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

“Is the difference so subtle that even you could not tell in a performance?” I inquired.

“It depends. Sometimes I clearly know and sometimes I wonder.”

The masukami mask bulges and furrows on its forehead, in the shape of a curving, four-taloned claw. There is a wrinkle beneath its lower lip, and its chin has sharpened, its lower face narrowed into a sort of rounded arrowhead. But the cheeks are still smooth. It is sometimes used in that very sad play of blindness, madness and separation, “Semimaru.”

The manbi may be a trifle younger; the forehead is smoother, but the underlip is accompanied by much the same crease, and wider, shallow creases swerve outward from the corners of the mouth across the woman’s slightly flaccid flesh to above her chin.

The mask maker Hori Yasuemon describes manbi s rather more appealingly: “How can charm be expressed? That is what makes carving interesting. It is quite difficult to carve extreme charm after carving a noble piece such as a zo-onna . How can we express a sex appeal different than those of ko-omote and waka-onna ? Some twists are needed, such as the way her eyes and mouth are carved, the shape of the nose, double-chin, making a small dimple near the mouth, lifting the lip high, making the face slightly clear-cut, and the parts larger.” The manbi , he says, has wider eyes than the ko-omote . “The name is derived from the phrase stronger than a hundred coquetries … Adding some seduction with sex appeal to a ko-omote , the brush stroke sends a clear message. Perfect for the beautiful woman that a demon has turned into in ‘Momijigari.’ The Katayama Kurouemon family has another manbi mask carved by Omi, which has goggling eyes and mysterious sex appeal…” The manbi about which he writes “is young and beautiful, and is used for roles such as Hanjo, who is crazed in love.”

In any event, the manbi has suffered more than her younger counterparts. Still older women are represented by the rojo , “old woman,” and the uba , which means not only an old woman but also a wet nurse. In “Obasute,” when the ghost of the deserted crone finally comes on stage undisguised as a living woman, she replaces her fukai with an uba . (Hokusai’s final — and incomplete — series of colored woodblocks was entitled “Pictures of One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, Explained by the Uba ,” and an editor believes that the artist’s “style is the same as hers — not a style of ignorance, but of innocence.”) Uba and rojo are both used, among other purposes, to portray the poet Ono no Komachi. The latter, so I read, can “reveal inner elegance. Only an occasional crease lines the clear skin.” The first exemplar was carved in the fifteenth century.

In an old woman’s mask, the lips turn downward, and sometimes the face becomes spectacularly hideous, as in the mask which Mr. Umewaka employs to represent Komachi, who turned away all her suitors and found herself alone, 5it wears a downcurved, self-disgusted grimace and eye-slits which curve upward like Kagekiyo’s (although they are slightly wider than his, since Komachi can see). Mr. Umewaka remarked about this mask: “In the end, her miserable appearance is a very sad final stage of her life. We just symbolize her as a beggar. She had the loneliness of someone who maintained her own thinking. There is another interpretation: It was actually not Komachi, who’d been famous for her beauty, but some spirit who took over this old woman who then thought of herself as Komachi. I follow the first interpretation in my performances.”

Then, of course, come the ghosts of angry or unsatisfied women.

The deigan is a living woman crazed with jealousy. Ms. Nakamura showed me one of her unpainted blanks, a mask of a woman concentrating on something, staring up at me from the table, the mouth downturned. To my naive gaze, there was hardly even a suggestion of sullenness in her yet. Although the name means “mud eyes,” a finished deigan , she said, would have the whites of her eyes painted gold. The jealous ghost of Lady Rokujo often appears in a deigan mask at the beginning of “Aoi-no-Ue.” The abandoned wife of “Kinuta” can also incorporate herself in a deigan.

The ko-omote s, waka-onna s and zo-onna s look through me. A seventeenth-century deigan by Genkyu Mitsunaga looks at me, but seems not to see me. Her face is as smoothly beautiful as that of the other three masks, but her mouth, instead of ending in sad smile-points, forms a long rectangle, and the teeth are paler against its opened darkness. On each temple, two strands of hair curl out of place. The pupil-holes tilt slightly upward and outward. If the whites of the eyes have been gilded, it was with an understated touch. Who knows what she is thinking? As I stare at her I begin at last to sense that something is not right with her; some sorrow hurts her. But I would still be foolish enough to trust myself to her, since she seems to trust herself. This mask is a gem of subtlety.

In contradistinction to the deigan is the extremely varied category of hashihime , “bridge princess.” In Ms. Nakamura’s words, “ the deigan has some grudge inside the mind, while the hashihime has not kept the grudge inside concealed but is showing it.”

She showed me her masks of this type; they had protruding cheekbones, gold-plated copper rings about the eyes. Often many Medusa-strands twisted down their foreheads; and they seemed to be lost between anguish and the subsequent stage of demonhood, malignant joy; for their mouths narrowed in the center and widened at the corners, while the downward gaze of those black and golden eyes expressed great pain. Some of them were snarling, some had smaller, demurer mouths, all downturned. Their attachments had so far enslaved them that they seemed less feminine than their deigan sisters and predecessors; they were humans becoming monsters. “The reason why there are so many types of hashihime,” she smilingly said, “is because the mask makers are male, so for them probably each one has a personal experience with a jealous female.”

In this group is the ryo-no-onna , and also the hannya , which one source singles out as “particularly famous as a mask embodying a woman’s hatred and sorrow.” Pound and Fenollosa opine that hannya comprise not one type, but a full group of masks. “The hannia in Awoi no Uye [another transliteration of ‘Aoi-no-Ue’] is lofty in feeling; that of Dojoji 6is base… The Adachigahara hannia is the lowest in feeling.” These masks resemble horned, grinning skulls with the flesh still on them, darkness glaring around the round holes in their golden eyes, the teeth huge and variously discolored, with greyish-black hair flowing thinly around the horns. Their malignance is spectacular, their hatred terrible. They tend to express grief when tilted down, and fury when raised.

What the hannya proclaims the ryo-no-onna understates. The Kanze School considers it especially appropriate to represent the ghost of Unai-otome, who, harassed by two suitors, diplomatically drowned herself.

The yase-onna , “skinny woman,” is in a different group from the above. As already mentioned, sometimes the ghost of Kinuta wears this particular wooden face: hollow-cheeked and bony-cheeked, with sunken eyes and a narrow almost rectangular gape — all in all, a softer feminine version of the abandoned exile Shunkan. One commentator remarks on its “calm, almost rectangular pupil openings.” It is used to portray vindictive female spirits “when the intention is to empathize their pathos.” The ancient carver Himi is said to have used the frozen corpse of a starved woman as his model for the yase-onna . Asked to differentiate between a rojo and a yase-onna , Kanze Hisao replied: “The bones are the same. However, the yase-onna must have a beauty which shows that a beautiful woman became thin because of love.”