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

Why do I believe in her? She is nothing but a wooden face; therefore, for me to believe in her, she must be a perfect face.

And what makes for a perfect face? Edo period prints of beautiful women and young boy-actors look much the same. At times (infrequently, to be sure) Noh actors employ a mask of one gender for a role of the other. Feminine beauty is not so easy to define.

All the same, Japanese art of any given period can express it explicitly and consistently, even to the point of stereotype. 1To be sure, in the various traditions called Euro-American we also can meet with this or that artist who devotes himself to representing the type that he desires: Just as the twentieth-century Parisian sculptures of Maillol glorify women (and often a woman: Dina Vierny) sporting lushly slablike thighs, so in the beautiful-lady woodblocks ( bijin-ga ) of the early ukiyo-e master Kaigetsu one very frequently sees a woman standing in a particular way, using both hands to comb her hair. But what defines the face of a Kaigetsu beauty? Would she be equally appreciated by a tenth-century Heian courtier and a twenty-first-century corporation president?

Noh mask, ukiyo-e lady, geisha — these three points upon the arc will occupy much of this book’s investigation. Divergent as they are, they all partake of a certain kind of radiance, which over the years has become as preciously familiar to me as the blue streetlight glowing up into my coffin-hotel in Shinagawa. What is it? In the Ukiyo-e Museum in Tokyo you can see, for instance, chrysanthemums and birds; the fishes are simultaneously representational and stylized, wide-eyed and aware, frozen in an upward or downward lunge through a blankness which sometimes shades into blue; a prawn rises up behind a pale pink bream which is swimming across a blue bonito in an aquarium whose borders are blue paper imprinted with white birds. Can we say any more of all this than that it is “Japanese”?

“LIKE A JEWELED HAIRPIN”

Let us begin with the black teeth. A nineteenth-century American (one of Commodore Perry’s men) appraised them without undue enthusiasm: “As their ‘ruby’ lips parted in smiling graciously, they displayed a row of black teeth, set in horribly corroded gums. The married women of Japan enjoy the exclusive privilege of dyeing their teeth…” 2

Five and a half centuries earlier, a famous tale immortalized the eccentric young lady who in spite of her noble blood and upbringing admired snails, insects and other such creatures; moreover, she refused to blacken her teeth! People said, “Her eyebrows look like furry caterpillars, all right, but her bare teeth you would think have been skinned.” The ugliness of black teeth or white ones, like that of the unbound Chinese lady’s foot, or the uncircumcised Sudanese clitoris, definitely varies by time and place. I have been educated by my dentist to consider black teeth a sign of decay. One Filipina prostitute of my acquaintance, possessor of what could politely be referred to as a “midnight smile,” found her business suffering on their account. I took her to get all her top teeth pulled (anesthetic unavailable, I am sad to say, but this did not deter the patient), after which plastic teeth were installed, and Virgie expressed satisfaction. On the same planet where she allures men with her new white smile, I open a book, and look in on court ladies blackening their teeth for the New Year’s banquet of 1025.

Hence the blackened teeth of a Noh mask, which even nowadays may occasionally be emulated by a geisha in her last month of maikodom.

Tanizaki, in whom I see myself because he too embraces the no-longer-existent, offers a characteristic theory about the old practice: “Might it not have been an attempt to push everything except the face into the dark? In the past this was sufficient. For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face — a full body was unnecessary.”

A face alone, with even her teeth dulled down into darkness, is this not a mask?

But what, if anything, does a lovely mask “represent”?

“Like a jeweled hairpin, / a vision of her alone / pierces my sight more and more.” Thus runs a poem in The Tales of Ise . I would have supposed that any vision sufficiently noteworthy to pierce my sight must require specificity . An Italian Renaissance poet might spell out the beauties of the cheek. But The Tales of Ise , which concern themselves mainly with romantic assignations, many of which bear voyeuristic overtones, say no more of the women (or men) involved than that they come from this or that social station, or are old or young. The sole physical description of any lady in the Tales is this: One or two boils erupt on an unnamed someone’s body, so she declines to meet her lover. She shrinks from being imperfect before him, withdrawing into the darkness forever.

Some years on in this dreamy epoch, maybe sixty, perhaps two hundred, Lady Murasaki writes in her diary a line that epitomizes feminine beauty in the Heian period: “The moon was so bright that I was embarrassed to be seen and knew not where to hide.”

For her, the beauty of a lady’s face resides most of all in the hair, which in the Japanese case is darkness reified into a waterfall; much of the time Murasaki hides herself behind the ornate fan she bears for that particular purpose, so that her garments define her still more than her face; certain color combinations are elegant, others shockingly incorrect. In the picture scrolls and sometimes at Noh plays I feel almost exhausted by the detail of so many kimonos, their lovelinesses’ intricacies beyond not merely my powers of recall but even my ability to see them entire; occasionally a garment may bear a simple, repetitive geometry, like the one which alternates triangles of beautifully tarnished gold with triangles of dark purple; but more often the effect is to understate any human face above it into a pale oval. This must have been the intention. Here is Murasaki’s description of Lady Dainagon: “Her hair falls just about three inches past her heels and is so luxuriant and kept so beautifully trimmed there is hardly anyone to match her for elegance.” Miya no Naishi: “The contrast between her pale skin and her black hair sets her apart from the rest.”

What is blackness? Ms. Nakamura left white specks in the black hair of her Noh masks, remarking: “If we make it solid black it looks strange.” — To me it was all strange.

In any case, the value set on black hair endures. In the bijin-ga woodcuts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we find depictions of courtesans whose black hair is studded with ornamental picks. Ichirakutei Eisui’s print of “The Courtesan Karakoto of the Chojiyu House” shows its subject’s heavy bun of hair pierced with pale hairpins like wheelspokes, her hair shaved or at least lighter at the temples. Meanwhile, in the poems of the Manyoshu , or Collection for a Myriad Ages , whose contents go back to the eighth century and before, the stock epithet for a lovely maiden’s hair is “as black as the bowels of a mud snail.” One poem deserves to be quoted at greater length, since it spells out the attributes of loveliness:

Her tresses black as a mud-snail’s bowels,

The way she wears those fluttering yu-ribbons,

The way she wears her Yamato boxwood comb,

That beauteous maid, — my love.

Aside from her hair, whose length and color resist uniqueness, our only vision of this girl consists of her accoutrements. She might as well be a mannequin — or a mask. Why not? Yu ribbons can stand in the girl just as well as a jeweled hairpin. The longer I have loved women, the more deeply and sincerely I love them. And as I study Noh’s props and as I watch the women I love ageing, suffering that loss which some of them anxiously, bitterly, defiantly, despairingly or coolly fight with makeup, creams, wigs, the more I have learned to love the things associated with women, for instance a ribbon blowing in the hair. In the Manyoshu the lovely woman is often compared to a mirror; and the seashore of Osaka Port recalls to a lonely poet-husband’s mind the mirror on a certain girl’s comb-case.