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

In Heian times, this web of allusions must have been at least theoretically coherent and manageable. Arthur Waley believes it to have been sufficiently limited that an illiterate would have known much of its weft from popular songs. One measure of a society’s degree of refinement and “culture” may well be the number of references its people share in common.

“In Zeami’s day,” I asked Mr. Umewaka, who was sitting before a white paper screen, “were all the conventions understood by the general public?”

“I think so,” he said.

“And now?”

“Maybe it was easier then.”

The difficulty of an undertaking need not increase its value. However, if, as Fenollosa claims and I believe, the alteration of language involves the sedimentation of layers of metaphor upon fundamental relationships (“a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which communication forces for itself”), then to undertake an excavation beneath the calcified usages upon which any given generation thoughtlessly treads offers the hope of revelation. “The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.” Accordingly, as Noh grows and grows into a constellated super-text, our journeys from star to star grow likewise, from leaps into quests.

So the game goes on. In 1825, the woodcut artist Utagawa Kunimori I makes erotic parodies of both the Suma and the Matsukaze parts of Genji . Why not? Isn’t frivolity a virtue when we play upon this floating world? In a subsequent century, the Nobel Prize winner and soon-to-be kidnapper-suicide Mishima Yukio recasts several Noh plays in contemporary settings. And as the new allusions swirl down, century by century, the old plays themselves begin to alter.

If Zeami could be resurrected, he might take issue not only with the increased length but also with other alterations of his plays. The scholar Hare, who knows infinitely more about such matters than I, finds it “safe” to say that “the shite ’s parts are more reliable than the waki ’s, and that passages in congruent song are more reliable than those in noncongruent song, which are in turn more reliable than spoken passages.” (Regarding the instrumentation and the dance choreography less can be said.) About the Genji- based play “Aoi-no-Ue” a performance guide advises that the version “Zeami experienced must have been more visually explanatory and possibly centered on yugen , while the revisions focus more on Rokujo’s jealousy.” Moreover, once upon a time Rokujo’s robe was green. Now it is black and grey.

Zeami advises that if a Noh play has to do with a place, “then you should take lines from well-known poems about the place, in Chinese or Japanese, and write them into concentrated points… In addition to this, you should work distinguished sayings and well-known expressions into the shite ’s language.” To me, of course, those sayings and expressions will never be well-known. But in some regards I am richer than Zeami and Lady Nijo. Amidst my treasures I possess, for instance, some reproductions of Hokusai, whom those two never saw. I also prize my foreignness, thanks to which Noh, not to mention Japan, can never be mastered by me. I am accordingly spared much recognition of triteness. The pretension that snowflakes can be cherry blossoms and vice versa begins to irritate me in its knowing repetitions across eras and dynasties. 10Wouldn’t I be better off if I avoided getting annoyed? Translating the eleventh-century Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon , Ivan Morris sets out to escape the “false exoticism that can arise from identifying the Emperor’s residence, for example, as ‘the Pure and Fresh Palace.’ ” I could not disagree more.

So I am ignorant. So I have lost much. No matter. Malraux writes: “All that remains of Aeschylus is his genius.”

An Interview with Mr. Mikata Shizuka

But in spite of these lovely textual landscapes, which are fully as rich as a Kyoto garden, it must be repeated: The text, beautiful although it often is, remains of limited importance in comparison to Noh’s wordless lovelinesses. The mask is most important always — the living mask.

The day after he gave a spectacular performance of the warrior play “Michimori,” I asked Mr. Mikata Shizuka the following question: “In the essay ‘Kyui,’ Zeami discusses the top three levels of Noh: flower of peerless charm, flower of profundity and flower of tranquility. Could you please explain in your own words how spectators and actors can perceive and distinguish these three levels and what they mean?”

“For the spectators to appreciate them,” he said, “the actor must be in that stage already. Otherwise it does not look like that, because he has not achieved that level. Even a good audience who looks at a deficient actor cannot see it. The actor who is able to achieve that level, if he acts with the right timing and tension, and if the other actors’ ki has been unified with the surrounding air including the audience, only then will there be peerless charm.”

(Proust must have been referring to this same phenomenon when he described Madame Berma in the title role of Phèdre : “Certain transcendent realities emit all around them a sort of radiation to which the crowd is sensitive.”)

“For a great actor, how often can this take place?” I asked Mr. Mikata.

“It is difficult,” he said. “If he feels the intention, and wants to feel this way or that way, and everything goes well, of course, then he can achieve this state…”

All I took from this was: It is difficult .

“What do you think Zeami means when he speaks of snow in a silver bowl?”

“Because snow does not have any noise, the noise of no noise, and silver rather than gold is very like Noh. That indicates the tranquility.” 1

“In the second highest level, when there is no snow on Fuji because it is not just high but also deep, what does that mean?”

“I cannot imagine clearly,” he said. “But one thing is that Fuji is higher than a cloud, and then it does not snow. It is just stable, just itself.”

“And in the highest level, the sun on Silla?”

“You can imagine the temperature and the coldness of snow in a silver bowl. But you don’t feel any sound there, no smell there, so you cannot imagine really. As a picture it looks pretty and it is easy to imagine, but peerless charm is an expression to try to express what each member of the audience has inside himself or herself. Tranquility, profundity and peerless charm, these refer to some aura that the actor can naturally exude without doing anything. But the audience’s ability to appreciate and receive is definitely necessary.”

And still I did not know what the sun on Silla would entail. Still I could not define the beauty of women.

Maiden, Mask, Geisha, Wife, Princess

Someone once said that black hair is a shunga [erotic picture]. If our models were dressed, the aesthetic feeling would vary from age to age. However, the beauty of a fairskinned woman, and of a woman’s black hair, are universal. Thus the two major elements of eternal feminine beauty. In particular, the black hair of naked women offers texture and volume, and also expresses the flowing affection and subtleties inside the woman.

MASAYUKI TOMITA, PAPER CUTOUT ARTIST, 1988

Why do I want to kiss the zo-onna ? Because she is a woman and I am a man.