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

FANS

The flash of gold around leaves of green, purple and red on a toujumon-kami-ougi fan, you can be sure that it means something. Black slats are associated with women, naked bamboo, with men, gold, with old men. Spiral patterns are associated with strength. Abstractions tend to express demoniacal madwomen; the same goes for combinations of red and gold.

SCHOOLS

At the time of writing, five schools or styles of Noh exist. The Kanze School, from which the Umewaka School once did or did not temporarily break away, depending on who tells the tale, is dominant. The other four schools are Hosho, Kongo, Komparu 11(which is said to own the oldest Noh mask of all), and Kita, this last being a newcomer from the Edo period. An expert writes me: “Kanze has the reputation of being on the flashy side, though not as flashy as Kita… Certainly the dancing style of Kanze is livelier than Hosho, while the latter is renowned for the beauty of its chanting.” These have to do especially with shite acting. Hosho, which is rightly or wrongly said to be less elitist than some of the other schools, frequently employs zo-onna masks for shite roles and ko-omote for tsures . The Kanze School prefers ko-omote s for shite s. Schools for waki , musicians and kyogen actors exercise their own influence. Most of my experience as a Noh spectator has been with the Kanze School. 12

In case you wonder how it happens that an actor follows a particular school, the answer, for once, is simple.

“Why are you a member of the Kanze School?” I once asked Mr. Mikata Shizuka.

Patiently he replied: “Because my father is a Kanze.”

EQUALIZATIONS, NEUTRALIZATIONS

As mentioned in the section on costumes, Noh seeks to balance or even neutralize the image color of a given play, to harmonize positive and negative. For instance, brighter Noh pieces should be performed at night, when the ambiance of the theater is always gloomy. “As a rule,” notes the first-rank translator Royall Tyler, “the more intense the emotion, the more regular the metre.”

This principle, so alien to my temperament, is fundamental to Noh. Later on in this book, I hope to tease out some of the implications for feminine beauty itself.

A Catalogue of Female Masks

Noh was supposedly born out of sacred Shinto chants and dances, which gradually became masked. Masked court dances also seem to have been already on the scene. 1Their sacred character has not entirely faded away even now, as we heard from Mr. Umewaka’s remarks about “Okina.” Some masks were thought to have fallen from heaven or appeared miraculously in the sea; they might be credited for a good rice crop. I try never to forget this aspect of, say, the zo onna mask which has just come to life in a Noh performance; it is more than a beautiful object. The same is true of the face of the woman I love.

Zeami himself says little about masks, and in the appended “Sarugaku dangi,” prepared by Motoyoshi, we learn mainly which mask carvers of that epoch had the best reputations, and why it is that masks should not have too high a forehead (a hat or crown will go out of alignment). “Sarugaki” can mean either “monkey” or “god,” depending on the pronunciation; while “dangi” means “music” or “speech.” In keeping with that name, Noh in its early days most often encompassed gods, devils and the like. Accordingly, those sorts of masks were most in evidence. But by the late sixteenth century, mask makers were no longer creating new categories of masks, but copying old ones, in part because, as one period treatise explained, “masks that are too new tend to glisten and give a bad impression.”

I have not seen many early illustrations of masks. Even in the Edo period, when ukiyo-e frequently depicted Kabuki actors, Noh actors rarely got featured, because in the words of one expert: “Noh was considered the property of the government, so the samurai would not have ventured to own such a print.” All the same, it was probably at the beginning of the Edo time that Noh, and Noh masks, got codified. There are now sixty main types, which can be elaborated into about four hundred and fifty exemplars. More manageable is to consider the five fundamental divisions: Okina, demons, old men, men and women. Of course it is the final category that is of greatest interest in this book.

It is common for Japanese art to imply that each social gradation is its own world, that women, for instance, may be subdivided into hyperspecific sub-types, so that geishas and prostitutes are readily distinguishable, and indeed employ different tools. 2In about 1793 there was a vogue for teahouse beauties, and I don’t mean just any teahouses, but mizuchayas , which is to say the teahouses next to temples or shrines. Utamaro depicted these fetching mizuchaya-bijin in several woodcuts. Here, for instance, is a large multicolored print of Ochie of Koiseya reading a comic book. Although her image might be stylized, the props she bears comprise a coded placement in this typology. For instance, how old is Miss Ochie? If we know that the oomarumage hairstyle is for old women in their late twenties, if we are capable of being informed by the shaved eyebrows and shimadakuzushi hairstyle of another Utamaro beauty that she is a still more elderly woman — very likely in her thirties — if we can turn to Ochie and determine that she is still in her fullest teenaged flower, then we are advantaged like that Melville reader who knows his Bible. As for Noh, since it possesses so deep and wide a visual vocabulary, quite a number of feminine epitomizations lie available to it as masks.

Reader, have you ever wondered which mask might be tip-top for expressing a woman from long ago who drowned herself when the Emperor ceased loving her? It is a certain atypical kohime , carved by the great Tatsuemon. One carver believes it to be “the origin of female masks.” In old times, many ko-omotes , rather than being simply “adorable,” retained a trifle of what the carver refers to as “chilling godliness.” As you see, kohime s could be even chillier. This one possesses smaller eyes than a ko-omote . It lacks “the soft look of the dimples near the lips as in the ko-omote . Both upper and lower lips are thick” like a fukai ’s, “giving a deep look of a woman… It has an image of a Buddha statue. This is the finest among the masterpieces, from a period before they began attempting to express softness with techniques in female masks… Eyes, nose, forehead shows the nobleness of a mature woman… the hair and double-chin are closer to a ko-omote ’s.” Indeed, the face is wider than that of many suffering masks, so that not only the eyes but also the mouth appears smaller. The double chin widens as it descends. The underside of the nose is relatively flat between the nostrils. The expression is almost troubled, the smile apparent only from the side, the corneas entirely dark except for some horizontal streaks of white to delineate the sides of the pupil-holes.

But why this kohime in particular? Would understanding require education in artistic verities, or in mere artistic conventions? — How many mask-choices an actor truly has to express a given role is debatable. In 1765, Kanze Motoakira published canonical versions of various Noh plays. Indeed, he went far to establish the modern canon itself, eliminating hundreds of plays from the repertoire. Furthermore, Motoakira strictly specified which masks and costumes could be used in each play. His rules continue in force, at least for the Kanze School. One scholar bitterly writes that “Motoakira’s legacy today is the rigid world of noh in which a narrow canon of several hundred plays is enacted according to strict rules interpreted” by “the family head.” For whichever reason, the Noh actors I interviewed for this book, who all belonged either to the Kanze School or to its very near relative, the Umewaka School, never mentioned Motoakira’s name. They simply told me which masks they considered appropriate for a given role. I will now relay some of their remarks to you.