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

Texts, Places, Histories, Masks

Then out comes the masked actor, silent against this spring night’s birdsong. His wife, the tsure , knows all too well that he was not abducted by the enemy but accomplished the glorious act of suicide. In short, he betrayed her. So she attempts to return to him the red-wrapped bundle on the white fan — a lock of hair he’s bequeathed her. Her rejection embitters his ghost. And they fall to blaming one another, the salaryman beside me sleeping through it all, until the inevitable reconciliation allows the dead warrior to become a Buddha. Thus the plot of the eponymous “Kiyotsune.” The wrinkle between the flutist’s eyes as he blows, the chorus’s chrysanthemum-in-diamond kimonos, the way the shoulder-drummer strikes the base of his instrument with his palm, may be less “important” than the plot, but one can experience them, as do I, without comprehending a word. Kiyotsune 1turns around. He is so wide without depth, like a beetle, that his rotation is one with a fan’s supernatural revolutions in a geisha’s hand. From behind we see how the kneeling Noh actor slowly paddles himself about with his white-stockinged foot, but even that motion is eerily perfect.

What would it mean to truly “understand” Noh? Presumably that would entail mastering not only the interrelated texts, places and events in a play’s epoch, but also the refinements and allusions of the centuries between that play’s composition and today’s performance. 2Noh actors tell me that a mask grows more alive with age. The same must be true for a play. Does the thing itself “gain character,” or is it our collective experience and appreciation that grow to “characterize” the thing? The answer depends on whether we objectify what we perceive or the lens perceiving it.

Once upon a time — in 1203, to be exact — the monk whom we now call the Venerable Myoe received visions of the god of Kasuga Shrine, a place whose present day white paper prayer-curlings on vermilion latticework, wet pavingstones, forests of stone lanterns and overarching trees may offer some equivalent of its thirteenth-century incarnation; but Kasuga must have diminished, relatively speaking; for the neighboring temple of Kofuku-ji, whose god adopted a dragon’s form as one of his attributes, gradually devoured more and more of the legend for itself; and when the unknown author, who could have been Zeami’s son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku, wrote the Noh drama “Kasuga ryujin,” which translates as “The Kasuga Dragon-God,” the Venerable Myoe’s visions scarcely resembled their originals, which, by the way, had been facilitated by a female medium whose body emitted divine fragrance. The Dragon Girl’s kimono-sleeves pass across the ocean; the Eight Great Dragon Kings bow their crowns to her. There is now a Dragon God Noh mask, a kurohige , employed in such plays as “Kasuga ryujin.” “The face is long, the chin protrudes and the tongue is visible in the widely opened mouth. The slanting eyebrows and moustache are delineated in black.” Kofuku-ji had aggrandized itself through its dragons, invading Kasuga’s story. And why not? After all, it was older and more prestigious than Kasuga. In its saplingdom, Kasuga Shrine’s eight-hundred-year-old cedar might have witnessed different events than this; such are time’s customary corruptions. “No doubt the Dragon God of the play… is continuous with the Kasuga deity proper…” grants the play’s translator. “But although dragons are not absent from Kasuga lore, nothing in this lore suggests that the deity could actually star in a play in dragon form.”

In this play, Kasuga recalls Kofuku-ji.

(How does it do so? Why, in its own indirectly Noh fashion, of course! It mentions the Venerable Gedatsu of Kasagi, a pre-eminent Kofuku-ji monk; 3it refers to the Seven Great Temples of Nara, most of which figure in Noh plays and one of which, Kofuku-ji, is supposed to be supreme. We might also note that Zeami’s Noh troupe were one of several affiliated with both Kasuga and Kofuku-ji.)

Behind Kasuga’s sliding screens of paper and latticework, within rectangular tatami-matted rooms overhung by tassels, the chantings of monks tell their own stories, as does the sad back of the woman who prays motionless, slowly bows, then returns to her frozen kneeling. A greyrobed priest with a peaked cap seats himself on a mat with his back to us outside, and begins to chant; to my foreign ears his lilting male cadences resemble those of a Noh song although they are more rapid, less trained, less musical, and he is not reciting but reading. Kasuga is itself — indeed, so perfectly as to be one of merely two shrines which Zeami specifically mentions before remarking of Noh: “One must not permit this art to stray from its original refined elegance.” The other shrine referred to is Hi-e. But Noh has joined in eternal marriage Kasuga not to Hi-e but to Kofuku-ji, where on a late spring night just after the fall of the cherry blossoms I sit watching a Takigi-Noh performance of “Kiyotsune.” Although torchlight Noh plays now take place in more than two hundred sites in Japan, they say that it was here at Kofuku-ji that the tradition began 4eleven hundred and thirty years ago as I write — nearly five centuries before Zeami. The Noh stage evolved from the paper which used to be laid down upon the grass. If moisture passed through fewer than three sheets, performance was permitted. Takigi-Noh events originally lasted for seven days, and forty-nine Noh dramas were accomplished on one such occasion. Of course they were speedier then.

KIYOTSUNE’S FACE

Very close by, the temple bell sounds tinnily. Another mask comes to life, incarnated in a blue-grey pillbox hat, long hair and a blue-grey kimono. Turning, it becomes an old ivory profile against the summery trees. The black teeth, moustache and frozen fan are all beautiful. A bus passes behind the temple wall; the foliage falls still; paper knots hang limp from the ropes. And Kiyotsune is dead , his mask staring and gaping, its expression somewhere between despairing and ecstatic. What is that expression, exactly? I once asked Mr. Kanze Hideo the same question I so often asked others, namely, why it was that the faces of woman-masks differed from the faces of living women, and he replied: “Particularly the female masks, if you make them with much expression of joy or sorrow, you can express only that one emotion in performance. So you must express the joy or sorrow only in the gestures. Of course a living person makes different expressions! With a mask, using the same expression you can convey different emotions.”

Mr. Kanze is dead now. He died but lately as I write. He was never as warm to me as Mr. Umewaka; on the one occasion he allowed me to interview him, he seemed guarded and harassed, so that I felt a trifle ashamed. The mood of his performances was more gnarled than Mr. Umewaka’s, and when I watched him on stage, my aesthetic pleasure partook of an awe whose colors balanced one another to near invisibility; while in Mr. Umewaka’s case, the experience, by no means inferior or less “subtle,” was iridescent. One man’s art budded as if from an ancient pine; the other’s was greener, as if Keith Jarrett had replaced Tatyana Nikolayevna in playing Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues on the piano. Now the ancient pine is dead. Someday Mr. Umewaka and I will also be dead, like Kiyotsune, whose mask will be reanimated by an actor whom Mr. Umewaka or Mr. Kanze might have taught. That unknown actor’s Noh will remain Zeami’s, and his, and theirs. And the expression of his mask will be nameless.

Kiyotsune swings his kimono sleeve around and it suddenly, naturally unfurls. It is shorter than a geisha’s. The stage creaks, unfortunately. Somebody coughs. Then in sudden darts of the head the mask comes once more alive against the darkening foliage. The staff flashes out; the fan curls.