Kan'ami and Zeami perform for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu: the rise of Noh

Sarugaku, a mixture of mime, song, dance and comic sketches, was performed by troupes attached to temples and shrines. Kan'ami belonged to one of the four troupes of Yamato that served the Kōfuku-ji temple and the Kasuga shrine in Nara, and in the 1370s he led his own company to Kyoto, where dengaku, an art that had grown out of rice-planting festivals, was then held in higher esteem and had been favoured by Ashikaga Takauji. Kan'ami won audiences by joining the mimicry of Yamato sarugaku to the elegant dances of dengaku and the rhythmic kusemai songs fashionable at the time.

At the Imakumano performance the teenage shogun was struck by the father’s art and by the beauty of Zeami, then a boy of about twelve. From then on the Kanze troupe was in effect the shogunate’s own company. In 1378 a courtier complained in his diary that the boy actor sat beside Yoshimitsu in the shogun’s stand at the Gion festival, and the regent Nijō Yoshimoto, who gave Zeami the name Fujiwaka, taught him linked verse. Kan'ami died in 1384 in Suruga, after a performance at the Sengen shrine.

Zeami, who led the troupe after his father, shaped Noh to the taste of his aristocratic and warrior audience: in the ‘dream’ Noh (mugen nō) a ghost or spirit relives its past, and the ideal of yūgen — subtle, profound grace — governs words, music and movement. He wrote many plays still in the repertoire and, beginning with the Fūshikaden (its first parts date from 1400), the earliest treatises on the theory of drama in Japan. His Kanze school is one of the five schools of Noh today, and Nōgaku was inscribed in 2008 on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.