Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater

In Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater, Susan Blakely Klein's thorough grounding in the textual traditions of Noh drama and in the esoteric poetic commentaries of medieval Japan coalesce in fresh and stimulating ways. Klein describes Dancing the Dharma as the companion volume to her 2003 monograph Allegories of Desire: Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan. That earlier monograph is a study of the esoteric commentaries and related initiation rituals produced by the waka poet and Shingon priest Fujiwara Tameaki (1230s–1290s), the grandson of Fujwara no Teika. In it, Klein writes about the rhetorical strategies that the authors of commentaries employed. Typically, they offered interpretive readings of secular literary classics as religious allegories to be passed down in the form of secret teachings. They tended to build their exegeses around surface inconsistencies or ambiguities in the literary texts, aporias to which they then...