William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

Are we not all dead in something, confined within something, seeking restlessly to escape into peace? The shite of “Izutsu” is known as “the woman who waits for her lover.” He is long dead, as is she. She recites a poem she once wrote comparing herself to a cherry blossom, which despite its reputation for transience, hence fickleness, spends the year awaiting the one who is destined to pluck it. But who and what is she? This constant ghost gazes into the well, and sees her reflected image altering into that of her beloved, “the man from long ago.” This, of course, comprises no escape, but a mere vicious circle.

When I watch this species of Noh plays, I often wonder to what extent the ghosts comprehend that they are dead. (As a woman’s specter in “Nishikigi” tells the waki : “We who dwell in dark delusions leave to you who are alive the question of reality.”) This question leads me to the more fundamental issue of whether I can ever comprehend my own evanescence. I remember the final poem of Tales of Ise, whose dying narrator, the Genji-like courtier Narihira, expressed incredulity that he must actually die today .

NARRATIVES

Zeami directs that most plays be written in five sections: one beginning, three middle parts and an end. In the first section, the waki comes onstage. In the second, the shite appears. In the third, the shite and the waki engage in dialogue. In the fourth, there is a musical interval. This is, in effect, the climax. Finally comes a resolution of some sort, and here in particular the shite dances.

Zeami summarized the above with jo-ha-kyu . These three terms, taken from ancient court music, refer to a smooth preface, a break, and then a fast climax.

A more fundamental aspect of Noh narratives has already been implied in the foregoing discussion of the shite : with the exception of a very few happy-ending tales such as “Ashikari” or “Hanjo,” 6the most impressive plays tend to be cautionary tales about attachment. Yes, there is a mother-child reunion in the beautiful “Miidera”; lines from “Takasago” may inspire a pair of traditionalist newlyweds; but many of the plays of harmony and success strike me as dully propagandistic, as when a goddess rewards some Emperor’s virtue with elixir. My book will avoid them insofar as it can.

When the waki first appears, he generally introduces us to a sad situation of some sort: a wandering monk’s musing over a memorial tablet for two long dead fisher-sisters whose courtly lover left them for the capital commences “Matsukaze,” while “Semimaru” begins with its eponymous blind prince being led by the waki , an imperial messenger, into the wilderness to be left alone by the Emperor’s command. The shite s of these two plays are respectively Matsukaze herself, ghost of one of the abandoned sisters, and Princess Sakagami, the sister of Semimaru. Both of these women are mad. At one point in her despair, Matsukaze mistakes a pine tree for the courtier who abandoned her and her sister. Sakagami, while she can converse rationally with her brother, mostly raves the rest of the time. When she parts from him at the end of the play, he and she both weep. Thanks to the waki , who is a priest, Matsukaze (possibly) finds peace. Sakagami does not. But the cause of their misery is the same: a parting from someone loved who, thanks to the temporary nature of human existence, can never be kept.

This theme is hardly unique to Noh plays. In the fourteenth-century Taiheiki , for instance, Nagoya Tokiari the governor of Totomi finds himself on the losing side of a civil war, and in danger of capture. He and his comrades slit their bellies open and then roast themselves “at the bottom of a war fire.” As for the wives and children, they are sent to drown themselves in the sea. “May it not be that the spirits of the dead remained there, thinking wrong thoughts of attachment to husbands and wives?” For afterward the husbands’ ghosts are seen attempting to reunite with the ghosts of their wives, who rise up out of the water, but fires separate them; the female ghosts sink back down, and the male ghosts swim away crying.

The transience of life and the consequent advisability of relinquishing attachments have figured in Japanese literature for centuries.

PROPS

With the exception of a few play-specific props, such as the temple bell of “Dojoji” or the bird-scaring boat of “Torioi-bune,” the stage remains always bare, but thanks to the imagination of Noh it elaborates itself whenever needed into a landscape as remote and fantastic as Hiroshige’s multiphallic mountains and elaborately vaginal gorges, which, surrounded by mist and trees, each comprise another world, perhaps the “real” floating world — floating on mist; and all of these tall, rectangular worlds have been mounted on scrolls which elongate them much further than in their original proportions; world upon world hangs framed upon the walls of the Ukiyo-e museum in Tokyo: a planetary system of the imagination without a sun. (These places, of course, are peopled. I remember the outlines of his women, simple, crisp and sweeping, stylized into life by the genius of his printmaking. Their “individuality” is gestural. They could be Noh actors.)

As I have said, the greatest Noh narratives have to do with separation and desire. Whenever the desire gets eased, the means is oblivion, visited upon a grateful ghost through the prayers of a priest. In the closing lines of “Kanehira,” the ghost of the warrior for whom the waki has come to pray cannot help but exult over his glorious suicide. Sometimes, as in “Aoi-no-Ue,” the ghost is initially not just ungrateful, but demonically menacing. But even that monster is finally overcome and attains Buddahood “free of delusion.” In Noh we never meet with any of the passionate epiphanies that can fulfill a life; for desire, of whatever kind, is precisely the problem.

And so the stage should be bare. This is the waki ’s world, and therefore mine. Mostly I can be no more than a framer and witness of quotidian hills and beautiful masks. I watch at the side, or I sit in my numbered seat in the Noh theater, transiently moved by the transient attachments of others.

This is likewise the shite ’s world and therefore mine. Forgetting the impossibility it must lead to, I kiss the mask, whose loveliness distracts me from perceiving the essential bareness of the situation upon which my attachment has been projected.

The chorus can express a single character’s consciousness, and Mr. Umewaka and his fellow shite s can subdivide into different entities at any time. And so the stage is everyone’s world and no one’s. It is bare because life passes across it only for an hour or two, then withdraws behind the rainbow bridge.

(By the way, what is bareness? Often, as at the Choraku-ji Temple and the Shoren-in Shrine, the garden itself becomes a performance framed by the stage-rectangle of a shrine’s or residence’s open wall; one sits upon a blank tatami mat, which is itself framed by time-polished boards around the room’s edges, and there might be a sliding partition of white screens behind or to the side, while in front it is open; a gnarled tree extends itself around a convoluted stone-rimmed artificial pond; a stone bridge vanishes into a bush or not, depending on how one moves one’s head; branches blow; birds croak, and shadow-patterns alter in two-dimensional dramas upon the swelling sea of foliage. Is this a world, or nothing, or a stage, or all of these?)

On the back of the stage is painted a great pine; the bridge to the rainbow curtain passes three smaller pines which are not painted but quite material. These will be discussed later, since every book needs a chapter about pine trees.