THE FEATHER MANTLE
(Hagoromo: a woman play)

This play begins on a perfect spring day: sweeping blue sky, mild air, pines along the beach, and sunlit sea. The world we know appeared, they say, when sky and earth split apart; now, though, heaven and earth seem still conjoined at ease, one lightly-breathing vastness. As on such a day the earthbound heart rises of itself into free space, so an angel, too, may, as in The Feather Mantle, descend.

No one knows for certain who wrote The Feather Mantle, or when, but it makes a fine introduction to the whole nō repertoire. Many of the marks of a god play can be found in it, and one of these is thanks given for our Sovereign's reign. This thanks is rendered for all harmony and delight, to the Lord who shall reign for ever and ever; whose reign endures, indeed, even through the trials enacted in the plays that follow. (If his reign did not so endure, then return to communion and illumination would hardly be possible.) This Sovereign is not only secular and historical; he is also the focal point and power center of the world.

It is the angel's warm, feminine charm that puts The Feather Mantle in the class of woman plays, for true god plays avoid such coloring. This very charm, though, makes The Feather Mantle more perfectly representative, for love is the heart of Japanese poetry—especially if to love between man and woman, one joins love for the fleeting graces of nature herself.

And who indeed is this charming celestial maiden? She proves to be the laurel tree that grows in the moon, and the very moon itself, giver of every gift. Her garment is less a human mantle than sky, mist, and cloud. The flowers in her hair are doubtless actually growing in the green spring hills. She really does have all of nature's fleeting graces, of which the moon is the sign, and might well move one to love.

In nō, mention of the full moon is likely to be coupled, as here, with the Buddhist term True Semblance (shinnyo). True Semblance can loosely be said to mean Reality, but this reality is no absolute to be grasped at and held. True Semblance can be owned or defined no more than the angel's loveliness.

As the moon, the angel invokes her own 'true ground,' the Bodhisattva Seishi. This is because Shinto deities, the natural powers of the world, were widely held to be local manifestations of the universal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Such a local manifestation is the projected image, and the name of this mode of understanding is honji suijaku, true ground and projected image. Seishi stands to the right of the Buddha Amida, Lord of Infinite Light, and is Amida's all-illuminating wisdom. Thus the angel, with all her graces, is actually wisdom manifest.

Versions of the story of The Feather Mantle are to be found all over the world. The pattern is that a band of celestial maidens (in ancient Japanese accounts the number is eight) come down to earth to enjoy some particularly wholesome pleasure, such as bathing in a spring or drinking fresh milk. There, a man surprises them. All escape back to heaven but the last one, who is detained by the man and often has to marry him. Much later, though, she does fly home again, and the man, who by some failing has let her escape, can never follow.

What the angel does during her visit to earth is to transmit certain music called the Suruga Dance from East Country Pleasures. East Country Pleasures is Azuma-asobi, a body of songs and dances from the region far to the east of Miyako, the capital. There is a tradition that an angel did indeed give the Suruga Dance to mankind on a beach in the province of Suruga. From the standpoint of nō, however, one might imagine that it is music itself that she teaches, and that the whole repertoire is an unfolding of this music.