BL. W. B. Yeats

109. Furukawa, Hisashi. Ôbeijin no nôgaku kenkyû (European and American studies of the nô). Tokyo: Tokyo joshidaigaku gakkai, 1962.

Furukawa, a scholar of the nô and not of English literature, while working on a section on the nô for a study of the cultural history of the Meiji period arrived at the remarkable conclusion that a comprehensive modern history of nô could not be written without reference to the European and American writers who had been touched by it. This careful study is the fruit of that understanding. Furukawa traces the source of Yeats’s knowledge of the nô from Umewaka Minoru (Ap) and Hirata Kiichi (Ap) to Fenollosa (D10) and Pound, and argues that Yeats was the first European to comprehend fully the remarkable beauty of the form. Includes a section reproducing Fenollosa’s letters to Hirata, and detailed description and analysis of the relation between Fenollosa, Hirata, and Umewaka. Demonstrates conclusively that the Fenollosa manuscripts from which Pound worked in his versions of the nô (CB1) were based on translations largely done by Hirata rather than by Fenollosa himself.