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Traces in the Way: Michi and the Writings of Komparu Zenchiku (review)

Traces in the Way: Michi and the Writings of Komparu Zenchiku focuses on a group of commentaries written by Konparu Zenchiku (1405–1470?), a Japanese sarugaku noh playwright and head of the Konparu troupe, which was patronized by the powerful Kôfukuji-Kasuga temple-shrine complex in Nara. Zenchiku was also the son-inlaw of Kanze Zeami (1363–1443), who (along with his father Kannami) is generally considered the creator of the theatrical form we think of as noh today. Under Zeami’s leadership, the Kanze troupe managed to monopolize shogunate patronage in the capital, effectively shutting out the other troupes, including the Konparu. Zeami’s success came back to haunt him late in life, however, when the notoriously unstable shogun Yoshinori interceded directly in a crisis of succession within the Kanze troupe. After the death of Zeami’s son Motomasa, Zeami refused to countenance Yoshinori’s choice of Zeami’s nephew Onnami for leadership of the Kanze troupe, a decision that may have led to Zeami’s banishment. It is possible that in his old age Zeami saw Zenchiku, the finest actor and playwright of his generation, as his true artistic successor, despite Zenchiku’s position as the head of a rival troupe. For this reason Zenchiku’s commentaries have been the focus of much scholarly attention, and yet these commentaries have proved remarkably resistant to interpretation. In Traces in the Way, Noel Pinnington manages to do what no scholar, Japanese or Western, has managed to do before: he actually makes sense of Zenchiku’s most frustratingly obscure texts, including the Go on (Five Voice) “typological” texts, the commentaries on the Rokurin ichiro (Six Circles, One Dewdrop) diagrams, and the unfinished Meishukushû (Collection of Writings Illuminating the Indwelling Deity). Pinnington goes after the meaning in these works using a two-pronged attack: first, he situates Zenchiku’s and Zeami’s commentaries in their historical context (particularly the patronage networks in which the two playwrights were active), illuminating their ideological underpinnings and their respective social uses; here he follows Pierre Bourdieu. Second, he makes no assumptions about what Zenchiku might have “intended” by these writings, but instead explicates the forms of their rhetorical argument and interpretive methodology, as well as underlying premises about written versus oral traditions, in this case following Michel Foucault and Walter Ong. Pinnington’s approach is amply validated by the results: in example after example obscure phrases and concepts that previous scholars have failed to elucidate are now convincingly explained.