No one even knew, neither the Regent nor the servants closest at hand, that Ze’ami was writing; it would not however have been too difficult to ascertain, as he asked for paper, just for taking some notes, he enunciated several times and with strong emphasis, when he called the Regent’s attention — simultaneously sending him the half-finished mask as a gift — to the fact that what he was receiving only occasionally was merely an inferior imitation of real paper; please try, the exile beseeched him, to find something of better quality somewhere on the island, and if this is not possible, then — and this was his only request — have some brought from the mainland, but the Regent considered that Ze’ami was just a pampered court darling and was whining about a trifle, he can be happy, his voice thundered out in his office, that he gets anything at all, but frankly speaking he didn’t even know what kind of paper Ze’ami was insisting upon, as in his entire life he had never seen such a thing, in a word he could not have the faintest idea of what kind of paper the temporary inhabitant of Shoho-ji had in mind, and what quality it was to which he kept referring, he could not even begin to comprehend that it very nearly caused Ze’ami physical pain to see, in the package sent to him when the messenger arrived from Shinpo, these coarse materials, pressed from the fibers of who knows what plant, horrible, crude, malodorous, on the other hand there was nothing he could do about it, his request had clearly not met with comprehension in Shinpo, so that, well, he began his work with the quality of materials at his disposal, although he himself would never have referred to what he was doing as work, because it had not been mere self-depreciation, when at the time of the submission of his request, he had designated the activity for which paper was required as note-taking: the thought formed within him very slowly that he could possibly in time put the fragments of quotations and fragments of his own versifications into some kind of order, which then at times ended up on this sort of, as he was to call it later, rustic paper — so, well, he started one morning by attempting to put into sequence everything he had composed so far, but the whole thing ended up being too contrived, he did not wish to write a drama, never again to write another Noh piece, nevertheless the thought of framing these broken fragments into some kind of coherency eventually would have led him to something that he didn’t want, this wasn’t his intention — why? — he shook his head, and he pursed his lips in disapproval as he sat in the cell of Shoho-ji arranged for him, in the light coming through the tiny window; puzzled, impassive he looked at the paper, at the lines written there, and he really had no idea of what the hell he should do with them, and he even pushed them to one side for a while, and just sat in the garden when the weather permitted, murmuring prayers, trying to find his bearings among his memories, or his attention was drawn for long minutes to a lizard warming itself in the sun at the base of a tree, then another morning he decided to put everything he had written so far into chronological order, but it was just then that the problem came up that he could not recall when one part or another had arisen, yet the idea seemed like a good one, to put these things here into chronological order, among the circumstances of his captivity, wedged in between the mute bird of time and the shriveled continuity of one single day; Obama came to mind, the name of the port in Wakasa, the journey made by sea came to his mind, the gulf at Oota, the fisherman’s hut, then the journey to Shinpo — and then, somehow just like that, the brush in his hand began to move as if by its own accord, and he began truly to narrate the story of his exile, in chronological order as it had occurred; he did not wish to think of it and could not ever have even thought of it as something for a future drama, as something for the ceremonies at Kasuga or Kofuku-ji; no, not at all, what for, he shook his head again, it would make no sense at all to embark upon such an undertaking, I no longer wish to embark upon any kind of undertaking, it’s just enough that I’m still alive, he said aloud to himself, it is just enough of a burden, so that he did nothing else but begin to describe how it had all happened — from Wakasa to Shinpo — but of course he also used everything that he had already committed to paper, the ink was suitable, he had brought the brushes with him from home, there was enough time, in that one single long day it seemed endless, and it didn’t even concern him that the whole thing was turning out to be a little discontinuous, fragments of verse followed upon one another as they came to mind, with prose descriptions, verse fragments of which he frequently had no idea at all if he or someone else was the author, sometimes he hadn’t the slightest idea about the one who wrote these lines, it seemed so, so unimportant; at a certain point, he felt the lines to be just right, and he played, as he had done so many times before, with the different layers of the meanings of the words, so that they would harmonize, and diverse places or persons or events would come into a sudden unexpected connection with each other, that is to say, he did what he had done throughout his entire life when he wrote a play, moreover when in his most enigmatic works, even his summaries of everything necessary for the Kanze School to be aware of, he could not free himself from this, from the play of this Chinese compositional mode, the growth of meanings, the concordance of meanings, the exchange of meanings, in a word the search for the joy of the meaning-rhythms, so that it didn’t concern him when, on a later morning in that one long, so long, motionless day, he saw already that his work, the likes of which he had never before committed to paper, was changing, was transforming from the loosely woven story of his exile to the chant of his religious feelings; above the next chapter he wrote the words Ten Shrines and then Northern Mountains above the next, and he looked out of his tiny window, he saw from his cell a little sun-warmed patch of garden, and he thought of the infinite distance extending from Sadogashima to Kyōto, and that would always exist between them for all time, and as his heart was filled with bitter sorrow, he painted these words onto the paper: beloved gods, beloved island, beloved ruler, beloved country.