The nō stage is solid hinoki cypress, and when you stand on it, something comes back up through the soles of your feet — or so they say. There are no microphones; none are used in any nō theatre. On this day, Ohkura Motonari arrived carrying several masks. He had seated them in the car, seatbelt fastened — because if the car were rear-ended, they would be crushed.
Ohkura Motonari is a nōgaku performer of the kyōgen role — a nōgakushi kyōgen-kata — in the Ohkura-ryū, one of the two lineages of kyōgen performers. Kyōgen, the comic theatre built on spoken dialogue, grew up alongside nō over some seven hundred years; together the two make up nōgaku, staged on the same solid hinoki cypress. He was born the second son of the Ohkura Yaemon family, which served the shogunal house throughout the Edo period. His first time on stage came at four years and eight months old. At the time of the interview his career ran to forty-two years — and even so, in this world, that still counts as "mid-career."
What follows is not an explanation of what kyōgen is, but a single question: how one person stands inside a form that has held for seven hundred years.
In a kyōgen family, the one who carries on the line is most often the eldest son. The second son, there to support his brother, receives the same training but stands in a different place.
Toguri: Could I ask you to start with a short introduction?
Ohkura: I am Ohkura Motonari, a nōgaku performer of the kyōgen role, of the Ohkura-ryū. I first went on stage at four years and eight months. In terms of career, that's forty-two years. But in our world, even thirty-seven years still puts you squarely mid-career. Above me there are great seniors in their nineties. From the first time you go on stage as a child until the day you die, you go on performing kyōgen — that's the kind of work it is.
Toguri: I understand you have an elder brother, and were born the second son. What was practice like when you were young?
Ohkura: Being the second son is a great advantage. The one who practices first is your brother, isn't it. And your brother gets scolded. You watch that happen, so the second son can practice in a way that avoids being scolded. The elder brother does it cold, sight unseen, so he gets scolded; the younger brother has watched his brother get scolded, so he can already do it. That was the second son's privilege, I suppose. But because of it, the habit of watching — of watching what's around me — set in very deeply.
Toguri: At the same time, there must have been difficulties in being the second son.
Ohkura: You do end up buried behind your brother, in a way. Becoming the figure in your brother's shadow — that's the second son's position in this world, I think. But at some point you find you can no longer stay in the shadow. It's odd to say "stand shoulder to shoulder," but once you reach the point of wanting to be seen yourself, you have to keep bringing out something of your own, or you'll be buried in the shadow. So I came to think hard about my own way of expressing things.
My maternal grandfather gave me a fine set of words. There's a saying: "Once you take up the sword, there is no master and no disciple." He turned it into the fan for me — "Once you take up the fan, there is no master and no disciple." That's exactly right. On stage, there is no master and no disciple. To the audience watching, there is no elder brother and no younger brother. They watch one performer's art. So rather than staying in the shadow, I had to make sure I too could carry the stage properly. I started thinking that way in my late twenties — a little late, maybe.
Toguri: You founded the Seisho-kai in 2005. Could I ask what prompted it?
Ohkura: That, too, was my maternal grandfather. To make the people who would support me, the companions who would build things up with me — to make my own disciples. He gave the group its name, Seisho-kai, taking the character 誠 from my name and joining it with 翔, "to take flight." In 2005 I set up a practice space and took on disciples. Tomita, who works with me now, came in as my first disciple. There are other amateur disciples as well, but four of us are able to work professionally, my son included.
The habit of watching, and the force of trying to step out of the shadow: these two things go on to shape the form of Ohkura's art. And yet he never once says "putting myself forward." The next chapter tells us why.
Kyōgen is comedy. And yet Ohkura forbids himself from going after the laugh.
Toguri: What do you hold most important in performing kyōgen?
Ohkura: What I hold most important is not breaking the kata — the fixed forms of movement, intonation, and staging, transmitted intact rather than remade. Because we're who we are, if I go after the laugh, thinking "this would be funny if I did it this way," the kata will surely start to change, and I'll fall into the shape of today's humor. To carry the old people's sensibility into the present as it was, I try, on stage, to keep to the kata — for both the forms and the intonation, killing myself, as it were. That's putting it too strongly, but I keep the kata foremost.
Toguri: Does it happen that you get carried along by the audience's reaction?
Ohkura: Curiously, there are times the audience really carries you. You get carried, and the performance grows broad, exaggerated. Then it becomes fun for you too — "today's stage was a great one." But in fact that feeling is mistaken. It's precisely then that the people around you say, "No, today was no good."
Conversely, on the days when I've done it in a flat, "I've got no drive today, I'll just go by the kata" state — those are exactly the days when they say, "Today was good." You really can't tell. That's what makes it interesting. Is it really more interesting to make yourself nothing and go strictly by the kata? How to hold that balance is perhaps something I can only consider now.
Toguri: I understand there are words about laughter that you received from your grandfather.
Ohkura: What my grandfather often said was, "Don't chase the laugh in the room." Art that goes after the audience's big, roaring laughs on the spot becomes a very unseemly kind of art. What we show is not so much our own art as the art that history has carried here. Aim, he said, for the kind of laugh where the audience gets into bed, remembers it a little, and lets out a small laugh. He asks something very difficult of you.
Toguri: Why do you think kyōgen has been handed down across seven hundred years?
Ohkura: Kyōgen is extremely simple in the content of its stories. There isn't some especially clever twist; many of the pieces treat, in earnest, the kind of story that could happen anywhere. To take a famous one, Busu. Someone touches the very thing the master told him, "Don't look at it, absolutely don't touch it" — it strikes at human psychology. There's still that kind of humor now, where being told "absolutely don't press it" means you have to press it the second time round; it's much the same. So it resonates with anyone, across the ages. The point of resonance is extremely thin, but anyone can share in it.
If he wanted to make it funny, he says, he could make it as funny as he liked. Not doing so is the skill of this art. So what, concretely, supports that kata? The story goes back seven hundred years.
That the kata is kept this strictly owes less, in the first instance, to a sense of beauty than to the memory of an institution. A "menu" submitted to the shogunal house in the Edo period still determines the shape of practice today.
Toguri: Could I ask, briefly, about how kyōgen came to be?
Ohkura: Kyōgen is a theatre handed down from about seven hundred years ago, from what in Japan we call the Muromachi period. It grew together with nō and became the genre called nōgaku — but originally it was called sarugaku, the medieval performing art from which both nō and kyōgen descend. Within that, kyōgen is the comedy built on spoken lines.
The performing art called sangaku, which originally came over from the continent, was transmitted to Japan and flourished in various regions. These came together, it's said, and sarugaku was born. In the old days people spoke of Yamato sarugaku and Ōmi sarugaku, and there were sarugaku troupes in many places. We were based in Nara, and our house belonged, as a resident troupe, to the Enmai-za within Yamato sarugaku — what is now the Konparu-ryū.
Toguri: How is the very beginning of kyōgen itself said to have come about?
Ohkura: Kyōgen is said to have been created originally by a man named Gen'e Hōin, who is also said to have been a scholar-monk of Mt. Hiei, and who I've heard served as tutor to Emperor Go-Daigo. In a world of war, in order to convey how a person ought to conduct themselves — to pass on a kind of morality — Gen'e Hōin is said to have created kyōgen.
Toguri: Entering the Edo period, nōgaku was designated the shogunate's official ceremonial theatre. Did that change the style?
Ohkura: In the old days it was basically transmitted by word of mouth — kuden, oral transmission — from father to child, and to grandchild. The pieces were passed down that way too. But an ancestor of ours, the thirteenth head, Ohkura Toraakira, set it down in writing, and that has become the text handed down in our house today. There is a book called Waranbe-gusa, and before it the Tenri manuscript and others, but what Toraakira wrote out in his time is what is still transmitted now.
Our house served each shogun, generation after generation. When the Edo period came, the shogunate said, in effect, "How many pieces can your house do?" — and you had to draw up a menu. This is called the nayose: the family's official list of plays submitted to the shogunate, the works they were bound to perform on command. Our house submitted a repertoire of one hundred and eighty plays — "these we can do." So today, one hundred and eighty plays are what has been handed down.
Toguri: Could I also ask about how the schools are made up today?
Ohkura: In kyōgen there are two ryū — the Ohkura-ryū and the Izumi-ryū. In the old days there was also the Sagi-ryū. When the shogunate collapsed with the Meiji Restoration, the Sagi-ryū died out along with it. Even so, a preservation society in Yamaguchi still keeps it alive. As for kyōgen, the two ryū are unlikely to increase, and may decrease — but everyone works so that they don't.
Within the Ohkura-ryū there are also individual houses, and five remain today: our own Ohkura Yaemon family, then the Zenchiku family, the Shigeyama Sennojō family, the Shigeyama Chūzaburō family, and the Yamamoto Tōjirō family. These five houses keep kyōgen, each with its own origins. The pieces are the same one hundred and eighty for all of us. What is transmitted is the same; only the staging, the kata, or some of the words differ here and there.
Toguri: For nōgaku as a whole, what kind of event was the fall of the shogunate at the Meiji Restoration?
Ohkura: They'd long been kept by the daimyō, kept by the shogun, drawing a salary and performing their art — so after the shogunate collapsed, they met with mass layoffs, in effect. I've heard that people let go of books and costumes to cover living costs. But afterward the zaibatsu, the great financial houses, came to patronize nōgaku. There was a sense that anyone who became the head of a company had to have cultivated Japanese culture, and I hear that being able to chant nō became a mark of status. Up until the early Shōwa era, they say, at a wedding, when it came to chanting the Takasago utai — the chant of nō and kyōgen — everyone could sing it. Not being able to was almost an embarrassment.
Toguri: In 2001, nōgaku was recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Ohkura: The genre of nōgaku was proclaimed in 2001 and inscribed in 2008, and I think that became a call to protect this, worldwide.
Toguri: Given the differences between houses, what happens at rehearsals when you perform with other houses?
Ohkura: Everyone now says "uchiawase," a briefing, don't they. "Uchiawase" — to strike, to strike together — belongs to the musicians, the hayashi-kata. For us, by contrast, it's "mōshiawase," to match words: lines checked in the dressing room, never blocked on stage. In fact we don't do it on stage, we kyōgen performers. In the dressing room we just say the lines to each other a little: "Well now, is Tarō Kaja there?" "Yes." Just an exchange of words. Because there is kata, it's like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together. Even without doing it on stage each time, you can do it at once.
Tarō Kaja is the role of an adult manservant who has come of age (genpuku); it is the most frequently staged role in kyōgen.
Toguri: Why is that possible?
Ohkura: In the old days there was "goyō-kiki," performing on command. If the shogun, or His Majesty the Emperor, said, "Today, do this; this is what I want to see," we had to be able to do it at once. You can't say, "Excuse me, I need a little time to practice, please wait." All the more so since our house submitted a nayose of one hundred and eighty. When told, out of that menu, "today, this one," you can't say, "Sorry, I'm a bit under-practiced on that."
Toguri: Does it actually cause trouble that the words differ by house?
Ohkura: The words do differ sometimes. A given house may not have this word, or may have that one, so we confirm: "you're told this, and you answer that." Sometimes the standing positions differ too, in fact. When brothers, or parent and child, perform together, we practice together all the time, so we need no mōshiawase; but with other houses we go through it checking our positions. There's a gathering of the five Ohkura-ryū houses coming up soon, and at the end we'll do just one piece with "mu-mōshiawase," no rehearsal at all. All the performers come out before the audience, we draw lots to decide who does which piece, and we do it right there on the spot. "Wait, you're going that way?" — that sort of thing really surfaces. We're going to try that experiment this time.
One hundred and eighty plays, produced on the instant whenever they are called for. That tension remains in the body as an institution. Kata is also the common language that makes such readiness possible. So what does that language itself sound like?
On this day, Ohkura brought several fans and masks. The props carried out onto the stage are few. Precisely because they are few, a single fan serves for many things.
Toguri: First, about the fan. What kind of presence does the fan have in kyōgen?
Ohkura: For us it's one of the most important small props. This is our ryū 's fixed fan, the kimari-ōgi, with three pines drawn on it. Depending on the role it changes — gold, or silver. This one is eleven sun long. Written vertically, "eleven sun" forms the character 寺, "temple." So my grandfather's teaching was: when you hold this fan, take the stage in that frame of mind. Though I think that's something read into it after the fact.
Toguri: What kinds of things do you express with a single fan?
Ohkura: Besides using it plainly as a fan, drawn it becomes a sword. Opened and held like this, it's the shape of pouring sake from a flask; like this, it's a cup. Done this way, it's the shape of opening a door; it can be a saw, too. It takes all sorts of shapes.
Toguri: I understand the fan also figures in the milestone called "hiraki."
Ohkura: When a kyōgen performer steps up, performing a special piece for the first time is called "hiraku," to "open" — a formal step up, often marked by giving out commemorative fans. You open a new piece. At that opening, we hand out fans to everyone. This is a fan painted with a moonflower, from when I performed Hanago. I painted it, submitted it to the fan-maker, and had it actually made. I do the design myself. This one is from when my son recently opened Nasu — an eggplant. He said that since it's "Nasu," an eggplant (nasu) would be good. I painted that picture too. They're things we hand out as mementos.
Toguri: How long does it take to master the handling of the fan?
Ohkura: Forever, really. At the very start, my son was waving a fan around before I knew it — imitating, opening the fan, pretending to dance. So it starts from there. It becomes like a part of your body.
Toguri: Could I ask about the costumes?
Ohkura: The costume — the shōzoku — is, you could say, the clothing, dressed on by the performers themselves. There are all sorts of costumes by role, and in fact we dress each other. It takes two people, front and back, to dress one person. It takes about three years before you can do the back, and about five years before you can do the front. It begins as dressing-room training. At first, from folding the costumes — folding them neatly, without creases. There are costumes handed down through the generations, so we handle them to pass them carefully to the next generation. We learn the color combinations from our predecessors and pass them on. This is one important task.
As for preparation before a performance — practicing and going on stage is a year-round thing. If I had to name something, it's the costume, which changes by the day: what costume, including the color scheme. "It's this season, so let's go with this," and so on.
Toguri: Do you do the upkeep yourselves?
Ohkura: Simple mending we do ourselves; and once a year, in August, we do "noritsuke," starching — applying starch to make the costumes crisp, treading them on rush mats to dry. We do the large-scale work all in August too. Things that are truly beyond saving we sometimes send out, but we do almost all of it ourselves.
The dōobi, the body sash, is basically a personal possession, unlike the shared costumes. The costumes are owned collectively, but the dōobi, the dōgi under-robe, and the montsuki crested kimono are our own. Mine happened to wear through, and when I wondered what I had, my father's dōobi turned up. It was a sash with a good, solid core. It seemed a waste to throw it out just because it had grown ragged, so I stripped off all the outer skin and rebuilt the outside. The core is solid, so I use it that way.
Toguri: How do you handle the masks?
Ohkura: As for masks, I sometimes have a mask carver repair them, but I don't bring them out unless it's truly necessary. The men, the mask, is the most precious thing to us, so of course I carry it — always by hand. I never put it in a trunk. If the car were rear-ended from behind, it would be crushed, so I always place it on the seat and fasten the seatbelt. I don't leave it in the car, either. The valuable ones can be masks from centuries ago, and those really can't be restored anymore. So I handle them with that much care.
Toguri: Could I ask about the masks you brought today?
Ohkura: This is the mask worn by the Sanbasō role in the shikisanban, which is said to be neither kyōgen nor nō. Against the white hakushikijō that Okina wears, this is the black one, so it's called kokushikijō. Rather than being characteristic of kyōgen, it's a very important mask.
This one is a demon mask characteristic of kyōgen. It's a mask called Buaku — though it's called a demon, the name puns on fu-aku, "not evil": it seems to want to say "it's not bad." It's used for demons and for the thunder-god. Somehow endearing, comical — compared with nō masks, it has a very pop quality, I think. Many of them have amusing faces. The eye-holes are relatively large, and the nostrils are open, so you can see your feet through here as well. It's quite thick. Both nō masks and kyōgen masks can be thick, or thin and light; the workmanship differs by carver.
A single eleven-sun fan becomes a sword or a cup, and the mask is fixed to the seat with a seatbelt. The fewness of the props and the strictness of their handling are two sides of the same thing. And the same discipline extends to the very place where the props are set down.
Kyōgen is performed on the nō stage. No large sets are placed on it. In their place are conventions decided down to the smallest detail.
Toguri: Do the making and use of the stage differ between nō and kyōgen?
Ohkura: Basically they're no different from nō in how they're used. Where the shite, the lead role, stands, where the ado, the supporting role in kyōgen, stands — basically unchanged. The flow of the curtain opening, the performer coming out and standing on the stage, is the same too.
But because kyōgen depicts the real world, we advance the stage as a theatre of dialogue. It isn't the world of yūgen, the dreamlike depth of nō, so the hashigakari, the bridgeway leading onto the stage, becomes an ordinary road, or the bridge of some temple, shifting into all sorts of things. Depending on the imagination of the audience watching, you can make all kinds of scenes — that, I think, is what the nō stage is.
Toguri: What is the origin of the pine painted at the back?
Ohkura: There are various theories, but there's a pine on the right after you pass through the first torii of Kasuga Taisha in Nara — the Yōgō Pine. Yōgō is the descent of a deity into the visible world; based on the legend that Kasuga Daimyōjin alighted there, a pine is painted at the back. So we stand on the stage in a very sacred frame of mind. It is held to be a sacred place.
Toguri: Could I also ask about how the voice carries on stage?
Ohkura: We use no microphones at all on stage. We perform in the bare, unamplified voice — jigoe — in every nō theatre, so feeling the performer's power is, I think, one of the interesting things.
The same discipline extends beyond the stage. In the dressing room, too, the way of handling masks and kimono does not change. And the stage itself is in a different place every day.
Toguri: How does an ordinary day pass?
Ohkura: The flow of a day differs by the day. As a business, we perform single-day runs. This day's program; tomorrow, a different program in a different place; the day after, yet another — there's no long run. Unlike kabuki or other theatre, there's no thirty-day run; it's one day, one encounter — ichigo ichie — practicing and building a stage for that day alone. In that sense too, it's samurai culture. A culture of one time, one meeting.
So we go all over the country, and often practice while traveling. My son is on stage now too, so I have to coach my son as well. We travel saying lines to each other in the car, and when we arrive, before the day's program we practice the stage for a week from now, and then do the day's program — it all gets tangled up, that sort of thing. But we really can go to all forty-seven prefectures, and to many places in the world, so it's very rewarding work.
The words ichigo ichie are, here, both a frame of mind and a matter of the schedule itself. Tomorrow it will be another place, another program. And so the time when a first-time visitor steps onto the stage takes on the same singularity.
Does someone who keeps the kata avoid going outside it? In Ohkura's case it was the opposite — from his first overseas performance at sixteen or seventeen to collaborations with street culture.
Toguri: When was your first overseas performance?
Ohkura: The very first place I went was Turkey, in my second year of high school — around sixteen or seventeen. I felt how deeply people abroad were interested in Japanese culture. Touching the height of their respect for their own culture, I reconsidered my own country.
Toguri: Could I ask what has stayed with you from performing abroad?
Ohkura: At the root of it, I love my own country. Among the many wonderful countries there are, I was born in Japan. Wanting to convey this country's goodness more, I've put effort into overseas performances as well.
When you perform abroad, everyone comes to Japanese culture from a question mark, I think. And when you explain that this is a culture handed down from long ago, they take it in with great interest. Everyone becomes curious that the culture never died out.
People abroad have a high respect for their own countries. They value their own culture, and everyone knows it well. So there are quite a few Japanese who go abroad, get knocked flat saying they don't know their own country's culture, and come home.
Toguri: I understand you've also made a stage together with street culture.
Ohkura: I was in touch with Japanese culture from a young age; my mother played both the koto and the shamisen, and there was a lot of Japanese culture close at hand. Looking at events in that light, I often felt that while there are plenty of "Japan-ish" things, there are few that are truly "Japan-like." For instance, a kimono sold at the airport, looked at closely, may have been made overseas. A tourist visiting Japan buys it and takes it home. That's not a bad thing, of course, but it's a "Japan-ish" thing, not a "Japan-like" one, I think. This too is one face of Japan today. If so, I want to send out Japanese culture in a cooler way. I had many friends around me doing street culture, so it started from "then let's all make a stage together" — the stage called THE FACTORY. That's about ten years ago now.
Toguri: What kind of stage is it?
Ohkura: A factory. There's a factory manager and two factory workers, and the three of them act, asking things like "Hey, do you know the difference between mai and odori?" mai and odori mean different things, don't they — two different kinds of dance; kyōgen uses mai. So we say, let's watch mai, and we watch a kyōgen dance; let's watch odori, and we watch nihon buyō, Japanese classical dance. Tsugaru shamisen comes in, and freestyle football too. Originally that's the culture of kemari, isn't it, the aristocratic ball game — from kemari it becomes freestyle football, so we put that in. For the finale everyone comes together to an EDM track. Shamisen for shamisen, shakuhachi for shakuhachi, taiko for taiko — each built properly by professionals. That's the kind of performance it is.
This was very well received — we got to do it at a closed event for the World Aquatics Championships in Korea, and at the countdown in front of Shibuya 109, and as the opening for GMO SONIC. The theme is how to carry things that have existed since long ago into the next era. That's why it's a "factory": kneading various cultures and passing them to the next era.
Toguri: How do you feel about sending things out from Japan?
Ohkura: Quite often, I'm disappointed. There's a sense of "you'd do better to show this side." Japan is clumsy at "sending out Japan." To begin with, Japanese people don't know their own country, so there's no way to send it out, and when it comes to making something like that, they don't know it — so it turns out half-baked. But young people are doing all sorts of things now, so I find it interesting.
Keeping the kata and standing in an EDM finale do not contradict each other in this man. Because the center to be kept does not move, the outer edge can be widened as far as you like without breaking. From where can a visitor touch that center?
The experience begins with stepping onto the stage. You kneel on the stage floor in seiza — formal kneeling — bow, and make sound. No special gift is required, but there is an order to it.
Toguri: What do you do in the experience?
Ohkura: First we start from the basics — how to sit in seiza, how to bow, movements like that. Then chanting utai, dancing mai. Also having them echo the words back, parrot-fashion. That's the kind of experience we offer.
Toguri: What would you like visitors to take home?
Ohkura: What I'd like them to take home is, after all, carefulness. The carefulness in how you bow, the carefulness in how you sit. On stage, we carry things out carefully. And that's not only on stage but in the dressing room too — backstage, the way you handle a mask, the way you handle a kimono. I'd like them to take that home.
Kyōgen creates all sorts of scenes in an empty space, so I hope it can become a place to work the imagination.
Toguri: When people step onto the stage for the first time, what surprises them first?
Ohkura: When you step onto the stage — since this is a solid hinoki stage — I think you can feel something like an unseen force. That, too, seems to come across strongly.
And in kyōgen, in nōgaku generally, since it's been handed down as samurai culture, I think you can feel the samurai's conduct, movement, and way of thinking. The real samurai. The image of the samurai as a warrior drawing a sword and clashing blades is very strong, but in fact, what matters most about the samurai, I think, is how much effort they put into not having to fight. Draw the sword and they're strong, of course — but beyond that, they were engaged in politics too. It's the same on stage; I'd be glad if you could learn each single movement.
Toguri: Do you have a memorable example of a reaction from someone visiting from abroad?
Ohkura: A Romanian couple once came for the experience. It was some anniversary of their marriage, and since they happened to be in Japan, they wanted to touch Japanese culture. Standing on the nō stage, they could barely manage seiza — they'd never done it. Wearing tabi, split-toe socks, was a first experience too. There they chanted utai in a big voice, echoed the words back. They seemed very happy to have touched samurai culture. They were glad to say they could feel not the surface samurai culture, but the inner samurai culture.
Toguri: How does the comic aspect appear within the experience?
Ohkura: Kyōgen does emotional expression in a very lively way, so trying that out powerfully on stage delights everyone. Laughing in a big voice, crying in a big voice, getting angry in a big voice. It relieves stress, too.
Toguri: Do visitors notice things unexpectedly?
Ohkura: The reaction "wait, you think about it that far?" comes up quite a bit. Which way you turn on stage is decided in that much detail, and there's meaning to it. You turn in the direction that doesn't put your back to the audience — that is, to the shogun. That all of that meaning is transmitted gets a big reaction.
A short experience doesn't make you good at kyōgen. But once you're handed, one by one, how to correct your seiza, how to hold the fan, the reason for the direction you turn, every movement on stage begins to look like something "decided, with a reason." That is a layer the audience seats can hardly see at first.
At the end of the interview, Toguri asked what, among the many Japanese cultures, can be tasted only in kyōgen. Ohkura searched for words for a while, and answered like this.
Ohkura: It's difficult. Every culture has its own value, but as the culture of kyōgen, I think "human-ness" becomes very visible through this theatre. The unchanging patterns of human life — the essence people carry, expressed unchanged — that, I think, is kyōgen. So when you're troubled, if you watch kyōgen, I think you'll see that "people have always been like this," and it can be something to lean on.
On his own mission, too, Ohkura's answer was in the same key. The first work is to pass kyōgen to the next generation without letting it die out. "As a goal, my mission probably ends when my grandchildren's grandchildren perform kyōgen. Beyond that, I can't take responsibility." And one more thing: he wants to leave, for the Japanese, the state of having "a place to return to."
Asked what he wants to do with the world of kyōgen, he answered that he has no particular wish to do anything. "I don't think it needs to go massively viral." As it is now — this state, by a thin thread — should just continue on a thousand, two thousand years ahead. That's all, he says.
For the words of someone who has gone on performing the same story in the same words for seven hundred years, it is unexpectedly quiet. But perhaps even that quietness is one of the kata. For a person who erases himself on stage and aims for the laugh the audience remembers after getting into bed, achieving something in his own generation was never the goal to begin with.
The part that became words ends here. The resonance of the solid hinoki floor returning the voice, the angle of the instant a fan turns from sword to cup — such things, film conveys far more honestly. Behind the Scenes is what comes next.