The Passive Hero in Kinoshita's Shigosen no Matsuri (The Rite of the Meridian)

――On the Characteristics of ‘Taira no Tomomori’ and ‘Kagemi’――

Abstract

Shigosen no Matsuri was written in 1977, 20 years after the author had found the material for the play in the story of Lord Taira no Tomomori in The Tale of the Heike (the great epic about the battle between the House of Heike and the House of Genji in the 13th century in Japan). One reason for the delay could be that Kinoshita had difficulty in creating in this play a passive hero, who could foresee the fateful fall of his house and accept it, and yet neither obeyed nor escaped from it. To create this hero, Kinoshita had to free himself from his almost fixed idea of the ‘positive hero’. The creation of this new type of hero was only possible by finding an appropriate role for Yamamoto Yasue, the actress who had been so important for his plays and his life, a fictitious role of Kagemi, a maiden of Izumo Great Shrine. Kagemi teaches Tomomori the harsh fact that Nature has no sentiment human beings can rely on: a realization which wings a kind of religious enlightenment. This might have something to do with the fact that Kinoshita is a Christian, though he says he abandoned his belief after he had been baptized in his youth.