ISSN 1347-2720 ■ Comparative Theater Review Vol.13 (English Issue) March 2014

The Impact of on Derek Walcott’s Early Plays

Laurence A. Breiner

Abstract In his autobiographical writing and elsewhere, Derek Walcott acknowledges a Japanese influence on his early drama, associated with his youthful study in New York, but critical attention to this episode has been limited. It is possible to estab- lish with some confidence what works he probably encountered: above all the films and , the texts of the nô play Eguchi and perhaps some others, and secondary materials about Japanese theater. For a short period this Japanese archive visibly affects setting, atmosphere, and the use of literally dead or figuratively haunt- ing characters in his plays. It also shapes two aspects of the plays about which Wal- cott was much concerned at the time: characterization and acting style. The notion of “creole” as opposed to “classical” acting that Walcott was formulating to develop a distinctively West Indian theater unexpectedly draws upon his limited exposure to Japanese culture, as does the seemingly very Caribbean notion of the “race contain- ing symbol” explored in characters like Chantal and Makak. Analysis of the impact of these works on his own early plays (especially Ti-Jean and his Brothers, Malcochon, Dream on Monkey Mountain), enables us to describe more fully what he learned (or did not learn) from Japanese artists, how he employed what he learned in his own plays of this period, and what his objectives were.

It was during two stays in New York (in 1957 and 1958-59) that Derek Walcott discovered Japan. The time was brief, and the number of Japanese cultural products he actually experienced seems to have been remarkably small, but he was inspired by the encounters to an extent that has affected his work not only in the short term, but throughout his career. There is no sign of these encounters in his poetry, perhaps because little poetry survives from that period (King 2000, p.152). But in his inter- views and autobiographical writing as well as in materials associated with the texts of his early plays (such as production notes), Walcott frankly acknowledges Japanese influences and they are especially apparent in several aspects of these plays, including setting, production design, characterization (for example the use of ghost characters), and acting style. Walcott’s enthusiasm for Japan was, like Pound’s, short-lived (artists notoriously take what they want and then move on). Perhaps for that reason, there has been limited critical attention to Walcott’s exposure to Japanese cultural material. Even Bruce King, who has written two enormously detailed biographical studies (1995, 2000), chooses his verbs so care- fully that he sounds almost dismissive when he describes Walcott’s encounter with things Japanese: “While in New York he saw Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, and discovered and drama”

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(King 1995, p.24). But Walcott’s engagement was deeper (if not much broader) than that curt summary suggests, and consideration of this episode sheds light on the early development of his drama. Consistent with the terms of his Rockefeller Fellowship, Walcott’s time in New York was a period of immersion in the craft of the theater, a period of intensive study but also of great productivity that established him as a dramatist. After an initial short visit to New York in September 1957 dur- ing which he wrote the first version of Ti-Jean and His Brothers (Walcott 1970b, p.46), Walcott then returned to live in the city from October 1958 through June 1959, supported by his fellowship. It was during this second visit that he also wrote Malcochon and the first version of Dream on Monkey Mountain. Of course Walcott was not thinking only about Japan; no doubt he was absorbing all kinds of new ideas and information which would have combined with one another in sometimes unex- pected ways. Some may have been useful to him immediately, while others percolated into his work only later, perhaps significantly modified from their original forms. Moreover, Walcott is a habitual reviser, and this can complicate any investigation of sources and influences. The three plays associ- ated with New York were no exception, and Dream in particular went through various changes, vari- ously motivated, between its beginnings in 1958 and its first performance in 1967. With such cautions in mind, however, we can be fairly specific about the Japanese influences that he encountered. They were primarily limited to three realms: drama, film, and visual art (particularly woodcuts). In fact it seems quite likely that his Japanese experience began with reading about Japanese theater as it was depicted by High Modernists, that the serendipitous availability of Japanese films in New York at the time powerfully reinforced what he was discovering in his reading, and that woodcuts were a way of supplementing his knowledge of the appearance and atmosphere of Japan whose representation so excited him in the films he saw. Other potential areas of interest— for example architecture, costume, music, ritual, even poetry —attracted his attention not on their own terms but only as they were pres- ent in those primary three. Perhaps surprisingly, he seems to have taken no interest at all in Japanese myth, religion, history, or food.

Visual Arts I say “perhaps” because Walcott the writer was also trained as a painter and draftsman, so it is not surprising that his interest was primarily visual and compositional. Thus he himself explains: “because I draw, I used [while in New York] to look very carefully at the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hi- roshige” (Walcott 1970b, p.47). Throughout his career he has maintained “another life” as a painter (his 1973 poem of that title is largely concerned with choosing between writing and painting). His work appears on the covers of some of his collections and the hardcover edition of Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) includes reproductions of twenty-six of Walcott’s watercolors. Even growing up in colonial St. Lucia, a small island with only about 60,000 inhabitants during his childhood, Walcott worked with local painters and studied closely the books of reproductions available to him (the books like the artistic talent were in- herited from his father, who had died when Walcott was an infant). Above all Thomas Craven’s A Treasury of Art Masterpieces (1939) was the closest he could come to a museum.(1) Later in life he made a point of visiting actual museums in his travels, so it is reasonable to presume that he spent some of his time in New York visiting both the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, with its exten-

(1) For details of how extensively Walcott used this book see (Walcott 2004, pp.212-214).

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sive collections of Asian art and of Western art influenced by Asia. He probably did not venture as far as the Brooklyn Museum, but it is possible that he saw exhibitions and consulted books at two other venues in Manhattan: the Japan Society, which had reopened in 1952, and the Asia Society, founded in 1956. One reason to suspect this is the Rockefeller connection; John D. Rockefeller III, who was post-war president of the Japan Society and then founder of the Asia Society, also served in the early 1950s as the head of the Rockefeller Foundation —the source of Walcott’s funding.(2) Quite a bit of Walcott’s own painting is functional; the margins of his manuscripts are full of drawings and even watercolors, and in the case of his plays these are often sketches for costumes, sets, blocking, and so on. Knowing Walcott’s involvement (as author and often director) in the visual design of his plays, his study of Japanese prints would have had an effect on costuming and scenery, but the extent of that effect would be difficult to tease out, since these are collaborative aspects of production and in any case not well-documented. It might be possible to identify some particular woodcuts that he saw or could have seen, but that research might not be worth the effort. There is for example an entire genre of woodcuts depicting scenes, characters, or actors in specific nô and kabuki plays, but I’ve found no evidence that they attracted Walcott’s attention; the role of woodcuts in his development seems primarily to have been providing confirmation of his impressions of the country’s topography and atmosphere, impressions initially made with more immediacy from his experience with a few Japanese films.

Film Film was Walcott’s crucial source, and as it happened Japanese film was on the cutting edge for sophisticated American moviegoers in the late 1950s (it was a moment comparable to the discovery in the 1990s of the Hong Kong “New Wave”: John Woo, Wong Kar Wai and Tsui Hark among others). His own later statement in an interview acknowledges that his interest was partly programmatic and partly fortuitous: “I came back to New York... and I began to study Japanese films... There was then a very strong popular interest in Japanese cinema – in Kurosawa, and films such as Ugetsu, Gate of Hell, Rashomon, etc.” (Walcott 1970b, pp.46-47). The extent of the rage for Japanese cinema almost immediately after World War II is worth docu- menting as a context. The first began considering foreign films in 1947, and there was an annual “honorary award” until Best Foreign Film became an standard Oscar category in 1956. Japanese films won three of the eight honorary awards given in that period —Rashomon in 1951, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell in 1954, and Inagaki’s film Musashi Miyamoto in 1955. Curiously, once the category was normalized, Japanese films were among the top five finalists several times, but not so frequently, and they did not win. For example, finalists in the first decade of Best Foreign Film prizes included The Burmese Harp (1956), Immortal Love (1961), Twin Sisters of (1963), Woman in the Dunes (1964), Kwaidan (1965), and Portrait of Chieko (1967). Japanese work also dominated the Film Festival in the early 1950s. Kurosawa’s Rashomon won a (the best picture award) at the in 1951, and his won a in 1954. Prizes went to Mizoguchi in three successive years: The Life of Oharu (International Prize,

(2) Biographical data from rockarch.org/bio/jdr3.php.Accessed 12/13/13.

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1952), Ugetsu (Silver Lion, 1953), and (Silver Lion, 1954). The status of Mizoguchi at this time should be emphasized. Shortly before his death in 1956, his work was ‘discovered’ in the West and championed especially by the French Nouvelle Vague, thanks in part to his impressive series of final films: in 1955 there was an extensive article on him in Sight and Sound (London) and an entire Mizoguchi issue of Cinéma (Paris). In 1958 issues of both Cahiers du Cinéma and L’Ecran were dedicated to his work.(3) To a degree, it is possible to find out what Japanese films Walcott could have seen in New York during that short period, in the hope of identifying other films that might reveal some specific influ- ences. Unfortunately a review of the extensive weekly listings of films and cultural events in The New Yorker magazine for this period turns up screenings only of Gate of Hell and Seven Samurai. Because we know he saw Rashomon (since Walcott describes Malcochon as modelled on it [Walcott 1970b, p.48]) and Ugetsu (King 2000, p.154) there must have been more esoteric screenings perhaps at some festival of Japanese film. The famous Film Forum did not exist until 1970, but in those days before video tape there were often small film festivals in non-commercial settings such as the universities or even the Japan Society, which had initiated a Performing Arts program in 1953. While further research might prove fruitful, we will find that analysis of the traces of Japanese film in Walcott’s plays supports the notion that he saw only a few of them at this time. There is corroborating evidence that Walcott was not an omnivorous moviegoer, but had a specific interest in Japanese film. Though one might expect an aspiring director from pre-independence St. Lucia to be especially curious about film from another corner of the British Empire, post-independence , Walcott was not moved to see the films of the Bengali director at this time, though Aparajito had just won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1957, and was playing in New York, along with Ray’s Pathar Pachali, dur- ing his stay. He did later see two Ray films (most likely these same two) at a film society founded in Port of in 1960 (King 2000, p.172). Bruce King is apparently the only critic who offers any extended reading of Walcott’s plays in the light of specific features of Japanese films, but his interpretation sometimes raises questions. For -ex ample, Walcott himself describes Malcochon as “a deliberate imitation” of Rashomon (Walcott 1970b, p. 48), and the relationship is patent: in both works, the characters are groups of strangers who meet by chance seeking shelter from the rain (Walcott’s subtitle is “Six in the Rain”) and in the course of the action all of them contribute differing perspectives on events. The protagonist Chantal is, like Kuro- sawa’s Tajomaru, a notorious bandit of the forest who is also something of a madman. The great actor Toshiro Mifune gives a riveting performance as the bandit that must have made an impression on Walcott. It is not difficult to detect Mifune’s example behind Chantal’s entrance. Clambering down rocks with a leap, he delivers his lengthy opening speech, an unnerving blend of boasting and self- pity (Walcott 1970a, pp.175-77) while insouciantly washing his feet in the basin of a waterfall (whose waters are said to make sinner’s confess [Walcott 1970a, p.180]). In Rashomon, we see the bandit sprawled on the rocks and drinking from a waterfall as an illustration of his testimony after his arrest (his first speech in the film), in which he is explaining that poison in the water gave him diarrhea (0:16:10).(4)

(3) Joseph Anderson and , “,” Sight and Sound 25:2 (London), Autumn 1955; Cinéma (Paris), no. 6, 1955; Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958; L’Ecran (Paris), February/March 1958. (4) Timings for films are necessarily approximate, since more or less front matter may be included in the figure in differ- ent issues of the film.

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King deemphasizes the relationship to Rashomon, noting only the device of conflicting testimonies and the presence of rain in both (King 2000, p.155). Instead he asserts by mere juxtaposition a relation- ship between the play and Ugetsu that seems superficial at best: “The alternative title [of Malcochon] is ‘Six in the Rain’; Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu is mostly based on the eighteenth-century Japanese ‘,’ which translates as ‘Tales of Moonlight and Rain’” (King 2000, p.156). Unfortunately for this suggested link, neither moon nor rain is thematic in the collection of stories or in the film. The two kanji for the word ”ugetsu” signify “rain” and “moon” (“moon” with a strong connotation of “month,” as the same character has in Chinese, and as occurs even in an English expression such as “after many moons”). The implication is that these are stories for a certain season, not stories about rain. Indeed, there is no rain at all in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. King offers no evidence for any resemblances between the two plays in character or plot. Indeed, what he seems to be responding to most strongly is Ugetsu’s atmosphere: “Mizoguchi’s film is poetic in its moody, haunting lyricism, historical styli- sation, use of myths, mixing of the living and dead, slowness, and circular form (beginning and end- ing at the same place); the model is Noh drama. Just the film for Walcott at this point in his career... ” (King 2000, p.154).(5) An implied argument in that quotation is that Walcott, as director/designer, was inspired by the look and feel of the film, and that is certainly true. But to be precise about what haunted Walcott we need to move beyond an approach to these films. The cinematographer for both Ugetsu and Rashomon is the same, , who worked with both Mizoguchi and Kurosawa. Rashomon was his very first film with Kurosawa; next in 1961 and much later in 1979. He also worked on Mizoguchi’s remarkable films of the 1950s, from Oyu sama (1951) until the director’s death in 1956. Of course directors and cinematographers work closely to- gether, and there is no need to try to parse out their separate roles in this case. But we can reasonably conclude that Walcott took away a unified impression of these films by two very different directors because they share Miyagawa’s distinctive visual style. Ti-Jean and His Brothers was already written before Walcott began to study Japan, and there are no obvious traces of Japanese film in it, but of the three “mountain” plays (Malcochon, Ti-Jean, and Dream on Monkey Mountain), the last is the one most affected by the author’s encounter with Japan, and indeed the most significant single consequence of Walcott’s exposure to Japan is the enigmatic figure of the Apparition in Dream on Monkey Mountain. She is introduced when the protagonist Makak, arrested for disorderly conduct, explains that he is not responsible because he falls into a frenzy every full-moon night. God once spoke to him in the form of a woman, he says, and then he narrates his en- counter with the woman, which he refers to as a “dream” (Walcott 1970a, p.226). Makak describes how he was high on the mountain walking through mist like “a man swimming through smoke” when he beheld this woman, “the loveliest thing I see on this earth, / Like the moon walking along her own road... like the moon had climbed down the steps of heaven, and was standing in front of me” (p.227). He understands her to be commanding him to take pride in himself and put on “the rage of the lion,” and that rage is his frenzy. The result of this moment, to grossly simplify an hallucinatory play, is that in the last scene of Part 2 before the Epilogue, he travels to Africa and becomes a worshipped but tyrannical king. Moustique, his companion through most of the play, tells him “now you are re- ally mad.... Once you loved the moon, now a night will come when, because it white, from your deep

(5) Though most of the generalized “poetic” traits in King’s list (with the exception of circular form) might be found in the nô repertoire, the claim that Ugetsu might be modelled on nô seems implausible.

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hatred you will want it destroyed” (p.315). The logic of events indeed brings him to that point and the scene ends when he beheads the woman of his dream. This woman is identified in the cast of characters as a multiply symbolic figure: “APPARITION, the moon, the muse, the white Goddess, a dancer” (Walcott 1970a, p.209). Her role in the play is com- plex; for present purposes I will not attempt to analyse her function but instead focus on how she derives from Japanese material. King of course addresses this question. After noting several models that contribute to Walcott’s problematic figure, King concludes flatly “...but the actual origin of the Apparition, first known[that is, in Walcott’s drafts] as the Moon Lady, is the white-faced spirit woman who appears to the potter in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953)” (King 2000, p.154). In support of this conclusion King tells us that Walcott “took from the film the image of the pale-faced female spirit (Ugetsu’s ghostly Lady Wakasa, the Apparition in Dream on Monkey Mountain), and the powerful image of beheading the woman (used in both Malcochon and Dream), which frees a man from his obsession (as [the potter] Genjuro must kill Lady Wakasa to return to his wife)” (King 2000, p.154). King seems as haunted as Walcott, but as far as Ugetsu is concerned he is not getting things quite right.(6) Lady Wakasa in the film is a more accurately a ghost, not a “spirit,” and if her face seems white when she first appears (0:30:00), that might evoke the makeup of an aristocrat, though the effect is achieved entirely by the sophisticated lighting of her face and gauzy veils from in front and below, with some strategic shading from her hat (the overall impression is one of radiance rather than ghostli- ness). To my eye, when she appears in shots with other characters, including both Genjuro and her ghost-attendants, her face is not perceptibly whiter that theirs. Walcott could not have taken from the Ugetsu the image of beheading a woman, since no woman is beheaded in the film (though a man is, at his own command, and in the story about Tobei, the peasant who wants to be a warrior, not that of Genjuro [0:59:30]). Nor can Genjuro be said to kill the ghost —he only flails with a sword to keep her at bay while he escapes the house (1:15:00). As he has earlier been warned, it is his leaving the premises that will cause the disappearance of the illusory palace and the ghosts. We need to be accurate about this, especially because Japanese film (like nô drama) frequently exploits precise distinctions between su- pernatural spirits, human ghosts, and hallucinatory projections. This kind of distinction is important in Ugetsu. After he sells his wares to the ghost, and as he is on his way to her castle, Genjuro stops at a shop and considers purchasing one for the wife he has left behind. Thinking of her, he sees her come into the shop, and we see her touching the clothes and exclaiming over them (0:36:42); here she is certainly a hallucination or a kind of memory, rather than a ghost. Arguably it is by drawing attention in this way to the difference between a ghost and an imaginative projection that Mizoguchi prepares us for the final homecoming scene. When the potter finally returns to his apparently de- serted house, he soon finds his living son and his wife. He does not know yet that she has been dead for some time. Is the wife he sees another hallucination, a projection of his desire and guilt? That seems unlikely, considering the long, silent, but psychologically dense scene she has after Genjuro falls asleep (1:23:00).(7) She must be a true ghost, still capable of feeling his desire (and her own), and

(6) Incidentally, in Malcochon the possibility of beheading the woman is not a particularly prominent feature, and does not stand alone; Chantal the bandit threatens to behead first the “obsessed” husband and then the wife, and does so in a judicial setting, when all of the characters are enacting a courtroom scene. No one is in fact beheaded in this play, though Chantal is stabbed (Walcott 1970a, pp. 197-198). (7) This is something Pound particularly admired in nô: “These plays are full of ghosts and the ghost psychology is amaz- ing” (Pound 1959, p.12).

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still attached, like many ghosts in nô, to a human locale. Motivated by that attachment, she has led their son from the village master’s house where he now lives in order to make a brief reunion of the family possible. I am inclined to take her as a ghost, but perhaps a measure of uncertainty is intended. Here the film powerfully presents the moment of homecoming itself as (in Freud’s sense) unheimlich, a term we usually translate as “uncanny,” though its most literal meaning is “not like home.” In the case of Dream on Monkey Mountain, as with Malcochon, the film Rashomon is at least as influential asUgetsu . I have noted already Walcott’s response to the cinematography the films share; they also share a remarkable actress, Machiko Kyo, who plays both Lady Wasaka and the murdered samurai’s wife in Rashomon. On her first appearance in both films her clothing is conventionally aristocratic and almost identical: light colored, opulent, with a broad hat and sheer veils that cover her face and body. When Lady Wasaka speaks to Genjuro she has approached him with her veils parted; he is overwhelmed by her beauty and status, as later he is elated when she knowledgeably praises the design of his pottery. His response to her later sexual advances is primarily confusion and wariness, rather than infatuation. In Rashomon by contrast, when the samurai’s wife attracts the attention of the bandit, he is able to see her face only because of a fortuitous breeze that moves her veil; his reaction to this exposure is immediately erotic and predatory (at least as he describes it). Kurosawa’s bandit is a man who can exclaim, “I thought I’d seen a goddess,” in the course of recounting how he raped her (0:20:10). This seems as conflicted as Makak’s relationship with the Apparition he worships and kills. The difference in the characterization of the male protagonists in these two Japanese films is some- thing Walcott may be playing with in Dream. Walcott’s other characters mock what they take to be Makak’s pathetic infatuation with an erotic fantasy, but Makak (as Walcott presents him) sees himself as transformed and empowered by non-sexual admiration for the woman, and in that he resembles Genjuro, who grows in confidence after the lady’s praise of his work, but still has to be chided and even pressured into a sexual relationship with her. Where the two films differ in their details, Walcott consistently follows the example ofRashomon . Thus for Tajomaru and Makak the woman in white comes into the protagonist’s ‘habitat’ in the for- est, while in Ugetsu the potter and the lady meet in the marketplace, a daylit, neutral public space. In Makak’s account of his apparition, he tells his listeners “Sirs, make a white mist in the mind; make that mist hang like cloth from the dress of a woman, on prickles, on branches...” (Walcott 1970a, p.226). In both films veils hang from the dress of the woman, but only inRashomon is it significant that they obstruct the view of her like a “mist,” and only in Rashomon do we get a teasing first view of the woman’s discarded hat and veils, when a passing woodsman sees them hanging on the branches of a bush (0:09:44). On balance, the closer Japanese analogue to Makak’s first meeting with his Apparition seems undoubtedly Rashomon, though both films leave their mark on the play— and (perhaps more re- vealing) there are no traces of other Japanese films that I have been able to identify. Can the influence of Japanese cinema on Walcott really boil down to these two films? There is a persistent peculiarity in how Walcott describes what he could see in New York: he tends to refer to “Kurosawa” and then some individual films by title. I cited an example earlier, and here is the same locution in a much more recent interview: “I went to cinemas and saw Kurosawa and Ugetsu” (Matsuda 2008, p.10). What films does that term “Kurosawa” include?Seven Samurai (1954) was definitely being screened during his stay in New York, and there is a tantalizing possibility that (1957), Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth, might have been shown before he left in summer 1959. But these are very

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distinctive films, and he doesn’t talk about either of them, though it is almost unbelievable that he could have seen them and not talked about them. For example, he often draws parallels between the Elizabethan and Japanese theaters, and even in those contexts he does not mention Throne of Blood.

Theater To conclude the analysis of the Japanese influence onDream on Monkey Mountain, as well as the larger account of Walcott’s encounter with Japan, we need to flesh out his experience with Japanese drama. During his theater research in New York, Walcott was immersed in both performance and study. He himself says that his first contact with Japanese theater came through his reading of Brecht; this contact was reinforced by additional second-hand impressions from Pound, Yeats, and other Modernists. Reading about Japanese drama inspired him and (he says) “I began to go to the [primary] texts themselves” (Walcott 1970b, p.47). It is clear he never saw a production of either nô or kabuki at this time, and from how Walcott de- scribes his study I suspect he probably did not read any kabuki plays in translation. In an interview Walcott says, “I was influenced by Japanese ôN plays and the whole Kabuki thing,” and I take the implicit distinction in the statement to mean that he had specific book-knowledge about nô but only a general impression of kabuki derived from secondary sources (Walcott 1971, p.19). The same inference can be drawn from the production note to Dream, in which he requests from his actors “the same precision and vitality that one has read of in the Kabuki” (italics added; Walcott 1970a, p.208). Kabuki was quite unfamiliar in the United States in the 1950s, while nô was discussed both in Modernist circles and among the Beats, for whom it was associated with widespread interest in Zen Buddhism. I have not yet found evidence of any productions of Japanese theater in New York during the period of Walcott’s stay, either live or on film. There are in fact a number of Japanese films which are realized in a very theatrical way, or incorporate representations of actual scenes from the the- ater. Mizoguchi’s characteristic preference for sound stage rather than locations for exterior shots is evident in Ugetsu and Walcott the dramatist would have noted that. Unfortunately that seems to be Walcott’s closest approach to any visual representation of Japanese theater conventions. Apropos of Dream, it is particularly unfortunate that he could not have seen Mizoguchi’s pre-war film, Zangiku Monogatari (1939), a visual marvel (not involving Miyagawa incidentally), about life in the theater with one scene in which, behind the primary action, an extended performance of the kabuki dance-drama “Seki no To” is going on; in it Sumizome, a courtesan who is also the spirit of a cherry tree, is being threatened with an axe (1:33-1:42). Can we identify what Walcott means by “the texts themselves”? The texts in question would be translations and adaptations of nô plays from Pound and Yeats as well as from professional transla- tors. The relatively accessible English translations available at the time were Arthur Waley, The Nô Plays of Japan (1921), Frank Lombard, An Outline History of the Japanese Drama (1928), the first volume of translations prepared by Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai (1955), and Pound/Fenellosa, The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (1959). We have, however, only a single piece of concrete evidence re- garding Walcott’s familiarity with a specific nô text: the very first lines of the 15th century playEgu -

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chi are quoted as the opening epigraph to Dream.(8) This is an important link; as far as I am aware, no critic (certainly no western critic) has suggested any specific nô play that Walcott might actually have read. In the absence of other evidence, however, we have to be cautious about assuming that Walcott really knew this play, or even read past the opening —he might have opened the play, and liked the first thing he saw so much that he read no further, or he might have encountered only these lines in a secondary source.(9) There is in fact an open question about where Walcott found these lines; in other words, what translation they come from. This is what he writes: “If the moon is earth’s friend, / how can we leave the earth?” (Walcott 1970a, p.207). That phrasing corresponds to none of the available translations. Eguchi is not included in Waley or Pound; the translation in Lombard, though it respects the repetition of the original, is ludicrous: “How, since the moon was my chum / In the good old days,/ in the good old days, /Can I escape from the world / and its lurking snares?” (Lombard 1928, p.115). The diction of the respected Ichikawa translation is at least in the same register as Walcott’s: “If the moon is an old friend, / If the moon is an old friend, / How can we flee the world?” (Ichikawa 1955, p.113). It is within the limits of the plausible that Walcott saw this translation but took poetic liberties with the phrasing. But this hypothesis is not very helpful. The value of finding a confirmable source would be that, knowing what translation he saw, we might recognize other phrasing from the nô text in Walcott’s work. And only in the light of evidence that he read at least a few nô plays could we as- sume that he had cobbled together some sense of the structure, conventions, and typical themes of the genre that we might seek out in his plays. Without such evidence, this discussion of Eguchi must become speculative, but the text is short (only about a dozen pages), which encourages us to think that Walcott read it, and there are prominent features that would be pertinent to Dream (for example, like Dream and also Ti-Jean, Eguchi is a “moon” play). So it is worth sketching some of the potential points of contact. Following nô conventions of narrative structure, Eguchi begins with a travelling monk.(10) When he arrives at Eguchi, he asks about a famous personage of the place, the “Lady of Eguchi,” a harlot who long before had bested a revered monk in an exchange of poems (about which of them better understands the principle of detach- ment from the world). As the travelling monk hears the story, a mysterious woman appears and talks about it with him; at the end of part one she is revealed to be the ghost of the Lady. In the interlude the monk learns that the harlot is believed to be also the bodhisattva Fugen, and in part two this is revealed to be true, when the Lady reappears in a pleasure barge with female attendants, enlightens the travelling monk, and finally manifests herself not as a ghost but as Fugen. The iconography in the Chorus’ description of her apotheosis is significant:

See! Bodhisattva Fugen now reveals herself, The barge becomes a milk-white elephant, And aureoled Fugen sails,

(8) The lack of interest in this quotation among even Walcott’s most sensitive critics is remarkable. Both Breslin (2001, p.139) and Ismond (2001, p.281) are content to say that these lines are from an “unidentified Noh play.” King does not mention them in either of his books, and in Baugh (2006) this is the only one of the play’s three epigraphs passed over without comment. (9) However, an internet search finds these lines nowhere else but in Walcott’s play. Accessed 12/13/13. (10) Royall Tyler’s more recent translation is based on a more detailed version of the original play which differs in some narrative particulars from Ichikawa’s source text.

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Borne by snow-white clouds, Across the western sky. (Ichikawa 1955, p.124).

There are at least two features here which might have contributed to Walcott’s invention of the Apparition, a figure which as King notes is compounded from a number of identifiable sources, and would have been open to others (King 2000, p.154). For one thing, it is crucial to the nô play that the Lady of Eguchi is both an erotic and a transcendent figure; as noted earlier, Walcott’s Apparition too is presented in both of these modes —one to Makak and the other to other characters. Secondly, the Apparition is closely associated with the effects of the moon (in Makak’s description of his dream quoted earlier), and may herself be an effect of the moon (for instance in this exchange: “MAKAK: Look, there she is!” SOURIS: [mocking] Yes, I see it. I can see it. Is the face of the moon moving over the floor” [Walcott 1970a, p.228]). The harlot who is Fugen is also, in effect, the moon, and this last image rounds off the reference to the moon in the opening lines of Eguchi that Walcott quotes as epigraph to his own play.(11) Speculation aside, the foundation for Walcott’s inspiration by things Japanese is a remarkably small group of works, and this conclusion coincides with his own accounts of his experience (as for example in the case of some films he could have seen but never mentions). As he tells the story, it always be- gins with reading Brecht (though study with the likes of Jose Quintero in New York would have exposed him to a range of non-western theatrical practices) (King 2000, p.149). It is revealing that Brecht’s own touted inspiration by Asian drama was similar, and built upon even less: Brecht wrote a “nô play” having read only Elisabeth Hauptmann’s German translation of Waley’s English translation of Taniko, which she had published in a journal in the late 1920s (Thomson 2007, p.112).(12) Walcott by contrast had the great good fortune of access to Japanese films, from which he could take away a much more concrete (if still quite limited) understanding of Japanese aesthetics than he could possibly glean from reading Brecht (or Pound, or Yeats). Indeed we have seen from the nature of Walcott’s attention to Japanese theater and film that he was much less concerned with printed texts than with props, gesture, posture, movement, staging —the theatrical rather than the dramatic.

Walcott’s famous axiom, “maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor,” is a good creole principle that sustains much of his work, but it does not apply to his engagement with Japan (Walcott 1998, p.36). It is tempting to think about other kinds of assimilations, of those who are not our ancestors. But such assimilation of the Other generally comes under the category of Orientalism, and I would argue that the terms of his engagement cannot comfortably be considered Orientalism either. What is missing in Walcott’s case is any real sense of the exotic. He is not collecting “Japa- neseness” and inserting it into his plays as such, the way a painter might feature some ceramics or samurai armor. Japanese objects do not turn up in his plays; nor do Japanese turns of phrase or even themes. An audience at any of his plays of this period would not perceive anything in them as Japa- nese —nothing would be, so to speak, italicized as exotic. This absence of the exotic is apparent not

(11) Tyler comments helpfully on the identification of Fugen with the moon, (Tyler1992, p.81). There is a fan by Hiroshige in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) on which the design of the painting of Fugen and her elephant makes this identification quite explicit: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/237756. Accessed 12/13/13. (12) Brecht’s contact with Chinese poetry also depended precariously on Hauptmann’s translations from Waley’s transla- tion of that material.

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only in his writing but also in his statements about his study of Japanese work; in a 1977 interview for example he says “I am strongly influenced by Japanese Noh theatre in which essentials are important, so that piece of cloth becomes a stream, or a movement of the hand a fountain” (Baer 1996, p.36). Here Walcott is delighted by something new, but there is no cultural specificity to that delight. He is not thinking “how Japanese,” but “I can use this; this solves my problem.” The exotic, like the beautiful, is too rich for use. To put the point another way, Walcott is not responding to the Otherness of Japan, as he might if he were actually present in Japan. Instead, and somewhat surprisingly, he frequently speaks of recognizing St. Lucia in the representations of Japan that he studied. The terrain, the weather, even the peasants of his home he recognized in Japan, and the effect of his recognition was to valorize and dignify his sense of home. Brecht, in fact, Walcott’s initial guide to Japan performance, has been described by Renata Berg-Pan as doing something similar, if narrower: “Having found ideas and opinions resembling his own in monuments of a culture as distant, exotic and ancient as that of must have thrilled Brecht with a shock of recognition and a sense of self-justification”(Berg-Pan 1979, p.231). In Walcott’s case there is an additional twist to the recognition. Unexpectedly encountering himself and his Caribbean in the arts of Japan changed and enhanced how he saw the Caribbean. The mechanism by which that happened is encoded in a peculiarly organized sentence. He is speaking to an unidentified interviewer in 1971 about studying Japanese plays, and then says this: “I thought that I could see in the truly ethnic West Indian dances —some of the surviving celebrating or warrior dances— he same kind of force you get in the Japanese theatre” (Baer 1996, p.19). He begins by talking about a particular kind of force he sees in West Indian dances, but then the sentence pivots, and it turns out he is saying that he only recognized (or articulated) that force after he saw it in Japanese the- ater, and took another look at West Indian dance in that light. Probably the most remarkable outcome of this generative maneuver of recognition has to do with the creation of characters like Makak and Chantal. Walcott speaks of trying to develop through those characters a figure that “represented the most isolated, most reduced, race-containing symbol” (Walcott 1970b, p.48). But he goes on to explain that this seemingly very Caribbean project, it turns out, was set in motion by his study of Japanese films — something he reveals in a similarly pivoting sentence: “I also wanted to use the same type of figure found in this material[i.e. Japanese films], a type essential to our own mythology. A woodcutter or charcoal burner” (Walcott 1970b, p.48). To visualize archetypal Caribbean man, it seems, Walcott had to see Toshiro Mifune.

References 1) ANDERSON, Joseph and RICHIE Donald. (1955). “Kenji Mizoguchi,” Sight and Sound 25:2. 2) BAER, William (ed.). (1996). Conversations with Derek Walcott, Jackson (Missis- sippi), University Press of Mississippi. 3) BAUGH, Edward. (2006). Derek Walcott, Cambridge (UK), Cambridge University Press. 4) BERG-PAN, Renata. (1979). Bertolt Brecht and China, Bonn, Bouvier. 5) BRESLIN, Paul. (2001). Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott, Chicago, Uni-

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versity of Chicago Press. 6) CICCARELLI, Sharon. (1977). “Before and After Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” reprinted in (Baer 1996). 7) CRAVEN, Thomas (ed.). (1939). A Treasury of Art Masterpieces from the Renais- sance to the Present Day, New York, Simon and Schuster. 8) HAMNER, Robert D. (ed.). (1997). Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, Boul- der (Colorado) and London, Lynne Rienner. 9) ICHIKAWA, Sanki (as chairman, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai [Japanese Classics Translation Committee]). (1955). The Noh Drama, vol.1, Rutland (Vermont), Charles E. Tuttle. 10) ISMOND, Patricia. (2001). Abandoning Dead Metaphors, Kingston (Jamaica), University of the West Indies Press. 11) KING, Bruce. (2000). Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, Oxford (UK), Oxford University Press. 12) KING, Bruce. (1995). Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama, Oxford (UK), Ox- ford University Press. 13) KUROSAWA, Akira. (1950). Rashomon. (DVD). 14) LOMBARD, Frank. (1928). An Outline History of the Japanese Drama, London, Allen and Unwinn. 15) MATSUDA, Chihoko. (2008). “The Gem of Theatre: Walcott in Conversation,” Sargasso 11. 16) MIZOGUCHI, Kenji (director). (1939). Zangiku Monogatari. (DVD). 17) MIZOGUCHI, Kenji. (1953). Ugetsu Monogatari. (DVD). 18) POUND, Ezra and FENELLOSA, Ernest. (1959). The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, New York, New Directions. 19) THOMSON, Peter and SACKS, Glendyr (eds.). (2007). Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Cambridge (UK), Cambridge University Press. 20) TYLER, Royal (ed. and trans). (1992). Japanese Nô Dramas, London, Penguin. 21) WALCOTT, Derek. (1970a). Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux. 22) WALCOTT, Derek. ([1970b]/1997), “Meanings,” reprinted in (Hamner 1997). 23) WALCOTT, Derek. (1971). “Man of the Theatre,” reprinted in (Baer 1996). 24) WALCOTT, Derek. ([1973] 2004). Another Life - Fully Annotated, BAUGH, Ed- ward and NEPAULSINGH, Colbert (eds.), Boulder (Colorado) and London, Lynne Rienner. 25) WALCOTT, Derek. (1974). “The Muse of History,” reprinted in (Walcott 1998). 26) WALCOTT, Derek. (1998). What the Twilight Says: Essays, London, Faber and Faber. 27) WALCOTT, Derek. (2000).Tiepolo’s Hound, New York, Farrar Straus and Gir- oux. 28) WALEY, Arthur. ([1921] 1976). The Nô Plays of Japan, Rutland (Vermont), Charles E. Tuttle.

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