The woman who sighs over her work and the oni who hunts the priests are the same person.
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The tale
A party of travelling priests asks for shelter at a lonely house on the Adachigahara plain. The woman who lives there lets them in. Late at night she spins thread by the fire and sings about it: even this night work, she says, is how one gets through the world, and it wears her out.
She tells the priests not to look into her inner room. A servant, too curious, looks. The room is piled with the bodies of people she has killed.
The priests run. She comes after them, no longer an old woman but an oni, burning with anger. They pray, and she is driven off into the night wind.
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Two sides of the telling
From its side
She is not two beings. The woman who sighs over her spinning and the oni who chases the priests are one person, and the play does not say which is the mask. Her one long complaint is about the work of getting through life.
From the human side
The priests are not heroes. They are the ones who did not enter the room, and the ones who prayed. The only person who looks is the servant, and that is what changes everything.
The question behind this seriesHow does a being with its own logic see us — and who gets to tell its story?
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What Noh does with it
The same story is performed under another title, Kurozuka, by other schools. The spinning scene is the heart of it: an ordinary, tired woman, on stage, before the oni.
Throne of Blood
Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) is his version of Macbeth. Kurosawa has said that the forest spirit who meets the two warriors was based on a similar figure in the Noh play Kurozuka. The three witches of Shakespeare become one old figure at a spinning wheel.
The spinning wheel is Adachigahara. The old woman who sits at her wheel in the mist, singing, who is more than she seems and who knows what the house holds, is Noh’s woman at her thread, moved into the forest of a samurai film.
