I guess we know Noh drama involves an exaggerated conception of time, where ghosts, gods, priests and royalty all come together to declaim mysteries that – by many accounts – routinely put audiences to sleep. It's easy to believe that one of the most difficult roles in the Noh repertoire requires an actor to assume a crouching position on stage and then emote from behind a mask for an hour and a half. While an audience is present throughout.

What's not well known is that Noh is the invention of one person – Zeami Motokiyo (1364-1443), who had some help from his father.

Zeami wrote about 50 plays. One of his best known in English – The Woman Within the Cypress Fence – features a priest and an old woman, who makes daily ablutions at a nearby river.

Here's how the old woman introduces herself to the priest and to the play's audience:

When I draw water from the River White
The shinning moon, floating, soaks my sleeves.

Natch. The moon, not the river, soaks the old woman's sleeves – which tips us off that she's operating on a different plane of experience than are the priest and the rest of us. The priest senses this and belatedly asks her her story. Actually, he just asks her her name, but she takes the opportunity to unload her troubles.

She says she's been consigned to living in a cypress fence hut and feels compelled to make daily, difficult trips to the river to purify herself. Also, she's a ghost.

From that point on, Zeami introduces us to a narrative structure where the rules of verb tense don't apply, and the dynamics of what's happening to the old woman/ghost – or is not happening to her – become murky.

For her part, the old woman/ghost talks about her current difficulties and her former life as a court dancer. She holds a conversation – or recounts one – with Lord Okinori. And altogether, she seems to have a firmer grasp on what's up than we do. Near the end of the play, she declares,

I, once the woman within the cypress fence,
Began to perform a dance of my days that had passed.

(The ghost performs a graceful court dance)

That might seem like an epiphany, but the play soon concludes with the old woman/ghost beseeching the priest for his help, while commenting on the ephemeral nature of foam, cranes flying overhead, and weeds.

Which makes me wonder what good reason there might be for trying to decipher this mess... And I'm not sure there is one, but a couplet from one of the old woman's first speeches includes a pair of images that resonates with Zeami's apparent theme (or, at least, supplies a Western reader with a novel expression of a familiar thought):

Ice, formed of water, is colder than water;
Indigo, derived from blue, is darker than blue.

A whole can be more than its parts... And that's as good a way as any to describe the visual impact of the repeating graphic patterns known as diaper motifs.

Traditional Japanese patterns often make use of diaper motifs, as this blog's series on Japanese patterns has shown for the seigaiha and shippo patterns and for some versions of the syoubu pattern. The diaper motif that Zeami alludes to in his play is known as the cypress fence or higaki pattern, which we know in the West as a herringbone pattern.

Shown below are three examples of the cypress fence diaper motif. When you look at these examples, think of ice, formed of water, and indigo, derived from blue, and an old woman consigned to a cypress fence hut.