The Nō Plays of Japan

These are not plays as Western audiences understand them. Nō theater moves like a dream, its actors masked and gliding across bare stages, speaking in a rhythm that hovers between speech and song. Arthur Waley's landmark translations preserve this otherworldly quality: the haunting encounters between the living and dead, the warriors paralyzed by guilt, the ghosts who return not for vengeance but for remembrance. The collection opens with Atsumori, in which a priest who once killed a young warrior must confront that man's ghost; Ikuta, where a boy seeks his father's spirit; and Tsunemasa, a sorrowful ghost listening for prayers never offered. Here too are demon kings, insane women, beautiful supernatural beings, and even a farcical interlude about a bird-catcher in hell. For nearly a century, this has been the English-speaking world's window into one of theater's most singular art forms, strange, beautiful, and utterly unlike anything in the Western canon.