Tom Hare's award-winning book Zeami: Performance Notes is not just a collection of translated “performance notes” by the medieval-period Japanese noh performer Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443). It is also a book about medieval Japanese culture and the art of translation.
Zeami was an important noh practitioner who played a pivotal role in the transformation of sarugaku, a medieval Japanese performance genre, to noh. Zeami's huge corpus of works, written over the forty years of his performance career and ranging from plays to various kinds of writings about sarugaku, contributed greatly to the institutionalization and canonization of noh in subsequent years. Hare's annotated translation of Zeami's writings, some never translated before, is therefore an important contribution to English-language scholarship on noh. Other than the translation, Hare has also included an introduction, three appendices, and a glossary in the book. These sections not only provide the readers with additional information...
