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

The Shinto-derived 1crescent-shaped indentations between her eyelids and forehead are as nude as a young girl’s vulva, for in approved Heian style she wears her painted black eyebrows (willow-leaves, no doubt) two-thirds of the way up to the parting of her hair, whose inky dullness is much more disciplined than Miss Aya’s luxuriant bangs and those slithery locks which frame her head all around. Indeed, the zo-onna ’s face, which unlike Miss Aya’s narrows as it goes upward, is outlined by its three innermost hair-waves, two thin ones within one thick, then comes the darkness of the mask-edge, ready to meet the wig.

In comparison to her rival’s, the porn princess’s eyebrows almost resemble moustaches, so frankly hairy and corporeal do they seem. Poor Miss Aya belongs to my mortal race! (“Her eyebrows look like furry caterpillars, all right…”) Please don’t accuse me of demeaning her; her beauty is comforting, sweet and not in the least eerie. In her various poses she changes bathing suits and backdrops as rapidly as the cyclings of Tokyo’s long narrow vertical brilliant neon signs in the rain, and the colors of the gel lights used to photograph her remind me of the glaring fires of car-eyes smeared on the black pavement, which is as shiny as new rubber boots. Perhaps I’ve even unknowingly seen her in one of Shinjuku’s bright small busy restaurants whose windows are wallpapered with the gilded or jade-shelled windows of skycrapers, white shirts of pedestrians swimming by as the night becomes ever more excitingly foggy, reflections blending with real signs and windows to form mutually translucent facets of a single giant crystal. I rush through the Japanese night, devouring it. Shall I experience the daburu sabisu , the double service? Then, as it gets clammier outside and hotter inside with cooking and the perspiration of human beings, the windows of the restaurants mist up, reducing all external shapes and lights to delightful non-definition. And somewhere in that steamy life, Aya Kudo breathes.

As for the zo-onna , she sleeps inside of a wooden box, and her waking night is perfect blackness, with three pine trees to guide her way across the bridge from the rainbow curtain. Once upon a time, the idealized Heian woman whom she was painted to invoke rushed through her own steamy life. “On the last night of the year,” writes Lady Murasaki, “the ceremony of casting out devils was over very early, so I was resting in my room, blackening my teeth and putting on a light powder…” And on the last night before the next performance, the zo-onna awaits the ceremony of being inhabited by yet another man, a man whose true flower sweetly guides him, like the woman I love who sometimes sits astride me to better control her pleasure; he inhabits her in order to bring her back to life in the manner that he expresses life, so that we may watch and experience the joyousness of our own desire, which he and the zo-onna have understated into metaphysics.

The distance from nostrils to eyes is slightly greater in the young woman than in the zo-onna , but this difference is less conspicuous than the others.

I said that I began by making the eye-to-mouth distances of both female faces the same. If we resize the zo-onna ’s head to make it the same size as Miss Aya’s, we immediately discover that the face has moved upward on it. If we align the eyes with Miss Aya’s we find that the mouth and nose are still higher than hers. In other words, the zo-onna ’s face actually occupies a smaller proportion of her head than Miss Aya’s. And this difference is most disconcerting of all. 2

What then makes a perfect face? In this male investigation of femininity and beauty, the answer must be: the face that is most perfectly female . Psychological research indicates that people asked to choose their favorite out of a set of face photographs tend to choose that which looks young, symmetrical and composite. Moreover, compared to masculine faces, feminine ones are narrow and short. In women the following two distances are longer: From one eye’s outer extremity to the other, and from eyes to eyebrows. (Now we know why women sometimes apply white eye pencil around the edges of each eye in order to “extend the whites.”) Meanwhile, these three distances are shorter: Between the cheekbones, between mouth and eyes, and nose width. — But do such variables help anyone but a mask carver or a casting director? — Moreover, even they fall subject to emendation, subcategorization. The mask maker Hori Yasuemon informs us: “Female masks, whether ko omote, waka-onna, zo-onna, fukai , or yase-onna , are said to require three variants — ‘Yuki’, ‘Tsuki’ and ‘Hana’ ” — which is to say, Snow, Moon and Flower. “In general,” Hori continues, “masks give a strong look when the eyes, nose and mouth are closer to the center, but with ‘Hana’ they are about four millimeters apart from the center, giving it a generous, gentle expression.”

So what makes a woman look womanly? Just as in Tanizaki’s reverie of his mother there was no female body, so in Taliban Afghanistan there was no female face , not in public, at least; and that cool, conscious purveyor of femininity’s theatrical allurements, a prostitute, might flash her red-fingernailed white hands, or wear fancy socks. Femininity is an embellishing act as much as specific concatenation of bone and flesh. Like a Noh mask, a woman’s face alters infinitely and eternally as it moves.

A Noh mask gazes through me with her hollow eyes, and she is so real that I believe in her and love her; accordingly, I want her to see me, but she cannot, not without an old man inside. It is he who makes her alive.

A woman sees me, and kisses me. I refuse to believe that because she is real she is not perfect.

WITHIN THE MASK

Ms. Nakamura Mitsue was the one whose exhibition I’d seen in Yokohama. She had made the zo-onna mask under discussion here, and also the waka-onna . Mr. Umewaka spoke highly of her abilities. As for Mr. Mikata, of his fifty or sixty masks, the oldest of which derived from the late fifteen hundreds, he possessed seven made by her. “Her technique is good,” he said, “although some things can be attacked. But some spirit will start dwelling in it as time goes by, since many actors wear it. Because of that, the colors may change and the mask’s power will increase. That’s why I appreciate the old masks.”

I interviewed her over several years at her studio in Kyoto. Downcurved, her masks often appeared dreamy and distracted like the faces of the dead. When looked at from below, they smiled less. The smile narrowed; the upturned eye-corners turned down, the blankness between the black teeth widened; so the lips curled into a grimace and then as I lowered my gaze the lips went down, too. Very set and sad at the appropriate angle, these young mask-women; and the middle-aged fukai expressed still more perfectly the truism that all of us must die.

Once I asked: “When you’re making the mask, at what point does it come alive?”

“It’s hard to say, but from a certain point it starts to exist.”

“How much individuality can you put into your masks?”

“There are cases when I make a mask and the mask starts to affect me somehow, so I start to follow that something from the mask, rather than doing something to the mask. In other cases I have a clear idea of what I am doing, and I simply obey that. Both approaches can be powerful.”

“Do you feel that there is a real spirit to the mask, or is it simply a tool for the actor?”

“Both can be true. This thing that is just made with wood; I don’t completely believe that there is a spirit in it; but there is something . And of course when it is worn on the stage and the actor is on the stage, the eyes start to be alive.”