As a youth Zeami, the son of a lowly performer, was given access to the highest social and literary circles of fourteenth-century Japan. Taking advantage of the education and tastes he acquired from these patrons, Zeami transformed the popular theater of his talented father into an elegant art form known today as the n theater. His innovative, poetic plays are some of the best in the genre, as are the treatises he wrote about many aspects of theater. After his oldest son and artistic heir died and he was exiled to Sado Island at the age of seventy-two, Zeami had little hope that his legacy would endure. Yet, his work has continued to inspire artists as late as the twentieth century.

According to the Kanze-Fukuda genealogy, Zeami was born on the twelfth day of the eleventh month of 1363 in Nagaoka in Yamashiro province to Kanze Kiyotsugu (better known...