The Silk Board

A play about a husband long-absent

Kinuta by Zeami Motokiyo, translated by Ernest Fenollosa

Like many traditional plays of the old Japanese theatre, this story is better grasped as a series of attitudes, as a series of poetics, than it is as a drama. For in truth very little happens, and what happens does not follow in obvious sequence; it does not explain itself and make itself clear.

But we’re to imagine something. We are to imagine an immense absence, a great gulf between husband and wife.

Now, to conceive of it, we have to think about the kinds of things that take husband from wife and do so for a good deal of time. Some of these are jobs; and some of them are duties. But some are just loitering.

Perhaps the husband could be a fisherman, out on the water for too long. He might have been made to drift away by unfavourable winds, and find himself marooned, it’s possible, in unfamiliar places. Far beyond the possibility of sending a message, even a message in a bottle. Entirely unable to communicate his fate and to ensure the survival of his love.

But this man is not a fisherman. We might imagine him as a trader or merchant. His business means travel. He must transport goods; he must prospect for new trade. He must inspect those he buys from and those to whom he sells. Such a man, his animals laden, must travel much. He may be almost never at home. All the more so if he not be prosperous. If so, he must do the work himself. He can’t hire a man or a boy to do the travelling on his behalf; he must find himself buried in marketplaces, besieged in shops and factorio. He must be absent from his wife for many years, all dictated by the necessity of plying his trade.

But this man is not a merchant.

He might have been a man of government. Soldiers in the army are often away from home. They must mount their exercises; they must travel, perhaps, to campaign in other lands, perhaps across the seas. A soldier has no say over his life or his lifetime. It can all be spent fighting the wars of other men. A general may compose verse in the privacy of his tent; he may eagerly plan to write the death poetry he hopes to surmount his decease and to give his life some meaning, if only in retrospect. But he is at others’ disposal. His life is not in his own hands. He must go where he is bidden.

But this man is not a general.

We might imagine him as a minor magistrate. Such people are sent on their way. They travel for the land requires administration. Even the petty lords send their magistrates hence. For every part of the land needs administration; and the magistrates are the servants of the lords, the lowly functionaries of, even in the good times, but a narrow, scarce-functioning system. They must go where they are told to go, and they must be distant from those they love.

Yet this man is not a soldier, nor is he a high government official, doing the bidding of emperor or shogun, without hope, without strength to defy instructions that keep him where he is. And this man is not a magistrate. Each would be more honourable. He is in fact a country gentleman, a man who has stayed too long in the capital because he has had to wrap up some litigation in which he was endlessly involved. He has loitered. And now he will pay the price of loitering.

This man has been absent from his wife for over three years. It has not been his intention; but that is the way life works out. And though he has wished to communicate, he has not done so. It’s all been beyond him; all proven impossible. But now, after three years, the gentleman decides he must send some word, some emissary, back. He will shortly be going home himself. But first he must send word.

He chooses a maidservant to send his message. It will be her task to travel back, all the way back, down the road up which they journeyed. And she must bring word, long-expected word, to the man’s unhappy wife.

As this happens, as the maidservant goes, the chorus of the play reminds us that time flies, and that distance in proximity is distance in the heart.

We arrive now to see the wife. She has been desperate — utterly without contact, effectively isolated, unknowing, unknown. All the while, she has waited. The chorus commends her efforts, for they are the tokens of clear and devoted love.

But any messages she had were not received; there are some distances that even eager attempts to bridge them cannot cross; and the wife, though she does meet the maidservant and does hear her message — she is reduced. Reduced to remark that three years has changed both of them; reduced to talk of the effects of the absence on her life. Reduced in health and in strength and likely, in the metaphorical manner of all these old and mythic plays, to breathe her last as her husband attempts to return to her, and as the chorus sings sad poetry in the fine old traditional way.