No Plays by Roy Teele.
The play by Mishima has been translated by Donald Keene in Five Modern No Plays by Yukio Mishima.
Information about Sotoba Komachi at the Noh Database.
Also see my blog article Japanese No Plays in Translation.
Also see my translation of Ono no Komachi's poem that has been included in the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each anthology.
Greatest Plays of All Time