Digitizing the Heritage and Modern Reception of Zeami's Critical Writings

2021 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 21F21702
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Institution: Hosei University
• Principal Investigator: 山中 玲子 法政大学, 能楽研究所, 教授 (60240058)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): MCGAUGHEY-SLANE HANNA 法政大学, 能楽研究所, 外国人特別研究員
• Project Period (FY): 2021-09-28 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 能 / 世阿弥 / 風姿花伝 / digitization / Zeami

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

This project's goal is to digitize a base text of all Zeami’s critical writings and to collate digital transcriptions of the text witnesses specifically for Fushikaden with a digitization of the first annotated and commented publication of that text by Nose Asaji. A critical evaluation of the resulting corpus of digital texts and of the insights gleaned in its production will inform further consideration for building a digital scholarly edition of Fushikaden.

Current Status of Research Progress

2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.

Reason

I commenced with manually digitizing the base text of Zeami’s Fushikaden as printed in Omote Akira’s standard edition in the Nihon Shiso Taikei anthology for the first research paper about agency as a characteristic of gender performances. For that paper, I compared findings in my digitization with the machine analysis of the UTAHI digital corpus of noh scripts, including plays no longer in the repertoire. Maintenance of metadata for the noh plays has required careful evaluations of the plays, including cross-checking reference materials and research on play authorship. I am currently writing the first paper.

Strategy for Future Research Activity

To conclude the first stage, I will analyze the texts digitized thus far to understand the modern reception history of Zeami’s critical writings. At the Yoshida Memorial Museum in Niigata I will consult material about Yoshida Togo’s editorial work on Zeami’s writings. In the second stage, my primary focus will shift to the collection, transcription, correction, and collation of the manuscript facsimiles of Fushikaden making use of the Hosei University archives and the rich resources available at various Japanese archives and private collections. These transcriptions will then be analyzed, and their characteristics compared with conventional text genealogies. At this stage, I will need to travel to archives in Nara and Kansai to consult original documents and meet with scholars there.