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

Regardless of its textual component, Noh is ultimately indescribable, like sexual ecstasy; what consoles me for my failure of language is the fact that so is everything else. Moreover, Noh aspires to indescribability. Beautiful mysteriousness, shot through with supernatural or sacred beyondness, possesses a name: yugen . Zeami informs us that this is the highest principle of his art. The actor must be simultaneously emotive and unostentatious. When he portrays a demon, his body may writhe fearsomely but his feet must glide gently. In all things he understates himself with the nuanced mildness of some bygone (and probably fictitious) noble of the Heian court. Such are yugen ’s prerequisites, but expressing them correctly can take a lifetime, as can appreciating them. Of Noh’s nine stages of excellence, the highest of the middle three is the flower of truth . “It is superior to the art of versatility and exactness,” writes Zeami, “and is already a first step toward the acquisition of the flowers of the art.” In short, even here we have gone beyond expressiveness! What comes next? The lowest of the three supreme stages is the flower of stillness . 5Zeami likens this, we now know, to the pure white light of snow piled in a silver bowl. What does this “mean”? What can it mean? 6If I could rush this little book to the highest of the three stages, I certainly would, but what if the mask of yugen can never be kissed? What if distance will always remain essential? Doesn’t snow melt in the mouth?

Whatever yugen may be, its very delicacy might partake of indestructibility. I admit that Takigi-Noh sharply distinguishes itself from indoor, electric-lit Noh; and in his classic essay “In Praise of Shadows,” the great Tanizaki, devotee of aestheticism, eroticism and sadomasochism, insists that Japanese lacquerware was not meant to be viewed under Thomas Edison’s glaring radiance, that Japanese rooms look plain only when darkness’s pretty mysteries have been swept away like cobwebs, that the gilding of a priest’s robes grows garish under any luminescence more powerful than candle light or firelight. “Whenever I attend the No,” he pursues this topic, “I am impressed that on no other occasion is the beauty of the Japanese complexion set off to such advantage — the brownish skin with a flush of red that is so uniquely Japanese, the face like old ivory tinged with yellow.” What about when the actor is masked? Well, his neck and hands can still be seen. At a performance of “Kotei,” Kongo Iwao impersonated the tragic Lady Yang, 7“and I shall never forget the beauty of his hands showing ever so slightly from beneath his sleeves.” And Tanizaki elaborates for another page, finally warning what disastrous vulgarity would ensue should floodlights violate the Noh stage as had already occurred in Kabuki. “It is an essential condition of the No that the stage be left in the darkness in which it has stood since antiquity.” Most of the Noh performances I have attended took place at a remove from this darkness. Was their beauty all vulgar, then? Is my understanding deficient, that I can’t dismiss them? Or is my capacity, or this world itself, so debased that yugen needs but to exist in a half-dead state in order to successfully hover above and beyond me? Do they present my blindness with an aluminum bowl of white sand? Even should this be so, the beyondness of yugen survives.

The trees begin to move behind Kiyotsune, and I remember a passage from “Kasuga ryujin”: When the Venerable Myoe first arrived at Kasuga, the trees and grasses bowed down before him.

SISTERS AND GOLD CLOUDS

A great many of Noh’s plots derive from The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike and The Tales of Ise. It’s in Kasuga that the very first story-and-poem of The Tales of Ise occurs: A young man who goes hawking on his estate there gets enraptured by a pair of “very elegant sisters” whom he spies through a fence. He cuts off his purple sleeve, writes a verse expressing the turmoil of his heart, and has his attendant convey these tokens in. The extremely sad Noh play “Matsukaze” is said to have originated from this episode, since it’s about two saltmaking sisters loved by a courtier in his exile, and left alone by his recall and death. But “Matsukaze” is likewise indebted to The Tale of Genji, for the courtier and Genji are both exiled to this same spot, the Suma seashore; and Genji’s impression of the ocean waves calls for comparison with the courtier’s poem. At the end of his exile, Genji’s desires draw him into an affair with a lady from Akashi, whom he impregnates. Once his position in the capital has been restored, he sends for his mistress and daughter, but finds little time for them. Accordingly, the lady makes a sad reference to the wind in the pine trees, a phrase whose Japanese equivalent, and the title of this chapter concerning her, is matsukaze .

Indeed, The Tale of Genji offers several two-sister love triangles. In an album of illustrations from the Muromachi period, 8we gaze down through clouds of pure gold into a tassel-hung room of green tatami mats on which sits Genji in his elegantly spread kimono of diamonds and quadruple dots, equidistant from Reikeiden and her younger sister Hanachirusato, whose long inky tresses sweep across their own more flamboyant clothes. Soon his enemies will get him expelled to Suma, and this double love will glimmer down into admitted ephemerality. The sisters will be left behind in the capital — a sort of reverse prefiguration of the situation of the Noh play “Matsukaze.” Years after the death of Genji, another illustration from the album shows his supposed son Kaoru (actually the offspring of Genji’s wife and his best friend’s son), dressed in a red flower-patterned cloak and bluish kimono, peering through a bamboo gate and beneath a cloud of gold into a raised house whose blind has been partially raised for moon-viewing, so that Kaoru can spy out four longhaired beauties whose respective kimonos depict spiderwebs, hexagons, sanddollar-like octagons, and triangles whose internal parallel lines alternate at right angles; two of these girls presumably are maids, and the other two are Big Princess and Middle Princess — sisters, of course. Recapitulating The Tales of Ise , Kaoru writes an elegantly sorrowful verse and has a servant bring them in…

And so a visit to Kasuga takes us not only to Kofuku-ji (and thence to a nineteenth-century Hokusai woodblock drawing), but also to Suma, and, through Suma, to Kyoto and Uji — the places depicted in the two Muromachi illustrations. In “Hanago,” the love-crazed prostitute Lady Han recites an old verse about Kasuga moor.

A millennium after Lady Murasaki completed her masterpiece, I saw geishas dance the Yukigeshiki Uji no Ukifune, which is to say the Snow Scene in Uji from the Tale of Genji . And this dance was an allusion to and partial resume of “Matzukase.” Just as when the flute ascends in two hands from the hidden folds of the flutist’s kimono, so Noh’s references arise unpredictably out of texts. 9An old man swirls his fan in the firelight, whose reflections crawl on his forehead. The fan passes from gold to silver depending on its angle. Sometimes the two sisters are Matsuzake and Murasame, sometimes Reikeiden and Hanachirusato, Big Princess and Middle Princess, or the unnamed pair who excite the anonymous protagonist of The Tales of Ise . Our spirits wander through firelight and embroidery.

THE TORN SPIDERWEB

At one time this game was not just for aesthetes, but for all educated people (in other words, for aesthetes). In 1271, a proposal that the fourteen-year-old Lady Nijo become the Emperor’s concubine gets couched in a metaphor from The Tales of Ise . She knows the reference. And in fact, this interesting, accomplished and ultimately very sad person quotes constantly in her memoir from The Tale of Genji . (In her time the sacred tree of Kasuga Shrine was brought to the capital, in order to overawe the mighty and thereby to influence policy. Fleeing an unhappy attachment, she refreshed herself with Kasuga’s rainy air and moss-paths walled by stone lanterns, but her lover dreamed where she was, and got her.) Several centuries earlier, another Emperor amuses himself by testing his concubine on the twenty volumes of the Kokin Shu poems. Perhaps because her father desperately hires the chanting of sutras for her in one temple after the next, or else because she has an impressive memory, the lady, enduring the Emperor’s resentful amazement, completes the ordeal without a single error.