Born into a life of acting and dance with a traveling theater troupe in 14th-century Japan, 12-year old Oniyasha has one problem-he doesn’t know what the point of any of it is. Why must I step with the left foot here instead of the right? Why is one performance good and another, bad? Why do people dance at all? It all seems perfectly arbitrary, until a chance encounter in a run-down shack sets him down a path to revolutionizing the art form and influencing much of Japanese culture to come.A fictionalized account of the early life of Zeami Motokiyo (Oniyasha), the founder of modern Noh theater-the world’s oldest surviving theater art-this coming-of-age artist’s journey vividly brings to life a man far ahead of his time during one of Japan’s most culturally and socially vibrant eras.
Oniyasha never understood why people dance, much less why he was dancing in his father’s theater troupe, until his encounter with an ailing and destitute shirabyoshi dancer. Moved by the raw emotion of her desperate, powerful performance, he awakens to the goodness in dance and devotes himself to the arts. Recognizing his growth, his father selects him to play a major role at the festivities at Imakumano Shrine, where the shogun himself will be in attendance. But distracted by everything at stake in this make-or-break moment, Oniyasha loses track of the beat…