Yukio Ninagawa likes it when things fall down. In one of his productions of “Macbeth,” marching Birnam Wood was actually a rain of cherry blossoms. In a London “King Lear,” his storm scene pelted the stage with boulder-sized hail. His latest show to hit New York, “The Modern Noh Plays” at the Lincoln Center Festival, began with a fall of camellias. This was no surprise; what was a bit shocking, considering Mr. Ninagawa’s reputation for elegance, was the studied tackiness of the gesture.

Two pieces made up Mr. Ninagawa’s evening. The first, “Sotoba Komachi,” flirts (dangerously, as it turns out) with the idea of vulgarity. “There is nothing that wasn’t once vulgar,” cries a hag, remembering the grander days of her youth. But Mr. Ninagawa, and Yukio Mishima, the playwright, both locate vulgarity extremely specifically, in the West.

When a Poet (Yo Takahashi) stumbles drunkenly into one of Tokyo’s public parks, he does it to watch the lovers who writhe on every bench. But an Old Woman (Haruhiko Jo) spoils his view. Dressed like one of the worse-off felines in “Cats,” the Old Woman seems little more than a bundle of smelly rags. Yet she begins to reminisce about her heyday as the beautiful Komachi, and drags the poet into her fantasy of the past.

Mishima’s own obsession with Japan’s past and the Poet’s passion for Komachi’s vanished glory run parallel. The Poet waltzes with Komachi at Rokumeikan, a social hall designed to Westernize Japanese society. The 19th-century courtiers, dressed uncomfortably in velvet bustles and imitation French finery, have already turned a cold epaulette to their own culture.

Most famous in America for his ritual suicide in 1970, Mishima haunted the line between East and West, between his obsessive love for the past and his own, distinctively modern, authorial voice. He used his work and, in part, his death to lash out at increasing Americanization. Mr. Ninagawa’s production makes the same cut, but slyly.

When something grates most painfully on our senses, like the cheesy bower that frames the stage, it’s usually a “Western” choice. Soupy classic hits make up the soundtrack (including an orchestration of Faure so sugary your teeth will hurt), and the Rokumeikan backdrop looks like it was painted for a well funded high school production. We know when things get dramatic because Mr. Ninagawa turns the Strauss way up. And those camellias keep falling throughout.

Instead of gliding down, however, each fake flower hits the ground with the “tock” of a shuttlecock – the onstage park seems to be under assault from some unseen badminton court. This lone note cuts across the piece’s sentimentality; each quiet pop is the sound of a romantic idea exploding.

All the melodrama and the ironic aesthetic here work a bit too well – despite an operatic performance from Haruhiko Jo, the piece is strangely unaffecting. But Mr. Ninagawa has only set us up for the killing blow. The second play, Mishima’s updating of the Noh drama “Yoroboshi,” goes for the jugular and nearly bites off our heads in the process.

Two sets of parents want to claim the blind Toshinori (Tatsuya Fujiwara), burned in World War II and lost for 15 years to his natural family. Both his foster and biological parents want him as his own, but Toshinori can no longer be bound by the usual bonds of affection.

The couples, played for excellent comic effect, must bow down to the young man’s every whim; he terrorizes and confuses them in equal measure. Presiding over the custody battle is the preternaturally serene Magistrate Sakurama (Mari Natsuki), but even she is silenced as the boy relives the night of his injury again and again.

“Yoroboshi” offers a thrilling picture of Mishima as part brat, part prophet, a man whose words burn the mouths that speak them. His voice rings so clearly through Mr. Fujiwara that the final stroke, a recording of Mishima’s last speech and farewell, almost seems redundant.

Apparently, in earlier productions, Mr. Ninagawa would project archival footage of Mishima onto Mr. Fujiwara’s body – dressed in a white suit, the actor would become a living screen. But for these performances, director and star make the magic without the technical trickery, and Mishima lives to die again.