What I was attempting was to construct in my imagination the figure of Zeami in the medieval landscape. I had a solitary but deep sense of anticipation that the scene surrounding Zeami would reveal to me something other than what the critical biographies I had read could tell me.

It was easy to find out that Zeami's mother was from Himeji and his father, Kan'ami, from Iga. Zeami was born in Iga in 1363. These background factors alone motivated me to travel to Iga, to wander wherever Zeami's ghost led. This was about ten years ago.

I did not begin my "Zeami travelogue" solely because of my interest in the subconscious physical reactions that occurred in performance or because of my interest in all things Japanese which supported my hypothesis on the subconscious. It was a vivid description that I had read in "Sarugaku Dangi" of a performance that took place in June 1349, in the fifth year of Teiwa.

Sarugaku was being performed on the street in the Shijo district fronting the river in the city of Kyoto to collect money to build a bridge there. The shogun Ashikaga Takauji was there of course, as well as other noble personages such as Nijo Yoshimoto and Prince Kajii-no-miya Takanori. Down on the riverbed, a three tiered, semi-circular gallery some one thousand one hundred meters across had been constructed of bamboo. Now packed with so many people that no one could enter or leave, this gallery was surrounded by even more people, standing ten or perhaps even twenty deep.

Before this enormous crowd, Kazutada of the Honza troupe and Hanayasha of the Niiza took the stage. They danced and danced until the spectators were intoxicated with the performers' gorgeous brilliance. Excitement gave way to such a frenzy that the makeshift grandstand collapsed with a huge noise, killing and injuring dozens of people. Even amidst this tumult, Kazutada and Hanayasha danced on, the stage now cold as death. The noble spectators on the other side of the river watched the entire performance without so much as clearing their throats.

This was the episode that captured my imagination. I even harbored in secret an occasional desire to make a film, a performance on film with Zeami as the main theme. It was partly to satisfy this caprice, to feel as if I were "on location," that I visited Iga. I wondered why no one had yet made a film on Zeami.

To get back to the subject of Zeami himself, his life story provides one of the most dramatic tales in the history of entertainment in Japan, of a rise and fall of fortune to rival other figures such as Senno-rikyu or Katsushika Hokusai, Okuni of Izumo or Saigyo or Basho.

A young man who danced nothing more than dengaku as a member of a troupe makes his way into the heart of the Ashikaga shogunate with only his art and youthful beauty to commend him. Suddenly, he falls from favor and is banished to Sado Island. Dwelling under the roof of fellow performer Zenchiku in his latter days, he dies quietly one spring morning. A camellia blossom falls heavily in the silence.

Through his story, overlaid with the history of noh as well as the grandiose flowering of the culture of the Muromachi period with its Machiavellian backdrop, I have a feeling that I could depict a model of Japanese culture. It was with these thoughts that I eventually set out for Iga.

Iga is where Zeami was born, but the region is also well known for having produced other historical figures, both famous and infamous, such as the poet Matsuo Basho and the grand daddy of all ninja, Hattori Hanzo as well as the don of organized thievery, Momochi Sandayuu. Strangely enough, none of these people settled down in Iga, but wandered from place to place or traveled quite far away despite their success in their various fields. Furthermore, their stories have in common an element of mystery.

Iga is surrounded on all sides by mountains, but the capital of Kyoto lay just beyond them to the northwest. To the east was Ise on the bay and beyond, the regions of Owari and Mikawa. Could it have been dreams of the capital that impelled them to leave the region of their birth? Whatever the reason, Iga was and is strategically located for the wanderer, as you can easily understand if you visit the area. The roads lead out from Iga west towards the old town of Yagyu, north to Kouga and beyond to Shigaraki, and south towards Sakurai via Murou and Hase.

Zeami, born in the 18th year of Shohei (1363) in Iga, accompanies his father, Kan'ami, to Iga Kowata (present-day Nabari) which is also in the same area, but from there they move on to Youzaki, joining a sarugaku troupe from the temple of Hase. In Youzaki, now the village of Kawanishi, the Itoi Shrine still stands where Kan'ami is said to have dedicated a performance. Despite development of the surrounding area, the shrine itself still stands in a small wood, suggesting what the area must have looked like in their day.

In passing, I will also mention that there is a stone monument called an Omozuka on the bank of Yamato River which runs past the shrine a short distance away. The monument which is said to have rained down from the heavens is placed on end under a large camellia bush. It just so happened that when I visited the monument, the ground all around it was strewn thickly with fallen camellia blossoms. Perhaps because it was quite late in the day, I remember that it was a carpet of extravagantly rich color, just visible in the dusk.

According to historical records, the guild to which Kan'ami belonged took up residence in Youzaki and called itself Youzaki-za. Later, because the local shrine of Itoi was closely affiliated with Kasuga Taisha in Nara, the records say that Youzaki-za eventually affiliated itself with this great shrine.

My travelogue now skips some years ahead to 1985. I visited a roof tile maker in Nara by the name of Kawarau in mid-December. I decided to stay a while because there was also an exhibition of ridge-end tiles, the decorative feature on Japanese roofs whose distant relative might be the gargoyles of Europe.

In the afternoon, I could hear a flute being played outside somewhere. It was the start of the traditional Japanese festival of Kasugawakamiya-onmatsuri. This was a bit of luck, for as a workman at Kawarau informed me, they were celebrating the event's 850th year, so this year's festivities would be even more splendid than usual.

The festival amazed me, for it retained the prototype of a medieval festival, including dance forms such as sarugaku and dengaku, the precursors of noh. It snowed that year on December 16 which is unusual for Nara, but when night had fallen, the festival began.

First, a sacred object was brought from the main shrine part of the way down the mountain to a temporary resting place. At twelve midnight, all lights around the shrine were put out. Then, from the resting place of the sacred object which lay enveloped in utter darkness came a line of people in white ceremonial robes. They silently filed down the mountain, treading over fires lit for purification. It was a scene that made one imagine the primitive ceremonies of our ancient forefathers in the days when man feared and worshiped fire and the forces of nature.

After this, bonfires were lit at the four corners of the place where the sacred object had rested and the dancing began. To the sound of drums, pan pipes and flutes, dance after dance dating from courtly entertainment was performed by people wearing exotic costumes. There was the Dance of the King of Ranryo who wore a mask to hide his kindly countenance in battle, the valiant Dance of Sanju, performed armed and in a dragon headdress, as well as Nasori, Kitoku and Battoraku.

Could these have been the entertainments or festivities of people from far away who danced remembering their homelands? They had been preceded that night by Japanese dance forms such as shingaku, toyu, dengaku, sarugaku and bugaku. I do not know where these forms originated, but they also appeared strangely exotic to me then. Perhaps it was because the snowy scene added another touch of unreality.

According to one theory, dengaku and sarugaku, the precursors of noh, were forms of entertainment brought to Japan from China. The historical veracity of this theory aside, there was something exotic or foreign about the festival of Kasugawakamiya-onmatsuri, with its lengthy and expansive narrativity. I would not go as far as to say that it depicts the lifetime of man or the gods, but its large and theatrical composition seemed different to me from any other festival in Japan that I had ever seen. It still feels to me as if its archetype must have been performances by strangers to this country who were nostalgic for their homeland.

It is now approximately 630 years since the death of Zeami. Could he have seen this kind of scene from time to time? Or perhaps it is easier to imagine him among the performers as a member of a guild of sarugaku performers. If that were so, it is exciting to think that the foreign dancers were arrayed in more exotic costumes than what we see today and were dancing their foreign dances with a greater sense of exotic contrast with their audience and surroundings.

My imagination leads me further to link the foreign influence with the systematic rationality of Zeami's writings. The many works Zeami left focus on the history and movements of noh, but they are more theoretical and more systematically explicated than any other works of their kind. His works are also supported by a rationality that none of his peers or predecessors evidenced. This leads me to think that it would broaden one's understanding of noh to consider the possibility of links on a deep psychological level to the logicality of foreign cultures such as China or the Near and Middle East or perhaps to the Asian continent in general.

To express this idea in rather romantic terms, the "Kadensho" by Zeami might be a record of the memories of strangers to our soil. The more I think of it, the more the forms I saw at the Kasugawakamiya-onmatsuri exude an impression of origin in the Asian continent and a disparity from older forms of celebration traditional to Japan.

In time, Kan'ami moved from Nara to the capital at Kyoto. At that time, Zeami was still known by his childhood name of Fujiwaka, and if the records are truthful, he was a beautiful youth. This was what drew the attention of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu who soon made Zeami a singular favorite.

In more direct terms, affection in this case must refer to a homosexual relationship. Although this may appear tangential, it is a subject not unrelated to performance. The idea has struck me that the physical body harbors an androgynous sexuality, for it can intentionally develop a bisexual gaze. Through this experience and as a result of it, the physical body becomes ever more neutral, allowing it to be structured semiotically as a sign for a human being.

By neutral, I am referring to the neutrality of physicality and physical acts when viewed as symbols, for example in the performance by Vito Acconci titled "Seedbed." In this work, Acconci masturbates under a ramp in the gallery over which his audience could walk.

Within the gallery as a system and through the mechanical system of representation of a video display, the actual sexual act becomes almost a caricaturized scene. Although the act of public masturbation can be seen as indecent, this instance differs from a reproduction of a pornographic scene in the usual sense in that the elements including the gallery, the video monitor and the viewers become assimilated into various systems of signs such as those of space, visual media and performance. I would particularly like to draw attention to the switching of the sign of the phallus and its symbolic reference to human activity with the concept of isolation, particularly of modern man.

For a different viewpoint, one could examine the arrangement of signs, for an action can signify completely different meanings depending on its related signs. A prime example is the changing of sexual signs, a sex change, for this is the most symbolic and affects an essential aspect of our being. Androgyneity is a synthesis of the symbols and perceptions pertaining to each sex. It can also trigger self-transformation, for it can change our physical being from an object signifying just that, a human being, to an object signifying a medium.

If we utilize the androgyneity of the body to the full, performance becomes an instrument for questioning our positioning of human existence. Acconci must have staged this performance to prove such a point, or rather to question our understanding and to invite analysis.

I have the impression that people in the arts are more varied in their sexual orientations than those in other fields such as perhaps economics, sports or politics. This is most likely because artistic endeavors always involve androgynous qualities in the psyche, although it also suggests that it is easier in this field for intentionally deviant concepts to find expression.

Of course, this is only one type of phenomenon, but it seems to me that performance from the modern age onwards has always been conscious in some way of semioticity as an indication of universality. Could it be that a psychological urge to transcend sexuality has resulted from an over-emphasis on our physical being?

It cannot be denied that a kind of androgyneity that we might simply call a manifestation of human qualities is behind the present rise of homosexuality. The question of the body in performance may be seen as parallel to the wider question of self-expression or self- assimilation that is characteristic to all modern art. It can also be seen as self-analysis in a medium that is essentially not of the self, a pretty cold way of acknowledging one's existence.

Zeami, as we have already mentioned, was a beautiful youth. In his day, the social environment was such that someone with power could easily take something beautiful for his own, supported by the customs of a stratified society. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu could have chosen Zeami as the object of his favors for a number of reasons, but it aids our understanding of the historical facts to consider the influence of the social structure as we study performance through the experiences of Zeami.

I do not imagine that Zeami was himself a homosexual, but I think that his experience of a homosexual relationship allowed him to discover a certain androgyneity within himself, both physically and emotionally. By this discovery, and because he did not negate it, I think he was able to apply his experience to his advantage in the performance of noh.

Now that I think of it, there are many instances in noh drama such as the transformation from a man into a woman, or from a human into a supernatural being in which homosexual experience, far from being a hindrance, could aid the performer. Experience is a most attractive agent for fostering imaginative power.

The moment Zeami's audience recognized a splendid transformation and grew wildly excited must also have been a moment when he sensed a subtle sensuality in the scene. However, one can imagine that both the performer and audience felt this sexual excitement across a deep emotional divide.

More than customs or practise, homosexual experience must have aided the performer in adding brilliance to the story he unfolded on the stage. And the more sensual the brilliance, the more captivated the audience would be. With his audience always on his mind, Zeami's consciousness of their gaze must have given his performances the flower of passion. The experiences that led him to know his own androgyneity on an unconscious level must have surfaced to his consciousness in this way.

Once a member of the lowest social order, one of the rag tag "riverbed performers," Zeami goes on to develop noh as a major dramatic form, based in Kyoto and enjoying the patronage of the ruling elite. Also active at the time were Daio, performer of Omi sarugaku, Kiami, performer of dengaku and Kazutada who appeared above in the episode I described from "Sarugaku Dangi." The presence of such stars in a competitive environment must also have contributed to the establishment of Zeami's art.

I travelled to the region where Zeami had lived several times after that first trip. Each time, I would do something different such as walking in summer from Iga to Yagyu or visiting a stone monument near Nabari which proclaimed the area to be where the Kanze form of noh had originated.

Each time, I visited in a different time of year. I have seen the area in the spring mist. On another visit, I walked from Nabari to Sakurai looking on either side at the winter mountains bereft of foliage. Although the banks of the Kizu, Iga and Yamato Rivers and even the surrounding scenery must be different from Zeami's time, I have stood on their banks thinking that at least the rivers must sound the same.

Walking in the places where Zeami must have walked and taking in the landscape that must have surrounded him in the same way, I gradually began to see a Zeami different from those in the books and lectures that have exhaustively discussed and analyzed the historical figure.

Zeami's own words, recorded in works such as "Sarugaku Dangi," "Fuushi Kaden" and "Hanakagami" took on an entirely different meaning and fired my imagination from time to time. In a sense, rather than interpreting the man through his works, I was gaining an interpretation born of the landscape.

I could even call it decoding the mental and emotional puzzle of Zeami using experiential clues, through the enjoyment of transforming myself into Zeami within his landscape. With Zeami's writings as clues and aided by a vigorous imagination, I was reaching entirely different conclusions from those of previously accepted theories of Zeami.

Among the well known statements of Zeami is the injunction, "What are hidden are flowers; what are not hidden shall not be flowers." This is considered an admirable metaphor, for it not only compares the beauty of performance to a flower but the same image could be construed to refer to the flowering of technical virtuosity and even the bloom of life.

Zeami also writes "What flower can remain without fading?" "Because it is fated to be scattered, the flower is lovely while it blooms." (from "Fuushi Kaden") He also writes, "To begin with, a flower is attractive because it blooms and lovely because the petals scatter and fade away." (from "Shugyoku Tokka") Shozo Masuda, a scholar of Zeami, interprets such words to mean that "no flower can possibly bloom forever, but precisely because it scatters and fades, when the season comes again for it to bloom, it strikes us as fresh and uncommon. The same can be said of noh, for one should not be transfixed by one mode of expression but avoid stagnation. Such an attitude indeed is the wellspring of fascination." ("Expressions of Noh" by Shozo Masuda, pub.: Chuko Shinsho)

Masuda is one of the most thoroughly versed scholars of noh today. According to his interpretation, by comparing the artistry of noh to a flower, Zeami is urging not only that it must be uncommon and interesting but implying that there is also a subtle element of timing involved. In modern parlance, might we call it improvisational timing?

Borrowing Zeami's words again, "Only the flower that is fresh and uncommon to the viewer's heart is a flower." If the heart of noh can be compared to a flower which enraptures the viewer the instant it is produced, its blossoming, on the other hand, is a secretive affair. According to Masuda, "Zeami states that others should not even be aware that one knows the secret of the art, and furthermore that one's knowledge should be kept secret even from oneself."

Such admonitions regarding noh contained in Zeami's metaphorical statements form the basis of a kind of established theory. It is a kind of initiation for the scholar of noh as well, and even attempts to gain a straightforward understanding of noh cannot circumvent this aspect of Zeami's writings.

However, there was something about these widely accepted interpretations of Zeami that left me unsatisfied, instrumental as they may be in diffusing a general understanding of noh. Perhaps this was because the figure of Zeami constructed through critical interpretations of his works did not suggest a living, breathing medieval noh performer.

My frustration was not limited to the historical figure of Zeami. I could not construct in my imagination lively figures of the people described in Zeami's work either. They all appeared to be immobile portraits of medieval people, inevitably flat or wooden because my imagination had come to a frustrated standstill.

Whether it was fictitious or anecdotal, I wanted to see Zeami as a living, breathing man of the middle ages. Zeami scholars might have been correct in saying that my frustration was simply due to my lack of imagination in constructing the figure of Zeami from available texts. However, if I might put the question from a different angle, I wondered why the figure of Zeami as depicted by numerous scholars was so uniform. Differences in style, detail and composition of their texts aside, it was difficult to imagine, from the figure they presented, the man who made dance the work of his dramatic and varied life.

I was impelled by a desire to write my own description of Zeami. Even if it represented only one line in the canon of criticism, it would be of the man who actually lived and performed in the 13th century. Although this was a self-righteous impulse, fulfilling this wish of my imagination was my greatest reason for departing from the accepted interpretations to form my own picture of Zeami.

"What is hidden is a flower." This is a beautiful phrase. Both "hidden" and "flower" are words that please the Japanese sensibility.

It was on one of my trips to experience Zeami's origins that I walked the Yamanobe road that runs from Sakurai in the direction of Nara. It is a narrow road hugging the mountain from Miwa Shrine to Tenri. This winding, hilly road is often mentioned in travel books and such nowadays, but not many people seemed to walk that way, perhaps because it was late in the autumn season.

I had a bowl of noodles at an old but imposing house near the mountain entrance to Miwa Shrine, and a sip of spring water at Sai Shrine which is at the entrance to the path going up the mountain. The entire mountain is considered the shrine of Miwa, and one encounters similar places along the Yamanobe road �\ shrines with deep affiliations to the emperor or places where sacred objects rested during festivals. This is not the route that Zeami would have taken, but it is one that many people in his time would have walked to travel from Sakurai to Nara and on to Kyoto.

More than anything else, I chose this road because this quiet and rather monotonous route made it the most appropriate in this area for imagining life in the middle ages. The villages scattered along the route would often have a heavy rope tied between two trees at their entrance, spanning the road or a river. A straw object hung from these ropes that could be seen as phallic or resembling the female sexual organs.

As the anthropologist Kenzaburo Torikoshi described in his work "The Road to Hunnan," these objects were made to ward off evil spirits and to pray for abundant harvests. As precursors of the torii shrine gates, the straw symbols impressed upon me the long history of human settlement in this area.

One of my objectives on this trip was, as always, to see the landscape as though through Zeami's eyes. However, I had also come this way to see native masks from all over the world at the museum in Tenri.

I cannot recall now why I decided to visit this place, but as I looked at the various masks displayed there, I suddenly saw before me the figure of Zeami performing, his face concealed behind a mask. I could not be certain whether it was an act from "Sottoba Komachi" which I had seen performed a few months before or "Dojoji" which I had seen much earlier, but the figure of Zeami with a female mask would appear fleetingly, imposed on the various masks in the museum, then disappear.

Whether I was playing in my mind with the masks or I was being played with in an illusion, masks from all over the world with their various costumes were dancing with Zeami. It was as if I were seeing or even experiencing a mugen noh, (where the character communes with a spirit in a dream and reenacts that dream), alone in the silent museum. My recollections of the exotic dances I had seen at the festival of Kasugawakamiya were also revived.

The illusion disappeared in an instant. But the intuition born of that instant's reverie linked the mask to Zeami's admonition that "only the hidden are flowers." The two blended into one the instant the association was made, giving my image of Zeami a vitality it had never had before.

The relationship between the mask and the flower is suggested by their ideograms. I would postulate that the parts that make up the ideogram for flower depicts its true disposition, for if one removes the top radical denoting plant life, one is left with an ideogram that means transformation or disguise. The word for mask in Japanese, on the other hand, can be broken down into two ideograms meaning "temporary or transient" and "face." Since the transformational element of flower and the transient character of mask even share the same pronunciation "ke" in their Chinese readings, I am led to believe that the two words have common origins.

The lower radical of "flower" that means transformation or disguise is also paired with an ideogram meaning different to make the word commonly used to mean "change." This word is also used to refer to a basic element in noh style.

The ideogram for "transformation" in the word for mask brings to mind the spirits and demon possession that figure among the themes of noh drama. One can also imagine that the masks not only transformed the performers in appearance but allowed them to experience as well as portray the humanity that society denied them, for they ranked lowest in a strictly defined class society and were often treated as less than human. In this sense, the comparison of the art of noh, and by extension the performer, to a flower which is itself a transformation must have been rooted in a painful necessity.

Throwing aside the conventional meaning of the word "flower," I became engrossed in these associations. And the more I thought of them, the more persuasive the ideas seemed to me. This was the moment my imaginary figure of Zeami came alive for me.

The Muromachi Age had a strict class society whose absolutism meant, in terms of daily life for the general populace, that a single word or action construed to be defiant or disrespectful could cost you your life. It was a time when the cultures of China and Korea were introduced to Japan to be assimilated into the indigenous culture as well as the culture of the aristocracy, and I am inclined to see the beginning of the Muromachi age as the first cultural renaissance of Japan. Yet, the strictures of the class society existed as a kind of precondition.

This meant that in terms of patronage of the arts, entertainments such as dengaku and sarugaku were not sought for their cultural value but for the status they could give. That is, those in power would keep something beautiful at their beck and call in order to display their absolute command.

It was Zeami's tragedy to have been of lowly birth. The high and mighty had many pejorative names for people in the lower orders, names full of scorn and cold disdain. Zeami, who received the patronage of the shogun Yoshimitsu not only because of his artistry but because of his beauty, must have always been conscious of the possibility of falling from grace. It is entirely possible that the high level of artistic perfection and his low social standing caused a deep subconscious divide that widened as he rose to prominence.

Later, when Yoshimitsu is succeeded by Yoshinori, Zeami is indeed stripped of his position and honor for almost no apparent reason. While his fate is not a direct result of his social class, no one would argue that it is unrelated. Furthermore, he is banished to the island of Sado some years later, again for no apparent reason. One can only imagine Zeami's grief, for his oldest son Motomasa dies at about the same time.

Zeami's need to find an outlet for his sorrow, his acceptance of his cruel fate within the rigid social structure of his time and the complex feelings engendered by his tenacity in pursuing his art in spite of the hardships brought on by the authoritarian class society all must have contributed to the prolificness in his later years. In a sense, the many works of Zeami are testimony to the cruelty of social destiny in the medieval world. As though work might save him from grief, Zeami writes many treatises on noh from the time of his exile, beginning with "Fushi Kaden" and going on to works such as "Hanakagami," "Shugyoku Tokka," "Sarugaku Dangi," "Musei Isshi" and "Kinto-no-sho" in his later years.

These writings must have not only been psychologically cathartic but served to affirm to Zeami his prominence in noh drama. His works are also testimony to a lifetime given to the artistic refinement of his chosen art form.

On the other hand, however, when one considers that writing is an expression of one's will through selection of a mode and expressions as well as a revelation of one's feelings, it is easy to understand that this was a dangerous pursuit for someone of low social standing such as Zeami. Whether it was criticism or comment, one miscalculation or misunderstanding could result in death. This was furthermore an age in which punishment fell not only on the individual but entire families.

Zeami was well aware of this as well as of the absolute power of authority in a class society, for he must have personally witnessed many deaths from his youth when he found favor in the eyes of Yoshimitsu, if not before. Deciding to write in an age when even the act of writing was dangerous, it is only natural that Zeami's works should be purely technical. Zeami also left these works secretly, in such a way that they should be read by nobody. Although they were technical on the surface, he must have been highly conscious of the power of the written word.

Constructing my own theories of Zeami through historical background and Zeami's texts, I developed a hypothesis regarding Zeami's metaphor of the flower. It appears to me that in statements such as "only the hidden are flowers" the flower has a two-fold meaning, referring to both the blossoming of artistic beauty as well as the concept of transformation suggested by its ideogram. The flower, then, can be compared to the artistry of a noh performer as well as the transformation wrought by his mask. In the metaphor, I sense Zeami's cry to be released from the painful constrictions of the social order.

In his work "The Theory of the Art of Noh," Michizo Toita conjectures that "the pain and sorrow of the performer's position on the lowest rung of the social ladder is all the more poignant behind the noh mask with its severe suppression of all emotion." The androgynous beauty of the noh mask in his view reflects the social situation of a time "when all people lived with the mournful fate that they were helpless to help one another."

Even without analyzing the role of the mask, the flower suffices to mediate Zeami's message. It is a voiceless cry, but a cry for freedom, or so it seems to me.

Through metaphors and similes, in allegories and other tales, the populace could defy the authority of their rulers. An unvoiced cry and a form without substance �\ these were the only ways in which the populace could allow themselves to express their thoughts and views.

My interest in Zeami remains to this day. Whenever I think of the problems surrounding the physical being in performance, I think of Zeami and try to imagine his life in the middle ages. The concept of improvisation in a form as old as noh as well as ikkai noh,, the Happening of noh plays which makes reference to the mysterious bond that makes chance encounters occur, bring to mind experimental art such as "Happenings" and the art of Fluxus. In this sense, it seems to me that noh has elements in common with modern performance.

For example, I sensed a similarity in the way beauty is perceived in the cultures of Europe and Japan when I saw a work of Joseph Beuys and sensed that the culture of Europe is regenerated by fragments of memory. Is this not similar to Zeami's question, "What flower can last forever, whose petals scatter and fall?" By scattering away, the flower takes on a new appearance.

My physical being is still somewhere in the distance between the two. On one end is the modernistic concept of the body and on the other my feelings regarding the historical body.

From Iga to Nabari, then on toward Sakurai via Hasedera. My journey following Zeami from Nara to Kyoto finally led me to Sado Island. When I trace the journey now in my memory, I sense the emotions of the seasons that I had not experienced reading historical descriptions.

The movements of the clouds drifting over the black roof tiles and beyond my reveries, and the subtle differences in the sound of running water. The breath of the wood, invisible in winter, bursts forth bright and vivid in spring. One must also have seen death on this road in the lifeless forms left wherever they fell, here and there along the road, and one is reminded of them as if their shadows were left on the old walls formed by storehouses that look like labyrinths.

It was in mid-summer that I visited the temple of Hase on Sado Island. I sometimes crouched, dazed, as I listened to the sound of cicadas which resembled the sound of the sea. When I saw the strait in spring, the sea was calm with thousands of tiny waves glimmering on the surface. Could the scene have been like this for Zeami when he crossed these waters in a small boat?

The landscape adds indescribable detail to history, as does imagination, and I cannot help feeling that it is only when the landscape is added to history that the story takes shape in the imagination. My journey in search of Zeami was a journey to confirm the destination of the emotions produced by my being every time I perform. However, just as there is no end to the metaphor of travel, my emotions are still on an unending journey.