Yama Uba the Zen play by Naoto Matsumoto p.9

Monk

[Stands up]

Now, a true hag and a metropolitan diva sing the song about a mountain hag.

Can you tell who’s singing about whom?

One mixes with the other.

You see?

This is how “an ugly old hag in the mountains” works.

This is how love works in front of us, human beings, in our everyday world dramas.

Hag

A poet can cherish a wonderful spring evening where flowers are blossoming and the moon is full.

He will not swap one minute of it even with one thousand pound of gold.

But this evening is more valuable than the poet’s one because it is the evening when Diva the hag meets a true hag.

Let’s sing a song of this unbelievable happening and tell the world how important this encounter is.

Diva

All right, all right.

I will sing whatever you like, even though there’s no audience listening.

Valet

I am listening, madam.

Diva

Shut up, idiot!

Hag

[Singing]

Your voice is a bird flapping.

Diva

[Singing]

Your drum is falls cascading.

the playwright's recommendation

A word can provoke many different feelings. It depends on the person. It depends on the place. It depends on the period in the human history or the personal development.

When you hear the word "revolution", what kind of feelings does it provoke in you?

For the young girl Rozalia, it might remind her of the sound of soldiers' boots or the wind through her abandoned house.

For the old botanist Fukuoka, it might remind him of the sense of happiness and the contentment of good harvest.

Rozalia did a lot of things and became a lady of the world.

Fukuoka did nothing as Lao Tzu of Tao Te Ching asks you to.

And he developed a revolutionary agriculture of doing nothing. Masanobu Fukuoka was in the middle of developing a method to grow rice by working only four days a year when he left this floating world for another level of experience recently.

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