The Plays of Zeami Motokiyo

Zeami stands at the heart of Noh, Japan’s austere and highly stylized theatre of chant, dance, and masked performance. These plays gather the spare, poetic dramas that made his name, works in which warriors, spirits, and grieving lovers return to relive a single moment of loss or longing. Rooted in Buddhist ideas of impermanence, the pieces move slowly and speak through image and suggestion rather than incident. The English versions here, shaped in part by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, helped introduce Western readers to a form that had guided Japanese art for five centuries. This collection is available to download as a free PDF and EPUB edition.