Unrin'in B

雲林院：乙 Unrin’in

1 Source and/or Related Material

Medieval commentaries on the Tales of Ise, such as Ise monogatari chiken-shū

2 Author

Late-Muromachi revision of a Zeami play by the same title, which is not in the modern repertoire but of which we have a manuscript from 1397.

3 Repertoire

Kanze, Hōshō, Kongō, Kita

4 Synopsis

Kinmitsu from the village of Ashiya (waki) loves reading the Tales of Ise. One night, he dreams of a crimson-clad noblewoman and a nobleman in a Heian-period dress suit reading the Tales of Ise together. An old man tells him that they are the Nijō Empress and Ariwara no Narihira at Unrin’in Temple at Murasakino in the capital, and Kinmitsu wakes up. He sets out for Unrin’in, together with some attendants (wakitsure). There, he sees the scene from his dream, except that the man and woman are absent. Kinmitsu goes to break off a blossoming branch as a souvenir but is rebuked by an old gardener (maeshite). When Kinmitsu tells him about his dream, he says that this place was once the retreat of the Nijō Empress and that Kinmitsu should await a second dream. Kinmitsu asks him if he might be Narihira by any chance, but he offers only ambiguous replies and vanishes into the evening mist. A local man (ai) comes and tells about the Tales of Ise in plain speech Hearing about Kinmitsu’s strange experience, he guesses that Narihira and the Nijō Empress might have something to do with it. As Kinmitsu falls asleep, Narihira appears in his true form (nochishite). He tells of his love for the Nijō Empress and dances until daybreak. In the defunct older version, the nochishite is not Narihira but the courtier Fujiwara no Mototsune, and he and the Empress reenact the events of Tales of Ise chapter 6, in which a woman is eaten by a demon, so it has a very different tone from the current version.