5 X NO
No author in the secular 20th century has reflected romanticism’s morbid preoccupation with death more strongly than the late Yukio Mishima, whose obsession with erotic violence (he once had a photograph taken of himself posed as Saint Sebastian at the moment of martyrdom) and with the past glories of his native Japan inspired a profusion of literary works and a lurid personal life that culminated in a sensational ritual suicide in 1970. That he should have turned to Japanese antiquity–14th-century No theater–for his five short plays, presented under the title 5 X No, should come as no surprise.
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The theme of all but one of them is the devastation wrought by perverted sexuality. In “The Cloth Drum,” a janitor kills himself for love of a haughty lady, only to find his ghost spurned. In “The Lady Aoi,” a jilted woman’s vengeful spirit torments the wife of the man who rejected her. In “Sotoba Komachi,” a crone is transformed into a lovely young coquette for one night every year, bringing doom to whoever admires her beauty. And in “Hanjo,” the title character maintains a trancelike stasis as she waits for her lost lover, who returns too late to rescue her from her own madness or her possessive, perhaps lesbian guardian (a potentially sinister personality made believable and even sympathetic by Isabel Liss, who also redeems the superficially coldhearted lady of “The Cloth Drum”).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/D. Bullard.
