Evoking Sounds From a Japanese Legend : Music: ‘The flute can suddenly take us back to ancient times with just one breath,’ says musician Michiko Akao. She will perform this weekend at the Japan America Theatre.

Once upon a time, two men were in love with the same beautiful woman. Her mother proposed that they vie for her hand by shooting a swan sleeping near the river. At dawn, they sent their arrows flying . . . only to discover that they had killed the woman they adored.

So they jumped into the river and followed her to the dark land of the dead, where they met her hideously ugly sister, the Woman of the Eternal World. She ordered her beautiful sister to return to the world, where she could continue to tantalize men as “the fleeting and bewitching instant of dawn light.”

Fluttering, mournful strains of the yokobue --a traditional Japanese flute--set the tone for the conflict between transitory earthly beauty and eternal life in “Legend of the Water Flame,” a contemporary music and theater piece based on a Japanese legend, which opens a three-performance run at the Japan America Theatre Saturday.

“The sound of the flute can suddenly take us back to ancient times with just one breath,” says musician Michiko Akao, 41, who conceived the work.

A solo and orchestral performer in Japan, Europe and the U.S., Akao has commissioned and premiered works by several contemporary Japanese composers. Maki Ishii, a longtime collaborator, has scored “Water Flame” for bamboo flutes as well as an unusual percussion instrument made of iron.

The ryuteki (“dragon’s flute”), employed in Japanese court music since the 8th Century, represents the beautiful Akatoki (Dawn Woman), while the nokhan --a flute played on the Noh theater stage, which has a smaller diameter, produces piercing high notes--evokes her powerful sister Tokoyo, the Woman of Eternal World.

The cideloihos , a vessel-shaped instrument with protruding rods developed by sculptor Kazuo Harada and percussionist Yasunori Yamaguchi, is filled with water and struck or bowed to make clashing, rattling and knocking sounds intended to heighten the drama.

The sole actress in “Water Flame,” the redoubtable Kayoko Shiraishi, narrates the allusive text by poet Makoto Ooka in a voice capable of switching with thrilling intensity from a hoarse growl to a piercing cackle. Hunkered down on the bare stage, she primarily embodies the character of the Woman of the Eternal World.

(For this first U.S. production, key excerpts from the libretto will be projected above the stage, so that non-Japanese speakers can follow the story and get a taste of Ooka’s highly charged poetic style.)

When the work premiered in Tokyo in April, two dancers--a woman in a white kimono, a male butoh performer in black--represented the twin poles of beauty and eternity. But Akao found their contribution “too simplistically representational, too easily understood.”

Instead, the piece--directed by filmmaker Akio Jissoji and enveloped in darkness punctuated by the muffled glow of mirrors--creates its spell largely by means of the evocative powers of the flute.

“For the Japanese audience, the flute is a powerful sound that recalls things that happened before they were born,” Akao says, speaking through an interpreter. “It calls to the gods, to the spirit of the dead. It’s part of our heritage.”

When she told Ooka of her wish to evoke the ritual source of the flute, performed at outdoor shrines as a call to the heavens, he suggested returning to a mythological source.

“Water and fire are mutually exclusive things,” Akao explains. “So a ‘water flame’ is something that is not possible . . . Mr. Ooka wanted to make a philosophical statement about beauty--that it’s transient, that beauty and eternity are never one. Beauty is a thing that humans thirst after and always long for, but always in a momentary way.”