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

4He was the elder brother of Narihira, the clever acrostic poet and situational acrobat of eros, whose verses about irises imparted to the Eight Bridges of Mikawa a poetic glow that lasted a thousand years; Narihira as we have just seen, lives on in Noh.

5This is no exaggeration. The carver Hori Yasuemon writes: “Kanzesoke has the beautiful tsuki and yuki fukai . This mask,” an original by Echi, and literally soaked in Zeami’s sweat, “is a tsuki and has the nose tilted left. The expression on her eyes is very gentle and full of love. Ideal for expressing the loneliness of losing a child or beauty in sadness. The other fukai , ‘Snow,’ has the nose tilted to the right, and is highly effective in scenes like ‘Neya wo nozokunayo’ in ‘Adachigahara’… It must have been made for special effects and scenes.”

6Some Japanese poets and essayists have argued that sabi ’s implicit pleasure in the yearning for past beauty may be still deeper than the pleasure of seeing the beauty still incarnated; and it has always been in just this way that I prefer to experience “Matsukaze,” the grief (which in its raw form is for any empathetic observer ghastly to witness) at least partially purified into beauty, as in Kawabata’s most exemplary novels.

1See above, p. 20.

2I inquired as to which position or gesture was appropriate when Kagekiyo first saw his daughter, and the answer caught me off guard as usual: “There is no particular move.”

3In the performance I saw at the National Noh Theater in Tokyo, Mr. Umewaka was in the chorus, being one of many kneelers in dark robes gazing past Semimaru’s hut while the blind man himself, led by an attendant, slowly came across the bridge. (The tsure Semimaru was played by Kanze Tetsunojo.)

4The same as a masugami . What can we do in this floating world, but let the transliterations fall where they may?

5As an American dance critic remarked: “You become really absorbed at a play when Romeo is not only distinct and spontaneous, but also makes you recognize the emotion of love, which has nothing to do with the actor personally or with acting in itself or with words in themselves.”

6Sometimes transliterated Satagami.

1Later I asked Mr. Mikata about this gesturing in unison: “Does this symbolize unity between the couple or something different?” — “It means that both of them felt the same way,” he replied. “About this move to show the sadness, for instance, both of them were about to go into the water, so they were both sad. The two of them perform the same move, so that the same movement accumulates for the audience. It’s not that the timing has to be completely the same, but the fact that they do the same move which shows that both of them feel the same. So when I play a role, of course the timing is important, but rather than the superficial move, the emotion is most important; that has to come first, if you want to achieve expression. The superficial stage of Noh ends once the hands move or it looks beautiful or like that. We must go beyond that.”

2Which could have been any one of three prison islands in southeastern Japan.

3So did Shunkan. The Tale of the Heike reports that “there were, of course, some natives, but their speech was incomprehensible.” And do you remember the two heroines of the Noh play “Matzukaze,” whom Yukihira played with during his exile from the capital? Five centuries after him, Lady Nijo writes: “when I learned that we were passing Suma, I thought of the courtier Yukihira,” who “had ‘lived alone with tears and dripping seaweed.’ ” Such is the snobbery of the capital.

4In his modern version of the Noh play “Kantan,” Mishima has the hero say: “I feel as if a mask kissed me.” The beauty replies: “That’s what women’s kisses are like.” — “You really are pretty,” he says. “But if you strip away the skin, what have you got but a skull?”

5In her eleventh-century Pillow Book , Sei Shonagon advises that a letter from the provinces should arrive accompanied by a souvenir. A letter from the capital, of course, needs nothing else, being its own souvenir.

6The space between musician and geisha is still another abyss to cross. Those two create a world together, but the musician merely upholds it without existing in it; the geisha exists alone.

1Content leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not the poet considers this beautiful.

1Clark does not give this distance explicitly but seems to imply it, as does the image of the Gothic Eve he reproduces.

1Definitions and examples of aware, en, miyabi, okashi and yugen are indebted to De Bary et al., pp. 197–99, 365.

*Both frontispieces were originally photographed with color film specially for this book. Unfortunately, reproducing them in such a way as to show you the resplendence of geisha attire would have been too expensive for the publisher.