Scott’s Reviews > The Nō Plays of Japan: An Anthology > Status Update

Ikeniye made me think of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. It's very like a horror film opening, but he leaves out most of it and summarizes it, noting that there is a dragon in it that wasn't even mentioned in any of the presented dialogue.

The Hōka Priests almost seems like a send-up, but it's not. The central characters plot to kill the man who killed their father and succeed without much plot complication. The next two Waley tells us he didn't even bother to translate in their entirety because the endings are too esoteric.

The Damask Drum, or Princess Bitch...

"Here follow the twelve concluding lines, too full of Buddhist technicalities to interest as general reader."--133

Lame choice, but given that this was published in 1922, Waley has probably been dead for a long time, or perhaps not that long..

Hachi no Ki is reminiscent of a parable of Jesus.

Miyamoto's play is more complex and like a western drama than the previous ones, but it seemed to me odd that the hatmaker knew nothing of his wife's family of origin. My parents told me all about my brother's wife's family, and my brother and I don't even talk.

The page numbers get screwed during Hagoromo. Chapter VI is supposed to start on page 185 (which is in the middle of Hagoromo) but actually starts on 187. This is a problem not only with the table of contents, but a lot of the footnotes tell you to see other pages, but being off by two is off-putting because it took me a while to figure out why the footnotes made no sense.