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

There are four basic types of female masks, or dozens, depending on how one counts. I will list sixteen, some of which are variously presented as subcategories of others. In contradistinction to this variability, the uniformity which convention has imposed upon these objects creates in them the same sort of spectacular coherence which shines in different stanzas of a great poem. Each female mask must be seven sun (13.03 centimeters) high. A male mask is shorter, since it lacks the stylized hair. Seen together, the masks haunt and ravish me.

The famous ko-omote , “small mask,” is for the youngest girls who are no longer children — which is to say (as Mr. Umewaka has already explained) girls of about thirteen to seventeen. 3Since Noh dramas take place in an era when people married young, it is quite common for lovely wives, concubines, etcetera, to be portrayed with the ko-omote . In “Hanjo,” the shite , Lady Han, is one of several girls kept at an inn for the purpose of entertaining “travelling gentlemen”; she wears a ko-omote . When I asked him which mask he would choose to play another kept woman, Yuya, Mr. Mikata replied that out of his collection of fifty, the only possibilities would be his seven or eight ko-omote , “plus waka-onna , but we have not so many. I don’t prefer those.” For the role in “Michimori” of the wife whose Heike warrior husband must bid her farewell to join a last doomed battle against the Genji, Mr. Mikata chose an Edo-period ko-omote .

How does this mask differ from others? The renowned carver Nakamura Mitsue replied simply: “It has its specified shape that is commonly understood by the people in this world. There is a sample of the shape. There is a pattern paper to make it. Mask carvers use that.” And she showed me an unpainted ko-omote that she had made. Since this book happens to be written in words, and since if anyone in this rushing, floating world is an expert on distinguishing one Noh mask from another, it must be she, I tried again, and Ms. Nakamura finally said: “I’m no good at expressing in words because I express in shapes, but I will try. The younger, the more plump. The lower cheek is rounder; that’s my image.” She cradled her ko-omote as if it were a baby, and it smiled guilelessly up at her. “Since it’s more chubby, the end of the mouth goes deeper,” she said. — For me a ko-omote recalls the face of the plump-cheeked, snow-skinned girl in a certain Genji Picture-Scroll, her eyebrows high and considerably thicker than her demure slit of a mouth, her hair stylized much like a Noh mask woman’s: on each side, a solid black zone from the crisp white parting down temple and cheek between two widening arcs, paralleled by long single strands which pass across eyebrow, eye, cheek, chin, neck.

It would be too easy if the masks of a given category could be interchanged; and in the Kanze family’s fabulous mask collection we find a “hard” ko-omote from the sixteenth century; this mask finds application, as in the play “Mina,” in the portrayal of young women who turn into goddesses.

Then comes the equally famous waka-onna , which means simply “young girl.” Acccording to Mr. Umewaka, it is used to represent seventeen- to twenty-five-year-olds. “Look at her from the side,” advised the mask maker Otsuka Ryoji of one of his creations, “and her mouth seems to smile wider.” Ms. Nakamura remarked: “The difference between the ko-omote and the waka-onna is very slight. 4The waka-onna ’s eyes are a little higher.”

“So would that make the forehead smaller?” I asked. “After all, both masks are about the same size.”

“Oh, the difference is so slight,” she repeated. “You can change this line or that line. But the cheekbones are a little higher.”

These subtleties reminded me of a certain plastic surgeon’s self-assertion: “In what I do, beauty is about millimeters.”

I asked the great actor Mr. Kanze Hideo whether it was really true that only the Kanze School uses the waka-onna mask, and he replied: “That may be the tendency. But the waka-onna itself did not exist in the time of Zeami. In the Tokugawa era, about four hundred years ago, it was created, and Kanze had good waka-onna masks.”

Mr. Mikata for his part remarked of this mask: “In the first and middle portions of the Edo period, it was very suitable for the Kanze School, but it simply looks pretty, graceful. Strictnesss or power I believe is hard to express with the waka-onna . Of course there are good waka-onna masks.”

Having passed her years in praying and grieving for her mother and son, who drowned themselves rather than be captured by the Genji, the former Heike-era Empress of “Ohara Goko” must surely be careworn, and yet as the play opens we find her sitting in her hut, wearing a waka-onna . The mask can also used in the plays “Yokihi” and “Matsukaze,” which will be discussed in chapters of their own. The shite of “Izutsu” wears it, as does “Eguchi’s” courtesan-Buddha.

Slightly less well known is the magojiro , whose name combines denotations of “grandchild” and “second son.” “This has a legend,” said Ms. Nakamura. “It is named after a man who made this mask remembering his late wife. Compared with others, this one’s proportions are closer to those of a real human. In a ko-omote , the eye-nose distance is shorter than in a magojiro , whose face is slimmer and slightly longer. But the truth is that the two masks are about the same size.” Apparently the cheeks are also more taut than a ko-omote ’s, and the lower eyelids more curved. This mask is frequently used to play Yuya or Hanjo. The Kongo School employs it almost exclusively.

The famous zo-onna (Zoami’s woman) was named after its creator Zoami, about whom Zeami said: “Both his acting and his singing should probably be classed at the rank of the tranquil flower.” Often the ko-omote seems “warm” and the zo-onna a trifle “cooler.” “From the standpoint of age,” said Ms. Nakamura, “this mask does not differ from the waka-onna . But the expression is different. The shape of the mouth is different. The waka-onna is smiling; the zo-onna is not. Actors often employ it for goddess roles.” We see it worn by the shite of “Seiobo”; he is portraying a heavenly maiden who has come to reward an Emperor for his virtue. It may also be used in “Hagoromo” and other plays; the Kongo School employs it often. One actor remarks of it: “The delicate red on the cheeks of this mask, the beautiful red color of the lips, are so beautiful that when I take a good look at it, it feels as if I am observing the first sunrise of the year on New Year’s day.”

These various young woman masks can most easily be distinguished from one another by the number (and sometimes the crossing-point) of strands which parallel the border of the hair’s solid inky darkness in its journey from the part down the curves of temple and cheek.

As I’ve said, the masks become leaner with the years they bear. The waka-onna has a slightly longer nose and a narrower chin than the ko-omote ; the corners of the lips turn upward a little less. These changes grow more pronounced in the fukai and shakumi , which are both associated with middle-aged women. Mr. Umewaka says that the fukai is for women in their thirties to early forties (and there are two subtypes of these, deep and shallow). Its gaze is sharp. In “Obasute,” when the ghost of the deserted crone first appears in the guise of a living old woman, she wears a fukai . Representing “Kinuta” ’s maeshite by means of fukai is elegantly appropriate, since the wife has just recently lost her desirability. In “Miidera” the middle-aged mother of a child kidnapped by slave traders can be represented by either the fukai or the shakumi , depending on which of the five Noh schools is putting on the performance. The shakumi sometimes has thinner, more slanting eyebrows than the fukai . (By the by, an American makeup artist informs us that “eyebrows convey different emotions depending on how they are drawn.”) The shakumi ’s eyes are also a trifle narrower and perhaps lower. “Basically they are the same,” said Ms. Nakamura. “ They are slightly different. The actor chooses what he likes.”