TAB Event - "Masks and Costume for the Noh Play 'Uto'" Exhibition

This event has ended.
At Tokyo National Museum
Media: Fashion, Other

Uto is a story that takes place in early summer at Tateyama in Etchu province and Sotonohama in Mutsu province. A traveling priest, humbly dressed in mizugoromo with a sumiboshi cap, arrives at Tateyama in Etchu province. He meets a wistful old man wearing a mask (called Asakurajo). The old man says that he is the ghost of a hunter who died the previous year. He begs the priest to tell his wife and children, who live in Sotonohama in Mutsu province, to pray for his soul, and offers one sleeve of his garment to show them as a proof of the story's credibility.

The priest visits Sotonohama, where he finds the hunter's wife, a middle-aged woman wearing a karaori without trousers, and boy wearing a kosode with long hanging sleeves. The surprised wife and child see the sleeve brought by the priest, fetch the hunter's garment from their house and discover one sleeve is missing from it. When they put the garment and the sleeve together, they fit perfectly. In front of the grieving wife and son the ghost of the hunter appears, not in the form of the old man the priest met, but as a dreary figure suffering in the hell of Tateyama for having made his living by killing birds. The features of the Noh mask Yase-Otoko are etched with the agony of the hunter's ghost. The hunter finds his son and tries to get close to him, but he cannot due to his sin of once killing a baby bird. The anguished ghost begs the priest to pray for his soul.

Although the author is unknown, this Noh drama is said to have been created by combining the Legend of Hell of Tateyama, known to be included in The Anthology of Tales from the Past, and the Legend of Uto (a kind of bird) from a Reference Book of utamakura (places famed for poetry). In the Medieval age, hunters and fishermen were socially discriminated against as people who dealt with animal killing. This drama, while dealing with the suffering of people bound by such an idea, depicts the love between a parent and child, a love common to all humans both past and present.

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