Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams

Nō drama, which integrates speech, song, dance, music, mask, and costume into a distinctive art form, is among Japan’s most revered cultural traditions. It gained popularity in the fourteenth century, when the actor and playwright Zeami (1363–1443) drew the favor of the shogun with his theatrical innovations. Nō’s intricacies and highly stylized conventions continue to attract Japanese and Western appreciation, and a repertoire of some 250 plays is performed today.Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams presents a selection of Nō plays, magnificently rendered in English by Royall Tyler, an eminent scholar and translator of classical Japanese literature. It includes both canonical and lesser-known works of Zeami’s, as well as anonymous works. Several are outside the established repertoire, offering glimpses of Nō before the tradition was codified in the Edo period, and have not previously been translated into English. An introduction describes the structure, formal features, and performance conventions of Nō plays, and brief essays precede each work. Through Tyler’s authoritative scholarship and keen ear for the subtlety and beauty of the language, Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams gives Anglophone readers access to the complex art of Nō.

Rightly celebrated for his magnificent English renderings of The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike, and other classic Japanese texts, Royall Tyler has struck again with another set of sparkling translations of plays from the Noh drama. The great medieval playwrights subtly spoke from, to, and of the heart; Tyler lets them sing., It is hard to see how Royall Tyler could improve on perfection, but in this latest offering from our most talented Nō translator, a revised translation of twenty Nō plays, Tyler achieves an ideal combination of elegance and accessibility. Including seven non-repertoire (bangai) plays, three additional essays, and several translations of engi (temple origin legends), this book is highly recommended as a classroom source for understanding Nō in Zeami’s time.

Royall Tyler is the award-winning translator of The Tale of the Heike and The Tale of Genji. His Columbia University Press books include The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity (2016) and The Dawn of the Warrior Age: War Tales from Medieval Japan (2024). After teaching at Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Oslo, Tyler retired from the Australian National University.