The Tilted Cup

Paul Griffiths’s The Tilted Cup effects a multilayered translation, taking a series of eleven Japanese Noh plays and turning them into stories in English. The reader will encounter spirit-beings set free, lovers lost and found, dreams and desires fulfilled, lessons learned from nature, and always a longing for the infinite, as the long, slow drama of each Noh play is transformed into a short and moving tale. Interspersed and contrasting with the stories are ten photographs of contemporary Japan by John L. Tran that further explore the relation between theatricality and narrative, while offering hints of a very different vision of infinitude.