An acquaintance of mine who runs a small publishing company sent me a copy of a book she has recently published. The book is called "Yes, Noh Naomi Seki," and is about the life of a female Noh performer.
What surprised me when I read the book was that this Ms. Naomi Seki, who jumped into the world of Noh at the age of 34 from a completely different world, is now a shitekata of the Hosho school, which is truly rare. Nohgaku is an art form that Japan is truly proud of, in that it expresses human characters in an extremely condensed and simplified form, as determined by each "family" that has been in the male lineage for 600 years. I hear that there are still few women in this art form as men's dances. What I feel through the various life patterns leading up to it is exactly the phrase "it is never too late to start.