Depictions of the Kawara-no-in in Medieval Japanese Nō Drama

The Kawara-no-in (Riverside Villa) of the courtier Minamoto no Tōru (822-895) figures prominently in tenth-century Japanese literary texts as both a site of elegant play and as a ruined garden redolent of bygone glories. A century after Tōru's death, the villa assumes a malevolent aspect in popular narratives, and Tōru reappears as an angry ghost who threatens visitors sexually and politically. This paper examines how and why nō playwnghts originally incorporated both positive and negative views of the Kawarano-in in early plays about Tōru and his garden, but eventually suppressed the sinister side, arguably to present a more positive depiction of the politically powerful Minamoto family and of aristocratic culture in general. Paul S. Atkins is an associate professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. His field of expertise is premodern Japanese drama, literature, and culture. He is the author of Revealed Identity: The Noh Plays of Komparu Zenchiku (University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2006). Versions of this paper were presented at the Association for Asian Studies (2007), the University of California at Berkeley, the Noh Theatre Research Institute at Hōsei University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Washington. The author thanks Professors Tom Hare, Keller Kimbrough, Elizabeth Oyler, Katherine Saltzman-Li, and Yamanaka Reiko.